MUCH TO START A SCARE
“Escalating requirements for testing have stalled its release for more than a decade ...
“New technologies often evoke rumours of hazard. These generally fade with time when, as in this case, no real hazards emerge. But the anti-GMO fever still burns brightly, fanned by electronic gossip and wellorganized fearmongering that profits some individuals and organizations.
“We, and the thousands of other scientists who have signed the statement of protest, stand together in staunch opposition to the violent destruction of required tests on valuable advances such as Golden Rice that have the potential to save millions of impoverished fellow humans from needless suffering and death.”
You just don’t get a more authoritative forum than this science journal or more qualified experts than these. And yet we know what’s going to happen: instant condemnation.
Why is this? What makes people believe our best scientists are automatically wrong, and crooked as well? If you go to the hospital with a broken leg, do you instantly tell the doctor he’s a con man in the pay of Big Pharma?
In 1999 I sat across the desk from the head of the British Medical Association’s research arm as she explained why her association was opposed to GM foods.
“We have to start with the fact the population is very wary of accepting scientific advice,” Dr. Vivienne Nathanson told me.
“If people are going to take a risk, they want to know what the benefits are,” she added. “There isn’t even a price benefit to (consumers) at the moment. So they’re saying, ‘Well, there may be a risk. That risk may be minute to health. It may not exist. But as there’s no benefit, why should we bother with what could be a risk, and what you can’t reassure us is a zero risk?’
“In that sense it’s quite a sophisticated argument.”
Then she added that she expected GM foods would turn out to be harmless, and even an improvement.
The doctors and public alike were gun-shy in 1999, for good reason. They had just been through the “mad cow” years, a time when Britain’s government and science authorities had told the public that beef was safe — until people started dying.
So when GM foods came along, the medical association condemned industry for introducing them without a longer testing period.
Years later, however, the British Medical Association dropped its objection, saying that a decade and a half of feeding this stuff to hundreds of millions of people had not produced evidence of harm.
But it doesn’t take much to start a scare. A French scientist named Gilles-Eric Séralini fed Roundup Ready corn to rats for two years and announced in 2012 that they developed more cancer than rats on a non-GM diet.
He had gruesome photos of bulging rat tumours, and British tabloids gobbled these up and did a lot of screaming about “Frankenfoods.”
Crucially, Séralini didn’t share
What makes people believe our best scientists are automatically wrong, and crooked as well? If you go to the hospital with a broken leg, do you instantly tell the doctor he’s a con man in the pay of Big Pharma?
the data with his colleagues, which is unheard of. In the science world, discoveries only count if you show how you made them, so that others can try to reproduce them.
Many other scientists had tested the same corn on rats and mice and not found any health impact. Most of the scientific community — not all — concluded his study was worthless.
The whole “affaire Séralini” has descended into name-calling in the grand old tradition of French scandals, but the result is that tumour photos keep circulating around the Internet. And no one has really seen the evidence.
But there are no tests proving GM foods are safe, people object.
Yes, there are, and not just from industry; many are funded and carried out by universities or groups such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The trouble is that most people can’t read them because they look like this: “Some of the differentially expressed genes found in the stable Estrela A line (Table 1) can be eventually related to a reduced indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) content, because the down-regulation of a nitrilase-associated protein was observed in the mutant/dwarfed line (SI Fig. 5A). Nitrilases are key enzymes in the biosynthesis of the plant hormone IAA (16), which belongs to the auxin class of plant growth regulators.”
That’s from a 2008 study from Ghent University, in Belgium, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which, like all reputable journals, only publishes studies that have been checked by independent outside experts. While one or two or 25 such studies may be wrong in the end, it’s unlikely that they all are.
And while most of us can’t read the jargon, summaries and abstracts of 600-plus studies are free at GENERA, an online database of studies in genetic research at George Mason University in Washington, D.C. The project does not accept any funding from industry.
On the other side, we never really see the evidence, do we? There are lots of allusions to alleged evidence but it’s always shadowy, like the cheesy “clinical studies” in a bad toothpaste commercial. They’ll tell you that studies have shown GM foods and vaccines are harmful, but what studies? Why don’t we ever see one? Or, better, several hundred from different sources, please.
Yet there has to be more to our widespread refusal to vaccinate, and our stubborn resistance to GM foods, than an inability to read the science, or see the benefits. After all, many of us are willing to take supernatural scaremongering literally on faith, so ignorance has never been an obstacle to acceptance.
But more to the point, the benefits of vaccines and crop engineering are all around us. Who alive, under the age of 60, even knows what diphtheria is? How many of us have seen a polio ward, or know a victim?
Life expectancy is higher than ever. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that life expectancy for Americans grew longer by just over 30 years in the 20th century. It attributes 25 years of that gain to public health — not fancy hospital procedures, but clean water and food, anti-smoking programs, care of babies and new mothers, and, first on the list, vaccination.
Meanwhile, we have all but eliminated the great scourge of humankind for millennia, the threat of crop failure, hunger, starvation. If we have a problem with food, it is that it is too cheap and plentiful, not expensive, uncertain, and adulterated.
It is customary to blame the media for peddling hysteria and alarm, and there’s something to that. Politicians have to take some of the blame as well — they happily jump on any passing craze if there looks to be an electoral advantage in it.
But both the media and politicians are merely playing to the crowd, happy to exploit a set of fears that stems from a deep-seated distrust of modernity itself.
In this, we are no better — and almost certainly worse — than the religious fundamentalists in Pakistan who open fire on UN polio workers, or the cartoon-shamans who do a dance or gut a sheep hoping the rains will come and the crops will flourish.
We can be a society that chooses conspiracy theories and mystery, or a society that chooses reason and evidence. Looking at evidence is harder work than posting catchy slogans on Facebook, but in the end it’s more rewarding.