If you’re enlisting the help of scientists to write a guide explaining genetically modified (GM) crops for the general public, should you declare in detail all their industrial interests?

Sense About Science (SAS), a UK charity, is being criticised for failing to do this in its recently published booklet, Making Sense of GM [pdf]. Anti-GM campaigners and academics, the Times Higher Education (THE) reports, say the guide’s potted biographies of its contributors don’t disclose fully their links to research institutes that receive biotech cash.

But the charity doesn’t think it’s done anything wrong.

Anti-GM campaigners complain that while noting that some of its experts worked at Norwich’s John Innes Centre, for example, SAS’s guide did not say that that centre attracts some biotech funding.

Nor did it mention that contributor Vivian Moses, a biotechnology expert at King’s College London, is chairman at CropGen, a pro-GM information group. This revelation was hardly secret, but should have been spelt out in the guide, Moses himself tells THE.

Michael Antoniou, a geneticist at King’s College London who provides advice to anti-GM campaign group GM Watch, tells THE that the omissions are “outrageous”. Open University applied linguist Guy Cook, who analyses the language of GM debates, says that by not declaring the contributors’ interests, SAS “deal a severe blow to their own cause, the authority of science, which rests upon rationality, objectivity, evidence and disinterest”.

SAS, which says it promotes “good science and evidence in public debates,” is narked by these accusations – and particularly the way they’ve been reported.

“The article misunderstands the convention and spirit of declarations of interest,” SAS managing director Tracey Brown responds in a statement on the charity’s website. “If the article is part of an argument that tenuous connections should be considered, then we would have to consider our contributors as having much stronger ‘links’ to conventional and organic agriculture than to biotechnology.” A spokesperson for the John Innes Centre also stresses to THE that its interests are not ‘vested’ and that it receives mostly public funding.

It remains to be seen whether this flurry of accusation and protestation, typical of GM debate, will affect the way the guide is perceived by its intended audience – the interested public. But after all this kerfuffle, wouldn’t SAS consider adding a page of small print if they were republishing the guide from scratch? “We are happy with what we did,” an SAS spokesperson tells Nature News.

Full interest disclosure: I was an intern at Sense About Science in the summer of 2005, and am a member of their ‘Voice of Young Science’ network.