Page 4, Section 2: Transgenic Plants and Crops

SITE No.2 - http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/T/TransgenicPlants.html

This site, while having little-to-no design, is actually incredibly factual.

The scientific content on transgenic plants – a still up-and-coming field of genetics – is rated pretty highly in my eyes. The page uses many scientific words, but most of them have links to a page which explains the meaning to you. Before, I had no idea what recombinant DNA was, but now I do. It goes into many areas of transgenic plants, such as what the common genes implanted are, and explains transgenic engineering well.

The detail this site delves into is pretty handy. It uses a lot of scientific words, such as somatic and germline cells, plasmids, vectors and recombinant DNA, but it is easy to read if you take your time through it and click on the links explaining the words which are scientific that you do not quite understand. The website discusses transgenic plants in high detail, like I explain, but it also has a nice level of accessibility to it. You can click on links to explain words you don’t know, you can look up a certain section of what you want to know about transgenic plants (for example, if you wanted to know about the increased nutritional value), or you can – quite easily – just read the whole article on transgenic plants without too much trouble.

The credibility of the site is supposedly incredibly high. Most of the information has been adapted from “Biology published in 1994 by Wm. C. Brown,” but has been slightly adapted to opportunities provided by an online text. This book was/is apparently used at a university level, which must mean the text is accurate, precise and highly informative.

This website is seemingly quite unbiased. It merely provides the pure, hard facts so you are able to read them. The information is accurate, doesn’t seem to sway one way or another in terms of the implications of transgenic plants and is a nice, easy, afternoon read available online.

Scientific Content: 8/10

Detail of Content: 9/10

Accessibility: 7/10

Bias: 9/10 (Higher is better.)

Total: 8/10 (average, rounded down.)