The GMO Corn Experiment

Hi Sherry, you can still get a kit if you would like to participate in the experiment. Send us an email at support@gmoexperiment.com and we'll hook you up!

Thanks, Mitchell!

The double blinding could also be extended to the growing/harvesting, receiving, packing and shipping, and even the interpretation of analytical results. Blinding at that level, however, comes with a cost of time, material, and labor. For a project of this type and magnitude, some, if not all of those are undoubtedly not feasible. I'm assuming Karl needs to keep his day job, not to mention his family and friends! While there will be criticisms, they would be lodged regardless, simply because of the people associated with the project. To me, a main objective in the effort is not really the GM question, but the educational/participant aspect. In that regard, the limitations and flaws are actually beneficial, demonstrating the difficulties in carrying out good objective research.

That's true Bill. The good news is that such things are going to be exceedingly rare. Plus, at the numbers we have such attempts would be diluted out. Sad we have to think of such things.

Andrew, we mis-communicated on the FAQ by describing their orientation as just 'side-by-side', as there was a decent distance between the two plots. We really just meant to communicate how similar the environments are. As far as determining rates of cross-pollination, we'll be taking care of that and we'll describe the process we went through to determine it and post the results. With regard to the 660 foot separation distance, that is not a 'minimum' as different conditions such as wind factors can make the separation distance required to reduce cross-pollination below a threshold longer or shorter. As a maize biologist, you know that maize pollen is very heavy and falls to the ground fast. Several studies have suggested that a 150 foot separation distance is often sufficient. http://ohioline.osu.edu/agf-fact/0153.html Moreover, we're not growing certified seed, here! :) We're taking reasonable precautions for a squirrel rejection/preference experiment. The corn was grown in Hawaii, not in the corn belt. Also, we are testing stacked multi-trait corn versus its isoline. Testing each individual transgenic trait separately would vastly multiply the size of this experiment so that it would be unmanageable. Instead, we can test them all in one fell swoop, and if we find a difference then we can pin it down to the individual trait in a followup experiment. Feel free to ask us more questions, and please try not to make assumptions.

Sorry to be a thorn. It's hard not to make assumptions when you have a GMO feeding experiment on a fund me page with little information that most scientists may want to know. I know it was made for the general public, but I see these things and it makes me scared that a flawed experiment will get out and publicized causing fear when there is no reason for it. Seems like you guys have done good job thinking about it.

Hi Wannes, please read the FAQ section which gives a basic overview of some of these questions. We are using isolines grown in almost identical environments, so the composition and other traits will be as close as they can be. Moreover, we are planning to verify this information independently. We have got a lot of good questions to answer in the coming weeks, look for some lab notes and blog posts that will detail this for everyone. Thanks!

Dr. Folta, thank you so much for your response! We will be sure to keep her data off the Internet until the final paper is published if that's acceptable. I still want to do this experiment with my two oldest and if it doesn't work out for the science fair we can always come up with another experiment!

It will be really difficult to measure the rate at which each ear is eaten, but the original claims that launched this experiment to test are that the animals avoid the GMOs almost entirely. That being said, there will be room in our protocol for individual volunteers to go the extra mile and gather additional data that can address that question.

Karl runs a clean experiment and believe me, I want this to be clear and above board. We talked this out extensively to make sure all bases were covered.

Thanks, and you will still be able to follow along with the project!