About 125 years ago, Gregor Mendel created artificial plant hybrids. Although he was at the forward edge of technology, he didn’t have to put up with any backward-looking, hysterical opponents who wanted to smash up his lab.
But today, there’s profits in protests.
Scientists working with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to resist pests and disease and increase nutritional value have the potential to feed starving and malnourished populations. But their work has been poisoned in the public eye by fanatic protesters.
The researchers are treated like mad scientists, and their inventions are regarded as monsters – “frankenfood,” in the words of many well-heeled protesters who don’t have to worry where their next meal is coming from.
Jeremy Rifkin, who, as president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, is one of the faces of the anti-GMO crowd, demonstrated a perverse sense of proportion and a willful ignorance of science when he said the spread of GM foods is “a form of annihilation every bit as deadly as nuclear holocaust.”
Of course, man has been cross-breeding his food sources for 10,000 years. But protesting a pluot (a cross between a plum and an apricot) or a tangelo (a cross between a grapefruit and a tangerine) doesn’t grab the headlines. Nor does it attract a lot of funding.
But going after genetically modified foods, which are nothing more than the natural progression of man taking dominion over his environment, or Monsanto, well, that brings in the dollars – more than $400 million in 2001. And it brings out the zealots who are armed with nothing more than superstition, loud mouths and a sympathetic media.
Could any of them name a single instance of death or illness caused by GM foods? Of course not. GM foods are safe. Even the Agriculture Department has said the risk they pose is “negligible.”
Anti-GMO activists can choose to avoid GM foods if they want. Unfortunately, millions of hungry Third Worlders don’t have that same choice – thanks to the well-fed protestors who seem to think that death by starvation is preferable to eating a tangelo