Growing Doubt: a Scientist’s Experience of GMOs

Jonathan Latham

Some of my concerns with GMOs are “just” practical ones. I have read numerous GMO risk assessment applications. These are the documents that governments rely on to ‘prove’ their safety. Though these documents are quite long and quite complex, their length is misleading in that they primarily ask (and answer) trivial questions. Furthermore, the experiments described within them are often very inadequate and sloppily executed. Scientific controls are often missing, procedures and reagents are badly described, and the results are often ambiguous or uninterpretable. I do not believe that this ambiguity and apparent incompetence is accidental. It is common, for example, for multinational corporations, whose labs have the latest equipment, to use outdated methodologies. When the results show what the applicants want, nothing is said. But when the results are inconvenient, and raise red flags, they blame the limitations of the antiquated method. This bulletproof logic, in which applicants claim safety no matter what the data shows, or how badly the experiment was performed, is routine in formal GMO risk assessment.

To any honest observer, reading these applications is bound to raise profound and disturbing questions: about the trustworthiness of the applicants and equally of the regulators. They are impossible to reconcile with a functional regulatory system capable of protecting the public.

https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/growing-doubt-a-scientists-experience-of-gmos/

Ignorance Is The Enemy, Not Carbon!

Ignorance Is The Enemy, Not Carbon!

Tim Miles commented:

Well have you actually noticed that none of the policies enacted in the name of reducing Carbon Emissions are doing that. They are doing the precise opposite. What slight warming we have seen is due to clearing skies since much tighter rules came in on smoke over the past 3 decades.
Here’s one to discuss. As a farmer I see it is getting colder, not warmer, hyping occasional days of hot weather doesn’t change that. A colder world is a drier world, and its one which will support a lot less people. What if Co2 has a minimal warming effect and we are as predicted 50 years ago in fact heading into an ice age.
If that were the case would you really want to tell several billion people living in Northern latitudes that they are going to starve but cannot stampede South because we cannot all suddenly cram into Southern latitudes where the soil simply hasn’t built up yet.
Ice ages both ended and started quite abruptly in contrast to what the media says. I learnt this reading papers for years in the Science Library as a student.