How many on the left are really anti-GMO? Anti-vax?

Great Debates
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Well, lots of things remind us of other things, do they not? :wink: For instance, the zeal with which you defend the biotech and chemical industries and their shills in the face of contrary evidence reminds me of climate change deniers.

The one thing that we agree on is that science and the facts should have primacy over all else. Trying to smear anyone who disagrees with you as being a “quack” runs counter to that principle and makes one wonder how sincere you are in this belief. Fact: Jon Entine has a long and sordid, tangled history of lucrative alliances with the chemical industry and agribusiness – see the abundance of evidence in my cites. Fact: When you asked for an example of where his GLP website has stated something false because of this bias, I gave you a glaring example. You ignored it.

Those who ignore the facts even when they’re highlighted for them and spoon fed to them are confessing that they have nothing to bring to the debate.

I’m glad to see that you at least half-heartedly acknowledge the EPA assessment of 20 years of data on the dangers of atrazine. I will remind you again that your pal Jon Entine publicly endorses the following position on his infamous “Genetic Literacy Project” website: “Until Hayes’ laboratory research, no studies had found significant health or environmental concerns over atrazine and its use”. The man is a lying shill for the industry.

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Since I earlier cited this EPA article [contains link to a large PDF that you can read online or download] on the risk factors of atrazine, which Jon Entine assures us are non-existent, I was curious to see what scientific literature the EPA based their assessments on, and over what time period the studies were done.

The answer, from skimming their citations, is that they assessed 285 relevant papers published between 1967 and 2015 (or possibly even earlier; 1967 was the earliest I saw in a quick scan). 6 of those were co-authored by Hayes as principal author and one other by Hayes as contributing co-author. All of those 7 papers – every one – had numerous co-authors, as many as 21 different researchers on one of those papers. But never mind. If one want to cast aspersions on Hayes because he’s eccentric, let’s just ignore those 7 papers that might allegedly have been “tainted” by the mere presence of Hayes. That will make the Jon Entine sycophants happy.

That still leaves 278 independent research papers over a period of 49 years studying the risk factors of atrazine. Many did identify such risk factors, directly or indirectly, including effects on other plants and animals and the production of atrazine byproducts like hydroxyatrazine in soils through adsorption and hydrolysis. As well, the potential for groundwater contamination was identified as early as 1980 if not earlier (Davidson, J.M., P.S.C. Rao,L.T. Ou, W.B. Wheeler, and D.F. Rothwell. 1980. Adsorption, movement and biological degradation of large concentrations of pesticides in soils.) Today of course atrazine is recognized as the predominant herbicide contaminant in drinking water.

But Jon Entine and his “Genetic Literacy Project” is still banging the drums about how “until Hayes’ laboratory research, no studies had found significant health or environmental concerns over atrazine and its use”, and Hayes’ research doesn’t count because Entine’s paymasters don’t like his results, and his prominence in criticizing atrazine and Syngenta have made him a target of the industry and its paid shills. Entine’s claim is a blatant lie, which was my point. There has been tons of research over a period of half a century, much of it incriminating, which is how the EPA reached its 2016 conclusions. Entine is a propagandizing liar and an industry shill. That there are undoubtedly things on his website that are true is immaterial since everything there is totally one-sided if not an outright lie and nothing can be considered reliable, because it’s impossible for the ordinary person to tell what’s accurate and what isn’t. It’s a freaking propaganda organ for the industry, plain and simple. Its slogan, “science, not ideology” just drips the same heavy irony as those conspiracy sites that proclaim “the real truth about …”, or some shit-hole tinpot dictatorship declaring itself “the Democratic People’s Republic of”.

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I think wolfpup forgot the premise of the article on GLP (which Entine did not write, by the way) - it was about claims of great harm to amphibians due to the herbicide atrazine, which were not borne out by research co-published by the guy who originally raised the alarm (and who wolfpup amusingly describes as “eccentric”). :smiley: Not an article about GMOs, but as I acknowledged, it contains an inaccurate portrayal of the safety profile of atrazine, so kudos to wolfpup for actually taking the time to read and cite an article on that site.

So the question is, do we accept his premise that a false statement in that article by someone else proves that Entine is an “lying shill for the industry” and so we are then free to disregard every article written by scientists and journalists that appear on the GLP website?

That’s a bit trickier.

How then do we approach Consumer Reports’ treatment of genetically modified foods? Their science editors have consistently fearmongered on the subject, citing unnamed animal feeding studies (I’ve never seen an article in which they mention what studies they’re talking about, but one hint is that a CR YouTube video promoted Seralini’s rat study). Since CR’s position obviously flies in the face of well-established evidence of GM food safety, are we then to conclude that they’re “lying shills” for the organic food industry, and that nothing they publish is worthy of consideration? I don’t think so (for one thing, they do some good health reporting and have taken on both drug companies and the supplement industry).

And what about Danny Hakim’s reporting for the New York Times on genetic modification? It’s been widely condemned in the scientific community for faulty premises, cherry-picking of data, non-disclosure of key information and consistent bias. Not long ago a Hakim article in the Times alleging ethical transgressions by supporters of biotech targeted the former editor of Food and Chemical Toxicology, Wallace Hayes. The article suggested that Hayes’ journal retracted “a key study damaging to Monsanto” because he was on the company’s payroll. Problem is, Hayes wasn’t working for them at the time the article was retracted, and even worse, this “key study” was actually the Seralini paper! We’re supposed to think that this unnamed “key study” was retracted, not because it was a piece of garbage condemned by scientists and scientific and regulatory bodies around the world (including the European Food Safety Authority, the German office of risk assessment, the French Academies of Science etc.) - but because Monsanto paid off the editor of the journal that had the bad judgment to publish the paper in the first place. :dubious:
This is terrible reporting, but do we then ignore everything appearing in the Times about GMOs, or at least Hakim’s articles on the subject? No, I think each article has to be taken individually. The Times has played it straight on the subject (as in its report on the recent NAS panel conclusions that GMO foods are safe), and even Hakim appears to have raised some legitimate questions about industry practice (a pro-GMO academic, Henry Miller purportedly used a Monsanto draft as the basis for an op-ed in Forbes. Are we supposed to ignore everything published in Forbes, or just op-eds on GMOs by Miller?). Hopefully you see the problem here.

I don’t even like trashing articles hostile to genetic modification just because they appear in places like Natural News or the websites of people like Joe Mercola and Alex Jones. The odds are overwhelming that any anti-GMO stuff they publish is grotesquely twisted or outright fabricated, but it still would be the lazy way out not to take time to debunk it, but to merely state “Everything they say is crap, ignore it”.

And what should we do with a Dope poster who consistently presents misinformation on genetic modification? Examples from recent threads: repeatedly citing an editorial in Nature Biotechnology as evidence that journal has serious doubts about the safety of GM foods, when the editorial in question is from the year 2000 and the editors have long since come down firmly on the side of GM food safety? Or calling a salmon genetically modified to be larger and meatier “a whole freaking new artificial species”, when the only difference between it and wild salmon is a single gene and a DNA promoter sequence? Or, prior to the National Academy of Science’s recent panel report, claiming that the NAS hadn’t said anything “definitive” on the side of GM food safety, and getting called out for this misstatement? Should everything that poster says on the subject of GMOs be automatically disregarded? No, each statement deserves consideration on its merits.

Reliance on the shill gambit in lieu of presenting good scientific evidence continues to be indefensible. What does work and is justifiable is shooting down a bad argument with facts, as well as looking at how the person with the bad argument may benefit financially by making it. Case in point: the “pig inflammation” study co-authored by Judy Carman and Howard Vlieger, which purported to show that pigs suffered various maladies when they ate GM feed. The published report stated that the authors had no conflicts of interest, a dubious statement in reference to Carman and outright laughable when it came to Vlieger, head of a company (Verity Farms) that marketed non-GM grain (Verity Farms also bankrolled the study). The gross, undisclosed conflict of interest is bad enough - what’s much worse is that the study represented horribly bad science (for reasons mentioned in the linked article, including one that I found especially glaring - researchers never confirmed alleged inflammation in the pig stomachs microscopically, they just assumed it by the color of the mucosa, which can be influenced by a variety of factors).

IDebate on this topic is only worthwhile when it’s done on the basis of solid evidence and good science, not through use of the shill gambit, well-poisoning, conspiracy-shouting or other sleazy tactics and logical fallacies.

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Yes. Criticize the science, not the scientist. Ad hominems and appeals to have authority are the refuge of those who are incapable of arguing the actual science.

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You should let Jackmannii know. The whole second half of his post #153 is a lengthy series of ad hominems against Tyrone Hayes, which he finds “entertaining”.

As for me, I am criticizing neither the science nor the scientist, but rather, expressing concern about what is essentially a political situation, the well established dominance of corporate influence in America. To repeat what I said earlier, I have never said that the GMOs we have today are unsafe, contrary to Jackmannii’s constant misrepresentations. I have huge concerns about the industry dominance of the legislative process and the untrustworthy environment in which future developments and regulatory decisions are going play out. My criticisms of Jon Entine are not ad hominems, but directly relevant criticisms of his track record and well-established industry affiliations. I’ve already shown, via the EPA assessment of atrazine and the 285 research papers it’s based on, that Entine is a lying shill who can’t be trusted.

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I note that after challenging me to “cite any GMO article appearing on the Genetic Literacy Project website (which Jon Entine founded), by any of the scientists and commentators who contribute to it (or any article reproduced there from other sources) and refute it using facts” (bolding mine), Jackmannii is now backing away and defending Entine because he didn’t personally write it. That wasn’t the question, and the fact that it was written by some other right-wing industry shill and then enthusiatically reprinted on Entine’s site demonstrates my point about his untrustworthiness. “Science, not ideology” is the site’s motto, and then they produce this pack of lies.

Atrazine is just a random example of an important object lesson here. It’s an unsafe herbicide with a broad spectrum of hazards that is also a major contaminant of our drinking water; indeed, even in some large North American urban areas atrazine has been found in levels that would fail European safety standards. It has been banned in Europe for over fourteen years, yet due to powerful lobbying and the kind of malignant PR that Entine and shills like him produce, it’s been widely used throughout the US. To understand part of my point one has to understand why the EU and most advanced democracies have such strong consumer-protection laws as those on personal privacy, food labeling, and pesticide regulation, and the US does not. One has to understand why every single democracy in the civilized world provides universal health care for all their citizens and the US does not. The fundamental underlying reason is the corporate lobby and its control of the legislative process, enabled by self-serving shills like Entine and the kind of right-wing “think tanks” like the American Enterprise Institute that Entine is part of.

Jackmannii’s attempt to compare Entine’s industry-promoting website with the New York Times is beyond absurd. That you should not mistrust some source just because it had one bad or inaccurate article might be a good argument if I had said such a thing, but I didn’t. I said (several times) that there are undoubtedly things on GLP that are correct (given that there is a lot of misinformation falsely maligning GMOs, I’m sure there are lots of situations where GLP is right and the GMO opposition is wrong). My point is that the GLP is not trustworthy,** given who runs it**. The reason to trust the NYT is that it has a long and sterling reputation and it has no affiliations that would be inclined to make it systematically biased. The reason to NOT trust the GLP is that it’s run by a proven lying shill for the industry, as amply cited previously, who makes his living promoting their interests.

Right now – at this point in the evolution of GMOs – there is no evidence of any harms, a fact supported by extensive testing. At the same time there are a few crackpots around spreading FUD about GMOs without scientific basis. This state of affairs puts Entine in the position of being able to say that he’s just promoting good science, not shilling for agribusiness or the chemical industry. This, however, is complete bullshit, because as we saw with the atrazine article, Entine is perfectly happy to throw science and the facts under the bus and endanger the consumer in order to continue shilling for the industry from which he’s been collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

As biotechnology continues to evolve, it becomes more important than ever to have stronger oversight and regulation, which are already lacking, as we just saw. Some of the things cited by CSPI that I mentioned before in #77, like a mandatory pre-market approval process at the FDA and science-based assessment and regulation of the environmental impacts of GE crops and the prevention of pesticide resistance in pests and weeds, would be a good start. Entine and the entire self-serving cabal that he’s part of are going to be fighting that tooth and nail, because that’s how they make their living. And THAT is my point.

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The scale for this cartoon is the relative likelihood of unintended genetic effects, not risk, yet you go on (below) discuss a “risk continuum.” But the report flat out states that “placement along this continuum has no bearing on risk of adverse outcomes.” Readers will note that their newest report left out the speculative cartoon and states that the process by which a food is made or a crop is bred is a poor indicator of risk.

So that cartoon doesn’t show a risk continuum and doesn’t match the latest NAS report. And you know this from an earlier thread, yet you posted the above anyway.

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“Cartoon”? :smiley: That sort of characterization of a graph from a NAS report doesn’t suggest impartiality on your part!

Anyway, it’s not that simple, and while they make a couple of valid points, that particular “flat out” wording is a bit odd, and is contradicted by other parts of the report, like the part in Chapter 5 where they discuss “unintended effects arising from the use of rDNA-based technologies in food production and the risks potentially associated with them”. A valid point that they make and re-iterate in the new report is that we should focus more on the final product of a given modification rather than the modification method or process itself, which is true. They also re-iterate the related point that unintended effects do not necessarily imply a hazard, and that intended effects can also potentially be hazardous, or that neither of them are.

While all of this is true, it’s also true that unknowns are obviously going to have some correlation with the extent to which novel traits have been introduced and therefore likely with processes that have the greatest capabilities for doing so, which is not to say that the processes themselves are hazardous, but only the way that they might be used. The European Food Safety Authority recognizes this in their GMO approval processes, such as their Guidance on the agronomic and phenotypic characterisation of genetically modified plants, which has several sections on detecting intended and unintended differences in support of risk assessment, making the point that differences and/or lack of equivalences in the agronomic and phenotypic characteristics of the GM plant may be relevant to helping assess food and feed safety.

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:confused: It’s a neutral term. Ask a scientist.