Why Im quitting GMO research
Devang Mehta
Synthetic Biology
ETH Zurich
...You see, for the last four years I’ve been embedded in a Swiss research group that specializes in creating genetically modified organisms, or GMOs (scientists prefer to use the terms genetic engineered organisms or transgenics rather than GMO). And no, we are not funded by Monsanto, and our GMOs are largely patent-free.
Nevertheless, my time in GMO research creating virus-resistant plants has meant dealing with the overwhelming negative responses the topic evokes in so many people. These range from daily conversations halting into awkward silence when the subject of my work crops up, to hateful Twitter trolls, and even the occasional fear that public protesters might destroy our research. Little wonder then, that having finished my PhD, I’m part-excited and part-relieved to move to a new lab and work on more fundamental questions in plant biology: how plants are able to control the levels at which their genes are active.
Unfortunately, I am not alone. The first commercially available GMO crops were first developed in the early 1990s in publicly funded labs in Europe and the US. In the years since, as many as a quarter of European universities have shut down their GMO research programs, some due to a loss of funding and others because scientists are leaving the GMO sphere, tired of the backlash and criticism.
My first experience of the intensity of anti-GMO belief occurred during a public panel discussion about patenting crops and GMOs organized by my colleagues. The panel was interrupted by a protestor shouting about how GM food was responsible for their American friends’ child’s autism. As the panelists tried to explain, there is no causal link between autism and GMOs (or vaccines for that matter) and GMOs have repeatedly been found to be perfectly safe for human consumption. But the protestor readily dismissed these arguments in favor for what can only be described as a fervently held, conspiracist belief. It really showed how futile researchers’ attempts at science communication can be.
...Apart from the sheer hate spewed by anti-GM activists both in person and online, I also find fault with my fellow scientists. Too often, other scientists ignore the issue of GMOs, or just treat it as a technology that we can do without (we can’t, by the way. Not if we want to feed 9 billion people by 2050). For example, it is an open-secret among the plant science community in Europe that GMO-research proposals have a very low chance of getting public funding. This is despite the fact that several European agencies, scientific societies, and publicly funded studies have deemed GMOs perfectly safe and even a valuable tool to fight world hunger.
...https://massivesci.com/articles/gmo-gm-plants-safe/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Of the pesticides, glyphosate is one of the safest. And Roundup ready crops use far less herbicide than non-GMO crops. Plus, if you are not going to use glyphosate, what is the alternative? That's right! It's much worse than glyphosate.
That is what the science says.
Plus, GMO crops has almost nothing to do with glyphosate, except for those few Roundup ready crops.
Of course, to the ignorant anti-GMO ideologues, GMO is only about Roundup and Monsanto. They are wrong.
Tell me which herbicide would you substitute for Roundup?
Maybe Agent Orange? 
Pshaw!
I'll stick with the science on this. GMOs are safe.
One of the things one hears from people handing out this crap about "joining the fight" is the idea that sloganeering is the equivalent of science.
The big feature of this kind of ignorant rhetoric is the idea that poor people around the world have to starve to death and otherwise suffer because some uneducated bourgeois person informed by loony websites has identified some tiny probability which they've magnified into a certainty out of sheer ignorance of and contempt for basic mathematics.
Roundup ready crops are not a "scourge." Roundup is not an evil boogeyman taking over the entire planet like a cartoon Godzilla.
It's a weed killer that happens to be a derivative of one of the most common amino acids in every damned living thing on the planet, glycine.
Now, there are seven billion people on this planet.
About 777 million of them, according to the FAO are malnourished.
The number of glyphosphate nut cases who give a shit about these 777 million people is extremely close to zero. They think that the solution to world hunger is to open a whole bunch of "organic" Whole Foods supermarkets in third world countries, expecting that everyone will drive a Tesla car into the parking lot to pick up "non-GMO" Tofu.
But let's talk about Tofu, OK? As a vegetarian I certainly eat a lot of it myself.
Two or three years ago, the United States, one of the world's largest exporters of soybeans was struck by a terrible drought that in former times would have totally destroyed the American soybean crop. However, the harvest was only reduced by 10% of what it might have been were it not for the fact that 90% of the soybeans grown in the United States were genetically modified to survive drought.
I of course - were the soybean crop destroyed - could have cut back on Tofu and had plenty of other stuff to eat. But without those soybeans that survived, what would have been the impact on that 777 million number?
I fail to see any person carrying on about Roundup who gives a shit about that number.
Little ersatz self declared "activists" can rail all they want about how scientists need to embrace their idiocy or have their work disappear, but scientists are educated, and the likelihood that they are about to embrace the dangerous fantasies of said self declared "activists" - I refer to them as "ignorance zealots" - is effectively zero.
Have a nice afternoon.
