'Seeds of Science' makes a persuasive case for GM technology by a man who used to oppose it

[progressoid]

The art of publicly changing your mind on GMOs

It’s hard to change your views when you are passionate about something. Indeed some cognitive scientists think that holding onto persistent, even if untrue, ideas may have been evolutionarily selected for in the distant past. For scientists working on climate change, vaccines, evolution, and GMOs, this tendency of significant sections of the public to resist facts that run counter to their existing beliefs can be extremely frustrating. This is why environmentalist Mark Lynas’ new book, Seeds of Science: Why we got it so wrong on GMOs, is such a welcome read :  it gives us a peek into the process of changing one’s dearly held opinions, from someone who did so very publicly.

Lynas is perhaps most famous for getting up at the 2013 Oxford Farming Conference (an annual farming conference in the UK that first started in 1936) and giving a speech beginning, “For the record, here and upfront, I apologize for having spent several years ripping up GM crops… I now regret it completely.” Five years on, in his new book, Lynas walks us through this remarkable conversion with disarming, and sometimes brutal, honesty.

The book begins in 1999, with a post-midnight skulk around in a testing site of GM maize somewhere in eastern England. Lynas and a dozen other British activists, dressed in black and improbably armed with machetes and other “sharp tools,” are slashing the “living pollution” that is GM maize, when they’re rudely interrupted by the police.

...snip...

Later in the book Lynas shifts focus to ongoing GM field trials in East Africa, and in a chapter that’s become my favorite, he turns his platform over to African scientists and farmers in a manner that both anti- and pro-GM campaigners have largely failed to do. The chapter is littered with quotes from African scientists and farmers, all echoing the same frustration with their technological disenfranchisement by a European-funded anti-GMO movement that appears to have captured legislatures across Africa. In one shocking example of this, Lynas recounts how activists used a much criticized (and now retracted) study to convince the Kenyan health minister, a breast-cancer survivor, that GMOs might have caused her cancer. Lynas also meets Tanzanian scientists and finds that anti-GM activists are spreading lies among farmers that eating GM corn will cause their children to become gay.

In nearby Uganda though, Lynas talks to Tripathi, who’s just completed a successful trial of GM, disease-resistant bananas, and finds hope when the government passes a law creating a path for their eventual release to farmers. Thus, in less than 50 pages, packed with stories of both hardship and optimism, Lynas manages to present an intensely emotional appeal for GM technology adoption in Africa ,  an appeal made largely in the words of the region’s own scientists, farmers, and lawmakers.

more...https://massivesci.com/articles/seeds-of-science-review-gm-crops-safe/

[Basic LA]

1. Fascinating article

Thanks for posting. Evidence-based science is under attack.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. What about Round-Up/Glycophate needed to

Grow the GMO? It can be absorbed into the ground and into the roots. Some studies have linked it with cancer.

[progressoid]

3. Getting rid of GMO crops wouldn't mean getting rid of glyphosate.

In fact it was in use for a couple decades before "Roundup ready" crops even entered the market. And it is still used on non-GMO crops as well as other non-agricultural uses (I have a small bottle in my garage).