Washington, D.C. -- 16 February 2001-- Will genetically modified food benefit society, or will it ultimately pose threats to human health, the environment and the world economy? These questions are debated in scientific circles, but the public gets just a narrow glimpse of the debates, usually in highly charged news articles.
That will change this week with the launching of a Web-based forum that will provide the public and policy makers with the tools to understand the debate over genetically modified foods (GMF). The information available on-line will come from top scientists in the field who study the techniques of genetic engineering and their impact on human health and the environment.
Controversies Surrounding Genetically Modified Food is the latest product of the SCOPE (Science Controversies On-Line: Partnerships in Education) Project ("http://scope.educ.washington.edu"). The Web-based project is the work of editors at Science magazine, which is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and scientists at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Washington. The groups are collaborating in order to provide a balanced scientific view of related issues and to do so in a way that might be useful to educators, scientists, policy makers, and the general public.
The challenge, of course, is to enable non-specialists to engage in the debate intelligently and critically, said Alan McHughen, a contributor to the site and professor and senior research scientist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. We do this by providing enough accurate information, balanced between being superficially simplistic and overwhelmingly technical.
Science editor Donald Kennedy notes that the magazines participation in the SCOPE project is a natural fit. Science and AAAS are concerned whenever new scientific findings and new technologies rai
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Contact: Cate Alexander
calexand@aaas.org
202-326-6431
American Association for the Advancement of Science
15-Feb-2001