GMO: A Cultivation Of Misinformation, Ignorance and Idiocy

GMO: A Cultivation Of Misinformation, Ignorance and Idiocy

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Genetically modified organisms are defined as organisms in which the genetic material has been altered via the use of genetic engineering. This allows the progression of favourable traits and introduction of new traits. Corn, for example, is a favourable GMO crop as it can be manipulated to be resistant to herbicides, pathogens and contain more nutrients. Another example is Papaya, which was genetically modified to make the fruit resistant to papaya ringspot virus (PRSV). Think of it as an iphone, you have the stand-alone phone, which is pretty and functional. Download a few apps and it becomes more functional, unique and better.

This all seems okay right? Well, that’s because it is.

All the while, as you now well may know, wherever there is science, there is science denial-ism. Those of my Facebook followers will have seen various memes (such as the one below) from various GMO activists – otherwise known as the ‘normal people’. Similarly, there are groups set up by anti-GMO activists -  otherwise known as the scientifically uneducated. These are the people that believe GMO leads to various problems, such as cancer.

Is It Safe?

There are numerous peer-review papers published in very reputable journals (not that that means all that much now days) testing the efficacy and the safety of GMO crops. A few of which are wonderful meta-analyses. Meta analyses are amazing things, they take articles from around the scientific world and collate the information together, and when you do that, excellent patterns and trends emerge. These really are the most salient studies in the scientific world, as one study my show a trend pattern different to that of a study, a meta-analysis will show the study as an anomaly or part of a trend. Science has given ample evidence to show that GMO crops are safe for consumption. Anti-GMO people (as they are most definitely not scientists) provide no evidence, save for a few cherry-picked papers.

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Why Cherry Pick?

Cherry-picking is pretty much the act of suppressing the evidence, you are picking papers that support your claim, ignoring the other data that is available, contradicting your view. A common example of this is confirmation bias, you have a view on something, you find something authoritative that agrees with that view and you run with it, we have all done this at some point in our lives and probably will do again. However, confirmation bias is a form of cognitive bias, meaning you don’t know you have really done it. Cherry-picking tends to be intentional.

This type of behaviour is seen all over the scientific world, sometimes however it is hard to spot. Anti-GMO activists love to use a paper that was published in the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology by Seriliniet al., that claimed to show that rats that consumed GM or pesticides developed tumours and died. This study was met with a mass of criticism from scientists across the world for awful experimental design as well as lack of viable statistical analysis. If you read the study you will notice fatal flaws such as the ratio of control to exposure group (20/80), which as you can also see that some of the control group had developed tumors. This alone is more than enough to label this paper as pure pseudoscientific bull, as well as the lack of statistics. So much so, that the paper was retracted.

 

Panorama

BBC two released a documentary last week entitled; GM FOOD: Cultivating Fear. In which they look at the anti-GMO activists, following a GMO potato in the UK and a GMO aubergine (eggplant) in Bangladesh. The aim being to remove pesticide use and make a better yield for the crop, thus, more food. In the show, it is revealed that a spokesperson, Marc Linus, who worked for the anti-GMO movement, is now a spokesperson for the GMO scientist movement. Basically, he’s done a 180, working with the anti-GMO movement and even helping to start up the anti-GMO movement back in the 90’s. His opinion had changed when:

“I decided there was no logic in deciding the scientific consensus on climate change whilst dismissing it on GM”

This appears to be a very miss-linked, but at least he’s now on the right side.

A common claim from the anti-GMO movement is that the money all goes to big corporations, such as Monsanto. That is simply not true, yes there are corporations that do grow and reap in money, as that is what corporations do. The panorama shows that many small farms reap the benefits, allowing better crop yield, thus, more money.

“Scientists may say that the technology is safe, but the way it is being used in the environment is not safe for that environment in the in the medium term and we have seen that over and over for the last twenty years. The technology is being used in the wrong way and we need to make sure we have controls and a vision for what we see in our country side and at the moment GM fits nowhere into that picture”

“…where they say there may be specific consumer benefits feels to me like an attempt to do a PR job on the technology”

-       Helen Browning CE, The Soil Association.

Well Helen, I challenge you to prove to me that it isn’t “safe for the environment”. What way is it not suitable for the environment, let alone unsafe? There is a clear disregard for any evidence here. There is no scientific justification that the wildlife or the environment is harmed, there are many studies on the cross sectional contamination of GM crops, that yield nothing. Also, let me point out that Helen Browning also sells her own organic products - (advertised on The Soil Association website) but it's not PR related *MASSIVE EYE ROLL*. There is also very little evidence for the health benefits of organic foods – but lets not bring science into this, right?

The show has a myriad of people saying that the GM crops are not safe to eat ‘they cause cancer’.

“A single study, if that has happened, that allows the use of GM crops and find them safe does not prove anything”

“we are assuming they are safe, which is a very big assumption”

No, we have studied that they are safe, over and over, which is very big evidence. Is there a way GM crop could cause cancer in people, probably not. The rate of cancer today is down compared to what it was 40 years ago, and the GM movement started in the 90’s – that’s a massive flaw in that logic. GM has not been proven to induce cancer; it is genuinely as simple as that. This shows that fear mongering is clearly their go-to. When all else fails in the face of adversity (AKA: Evidence), resort to fearing people onto the dark side.

Conclusion

GM Is a safe technology that has been around for many years. There is zero evidence to indicate that GM is even slightly harmful. What are the chances of GM being grown and consumed in the UK? – It’s quite indeterminate. The Panorama show states that the UK ministers are pro GM, although Wales, Scotland and Ireland are not. EU scientists havepassed over 40 GM crops as being safe for growing and consumption, but only one is grown in the EU, which is maize, and that’s grown in Spain, not the UK. It appears that adversity within the government is winning here; the countries ministers opposing GM in the EU are stopping the progression of GM crops. In the UK, scientists developed a GM potato, which was passed onto the US for growth as the EU didn’t commission the growth of the crop in the UK despite it being labelled as safe. Arguments from anti-GMO are lacking, unscientific and fear mongering. They will make things up to justify their arguments and why their opinions are being taken on board is dumbfounding.

Another argument of theirs, which I have argued with people before, is;

 

“we are living a lot less longer than our ancestors”.

I’m not going to deconstruct that; I’m going to let you think about the stupidity of that one.