Who actually writes the answers you publish on this website? According to Dr. Kevin Foltas emails and an article in the New York Times, answers are provided to the experts by a public relations firm called Ketchum and sometimes published verbatim with a scientists name attached.

Expert response from Community Manager

Moderator for GMOAnswers.com

Friday, 09/10/2015 11:44

You raise several questions, we’ll first address who contributes answers to this website. Depending on the nature of the question, the answer may be provided by an independent expert, industry organization, the GMO Answers Community Manager or an expert from a member company (Bayer, BASF, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta). The GMO Answers team is committed to finding the best experts to answer consumer questions.

With regard to the information in the New York Times article: getting ready for the launch of GMO Answers (a first of its kind effort to answer consumer questions) and in anticipation of a high volume of questions, the team prepared by initially drafting facts and sources that could be used by an expert if that individual believed it to be useful for his/her answer. Within a few weeks of launch experts let us know that this was unnecessary, and we abandoned it. Of the 1,000 answers, less than 30 have language that we shared with experts ahead of time. While our intention was to be helpful, we realize we have lost some credibility because of it.

Today, the GMO Answers team does sometimes provide links to scientifically verified facts, articles or other existing answers on the website that could be used as reference for experts when drafting answers, but there is no obligation to use the links. We ask experts to draft responses that are authentically theirs and in their own words. This approach is core to our commitment to transparency.

We’ve included more information below – which we hope you find useful – about the GMO Answers Q&A process and the experts who volunteer their time to provide answers to this site. If you have additional questions after reviewing this information, please don’t hesitate to ask. 

How We Work With Independent Experts To Answer Questions:

Many of the questions submitted to GMO Answers are answered by third-party experts – some who are employees of public universities and thus subject to FOIA requests. In these cases, a question received on our site is routed to one or more independent experts who volunteer to provide answers within their field of expertise. We do not pay experts to answer questions. And experts answer questions on their own time and at their own pace.

Once the third-party expert provides an answer, it is fact checked and reviewed for basic grammar. No edits are made without the consent of the expert.

In addition, we will occasionally make suggestions to experts when an answer may be confusing to a non-scientific audience.  Our goal for GMO Answers is to make sure consumers can get their questions answered clearly. Given the complexity of some of the questions (see www.gmoanswers.com for examples), this can take time and careful thought. GMO Answers encourages experts to write responses using language and terms a non-scientific person can understand. The experts make changes or authorize edits. Each answer is uniquely the expert’s response.

Once the expert provides the final answer to GMO Answers, it is proofed for punctuation and typos, but the content is not changed or edited.