Economics is defined so broadly in the textbooks that an economist would not be outside the profession’s domain to answer the two main policy questions of this conference: 1. how should the benefits of biotechnology be shared with providers of genetic resources and/or associated knowledge (commonly known as access and benefitsharing, ABS)? 2. how should society handle genetically modified organ...

Doug Gurian-Sherman is a senior scientist in the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) Food and Environment Program. UCS is the leading science-based nonprofit working for a healthy environment and a safer world. The goal of the UCS Food and Environment Program is a food system that encourages innovative and environmentally sustainable ways to produce high-quality, safe, and affordable food, whil...

BACKGROUND Safety assessment of genetically modified organisms is currently often performed by comparative evaluation. However, natural variation of plant characteristics between commercial varieties is usually not considered explicitly in the statistical computations underlying the assessment. RESULTS Statistical methods are described for the assessment of the difference between a geneticall...

This paper reviews the history of the federal regulatory oversight of plant agricultural biotechnology in the USA, focusing on the scientific and political forces moulding the continually evolving regulatory structure in place today. Unlike most other jurisdictions, the USA decided to adapt pre-existing legislation to encompass products of biotechnology. In so doing, it established an overarchi...

We report here a preliminary value for the πNN coupling constant deduced from the GMO sumrule for forward πN scattering. As in our previous determination from np backward differential scattering cross sections we give a critical discussion of the analysis with careful attention not only to the statistical, but also to the systematic uncertainties. Our preliminary evaluation gives g c (GMO) = 13...