Here at Biofortified, we’ve been collecting citations of papers about the risks and safety of genetic engineering. The goal of this collection is to populate our GENetic Engineering Risk Atlas (GENERA) with citations and, eventually, unbiased summaries of the literature. The database would be useful to anyone looking for more information about genetic engineering, from interested consumers to farmers to scientists.
Our biggest struggle so far has been trying to figure out how to turn this disorganized list into a useable database. The main stumbling block has been the sheer volume of work that needs to be done to summarize and present all the information we eventually want to. Finally, today, a stroke of genius: We can do it in steps, and crowd-sourcing is the key!
You, dear readers, make Biofortified great by getting involved in conversations and bringing new people to the site. Now, you can contribute to Biofortifed’s biggest project to-date and help create an important resource about genetic engineering. If you have some time this holiday season, you could help us enter the basic details about each study such as the authors, title, abstract, etc. into a spreadsheet that we can import into GENERA.
If everyone enters a few studies, we’ll have them done in no time. Please let us know if you would like to help – we have files all ready for people to work on. Just send us a message via our contact page and Karl or I will respond ASAP.