Michael Specter: GMOs: Why Reason Doesn’t Matter

please welcome Michael Specter thank you remarkably low-tech if I close this computer will anything that happen okay I'm not gonna risk it I I think I'm gonna try to be annoying enough actually it's daunting to talk to this group because I usually talk to people who come with Molotov cocktails and there may I thought last night gee I might just be speaking to the converted but I was then very assured me that there will be people who hate me so I'm hoping for that and so at least we can do and it's kind of crazy that I'm here at all I mean when you looked at those slides and you saw the things people were going nuts about 30 40 years ago you would think that things have gotten better because we are more sophisticated than we ever have been we do more scientifically we our progress moves by the second not by the hour the day or the year and it's actually kind of breathtaking what we are able to do in almost any area of science from what seems like a trivial thing I could download any song anyone here could name on a telephone to editing DNA which is both wonderful and scary and we'll be having lots of talks about that not today but GMOs are something that I have been trying not to write about for 20 years and I'm not very good at not doing it because every time I try to stop something so horrific happens that I just sort of feel compelled and it's now our society has adopted a view of these organisms as if they are some martien like different species I was actually um I have the house in the Hudson malady and I teach at Bard in the fall I teach a course on the future of food and how to feed the world and I went there's a movie theater in Great Barrington and I went to it a couple weeks ago and there's a new cafe next to it I went in to get some iced tea and this former student of mine who and like I came running up hugs how are you and then she looked at me and said Michael you know this is an organic cat cafe don't you I don't think yeah but she made it seem like I was behind enemy lines and I felt like I was lucky to get out of there with unpause and tea the truth desire these distinctions organic natural local mostly they're ludicrous I grow organic food I am a rich guy if Tomatoes fall off my vine and rod Earth I have a bad year then I just have fewer Tomatoes alright go buy Tomatoes that's not the problem that most people around the world face and the problem that we have I mean I think the central problem and I'll begin with that is the view of GMOs that has been put forth and this is by everyone though not the press because the press is blameless as you all know and we never exaggerate is that genetically modified organisms are products that can cure terrible problems in the world and we can make the environment better and we can make people eat who can't eat now and we can do it healthfully and cheaply and mostly what we've seen with GMOs and I am a proponent is there's GMO corn and there's GMO soybeans GMO cotton and they're really good for farmers and you could make the argument I would that they're good for other people too but they're not saving everyone's lives they're not special oils they're not vitamins that kids in Africa don't have that if they would just swallow one grain of it then they'd be better and so I once interviewed a guy about 15 years ago in in Londoners said you know if the first two products of electricity were the electric chair and the cattle prod people might think differently about electricity and not that these things are like that but the truth is there's a big disconnect between what has been sold and continues to be sold in reality the truth is that these are wonderful products they are tools in a quiver and arrow and we're going to need all of them because and I'm sure many of you know these statistics but in the next 30 40 45 years we're going to have to grow more food than we have grown in all of human history and we're not and maybe you also know this organic food requires more land it requires more water it requires meat requires more land it requires more space animals eat grain we don't have arable land left on this planet so what's happening now is we the two great countries that are growing rapidly and moving into the middle class with blinding speed are India and China and I don't know why I'm not a psychologist but when people get start getting rich they start eating like us because I guess they also start getting stupid when they start getting rich um but what that means is they eat a lot of meat so the fastest growing McDonald's in the world are in China and India and a lot of me there's a lot of land and it's a lot of grain and it's a lot of water in places that can't afford it no place can afford it but those places you know India relies on the monsoon bad year people starve good year people make it that is what they're looking at but what GMOs really can do they are not being allowed to do because there's something called vitamin a rice hundreds of thousands of kids go blind every year in the developing world because they don't have vitamin A interestingly if you go into a health food store in the United States which no one should ever do but if you're like on a drug or something and you wander in every one of the bottles in the health food store will tell you that its product is good for vitamin A it supports vitamin A health in the terminology that is allowed by the FDA and that's great because supporting vitamin A health is wonderful no one has a vitamin A deficiency in the United States and no one and that by no one I mean no one like zero people out of zero out of 330 million is a very low number so the fact that they are advertising this as a benefit should tell people where we're at in the developing world what we have is quite the opposite and 15 years ago a guy named Ingo Potrykus who is a Swiss scientist developed a way to engineer vitamin A into a grain of rice and it expresses beta-carotene and it looks gold like a carrot or orange is gold and it's called golden rice and for 15 years people have been trying to plant this in test plots see if it works because it would be just so wonderful in a place where rice is the basic foodstuff for people to be able to eat it so far no we're the only place they've really been able to plant it as a test is in the Philippines and it's been ripped up and burned down about four times in India it's been banned in many countries of Africa because the forces of people like Vandana Shiva and Greenpeace who say these things are evil because they're not natural have managed to convince people that something that's completely natural shouldn't be allowed to be grown and then what you have our lives so at the beginning like everything else when a flat-screen TV came out it probably costs five thousand dollars you can probably get it now for five hundred well the first vitamin a rice you would have had to eat two hundred gallon pounds of it to get enough vitamin A into you for to be abuse that obviously is of no value today what you need to do is the two large tablespoon full and that is nothing and that's what kids eat and it can be grown cheaply and yet this is an example and it's only the most visible example there's tons of products that have been developed by scientists developed by nonprofits that and I'm close your ears I'm about to say a horrible word that have it nothing to do with Monsanto and you can and I happen I happen to like Monsanto because I'm that kind of guy but these things have nothing to do with them Monsanto has nothing to do with it these are public domain intellectually available pieces of knowledge that can help and yet nowhere except they just planted some brinjal which is eggplant in Bangladesh and just a very little amount of it and what that means by the way is that the people who plant the GMO brinjal it has engineered into it a bacterium that will kill pests so they don't need to use this spray that we've always used everywhere and as an insecticide it is poisonous and they they've cut they've gone from sort of wom maybe one to two sprayings per week to one to two per season in India and in China this has happened with cotton and you've seen the results you've seen poisonings go like that you've seen benefits for water for things like people women get to go home earlier and be with their kids because they are the people who usually do the spraying don't know how that happened but you know when there's poison it's not going to be the boys who do it I it's a very what what frustrates me about all this is that we can't seem to move forward with the knowledge it is not enough to be armed with facts I was recently somewhere where a cousin of mine is very smart God a doctorate went back to school and got a PhD recently and I had seen her and congratulated her and we talked and she had said some things about some nice things about some things I had written and she said but I this thing with the GMOs this is why you're wrong I said okay I have a couple hours the Terminator see there's just no way you can justify Terminator seeds okay two things I can't justify them and more importantly they don't exist and they've never existed and people in if you don't know what a terminator seed is and the 1990s a company called Delta pine inland developed a patent that said gee we have these GMO products and it's kind of like software it's an intellectual property we want to sell it but we don't want it's like Microsoft Word we don't want you to be giving it to your neighbor and we don't want you to use it again and again you want to use it that's your bite again and you can argue about whether that's appropriate or not and I'll be happy to because it's mixed but if they develop this and some very smart activists in Canada figured out a name for it which was the terminator seed been turned into and it was an excellent it was I think at the time that the first Terminator movie came out right at that time if as if by cue Monsanto decided it would buy this company so activists went crazy and theory it became very emotional very angry and Gordon Conway who was then the president of Rockefeller Foundation is a brilliant man one of the finest ecologist alive basically negotiated a settlement with Monsanto and so that they actually came out in 1998 with a written statement saying we have never tried to make a terminator seed we will never make a terminator seed we will never market a terminator seed oh and by the way we've decided not to buy this company that was 17 years ago nothing has changed no one has ever made a terminator seed yet intelligent people constantly tell me that one of the reasons that GMOs are so terrible is because Terminator seeds means that poor people can't save seeds and get free seeds particularly terrible in India okay I really don't even after all these years I don't know where to start first of all everyone in India is entitled by law to keep and replant seeds sell seeds buy seeds give seeds to whomever they want in any way whatsoever except they can't rebrand seeds that they've bought from some manufacturer and sell them that way okay it's clear as day here's the more controversial thing people get upset one of the reasons I get upset about GMOs as they say it's gonna blow into the pollen will blow into a field and it'll contaminate my nice natural stuff by the way a few weeks ago I was in a hardware store in New York and I saw an ad for natural rat poison so you know this whole natural thing is great but that is a theoretical concern there are really good ways to prevent that but sometimes farmers don't do what they should wouldn't it be great if someone can vent away where you could plant the crop and everyone who heeded the crop could know for a certainty that they would never have their crops infected by it because the seed wouldn't reproduce we could develop one of those things and it would be great for the environment except that this is what that is and somehow the movement led by Greenpeace which I lived in Russia a long time I much rather have the Communist leadership then than Greenpeace now running anything but they've decided this is evil and it's evil and that's all there is to it and so we you know we live in a country you've probably seen this I was in Boston last week you walk by a Chipotle in the window they have goodbye to GMOs yeah work they're banning GMOs from all their products and they're so proud and any person any farmer any restaurant and the organization should have the right to make and sell whatever he or she wants fine with that you don't want to buy GMO products don't buy them they'll all get into why that's more difficult than you think but to have become a country that is super excited at being able to advertise that we are slinking into ignorance is really it's just quite sad because again we've been modifying our food for 10,000 years this is nothing new it's a more precise way to do it and there are many greater benefits there are also some risks there are risks and you'd be a fool not to notice it nothing is without risk and that is the biggest problem in terms of us inquiry that we face because people will say hey does mention this word but I don't I have there's a risk I live in Brooklyn most the time we're a bunch of over educated people with too much money raised too many children with really big strollers and I've had these arguments all the time and they know one of vaccinate their kids these are not illiterate people these are Yale graduates it's the rich people the worst place for this is Vashon Island it's a rich island off Seattle it's got like a 42% vaccination rate because people say there's a risk there's a risk there's a risk to vaccinating your child there's a receiving GMO foods I cannot promise anyone then that's Tuesday everyone who's ever in a GMO food that their right arm won't fall off it could we could die we could get cancer all I can say is that in 30 years of eating GMO foods after trillions of doses have been consumed the number of cases that have been demonstrably shown to have made people sick is zero zero zero out of trillions again we don't do the math we don't do numerators and denominators we say there's a risk if it's one out of three that's a risk if it's one out of like three trillion maybe we should worry about who's gonna win the Cavaliers warrioress series because that we don't make those distinctions so that's true with vaccines it's true with so many things and we believe that natural is good natural is perfect I I'm not speaking with you guys to enrich myself and I've said this many times in places where I was enriching myself I'm happy to get my speaker's fee to anyone anywhere who can give me a coherent legal intellectually rational and correct definition of natural do it because I don't know what it is because you got the natural rat poison so you know when people like Vandana Shiva talk about things are natural what they're really talking about is they're being done the way they've always been done and we can no longer afford to grow food the way we always have grown food now it would be a fool who could stand here before you and say and we're doing a great job in this country because we're making a third of our people obese were basically manufacturing empty empty calories and we're making it so easy for people to eat crap and so hard for them to eat something else and lots of the people in Berkeley in the Hudson Valley at one of which is the place I live in their solution to all this stuff is everyone should eat more home food they should cook they should have Brussels sprouts I agree I like Brussels sprouts I cook that's not solving the problem of Furth about 240 million people and money matters so as long as someone's a Harriett person who has kids is trying to get home who needs food doesn't have time and doesn't have a lot of money they're gonna buy what's available what's convenient and what's cheap and that will never change and those things right now suck they're really bad for you now there's a movement afoot to make cheap fast food that is good for you I'm looking into this now right now I suspect it's mostly cheap fast food for rich people but I don't know that for a fact and I think there's some people out there who really want to try and again sure the answer is do a better job of educating your kids the one thing I made my kids learn when she doesn't do physics and she can't count to ten but she can cook you don't need to count to ten it's really not that useful because you have the calendar I once asked her like do you remember what your aunt Sylvia's phone number is she said yeah it's three because it's just okay no problems problem solve modern world is great so I do I could go on and I'll go in a little bit longer but I just feel that we've perverted our goals to such a degree I wrote a story a couple years ago about dengue fever dengue fever is really bad it's something you don't want to get it doesn't usually kill people but it's very painful and there's no cure and it's getting worse it's getting worse for a couple reasons climate change is one another one is that they used tire market in the world is very successful and ATC jib died mosquitos like to meet and have sex in the little water pools inside of used tires and so billions are shipped around the world and the mosquitoes go with them so we're seeing these mosquitoes where we never saw them before one place it's really bad as Brazil so these guys from Oxford actually I think two of them were students of Dawkins entomologists said who what they're doing now to deal with this is dumping a lot of chemicals in people's backyards there are dangerous to that let's modify a mosquito so that when it mates the eggs from the female develop without wings and they all die and if we did that enough that would be the end of those mosquitoes in this area and eighties Egypt I happened to be one type of mosquito that you can get rid of without worrying about a cascading problem of what is the effect on society and on other animal life their invasive anyway they were never in this hemisphere so they did that in Brazil and it's working really well they did that I went down there that the experiment was great now they're doing it in a bigger way suddenly Key West has the problem they get some dengue and the Oxitec guys say hey let's go talk to Key West and the person who runs the health department there is an X CDC employee and he's cursed by being rational that thing to be so I went there the day that Oxitec presented to Key West Key West's some of you have been there it's a beautiful community fulfilled with a sort of you know the prosperous people who like to pretend they're still in the 60s but drive Alexis's and stuff and it's mellow it's overly mellow but it's a very pleasant place and dengue in a place like Key West is very bad because of Key West has one industry tourism I'm not taking my family to a place for a minute they're gonna get dengue I'll just go to one of the I'll go to the Caribbean where they don't have it I mean there's millions of places you can go and not have that particular risk so if dengue is a problem Key West has a problem so these Oxitec guys said they got up there and they presented their data which is very compelling and I admit the idea of making a thing that can fly around changing its genetics is it's fundamentally scary there's no question about it a couple things to know a mosquito live seven days like a super long live mosquito is ten days if you're a great world traveler as an 80s that you've died flying around you fly a hundred meters so what this means is it's really easy to cordon off sort a 300 meter square place to do a trial and see if it works so it's not like Jurassic Park though it is understandable I think it's understandable to be concerned when they presented this the citizenry of Keywest stood up as one in went berserk accused them of being like monsanto evil multinationals who are trying to come in and sell them their product because there's nothing worse than selling a product I mean I hate Apple for doing that and it was really bitter it was really personal these are just guy they're entomologist that's I mean they're just smart guys from Oxford University sure they probably want to make money but that's wasn't their main thing and who cares if it was these guys screamed them out of town because they would rather do what they're now doing they would rather dump DuPont chemicals and all their backyards all the time then consider something different because we are so afraid of change that Oh DuPont you you may be horrible in other instances but I'd much rather have you than a thing that causes no harm for which there are no chemical involvement no cancers no poisoning their groundwater nothing just they wouldn't even consider having a trial of it and you should certainly shouldn't do this without lots of trials but to not have a trial to not have a trial of some of the oils they have in India that if people had then it would lower cholesterol in a country that has obesity problems it would fight I mean we could use it to but forget it there are so many wonderful products out there that we cannot even get people to test let alone try and that's because the world of I know the world the rich world that sort of defines the whole food mindset feels like we're somehow doing something wrong when we use these products and by the way I teach I'm just gonna end on this because it's not as depressing as I usually am I teach this course at Bard and the first thing I say on the first day to the kids is how many of you try to avoid consuming GMOs at all costs everyone's hand goes up I've done it five times like two kids out of a hundred have kept their hands down and I think they were just brown nosers so at the end I say fine that's good and then I just sit down and I talk to him about for ten minutes about vitamin A rice and do you think it would be good if kids could not go blind do you think this would be good if it wasn't risky was like regular icing everyone loves that so I say okay so now we're all pro GMO we just for the next three months we can work out the details and I tell you this because I think a lot of what this is going on is when people say there are anti a product they're anti Monsanto or they're anti-monopoly or they're anti a certain type of pesticide use that they don't know enough about and some of those things are legitimate but they're all half solutions there's philosophical solutions there's political solutions there's patent law solutions if you think monsanto has too much of a market in europe they're they're suing Google now for having too much of a market and Google gives its products away it's there you know there's not one Google product you have to use you don't like Gmail you think they have too much of your information use someone else there's no there's nothing but it is true that with once I know they actually sell their products if you think there's a patent problem we know how to resolve those problems in this country and in other countries but people don't want to do it so I guess my thing is we have to stop and I'm as guilty as anyone of sort of saying the science which I haven't spoken about much but it's very powerful and overwhelmingly the case that data supports the fact that GMOs the use of genetically modified products and are the same as any other product in many cases it relieves a lot of use of insecticides and in some case there are herbicides that you use more and people will say you use 26 times more herbicide now that you're doing this roundup corn that's true and it's a problem and it's particularly a problem if you have a monoculture where you just grow a lot of one thing which you shouldn't do whether it's GMO or not but the twenty six times more thing is an interesting statistic because roundup replaced two other drugs that are 900 to 1100 times more toxic so 26 times is still I don't know you do the math seventy eighty nine times less than they were using before and they're using less of it so I don't think these things are nothing but I think when we say we are opposed to genetically modified organisms more opposed to big business or we're opposed to what we think we know about what it does to the environment and I'm not opposed to big business but it's fine to be opposed to big business there's lots of ways to express that some of these companies have stopped using GM products okay that's the right and it's the right of people to decide to bomb those or not by those but let's not do this by pretending that something is dangerous that isn't because there are so many things that are dangerous out there and we have the ability to address them let's do that let's focus on that but not arrogantly dismiss the anta's but ask them just why it's much easier in the food world I think than the vaccine world because the vaccine thing they're just it's a very emotional purely emotional my baby thing and on some level I get it but on it's very harmful with the food thing it's almost always a misconception and you can usually talk to people in and we don't do that because we're too busy being angry that they're so stupid we are among friends no tweeting no recording no memorizing and that's a problem in it I it's a problem that I faced in the past in my book I was very incredibly harsh on this subject and that was after one and the best editors at The New Yorker read the chapter and said let's have a cup of coffee and this piece I wrote about Vandana Shiva Laster was much more measured she's still trying to sue us that's fine that's what it's what we do but I guess my big point here is try you gotta educate you got a reason you got a care but don't but it's never gonna do any good because I'm doing this a long time to get into that science is right you're a Luddite and we're going to all starve if we don't do this stuff because that's not going to make anyone change their mind and we meet and also over selling it and saying we're gonna wave a wand and everything will be better it won't be but it'll be a little better and there's 27 other techniques that'll be better there's no question we can feed the world no matter how rapidly its growing no there's no question I don't know any scientist who doesn't think that's true but it's gonna require some effort and it's going to require some acknowledgement that we're running out of water that climate change is an actual problem as opposed to one that Congress thinks is a theoretical problem and that we need to deal with all of it together but we can so that's it for me but I think there's time for questions or yelling if anyone hasn't thank you as always I wrote a speech and I didn't give one word of it I don't know why I do this happens to me all the time but it's the gist hey quite some time now thank you one of the very strong subtext that a lot of people don't talk about to me in the anti GMO argument is there's a subtext that farmers are stupid Hicks and don't understand they're being ripped off by Monsanto I'm sorry farmers make more weighty financial decisions than anybody else I can think any profession I can think of every year is a test of a financial hypothesis you won't get any argument for me they're not they also care more than most people about the health of their fellow humans for a number of reasons one of which is if they're dead they can't sell their product but also because they're good people it takes a special person to be a farmer it's not an easy thing to do but I agree with you hay circuit mileage out of using a medical analogy for example pointing out to people with bacterial meningitis is perfectly natural semi synthetic antibiotics are not I I've tried I mean you can insulin is a GMO I've never seen anyone protest the use of insulin I never seen anyone go around saying oh my god that guy has a pig valve in his heart he's gonna have sex with someone else they're gonna have a baby and it's gonna be like ha spit no but I've never seen that problem in the end the reason I think is because when something is demonstrably useful to someone they get it the problem with the corn stuff and the soybean stuff is I can explain why I think it's useful but it does like you don't go home say oh my god we developed GMO corn phew if we develop a type of oil where your doctor says you need to put this oil and everything you eat instead of avoided people and it brings down cholesterol and reduces saturated fat and things like that I think people would feel differently but I've tried I'm open to anything I've tried yes hi I want to thank you for your presentation today and I want to compliment the organization on all of the things they're talking about I recently saw an excellent documentary which premiered at Sundance and I was happy to get in my small town of Columbia Missouri and saw last week it's called merchants of doubt' and some of the people in this room are in the film it's an excellent film it links together everything from climate change to GMOs and if anyone has the opportunity to see it I certainly hope they clamor and go see it just thank you very much I will second that it's a really well-made and thoughtful documentary and you should try to get it and if any of your teachers you should try to shove it down your students throats as I will do this year hi with your research on GMOs do you believe there are certain foods that would be more hazardous if tampered with chemicals or do you believe that there's there's really no danger generally or what what is your life case on that well the first thing is you need to test every different product differently because they do have theoretical dangers at one time they were testing using two amino acids from a Brazil nut in soy bean and that would be much better to feed pigs it would be much more efficient that growth festered be cheaper except that people look on labels for nuts because some people are allergic two knots even Brazil nuts you wouldn't have known that you were eating Brazil nuts and this was caught by the company that did it a company called Monde something and it never got out of the lab but it certainly theoretically could and by the way our FDA is a little more vigilant than some others in other places in the world so I don't I don't think it's like biochemically true that some of these things make sense and some don't but I think you can always make combinations that are that that could cause problems and things you don't necessarily foresee I think it's definitely the case that that needs to be always considered I would like you to please say something about the connection between hostility to GMOs and the lack of understanding of biology in general and evolution in particular because when I argue with people about this I often find that really the the root of their opposition is that their vitalists you know the stuff of life is sacred and it can't be tampered with and they go on about species barriers and stuff like that so you know is there anything useful you could give us to address that problem yeah I mean I think we need first of all many many people including well educated ones think that the chicken they eat at dinner was born wrapped in cellophane we don't have a sense of how animals live in partly that's because we treat them so badly for the most part but I took my kid a couple years ago she's a college student two place I get eggs and she like I have a picture of her of her getting an egg as it came out of a chicken and literally you would think she'd discovered fire and just come out of chickens like that and she'll come to my place I'm saying sure that you just put this these things called kale on the ground and they just grow up and you eat them yeah we've been doing that for 10,000 years or more but I think the evolutionary thing is important just to give people a sense that we're on a continuum and that there's nothing we do now that we didn't do or didn't grow out of before and if you look and as a molecular biologist people would know this we're related to any I'm related to an elephant that the ancestor of an elephant they lived 50 million years ago and that can be demonstrated and people you know this gets into the whole creationist stuff which I didn't write about in my book but it's a big problem I mean half of this country believes that angels are real and I decided not to write about it because I two things I thought mr. Dawkins probably could handle that himself and also I just felt like I wanted to deal with these issues that weren't to me as cut-and-dry that I was probably wrong it is in cotton right but I think just simply walking people through the development of humanity to the development of crops letting them know that G we have basically made everything we need we've modified it they've been bred there were no Christmas trees in the garden of you know there were no cantaloupes there were no raspberries we made everything if we didn't eat corn if we didn't raise corn there'd be no corn that people don't know that so the whole natural non natural thing is a is a real problem that house has to be addressed slowly but someone who was usually rational comes out with something and I don't know the answer it bugs me and so I listened to thom hartmann on the radio and he's usually rational but he went on this rant about GMOs and he said well what they're doing is they're growing wheat that is resistant to Roundup so they just plant it and they don't worry about the weeds and then they spray everything with Roundup and so what you're doing is encouraging the use of more roundup so I'd like to get your answer today that's true but it's true in a context I mean Roundup Ready products are embedded with the bacterium with a so that if you dump a bunch of roundup around it will kill everything but this stuff that it's protected so mostly it's what it's killing our weeds that you would be killing in other ways and it's totally it's not a harmful product the problem with it is if you use it wrong you know I've been out to farms in Indiana where there are 10,000 acres of corn and not GMO corn and they use roundup and it's wrong because you should be alternating crops there are ways to grow crops that so that they protect each other because otherwise you are getting a resistance that's evolution is very clear all we are is an arms race and every time you develop something some bug or some virus or some entity is going to figure out a way to beat it and then you got to develop something new and that's why aids treatments the ones that works TB treatments they're not a drug there are three drugs at once because they make it possible to evade this process so he's being hyperbolic but technically he's right the thing to do is people need to understand how to use these products it's easy to understand and actually mostly in America they do but overseas that's a big problem in India it's a problem okay I think I have time for one more question which is convenient because there's one more question so I love the talk I also loved your article and dr. oz fantastic he just hired a fact-checker yesterday and wait it gets better the fact checker is a well-known anti-gmo activist if he gave a he would go to The New Yorker we have the best fact checkers he would just hire one of them away he has a lot of money and just give him a lot of money and they would anyway did you a question so I'm from Canada and the one the one thing that confuses me often I I mean I can understand that sort of run-of-the-mill people who get into the anti GMO movement but there's people like David Suzuki who's considered like a national hero in Canada who takes some stands on these topics that are more akin to the anti GMO side and there's also large bodies of scientific organizations like the Union for Concerned Scientists that sometimes takes anti GMO stances and those those are the ones that confuse me of like how to deal with first of all there are large bodies there's a large body and the Union for Concerned Scientists is a ludicrous organization and it's filled with people who don't do their jobs so I'm not saying there aren't legitimate reasons to be anxious about anything but there's no legitimate reason to listen to them and by the way the National Academy of Science I can list 17 scientific organizations in this country and the Academy of Sciences in France the Royal Society in England in Australia in Russia in Germany every society with serious science that has looked at this problem has come out with the same result so you know they're gonna be outliers they're gonna be people who are gonna tell you what they tell you and we're never gonna erase at all just most of it I hope or some of it anyway whatever you take away from this talk the universe the the concerned scientists aren't concerned about science I don't know what they're concerned about but anyway thank you very much you guys are great

Channel: Center for Inquiry

Views: 2,308

Rating: 4.395349 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Cly43zyPDKs

Length: 46min 37sec (2797 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2016