GMOs have the potential to address countless social, environmental, and health issues, yet they face immense opposition. With rigorous studies crediting their safety, it begs the question: why so much hate? This study asserts that much of the resistance to GMOs stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of genetics in general. Through a survey given to over 800 Sierra College students, responses to a set of opinion questions were compared to participants’ overall knowledge of genetics, gauged by a brief quiz.

Read the article here: GMOs and Public Perception: College Students’ Opinions and Knowledge of Genetic Engineering

I wrote this paper at the end of 2024, and I wanted to post my findings on my website, but decided to hold off in favor of trying my luck at publication. This paper was published in the undergraduate journal RURALS, which I feel important to note is faculty-reviewed, not peer-reviewed, the academic standard for research. I did not submit to a peer-reviewed journal, because as you may have read, Sierra College doesn’t have an Institutional Review Board to approve the survey. I got approval from our Dean of Research, but it’s not the standard journals look for. Plus, previous studies have already found similar correlations to the ones I found in this study, so the news isn’t particularly breaking. Nevertheless, I am excited and proud of this publication!

I do appreciate that I got the results I was looking for. It would have been a little anticlimactic if I found that performance on the quiz wasn’t related to outlook on GMOs, or worse, was negatively correlated. Instead, we see that the participants with the strongest opposition to GMOs scored an average of 57% on the quiz, and those with the strongest support scored an average of 75%. It’s not perfect; those that responded with milder support actually averaged 76%, but the overall correlation is clear.

A simple survey consisting of students at my own college may sound relatively simple to conduct, but it was not easy. Just making and dispersing the form people submitted their answers with was difficult enough; since I didn’t want people to change their opinions after taking the quiz (and realizing how little they knew), I couldn’t use something easy like Google Forms. I ended up asking a Statistics professor at my school for help, who coded the entire survey by hand for me. You can actually take the survey if you want, though we’re no longer using the responses for analysis: https://serene.jaykesler.net/

Then, we had to randomly select 500 courses and email their respective instructors. Doing that manually would have taken many, many hours (that I did not have during the hectic school year), but automated emails were blocked by the system. I got someone to code the whole thing by hand, but even those attempts were blocked. Eventually, the Stats professor, Jay Kesler, was able to figure it out (don’t ask me how), but time was running out. Also a lot of professors thought it was a fisching scam.

In the end, though, we collected hundreds of responses, and the results were fascinating. I had to learn how to make the graphs I wanted through Excel, how to format a scientific paper, and find a journal to submit to, none of which were particularly simple. But I did it! Hooray!

Hope you enjoyed reading about this project, because I’m super proud of it! Stay tuned to learn with me!