having a hard time understanding some of your points, but ill try.
Sorry, the method constantly saying "Hey, look over there at that!" to distract people from focusing on the science and having it clearly & concisely tested, is not actually proving the safety - despite all the money that gets pumped in to claim it is. What that is, is a psychological gambit of "How long can we distract them?". Thus why cigarette packages have to be labeled - in the long term their gambit failed.
i think you are confusing my analogies with a straw man argument. IMO my analogies are valid.
My point was, and is that, GMO foods and technology are insanely more beneficial than they are potentially harmful. further more, there is almost 0 credible evidence of harm caused, or even a mechanism wherein they could harm. as such they merit free use.
their potential for good far outweighs their miniscule potential for harm.
cell phones. same deal. very very beneficial, very little evidence of harm.
the ideology of " we just dont know enough about it!" is a very slippery slope as im sure you can imagine. who gets to decide when we know enough? you? political activists? or the body of scientific research? the department of agriculture? FDA?
to you these agencies are corrupt and shilling. there is 0 way to convince you or any other virulently anti gmo oriented person otherwise
the problem is, you and similar ideologues view scientists and researchers as having 0 moral compass. They just shill and whore to any and all sources of funding. The fact is that scientific literature is peer reviewed and scrutinized heavily, improper methodologies are slammed and premature jumps to a conclusion are as well. published research is very often redacted from journals when problems are discovered.
why do you think people always say post peer reviewed journals or " it didnt happen"? its because peer reviewing is a rigorous framework wherein we can keep people honest. they can be scrutinized and held accountable or at the very least criticized for poor or erroneous methodology. When people make wild arm waving claims, cite data, and then publish a conclusion, but withhold their data and methods they are not adhering to the spirit of the scientific method because their experiments or procedures cannot be replicated.
when their claims are severely criticized, the gmo ideologues dismiss any of the criticisms and insted embrace them as brave acedemic pariahss, willing to stand up to the man and fight for the common person. ( see rat cancer guy... puztai (sp?))
.. So, can the issue of, say, the -millions- of people that have become dependent on anti-depressants and other drugs be excused because in the short term the companies & doctors pushing them didn't see dramatic side-effects, lasting side-effects? (same goes from defective birth control, etc, since you made mention of those)
what is your point here exactly? what do you mean by excused?
i THINK you are asserting that i draw the following conclusion ....
many people take anti depressants & few exhibit side effects. therefore they are in fact safe and merit no study at all.
i do not.
i do not fully understand your point well enough to expand on.
What i have asserted all along here is:
1-GMO is enormously more beneficial than harmful,
2-opposition to gmo is driven largely by misguided naturalistic ideologues and by simple fear and ignorance.
3-There is no credible evidence of harm to hold up that would merit taking them off the marked, or merit forcing labeling.
How are you deciding to differentiate between deciding which items and their long term effects are worthy of study and which aren't?
You mention that studies on environment and effects of oil spills are credible, but then you list several that - because the long-term effects aren't immediately apparent - somehow aren't. So.. "If you don't see it, it didn't happen"?
im not arguing that things shouldn't be studied on a long term if the effects arent instantly apparent. that is nonsense, and i think you are being purposely obtuse and combative here.
i am simply arguing that, barring some completely new and hitherto untested technolagy that is completly unlike anything else, they must in some way have a valid mechanism for possible harm, or if the mechanism is unknown at least have some degree of evidence for the existence of harm.
example: oil spill.
we know oil harms wild life and ecosystems correct? we know these effects last a while correct? we know what oil is what its made off and how it can effect organisms. we dont know how it effects a... wetland and alligators for example. we should therefore study the effects because we could learn something valuable.
example: cell phones.
we do not know how these radio waves could even possibly harm us. we do not have any demonstrable mechanism for possible harm, there is no history of similar harm from other similar technologies, we know lots about radio waves micowaves etc. therefore what is to be gained by studying this non issue? why should we study something closely for decades when there is no plausible mechanism for, or evidence supporting harm?
NOW, on the other hand if say. 10 years down the line, epidemiological studies show that people that use cell phones heavily develop similar cancers 5% more often than others. we would then ATLEAST have a some demonstrable harm to investigate. it would then be studied to find a mechanism for the harm, and from there we could look for a way to correct this.
do you see what i am saying?
GMO products have 0 demonstrable direct harm to humans, no plausable mechanism for harm, and lots of history to rely on.
you mentioned somewhere that GMO products are a means by which farmers can make more money than they would otherwise? Yea this is probably true, but so what?
are you saying that because they making a greater profit they are therefore unethical? even if this were true, so what? do you expect people to farm for purely benevolent reasons?
what does more profit mean?
in the context of a commodity market place, where demand is stable and highly elastic... greater profit results from one of a few things. greater production, lower marginal costs, higher efficiency.
which one of those is bad?
perhaps you are saying that because so much money is involved... there is incentive to cover up good science and hide the harm that is being done? i suppose this is possible, the similarity you drew with respect to tobacco companies is valid imo. i do think agribuisness would try very hard to defend the status quo, but where is there evidence of this?
tobacco companies used a series of now famous PR tricks, and political leverage, but none the less succumbed to good ole' science and the body of scientific consensus.
please stop being disingenuous with your arguments, i dont think my views, as i stated them, are anywhere near ambiguous enough to merit such a wild misinterpretations. if you are somehow genuinely misinterpreting what i have said, then i suppose i am sorry.
from what i can tell... the rest of the issues you and others take with what i have said, tend to fall in a similar if not identical vane. as such ill let the above responses speak against yours and others claims and assertions.
EDIT: BTW, i dont know if i made this clear earlier, but i am in no way saying that GMO crops should not be studies period.
im saying that they should not be held hostage pending some exhaustive 20 year long study. this is not merited for the above reasons.
FWIW, GMO crops do have a number of consequences that are INDIRECTLY responsible for problems we are now seeing in isect populations migrations etc. in many cases however these are not specific to gmo crops in particular, but to farming practices as a whole. i would however argue that these problems are well within our ability to manage without requiring drastic alterations in farming practices and methods that others seem to espouse.
Nigel said:
This was written in 2003, which to my obviously bad math, is less than 20 years ago.
Can Science Give Us the Tools for Recognizing Possible Health Risks of GM Food?
†
- Arpad Pusztai*, Consultant Biologist (formerly, The Rowett Research Institute)
- Aberdeen, Scotland, UK
- ↵*6 Ashley Park North, Aberdeen AB10 6SF, Scotland, UK. Phone/fax: 44-(0)1224-594954. E-mail: a.pusztai@freenet.co.uk
Abstract
Nearly ten years after the introduction of GM foodcrops there are still only a handful of published studies about their safety. Independent studies are even fewer, moreover, no peer-reviewed publications exist in which the results of clinical investigations on the possible effects of GM food on human health are described. Even though the evaluation of the safety or possible toxicity of GM foodstuffs is more difficult than that of drugs or food additives, this scarcity of data and the lack of a scientific database is curious particularly as descriptions of the results of chemical, nutritional and biological testing in some early (unpublished) studies or some more recent publications demonstrate the feasibility of carrying out proper and scientifically valid health risk assessment on GM foods. In this review, after critically examining some of the basic principles, past results and possible novel methods of future health safety assessment of GM foodstuffs, the conclusion appears to be that as the tools for the recognition and indeed for the elimination of the risks GM foods may present for us are available or can be developed, it is the will and the funding for such work that needs to be found.
a little objective research goes a long way.
please read about why he is 'formerly' associated with that research institution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81rp%C3%A1d_Pusztai
