This work started in 1999, when a large Consortium of several institutes, led by CEH, and including Rothamsted Experimental Station, won a tender to undertake the Farm Scale Evaluations (FSE) of Genetically Modified Herbicide-Tolerant crops.


The public engagement with science is something which the great majority of our colleagues that work on the FSE, in all institutes, take very seriously. Because of the controversial nature of the subject, we have all spent much time at public meetings in draughty village halls, in conversation with those who are pro- or anti-, speaking to lay people who have no fixed ideas, briefing journalists, or going to schools and colleges to try to explain what the work entails. Even if the visit seems to do nothing but attract criticism from others, none of this time is wasted.

Here are some photos of just a few of those occasions, some publications and some field work.






An attentive audience in a packed village hall on a hot evening in 2000 in Harbury, Warwickshire.









Photos of Harbury taken from http://www.harburynews.freeserve.co.uk/supplementary.htm




The audience being addressed by Mr Dutch Van Spall, Deputy Chair of the Parish Council. Looking on, from left, are Dr. Adrian Butt (DETR),
Dr. Paul Rylott (Aventis), Joe Perry, Dr Gareth Davies (Henry Doubleday Research Association), Ged Marshall (Beekeeper's Association) and Patrick Holden (Soil Association).












The dreaded Vortis suction sampler making short work of a beet field,in the capable hands of Richard














Dr Keith Davies Millenium essay for the journal Nature put forward the novel idea that the public psyche still uses a Platonic/Aristotelian paradigm of ideal types to understand the genetic relationship between individuals and species, rather than the Darwinian concept of the unique genetic individual, and it is this that explains the abhorrence with which the public view genetic modification of plants.

See Davies, K. (2000) What links Aristotle, William Blake, Darwin and GM crops? Nature 407, 135
and
Davies, K. (2001) What makes genetically modified organisms so abhorrent? Trends in Biotechnology, 19, 424-427.









Dr Matt Skellern demonstrates the extraction of DNA from an onion to pupils from Parkfields School, Toddington, Bedfordshire, during Science Week, 2002.
Zoe, Sarah, Neal & Joe think this rates highly compared to Matt's usual culinary masterpieces. The pupil thought it smelt horrid.









Three pupils at Parkfields, with the dreaded Vortis machine, during Science Week talk in 2001. For more photos, see the excellent Parkfields School science department website on http://www.parkfieldsscience.ik.org/



















Teaching the principles of herbicide tolerance