Dr Mike Wilkinson
is a lecturer on crop genetics and methods of crop improvement at the University of Reading. He received a Ph.D. at the University of Leicester, UK in 1986 for studies on the systematics and population genetics of the grass aggregate species, Festuca ovina L.s.l.. He studied the in vitro control of pseudo-vivipary and the transformation of Pisum sativum at Leicester. He was based at the Scottish Crop Research Institute between 1989 and 1995 where he was responsible for the Commonwealth Potato Collection and for studies on geneflow and introgression in several temperate crops. He has published several studies on GMO risk assessment, principally relating to the quantification of gene-flow under natural conditions from cultivated oilseed rape and into feral populations of the crop or its wild relatives.

Julie Hill
is former Director of The Green Alliance, one of the UK's leading environmental policy organisations, for whom she has worked since 1985. She is now its Programme Adviser and manages the Biotechnology Programme. The green alliance has had a biotechnology programme since 1987, when we hosted a visit to the UK by US biotechnology campaigner Jeremy Rifkin. The Green Alliance played a leading role in lobbying for improvements to the genetic modification section of the 1990 Environmental Protection Act. In 1990, Julie Hill was invited to join the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment, the scientific committee that advises the UK Government on applications to make releases, an early examples of someone from a pressure group being asked to join a government committee. She is also a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Party on the Genetic Modification of Plants, the Advisory Committee of the Pesticides Trust and a number of other boards and committees. She has been responsible for a number of publications and papers on biotechnology issues, including 'Why are Environmental Organisations concerned about release of GMOs into the Environment? '(1994) and 'How can Biotechnology Benefit the Environment?' (1997).

Dr Rosie Hails
is an ecologist interested in the risk assessment of genetically modified organisms. She was part of the Planned Release of Selected and Manipulated Organisms (PROSAMO) project at Imperial College, London, with Professor Michael Crawley, using manipulative field experiments to study the ecology of transgenic plants in natural habitats. She is now based at the National Environmental Research Council (NERC) Institute of Virology and Environmental Microbiology (IVEM) in Oxford where her research interests include the risk assessment of genetically modified baculoviruses.

Dr Ian Cooper is a virologist who has studied virus ecology and evolution in crops and their wild relatives in Europe, Australia, China and many parts of the temperate world.

Dr Andy Lilley is a bacterial ecologist with a special interest in horizontal gene flow (particularly associated with genetically modified micro-organisms) and its effect on population and community structure. He holds a NERC personal fellowship to study the regulation and effects of plasmid transfer between bacteria on plant roots and leaves.

Dr Mark Bailey, a microbial ecologist, established the IVEM Molecular Microbial Ecology group in 1989. His studies the functional activity of microbial inocula with particular reference to the risk assessment of genetically modified micro-organisms (GMMs). He led some of the first UK field release experiments with GMMs on crop plants studying dispersal, gene flux and impact on indigenous communities.

Dr Paul E. Arriola
is a plant ecological geneticist working on the population genetic structure of invasive plant species and the consequences of the escape of engineered genes. He received his Ph.D. in 1995 from the University of California at Riverside, and is currently an assistant professor of biology at Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, IL. He has published several papers on risks of biotechnology, including reports on gene flow, and fitness of hybrids between crop sorghum and johnsongrass. His current projects include a survey of the genetic structure and genetic diversity of Sorghum halepense populations over its worldwide distribution. Paul Arriola is also working with Norman C. Ellstrand to create a database on crossability, distributions, and flowering times of feral relatives of the 30 most abundant crops sown in the USA, Canada and northern Mexico as a tool to estimate risk of transgene escape in those regions.

Dr Mike Gasson
is head of Genetics and Microbiology at the Institute of Food Research, Norwich, UK. He has been involved in gene technology research for over twenty years, with a particular interest in the genetics of food-relevant micro-organisms, including the dairy lactic acid bacteria. He is a member of the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes (ACNFP) which advises the UK Government on the safety of food applications of gene technology.

Professor Alan Gray
is Head of the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology's Furzebrook Research Station in Dorset, UK. His major research has been in the field of ecological genetics. In recent years he has worked on the potential environmental impact of genetically modified crops. He is a member of the UK Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment, a Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton, a former Vice-President of the British Ecological Society, and has served on the Editorial Boards of Heredity and the Journal of Ecology.

Professor David D. Jackson
is Science Director of the Southern California Earthquake Center and holds the chair of Geophysics at the University of California at Los Angeles. He earned a B.S. in Physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1965 and a Ph.D. in Geophysics and Space Physics at MIT in 1969. His research includes inverse theory, hypothesis testing, earthquake forecasting, and hazard estimation.