Two-Thirds of Americans Believe Scientists Do NOT Understand GMOs
An article published at Business Insider spotlights a new survey from Pew Research Center which says two-thirds of Americans interviewed think that scientists don’t fully understand GMOs, and therefore cannot guarantee people are safe if they eat genetically modified food.
The article goes on to explain that this ‘flies in the face of any logic,’ seemingly ignorant of the fact that Americans have realized that an industry which pays for its own studies can’t be believed. Even the PhD’s and professors with long lists of credentials can’t be taken seriously. Regardless of biotech-funded studies finding GMOs to be ‘safe,’ GMO studies conducted outside of the industry gag-practice point out some very obvious things to be wary about.
How do you take scientists with known connections to Monsanto or Pfizer seriously, or Universities who receive huge donations from biotech so large that they build entire departments around those donations? I mean, we should at least be questioning the claims, right? It was even arguably revealed that Monsanto has an entire department meant to discredit any scientist who dares to argue against biotech’s claims.
How does a publication like Business Insider overlook the obvious sentiment of a million marchers against Monsanto, or lawsuits being filed against Monsanto in Argentina, California, and St. Louis just lately which are based on genuine concern, not just a ‘bad reputation.’
The biotech industry keeps trying to pass off this global disdain of genetically modified foods (and now genetically edited, their new phrase for the changing technology) as some kind of mass idiocy. This, when people have read Seralini, they have seen the butterfly populations and bee populations die-off, they have listened to farmers talk about raising pigs with more birth defects when fed a GM diet.
If a Pfizer VP, Dr. Peter Rost, has come out and said that we can’t trust the studies which support the pharmaceutical companies because they are tainted, and Monsanto spun off to become, in part, Pfizer – what does that tell you?
Major scientific journal editors have said the same:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.” – Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime editor-in-chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ) (source).
This distrust of the scientific ‘evidence’ is rightfully felt because it isn’t trustworthy information. At best it is the evidence only for flagrant conflicts of interest, which are riddled throughout the Big Pharma and Big Ag industries. Conflicts of interests which are now easily seen as one collective, chemical-selling whole.
Americans aren’t dumb. We have woken up.
All this tells me is that two thirds of Americans don’t understand molecular biology.
The public’s opinion of any particular field of science is irrelevant with respect to the reliability of the science within that field. What a poll like this does tell us is the relative success or failure of scientists within said field to communicate with the public.
The good thing is the average Joe can communicate what it means to consume pesticide.
Pesticides and GMOs are not the same thing. What’s your point?
The authors of the Business Insider article claim that the National Academy of Sciences states that GMO foods are safe to eat. When you click on the link that they provide, the study that they use as support is not a study that declares safety but of “Approaches to Testing Unintended Health Effects” of GMOs. The Academy’s Executive Summary for this study asserts that: “the products of this technology have the potential to be hazardous if inserted genes result in the production of hazardous substances” and, “as with all other technologies for genetic modification, they also carry the potential for introducing unintended compositional changes that may have adverse effects on human health.” One wonders if BI’s journalists here are completely out of their league, when they can’t even paraphrase their sources correctly.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/americans-doubt-scientists-on-gmos-2015-7#ixzz3fJebzLoC
The authors of this article claim that the National Academy of Sciences states that GMO foods are
safe to eat. When you click on the link that they provide, the study that they
use as support is not a study that declares safety but of “Approaches to
Testing Unintended Health Effects” of GMOs. The Academy’s Executive
Summary for this study asserts that: “the products of this technology have
the potential to be hazardous if inserted genes result in the production of
hazardous substances” and, “as with all other technologies for
genetic modification, they also carry the potential for introducing unintended
compositional changes that may have adverse effects on human health.” One
wonders if BI’s journalists here are completely out of their league, when they
can’t even paraphrase their sources correctly.
I’m referring below the the Business Insider article–it reads like pro-GMO propaganda…
how’s about this?
http://www.siquierotransgenicos.cl/2015/06/13/more-than-240-organizations-and-scientific-institutions-support-the-safety-of-gm-crops/