110 Nobel Laureates to Greenpeace: Change Your Stance on GMOs

27 comments

1. A press event? And an informative web site? That seems so civil.
   https://twitter.com/mem_somerville/status/748609191317737472

2. Tamar Haspel tweeted — “Here’s the thing about Golden Rice. Don’t you want it to succeed?”

   THAT is the truth. /mic drop

3. Which corporate will own the GMO patent variety of rice? Who will benefit from the GMO patented rice the most? The children, the farmer or the corporate who owns the patent?
   What happens currently in India and other countries where farmers have purchased GMO rice and other crops and want to plant seeds the following year?
   Since when has round-up ready crops been good for the environment?
   The world is a complex ecosystem, what happens when you start playing with it. What happens to the choice of people who do not want GMO food? Do they get a say, or do GMO crops pollute the non-gmo crops.
   There are surpluses of rice (and other crops) around the world, GMO is not necessary to feed the population. Vitamin A can be addressed by other means, GMO crops (golden Rice) is not the only option left??

4. I suspect that you will flat dismiss this, but here is some suggested reading by the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board. [http://goldenrice.org/Content3-Why/why3_FAQ.php#Commercial_interest] Here is a more detailed explanation of the licensing arrangements. [http://goldenrice.org/Content1-Who/who4_IP.php]

5. Thanks, I will read.

6. All the while, organic markets are increasing rapidly.

7. I’m one of the less impressed. I do see that genetic engineering has a great potential to do a lot of good for a food future, yet has seemingly significant potential to do substantial harm as well. Current GMOs are around 85% pesticide-ready, which to my way of thinking is pushing pretty far over onto the more dangerous end of the continuum. I do not agree that there has been enough toxicologic research done for unintended consequences and potential harm to overall public health… not to mention environmental health for wildlife, from pesticides.
   Much of the public objection to GMOs relates to the pesticide issues and to unintended chemical trespass onto neighbors in many ways and incidences. Of course, pesticide applications are not specific to GMOs, it just happens that currently, they are tied closely together. This is bad publicity for GE potential. When the scientific method is followed by researchers, they often omit the essential edict… that just as much effort needs to be put into trying to disprove a hypothesis as is used in trying to demonstrate adequacy. Funding sources usually mandate that only part of the scientific method is usually funded and followed. This omission has resulted in a whole slew of historic woes for society, and causes a whole lot of thinking folk to pause before accepting current assurances by industry of sufficiency of care in the process utilized by GMO and GE science. IMHO

8. I e-mailed the following questions to Greenpeace International, UK.
   1. The Nobel Prize winners said in part: “Scientific and regulatory agencies around the world have repeatedly and consistently found crops and foods improved through biotechnology to be as safe as, if not safer than those derived from any other method of production. There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption” (emphasis added).
   If your organisation has any paper in a peer-reviewed journal showing that GM crops and foodstuffs are unsafe, I would like to get a soft copy. How do you react to the emphasized statement?(“There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption”)
   2. How do you explain the stand taken by 110 Nobel Laureates against the anti-GMO activities of Greenpeace? Admittedly, not all of them have the right academic qualifications. But many of them are physicians or physicians specialised in select areas.
   3. Mark Lynas and Stephen Tindale were two ardent supporters of Greenpeace. How did they turn against it?
   I requested written replies to avoid controversy..They could not provide any.Mr Paul Johnston of Greenpeace International UK was willing to talk to me on phone.He said he was unable to give written replies till Monday( after over 3 days!).Mr Jason Schwartz, a Media officer of Greenpeace gave me some inputs including the names and qualifications of the Nobel Laureates and suggested how I should use the inputs diligently. He also could not provide written replies to my questions.
   He wrote: ” Unfortunately, this is not a Greenpeace USA campaign, and we do not have PhD-level expertise in this hemisphere to respond to your inquiries at this time.”Can you give me a sense for your deadline on this? How much time do we have to mobilise our overseas experts? We are eager to respond but want to do so in a level appropriate to your organisation’s needs” I was grateful to the officials of the Greenpeace for their efforts. I waited long enough. I did not get any reply.
   I sent a few questions to Sir Richard Roberts, the Nobel Laureate who led the letter-campaign against the Greenpeace.He replied promptly.I wrote an article on the topic. Here is the link: http://thewire.in/48074/nobel-laureates-slam-greenpeaces-opposition-to-golden-rice/

9. Surprise. They want permission and funding to keep on playing God with evolution.
   Just about ever single time a genetically foreign organism has been imported to a new land, it has either died quickly or screwed up the new environment.
   When we ‘modify’ an organism we are creating a new life; a life with no natural predators or natural controls. Good luck with that.

10. Yes, so helpful. Lets feed people empty calories (rice is already hardly a ‘complete’ food) and, to make it worse, we will invent entirely new versions for which their digestive system and our biosphere is totally and completely unprepared for. This should be fun.

11. You do not know what you are talking about. Brussel sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collard greens and half a dozen other distinctive vegetables were all developed over two millenia from a single species, the weed like Brassica oleracea. Humans produced them by playing “God with evolution” and they have not “died quickly or screwed up the environment”. Almost every fruit and vegetable you eat is the product of “playing God with evolution” yet here you stand, in blissful ignorance, biting the hand of the farmers who feed you. I sometimes think farmers should go on strike and let ungrateful and spoiled city folk starve.

12. I do not agree that there has been enough toxicologic research done for unintended consequences and potential harm to overall public health …

    Of course you don’t Ray. You are on the organic side of the debate and you will never be satisfied no matter how much science is done.

13. The Golden Rice Humanitarian Project did not select rice as a staple. History, culture, climate, soils, topography, and practicality did that. That would be the case whether ge existed or not. Fortification is not a novel concept, nor does it preclude whatsoever alternative strategies you might envision. Unless you can adopt the lifestyle of a impoverished subsistence farmerl, you have no moral or intellectual authority. Nothing more than naive, privileged 1st world holier than thou nonsense. You are a lightweight I’m intellect and morality.

14. Well, yes, the organic folk are master propagandists and ruthless capitalists who have used lies and deception to build market share. As well as duping the middle class, they have also duped some poor people into paying twice as much for food so they have less money left over to house, educate and clothe their children. How do the organic crowd sleep at night?

15. Why do people have to be so aggressive? You are, of course, entitled to your opinion but there is no need to be either nasty or arrogant.
    As it happens, I actually do know what I am talking about.
    And, in case you are really interested, consider this:
    I think we can probably agree that there are three types of genetic modification:
    1) Natural Selection: Very, very slow.
    2) Selective Breeding: Must faster. (Such as you have described.)
    3) Instant. (What most people think of as ‘GMO’.)
    The cow is a GMO version of the Aurochs. It took us, say, 30,000 years to genetically modify this animal from a naturally evolved 4% body fat, with a roughly 40/60 unsat/sat fat ratio to an animal with 40% body fat with the reverse ratio. (With much of that ‘improvement’ coming in the last few hundred, once selective breeding was fully understood.)
    Then… America hits boom-time in the fifties and the population starts eating beef daily, instead of, say, weekly or monthly.
    The difference: Surgeons that were active in both World War II and Vietnam noticed a marked increase in arterial plaque build up in the MUCH younger Vietnam War soldiers. So much had changed in only 30 years. And now, Heart Disease is the number one killer in America. Due, in no small part, to GMO aurochs.
    And now we can change species in an instant, with no thought to what might happen when we produce a new life form with no natural predators.
    Not to mention that the digestion of food is also an evolved process. Animals evolve both the dependance upon, and the ability to process, certain foods. And that takes a very long time. And now we are messing with that. Creating new organic substances that, well, our digestive systems don’t understand. Some may be fine. Some may be, well, catastrophic.

16. Your last sentence shows that in dramatic form.
    You are shrill and have, at best, convergent intelligence that has resulted in a myopic worldview. Nevermind your limited writing skills. Perhaps you are dealing with malnutrition.

17. Normally, I don’t see the need for this kind of aggression but it seems to be your language of choice; and so I am simply attempting to establish rapport by matching your shrill and objectionable tone.
    In short, I will simply say your very holier-than-thou response was way off the mark. I have lived with subsistence farmers in a variety of African countries. I have watched what the ‘sharing’ of surplus grains as done to the people on that continent.
    I have also lived with people at a pre-farming level of society only to watch, in the past few years, their health decay as misguided western missionaries introduce them to wheat, corn, maize and rice. They are now in the last or second-to-last generation, thanks to ‘us’.

18. I am sorry if you are offended. I get so sick of the inane accusation and condescension that emirates from both sides in these threads, and yes including to ge skeptic side. And maybe I overreacted this time, but the skeptic community is every bit as guilty of hubris and arrogance, so maybe I have come to expect that as motivation.
    I”m sorry, but you came across as snarky. If i misjudged, i apologize.

19. None of what you have just said makes any sense and clearly you just made it all up. Naturally you haven’t provided any peer reviewed evidence to tell me why a GMO would be more likely than a cultivar produced by some other method to cause what you call “catastrophic digestive problems”. You also confuse matters by telling us that GMOs are “instant” then contradicting yourself by telling us that the cow is a GMO!
    Can you not comprehend how utterly tedious it is for people who take science seriously to be bombarded by half-baked cock and bull stories invented by anonymous nobodies with no science credentials? I will stick with the scientific consensus on GM, take seriously the opinions of Nobel laureates while continuing to feel physically repulsed by the keyboard worriers who consider themselves underappreciated science geniuses.

20. Well, I admit that I don’t know much about Golden Rice, but has it not been the case that widespread use of arsenical pesticides on agricultural land has contaminated vast acreage of cropland? And, that rice has a particular ability to incorporate the arsenic contamination into its physiology? What are the realities of arsenic adverse toxicologic accumulative effects of chronic low dose outcome for public health from rice intake from polluted cropland? Do you really think that adequate science has been done to ultimately understand the risks and benefits? How much cropland has had legacy contamination spread on it from industry deciding to dispose of the toxic waste created in their smoke stacks (that they were having to pay to get rid of under government rules) by finding the loophole in regulation that allowed the toxic waste to become reclassified into being a ‘soil amendment’ rather than toxic waste?
    We are continually damaging our soils, bodies and brains by underestimating the toxicology of what we produce, and the wastes from that production. Why is the current state of agricultural science so damned sure that there are no adverse effects yet undiscovered with the current state of GMO production? Skepticism is the hallmark of scientific method, why does current agricultural science not seem to have a healthy self-awareness of the scientific methodology? Is it because the profit motive is so strong that it dictates that there is only funding for supportive science, while not funding unsupportive science? Should ‘scientists’ that only provide predominantly supportive results really be called scientists???

21. Just about ever single time a genetically foreign organism has been imported to a new land, it has either died quickly or screwed up the new environment.

    That’s not the case at all. And food is the best example of that. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/13/481586649/a-map-of-where-your-food-originated-may-surprise-you
    Can you imagine Italian food without tomatoes? Crazy talk. The world is a much more tasty place because we swap plants around so much.

22. As for the last sentence, yes I see the sentence structure was confusing. That has more to do with not catching an incorrect autocorrect my phone applied as I was typing.

23. Thank you. Honest replies such as yours are no so common here. Apology accepted. And offered in return for my harsh rebuke.

24. Yes, it is. There are countless examples including your beloved tomatoes. Try growing them in the wild… And the re-read my sentence.
    “Just about ever single time a genetically foreign organism has been imported to a new land, it has either died quickly or screwed up the new environment.”

25. Your have made my point for me:
    Try growing any of the GMO-through-breeding plants you mention in the wild…. They will not survive. Or, if any of them do, they will thrive in the absence of predation… And reek havoc on their surroundings. (The latter outcome being the significantly less likely outcome.)

26. You are babbling. We have tens of millions of acres planted with GM crops and none of them are reeking havoc with the environment. Nearly all food crops need extra TLC to survive and are not well adapted to survive outside the farm system. The plants that “reek havoc” are usually pasture grasses, horticultural imports and inadvertent imports.
    Your use of the term “playing God” to describe GM development is childish and unhelpful. I think the Nobel laureates are offering a much more interesting, informed and considered point of view than yours.

27. Rubbish. The tomato and hundreds of other fruit and veg have been imported to new lands and they have not died quickly or screwed up the environment. Most do not survive well outside the farming system.

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