The Stream - The GMO debate

On The Stream: A discussion about the impact of genetically modified foods.

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[roseh]

It doesn't have to happen in a laboratory, although it probably wouldn't ever happen in nature.  Farmers have done this for thousands of years.  When you splice different plants together, they grow together and create different fruit.  No we didn't move the genes ourselves;  after the farmer did the splice, nature incorporated the two genes into one in some way, which is the same thing.

[megadyck]

This show was ridiculous... All I seen was bullying of the 2 females and a terrible moderator, also no talking points on how gmo's can make it possible for companies to patent seeds and charge prices on those seeds that are destroying the lively hoods of many farmers. When you are able to patent source seeds of foods we all depend on and make it so farmers can only use your seed and sue them if they take said plant out of their fields that can lead only to tyranny and more indentured servitude. For who controls our food production controls us all...

[charlesmrader]

There was a part of the discussion that mentioned work with pigs conducted by Judy Carman. And other scientists criticized it as invalid.

Most of us don't have the background to judge the validity of an experiment. But there's another way to deal with such claims.

Ask if the scientist who performed the experiment was either (a) trying to get an answer to a question, or (b) trying to prove something she already believed. In other words, is she biased?

Sometimes that's hard to determine. But lots of time, it's easy. You look at whether he/she has a past record of uniformly taking one side of an issue. In Ms. Carman's case, she has been against GMOs consistently. She has praised every study that claimed to find a problem, even when the original scientist who did the study recognized a mistake and retracted the study.

Does this prove that Ms. Carman's pig study was wrong? No, that would take someone with specialized scientific knowledge. But in forming your own opinion, you should take obvious bias into account, certainly before you pass on the study as a proof.