Professor Joe Perry, chair of the European Food Safety Authority's GM panel, said: "Professor Glover is correct to criticise those NGOs that encourage or refuse to condemn the trashing of crops designed to supply robust scientific evidence for risk assessment.
Professor Richard Craster, who is chair of the board's maths panel and professor of applied maths at Imperial College London, warned in the letter that a decrease in the uptake of A-level maths, particularly further maths, would mean that disadvantaged students had less chance of getting into the "very best universities".
Mensah was joined on the judging panel by Professor Jon Cook of the University of East Anglia, novelist and Georgetown University professor Jennifer Natalya Fink, Guardian journalist and author Hannah Pool, and Mohammed Umar, the Nigerian novelist, journalist and bookseller.
The judges on the main prize panel were Professor Jonathon Ashmore, Department of Physiology, University College London; Dr Brian Cox, Royal Society University Research Fellow, University of Manchester and CERN; Fiona Macrae, science correspondent, the Daily Mail; Professor Iain Stewart, School of Earth, Ocean and Environmental Sciences, University of Plymouth.
The panel chairman Professor John Burrows said the panel's decision had been guided by the responses it received from thousands of people about what New Zealand "stands for", as well as its own criteria.
At a meeting to discuss the outcome document with some panel members, Professor Gita Sen, from the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, said the perceived wisdom that economic growth is necessary for poverty reduction really depends on what type of growth it is.
The chairman of the 15-member expert panel, Donald C. Winter, professor of engineering at the University of Michigan and a former secretary of the Navy, said it appeared that the measures were taken at least in part to save the companies time and money.
Dr. Ruth Macklin, a member of the advisory panel and professor of bioethics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, said she worried that researchers with financial conflicts would try to keep information about risks a secret for fear it would hurt investment in their companies.
Schmidt and panel member professor Luciano Floridi were also asked about how a 'Streisand effect' can be avoided in the implementation of the ruling — i.e. caused by the search de-listing process itself drawing attention to the content the individual was intending to obscure.
On the panel was Professor David Nutt, an ex-advisor to the government on drug policy, who once famously stated that horse riding was more dangerous than ecstasy.
