August 2018 Update

Dear GMO Corn Experiment participants and supporters,

Thank you so much for your patience. We deeply apologize for the delay in releasing the data.  We are working toward publication as quickly as we can. Science can be a slow process. Taking a project from an idea to publication often takes years. We rarely know how long scientific research actually takes because the process is usually hidden from public view. Still, we’d hoped this experiment would be published by now. We, too, are frustrated, and we have learned a lot from this experience.

As described in a blog post from August 2017, much of the delay was due to the difficulty of analyzing hundreds of images. We originally intended to use some sort of digital image analysis, but ended up having to have volunteers score them by hand.

Another major reason for the delay is life. Since the GMO Corn Experiment was launched, Karl was involved in an intense job search, culminating in a position researching citrus genetics. He undertook a cross country move, then a move across his home state. Anastasia was not able to participate in the project while she was employed full time with the USDA. She resigned at the end of April 2018 to care for her daughter full time. She’s also had a local move, then a cross country move, then another local move. Lots of changes!

The paper was progressing earlier this year, and we were planning to add an additional digital analysis of the images that would back up the results we got from our team of volunteers.

However, we recently learned that one of our collaborators on this project had a significant conflict of interest that they failed to disclose to us, but denied it when we asked them about it directly. We confirmed that it was true with their employer. This was not in line with the ethos of transparency in the GMO Corn Experiment, threatening to harm the work that everyone has done, so we have removed this collaborator from the project entirely. This means that we have to re-do the analyses and writing contributed by this individual, replacing it with fresh data that we will be able to publish.

The good news is that we are working with new collaborators in one more attempt to at digital analysis, as well as redoing the scoring with a fresh set of volunteers. Learning from our first experience analyzing these images, we believe that we can get better data and clearer results with these new analyses! Unfortunately, investigating this issue has taken time, and replacing these analyses will take additional time.

Thank you for understanding. Know that we are working hard to get the GMO Corn Experiment finished so we can share the results with the world, and get started on the next project. Some of you have contributed many very intriguing ideas that we can’t wait to work on, especially with the knowledge we’ve gained from this project. As we continue to work on this experiment, we will post an update on Experiment.com as frequently as we can so that you know where we are with these final analyses, and the submission of the research paper that everyone involved has put a lot of work into!

Sincerely,

Karl Haro von Mogel and Anastasia Bodnar