Conrad Lichtenstein (who, as it happens, used to lecture me when I was a biochemistry undergraduate) has provided a welcome dose of sense and wisdom in the otherwise hysterical and ignorant world that is GM in the UK today.
Writing about the farm-scale evaluation (FSE) results that were widely (mis)reported in the British press a month ago, he says:
That the evaluation involved GM crops is not relevant: herbicide-tolerant crops can also be, and indeed have been, developed by conventional methods. GM is a process not a product - and, as demonstrated by this study, each new product (whether it is GM, conventional or organic) needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis using rational evidence-based science.
Thank you — at last someone's talking sense. Contrary to press reports, which led people to believe that these experiments cast further doubt on the safety of GM technology, they were really investigations into different herbicide treatment regimes and only indirectly relevant to the GM debate.
This confusion arises from a profound misunderstading that has infected the debate in Britain: GM technology is just a tool and, as such, is intrinsically neither good nor bad. It can be put to both kinds of use and it's our job to pick the good ones in as rigourous and dispassionate a way as we can. Instead the British media (backed up, it must be said, by most of the country's population) chooses to misrepresent and denouce GM technology through deep prejudice and ignorance. If we'd done the same to mechanical and electronic engineering as we're now doing to genetic engineering we'd have no cars and no computers, among many other good things.
Lichtenstein also goes on to point out that GM is a truly organic technology, and that it can provide us with plants that are less damaging to the environment than the chemical-laced "organic" stuff that we're forced to put up with today. For example, did you know that, to protect them from late blight, "organic" potatos come laced with copper sulphate-based chemicals? No, thought not — the organic lobby don't tend to dwell on facts like that. GM is currently the only realistic hope of creating disease- and copper sulphate-free potatoes. Do we really want to stop our kids from enjoying them for dinner one day?
Posted by timo at November 15, 2003 09:10 PM | TrackBack