Neil deGrasse Tyson gets to the bottom of GMOs

why do we need GMOs at all this is Startalk and I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson your personal astrophysicist and I'm also the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and I've got with me my coach Chuck nice Chuck a baby I'm still tweeting it Chuck nice comic that's right love your stuff love your stuff see in weird places and but the weird fun places all the time on TV yes it's great exactly they should just show up in place that's pretty much my whole career weird fun places on TV it's like a Where's Waldo it's like we're today so today I don't think we're talking about the science of GMOs and today we're featuring my interview with film director Scott Kennedy and he directed the documentary food evolution and just as a point of disclosure I let my voice to the film so I narrated the film I didn't write it I assist into some sentences just for clarity but it's his project and he found GMO scientist and and your voice lends a certain credence to the subject yours your well-known scientist and science as what's it when everyone knows your voice well when I when I read the scripts I okay he's trying to get the truth out there and that's all any scientist tries to do establish what is objectively true and share that wait a minute whether or not it agrees with any of your prior philosophies that's all I'm saying I heard what you guys were doing was trying to get that fat grant money so you could live it up and make it exactly all the people living in mansions from grant money my NSF yacht so a GMO of course is the abbreviation for genetically modified organisms and you know it's not an acronym just to make that clear okay decorative has to be pronounceable as a word right so NASA is an acronym GMO is just an abbreviation right because if you pronounced it so I I don't claim specific expertise and I'd have general knowledge we're not specific expertise and so anytime we're in that situation we bring in someone who's got the expertise so that's so joining us by video called today is our guest a plant geneticist pamela ronald Pamela welcome to the show thanks for having me yeah yeah so you studied rice genetics at UC Davis is that correct I do now I thought it UC Davis they just make wine there's a huge wine school there at UC Davis you're doing a lot of research you need to drink a little bit of wine now and then so so that's the relationship among the schools of study yeah and you're a co-author of a book tomorrow's table organic farming genetics and the future of food that's right it's a book I wrote with my husband who's an organic farmer okay alright Wow so you are you're a plant geneticist he's an organ you're like the Romeo and Juliet of biology it's pretty cool we're still alive though so why don't you start with basics here and just tell us what is a GMO and how do you how do you create them well as you said its abbreviation for genetically modified organisms and you know the term isn't really so useful for advancing discussions about sustainable agriculture and that's because the term seems to me means something different to everyone and the Food and Drug Administration has stated that it's scientifically meaningless and that's because everything we eat breakfast lunch and dinner has been genetically altered in some manner and so for an example some foods have been developed through a process of chemical or irradiation mutagenesis which introduce random changes in the genome some are developed through conventional breeding or hybridization and genetic engineering is a technique week to take a gene from any species and put it into a plan so you could take a gene from a virus for example and put it into a plant so so what you're saying is something I've known for a while but it's good to hear it just sort of out of the horse's mouth here that you you know we've been modifying organisms ever since the dawn of Agriculture right there there are no herds of wild milk cows wandering the countryside they we invented a cow for our purposes to get meat and to get milk and and we that we cultivate we usually cultivate but it's really you're genetically changing corn from whatever cavemen ate to these big ol sticks of corn that we now munch on so this is true for essentially every food in the grocery yeah that's correct and genetic engineering and uh another approach genome editing these are more modern tools but we've been spending about ten thousand years of history and there's been changes along the way Mendel discovered the genetic basis of inheritance farmers started mixing two species together through grafting there's me to genesis hybridization so there's many different types of techniques and genetic engineering has been around for 40 years and is one of the newer techniques so they're so they're distinguishing genetic engineering which happens in a laboratory from the genetic changes that were brought about through a crossbreeding and the history of this exercise going back to the dawn of Agriculture well that's partly true but a lot of crops that organic farmers and other farmers grow have been developed in the laboratory so it's not necessarily a laboratory step there's not really a scientific reason for excluding genetically engineered crops from organic agriculture but there's a historical reason why do we need GMOs at all I mean I know your answer but it's want to just hear it what is the data that we need so called GMOs but we need to advance sustainable agriculture and there are many important tools that we need and as I mentioned before we need ecolodge based farming practices but we also need seed that seed could be developed with many approaches but for particular there's some problems that have no real solution except genetic engineering we know some insecticides are very dangerous so there's the World Health Organization reports that 300,000 people die every year from overuse or misuse of insecticides mostly in less developed countries they don't have safety measures that they can take but what we do know is that every major scientific organization in the world including the National Academy of Sciences the European Food Safety Authority and many other organizations have concluded that the process of genetic engineering is no more risky than conventional breeding and in fact genetic engineering has been used for 40 years it's been used in cheese's in medicine and in crops and there hasn't been a single case of harm to human health or the environment so Scott Scott Kennedy okay as a documentary filmmaker I I think generally documentarians lean left politically left would you agree with that you think about it yeah for the most part and he makes a film that is not anti GMO so this is kind of whoa what's where's that what's what's he thinking if you are a left-leaning documentarian who puts out a a work that is not critical of GMOs then people are like another one's been bought expect Monsanto got to him too so I so I had to ask him so I've got I interviewed him just for this purpose and so I had to ask him what was he thinking as someone who generally leans left in his politics and in his thinking and definitely as a documentarian so let's check out what he said we wanted to make a film are so many reasons why we wanted to make this film one of the biggest ones was relieving anxiety right I've seen so many of my friends so many my neighbors so many parents and mothers that have their shoulders like this I know you can't see me on radio but they have their shoulders up again up in their ears about food and where they're getting their information from and they're freaked out so it's anxiety anxiety yeah and should we have that anxiety right that's the first question it's already about food should we have anxiety about food right and when we kept doing the research the overall science and data said we are living we could not be living in a safer time for our food more abundant food or nutritious food available to more people than we then then we were living in right now and that's not being communicated by some of the smartest people that have the ear of especially in a country like the United States have the ear of the media there's fear all over the place chemicals and pesticides and all of these things are some of those things in the food system absolutely but risk assessment so that was one of the biggest motivations can I can we make a film that talks about food and science and safety and sustainability looking towards 9 billion people screaming at us by 2050 are we gonna make our food system more sustainable and do it in a way that doesn't just give a Hall Pass to big food and big government and these other vague terms that are out there that have data that exists to say we need to be concerned about those things big profits and big greed can lead to problems does that mean the world is upside down and I shouldn't trust anybody and I shouldn't trust food and I shouldn't trust my government no that's what we found so so Pamela how do we what's our evidence that a genetically modified food stuff is is safe because that's been a big issue out there a big concern and can we genetically modify food to lower anxiety kill two birds with one stone on their way man what we're at it why don't we get to it yeah yeah well every crop must be looked at on a case-by-case basis whether it's genetically engineered or developed through mutagenesis but what we do know is that every major scientific organization in the world including the National Academy of Sciences the European Food Safety Authority and many other organizations have concluded that the process of genetic engineering is no more risky than conventional breeding and in fact genetic engineering has been used for 40 years it's been used in cheese's in medicine and in crops and there hasn't been a single case of harm to human health or the environment and I think it's important to remember that these are the same organizations that most of us trust when it comes to the safety of vaccines or the effects of a clinic changing climate oh well in that case you're screwed well you can see it's very politicized so the scientific consensus is very clear it doesn't matter if you live in France or if you live in the United States the scientific community has reached a consensus but you see that these different these are three hot topics vaccines climate chains and so-called GMOs that have been extremely politicized making it very very difficult for consumers to really access accurate science-based information so so this distrust this this anxiety I always wondered like where it came from did do scientists need better marketing people I mean III don't know so I asked Scott I asked him where does he think this anxiety comes from when normally these are people that would otherwise trust scientists and whatever is the consensus of observations and experiments so we chatted about that check it out we came to call it we're living in an age of distrust and in my simpleton historian way I go back to Watergate as being the beginning of modern distrust right we have distrusted each other since caveman days and we can get into it but the effect that Watergate had to to Effects of Watergate had was seeing the ruthlessness of money and power in politics how far they can go we like oh we didn't trust some politicians a little bit but this is another level the second one which is very interesting with the internet is who saved us from what could have been the outcome of Watergate would were in Bernstein two journalists now cut to 2016 and the journalists are on the internet some of them brilliant and doing hard work and getting us a piece of information that the New York Times could never get to and then there's a bunch of quacks that think they're Woodward and Bernstein trying to save the world and point out corruption it's like they want to find the next controversy so they can go see the rapture have to find a country where you have to find it whether or not it's there that's right interesting analysis and it and and that bad anxiety I'm surprised a lot of these people just even go outside you know if you follow through you know if you follow through on the level anxiety they have I'm like so why aren't you under your bed right now I could I would be if I believe what you believe you be in your closet I don't I don't get it you know the unknown unknowns and all of this I'm like okay there are tons of things that we don't know about and there but thankfully there are many many more things that we do have good information about and we do know that if you're choosing to eat a traditionally produced vegetable called they would call that big egg first an organically produced vegetable which is more important and my friend and dr. John Schwartzberg at the Berkeley wellness letter somebody tried to communicate good science said it's much more important to eat the vegetable than determine between those two vegetables right eat the vegetable eat the frozen vegetable eat the canvas your vegetables sorry he's got some buttons there okay Pamela do we just we do we just eat our vegetables let's solve all the problems it'll solve a lot of problems it's not always easy to do I have a 16 year old daughter getting her eat vegetables it's not so easy and then there's places in much of the world where children don't have access to vegetables so but if you can eat your fruits and vegetables that's that's important but still you know I know because of my husband that farming is challenging whether it's a big farm or a small farm farmers face a lot of challenges and they need the best tools available so all farmers whether you're an organic farmer or a large conventional farmer you need to have access to genetically improve crop varieties as well as good farming practices and government policies is it possible to be an organic farmer of genetically modified foods so according to the National Organic Program standards if you want to be certified organic you cannot grow genetically engineered crops however you can grow crops that have been developed through mutagenesis or hybridization you can buy your seat for Monsanto you could do pretty much everything in terms of planting genetically improved seeds except you cannot for example plant the genetically engineered papaya that I know you're going to talk about on your show and be certified organic there's a serious insect that can destroy an entire egg plant crop in Bangladesh if it's not controlled and eggplant is the most important vegetable in Bangladesh so to control this disease farmers spray chemical insecticides two to three times a week and but we know some insecticides are very dangerous so there's the World Health Organization reports that 300,000 people die every year from overuse or misuse of insecticides mostly in less developed countries they don't have safety measures that they can take so bangladeshi and Cornell scientists decided to try to control this insect using a genetic approach that builds on an organic farming strategy so organic farmers will spray a pesticide called BT on crops to control various types of insect infections and they use it because it's not harmful to humans or wildlife or fish and in fact it's less toxic than than table salt but the problem is in Bangladesh it's very difficult to get this insecticide it's expensive and it doesn't prevent the insect from getting inside the plant so what the Bangladeshi and Cornell scientists did was they took that gene from the bacteria and they entered it directly into the eggplant and it's been really very effective in the last three years farmers that are growing this eggplant can reduce their insecticides dramatically often down to zero and they could self the seed and replant it the next season is it's a public domain seed you've been listening to Startalk and i've been your host Neil deGrasse Tyson your personal astrophysicist Chuck nice as always thanks for doing this and thanks to to Pamela Ronald for being on the show and as always I bid you to keep looking up [Music] [Music]

Channel: Mashable

Views: 1,043,894

Keywords: science, mashable-video, neil degrasse tyson, startalk, gmos, scott hamilton kennedy, chuck nice, genetically modified organisms, ndt, gmo

Id: aMDhUsxom0U

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 30 2017