March 2, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:02:53
3221 Are Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) Safe? | Jon Entine and Stefan Molyneux
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are often demonized - but what does the latest science say about their safety and benefit to society? John Entine from the Genetic Literacy Project joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the propaganda about GMOs and whether the fear around genetic engineering is warranted.Jon Entine is founder of Genetic Literacy Project and author of seven books, including Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We are Afraid to Talk About It. Get the book here: http://www.fdrurl.com/taboo-bookCrop Chemophobia: Will Precaution Kill the Green Revolutionhttp://www.fdrurl.com/crop-chemophobiaFor more from Jon Entine please check out: http://www.jonentine.com and http://www.geneticliteracyproject.orgFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Back for his second appearance, John Entine.
He is the founder of the Genetic Literacy Project, author of seven, count them, seven books, which means that I've really got to get busy myself.
Let Them Eat, Precaution, How Politics is Undermining the Genetic Revolution in Agriculture, Crop Chemophobia, Will Precaution Kill the Green Revolution?
We last chatted about ethnicities and athletic ability back to push the boundaries of politically correct speech.
We are going to talk about genetically modified organisms.
Now, you can go to johnentine.com, geneticliteracyproject.org.
We'll put the links to those below.
Please check him out and definitely buy his books.
He's a great writer and great topics.
Thanks, John, for coming back.
I'm really pleased to be here.
Alright, I'm going to start with the basics, right?
So, genetically modified organisms.
You know, when I first heard that, I mean, aren't they talking about dogs?
Aren't dogs like GMO wolves?
I mean, haven't human beings been doing this forever in one form or another?
Yeah, the whole concept actually of a GMO, an organism, that's modified is really a misnomer.
Because there is no organism, genetic modification is really a process.
We've been doing forms of it for thousands of years.
I was just having a discussion today about durum wheat, which is the basis for high premium wheat pasta used in organic restaurants and so forth.
That's essentially a modification not found in nature.
Involving changes that occurred thousands of years ago, and more recently to create a higher quality derm reed, they blasted wheat with gamma rays, with essentially radioactive activity to blow away the chromosomes.
It's called mutagenesis.
It's a high level process.
So we've created this artificial wheat that's sold as organic because it is really.
It's because the process is the modification itself.
So the idea that somehow there's a GMO out there like it's a little organism that you can identify is a misnomer.
There's no GMO organism.
There's just things that have been genetically modified whether over thousands of years or more recently by high precision techniques.
Right, so we've kind of got email now as opposed to the Pony Express and beforehand there was a lot of trial and error with crops with livestock and other kinds of animals in an attempt to make them as useful for human beings as possible and you have a great example which you can dip into about corn but so basically we've gone from a slow trial and error process to a much more scientifically precise form of inserting genetic material into existing crops for the purpose of course of trying to make them either more resistant to To
bugs, the great scourge of farmers, easier to grow, requiring less water, less likely in the case of the Arctic apples to brown and therefore be thrown out, which of course is a completely disastrous environmental waste.
So I wonder if we can just talk about at the beginning, because people think GMO is one big blob, but there are two broad types, the transgenic and cisgenic.
I wonder if you could help people understand, you know, the big context of what we're talking about before we talk about the health issues.
Sure.
I think most people who express concern about genetic modification, so-called GMOs, if they're genuine about it, have phrased it in this way.
We are taking genes from one species and putting it in another.
And that raises concerns.
I mean, you've seen pictures of the so-called fish tomatoes putting a fish gene in a tomato.
That doesn't exist.
There's not such thing as a fish tomato.
And no experiments have even tried to do that.
But we do put genes from one organism into another because genes are just genes.
We share, I don't know, 98% of our genes with apes, but we also share 40% of our genes with marigolds.
And we share 60% of our genes with fish and 70% of our genes with worms.
So the idea that there's a worm gene and a human gene when we share a common ancestor, fish, bacteria, everything does, is a real misnomer.
There's a bit of a fear that when we take a gene from another species, put it in a separate one, this is called transgenics, moving the genes from one species to another.
That creates this Frankenstein imagery.
And in fact, the new generation of gene development is something called gene editing.
You've heard the term CRISPR-Cas9.
There, it's a term we use called cisgenics, where you actually don't bring in so-called foreign genes.
What you do is operate within the genome itself, which really should put to rest all these concerns about creating these Frankensteins.
But in fact, anti-GMOers never were really concerned about this Frankenstein thing.
They were really concerned about the technology itself.
So they want to call these new things GMOs as well when they're not.
So this is just the turning on and off of particular gene sequences within the DNA of the plant itself, is that right?
Yeah, the new generation of things called cisgenics.
And we see it not only in crops, but we see it in humans.
There's been a big controversy over gene editing, creating designer babies.
The process is identical in humans as it would be in crops.
It's learning how to express certain genes, enhancing certain genes and not others.
And again, since we share our genome, With the plant world, the bacteria world, you just have to reach into this huge melting pot of genes and select out ones that can do various things, turn them on or off, and you can create many of the things that we have created using transgenics, but it should have put to rest this whole Frankensteinian transgenics foreign gene scare, but it hasn't really gone away.
Right.
Now, I mean, again, I'm going out on a limb here.
I'm not a geneticist, of course, but it seems to me, let's say there was some, I don't know, it can make something ridiculous that.
So in corn, there was some arsenic gene that, you know, every now and then it would just turn on and turn corn into arsenic.
It would seem to me that human beings would never have ended up ingesting that kind of plant.
So there can't be, at least it would seem to me, extremely dangerous one gene on and off sequences that if you mass, you know, turns corn into something explosive or deadly or something like that, because then we would never have a relationship with those plants, because every now and then that gene would be switched on randomly and would kill us.
So I don't know how people get this, like you flick one switch and it becomes, you know, death corn or something like that.
Yeah, I think you described it in a way I think that's comprehensible.
The fact is that conventional breeding is the mixing of two plants, creating thousands of unknown new combinations, none of which have occurred In nature before, just conventional breeding.
This is not GMOs now.
And we've never considered that a problem because our body is very adaptable.
We've been mixing genes for essentially millions of years and the human community has been doing it for tens of thousands of years.
So that's considered fine.
All these unknown mutations, mutagenesis is considered fine.
We've been doing it since the 1930s, you know, blasting out the chromosomes of genes Using either chemicals or gamma rays, creating such wonders as sweet ruby red grapefruit, which is created in a lab over seven years and sold as organic.
But when we make a precision change involving one gene and we map it and we check it for allergenicity and we trace it over a period of years, people are up in arms over that.
Thousands of mutated genes blasting chromosomes.
That's okay.
Let's call them organic.
Doesn't make sense.
Well, it would also seem to rather fly at the odds of the sort of diversity program in society, which is to get lots of ethnicities to get together and have babies and get married.
And nobody says like, well, you know, if a black guy has a baby with like, nobody's looking at Mark Zuckerberg, right?
Like a Jewish guy having a baby with an Oriental woman.
Oh, no, it's going to come out with tentacles and rockets and, you know, rule the world.
I mean...
We do this all the time, and I don't know why it would be so terrifying if it's done more specifically, more scientifically, and, of course, with the 13-year, on average, process of putting it through regulatory approval.
Sure.
I mean, you want to create a, let's say, a drought-resistant or heat-resistant corn or rice.
Absolutely something that scientists have been working on.
We could do it.
We're in the process of doing it through conventional breeding.
It takes maybe 20, 30, 40 years.
We can actually do it in a lab in three years.
And the conventional breeding one, thousands of unknown mutations, refining it over breeding and breeding and breeding until we may get close to what we want, but we still don't get quite there.
We can do it in a laboratory two to three years, get exactly where we want to go, have it tested out, utterly safe.
Version B that I just described can't get approval.
The other one, which doesn't matter if you get approval because it takes so long we haven't gotten there, that's considered okay.
There's a real rational disconnect among the non-science or science suspicious community, which is pretty large actually.
And there is, when you, let's just take the fantasy that you can switch one gene in one crop that makes it bug resistant, right?
So you don't need to use so much insecticide and so on.
Well, if you do it just by crossbreeding, you're going to introduce a whole bunch of other variables in because you can't, you don't know which genes are changing and which genes aren't.
I guess you could map them after the fact.
But if you could sort of target in and do just one, the variability that you have to test for is vastly reduced, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's why it's so interesting.
People say, oh, we don't know the safety of GM plants.
In fact, if that was true, why would 270 worldwide organizations from the European Commission to the Royal Society of Britain to the National Academy of Sciences, every single organization, say that not only are GM crops safe, But they're likely to be safer and more sustainable than non-GMO crops, including organic ones.
They say that for precisely what you just said.
Here we can do something that's precise, measurable, analyzable, and trackable.
That's better than the random version.
Okay, so let's, you know, whenever we start talking about the safety of GMO crops, people think that we're, you know, go sunbathe on mercury without sunscreen.
Like people are just way off the, they think we're way off the reservation when it comes to safety.
So I wonder if you could just point to the general scientific consensus regarding GMOs at the moment.
Sure.
I mean, if you're a great believer in Elle magazine or People magazine or whatever, you're going to hear, well, there's still debate over the safety of GM. But the debate is largely a non-science one.
The Pew, which is a major research center, non-Protterson, based in Washington, D.C., did a survey of scientists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is the largest Science organization, independent science organization in the world.
Canadian and American scientists mostly.
And they asked them about their scientific beliefs on a number of subjects.
Two most prominent ones were climate change and the safety of genetically modified foods.
Eighty-seven percent of them said that climate change is partly human-induced or even more so.
Obviously in line with the consensus that the progressive community embraces wholeheartedly and criticism of people who don't embrace that.
Well, how did GM science come out?
A higher percentage, 88%, said the GM crops were safe, versus 87% said climate change was human-induced.
In other words, within the science community, and these scientists are overwhelmingly either nonpartisan or liberal, very few what you would call conservative, so this is the liberal science establishment in the United States, reflective of the worldwide viewpoint.
It's not a controversy.
The controversy is literally A social controversy is partly generated by myths about naturalness.
It's partly generated by the organic community and how it has profited by the fears over conventional food and the technological intervention into the food supply, which they talk a lot about, even though organics had its highest end.
It's highly scientific and very technologically focused.
So there's a real disjunction, and this Pew survey showed it as well, between the public perception, which says, we don't really know, we should maybe wait another 50 years or so, versus the science consensus says, this is silly.
This is actually more safe than conventional breeding and much more safe than organic products, which lead to foodborne illnesses year after year at pretty high numbers and pretty scary numbers.
Right, right.
Because it's not neutral, right?
I mean, and this is what I think people is really, really important to understand.
And if you're talking about eliminating GMO, you're actually talking about eliminating people.
You're actually talking about increased danger of starvation, of crop-borne illnesses.
Higher consumption of water, massively higher consumption of natural resources, and, of course, you need a huge amount more cow dung for organic, which means a lot more cows, which means a lot more methane, which means a lot more production of CO2-mimicking gases that are going to accelerate what the scientists describe as global warming.
So it's not neutral.
I mean, it's not like, well, eeny, meeny, miny, moe, I kind of like the idea, so I'll pay more for the organic.
That's a personal choice.
But if we're talking about something institutional, we are talking about many, many lives hanging in the balance and a huge amount of ecological stability hanging in the balance.
Is that a fair way to characterize the debate?
I think so in some ways.
I'll agree with you in some ways and sort of part ways in others.
The fact is that a lot of the products that have been developed, genetically modified ones, What I call the first-generation ones, focusing on insect resistance, the so-called VT crops.
Another focusing on herbicide-tolerant ones, which is about 50% to 60% of crops, they're tolerant to a Low-impact chemical that allows crops to be grown at a higher level.
Those have really yielded great returns to the agricultural community, to farmers.
It's resulted in lower food prices.
U.S. food prices are 50% to 75% of what they are in Europe.
So everyone's benefiting from it, but it's not the kind of new generation changes on the horizon right now with gene editing and even with transgenics.
That will add things like nutrition into rice, lower drought concerns on things like staples like rice, remove the threat of diseases to the Cavendish banana, which we all eat.
We've already saved the Hawaiian papaya by making it virus resistant and essentially inoculating it almost like a human gets an inoculation.
So there's all these in the pipeline, these new generation products, which could really directly address things like world hunger and be absolutely essential as we What's so ironic about the anti-GMO ideologues,
not ones who are debating the overall look of the food system, but the hardcore ones, by demonizing all GM products, excluding the new ones that are in the pipeline, and some of which have been developed and are just waiting approval, they're essentially taking a direct aim at the developing world, putting a gun to the head of poor people and saying, you know, We're going to need to increase food supply, but we're going to do it with old-fashioned techniques that we already know cannot do it.
So essentially, they're condemning people out of their reticence, and I would say scientific ignorance to a large degree, to a pretty precarious existence going forward if we don't meet the challenge.
Right.
Now, of course, for leftists, the new synonym for evil is Monsanto.
And here I feel I need to put in that dun-dun-dun kind of music.
Monsatan.
Monsatan, that's what it's called.
And listen, I mean, I had imbibed the same anti-corporatist rhetoric, and I was going to go and put together a presentation on how nasty Monsanto is, and I... So I started looking and, you know, I always have to grit my teeth and be as data-driven as humanly possible because otherwise it's impossible to avoid being an idiot.
And so I started looking into it and I really found that it seems to be a fairly good corporate citizen.
Of course, it is only 5%, as you've pointed out, of the seed crop sales in the world as a whole.
So what is it that people are...
What did I miss or what are people mistaken about when they think about Monsanto?
Well, I think, first of all, Monsanto isn't really Monsanto in a lot of people's minds.
It's the symbol, the entity of the evils of large corporations.
So it's become the bogeyman.
And so when they say Monsanto, they mean Syngenta, they mean DuPont Pioneer, they mean research establishment, scientists who work for corporations.
It's just really become this huge mega symbol.
Monsanto today is a much different company than it was 30 or 40 years ago, 50 years ago, but it was involved in the development of Agent Orange, which was very controversial.
Agent Orange obviously hurt a lot of people, but not because of anything that Monsanto did.
It was actually corrupted batches, which was not anything supplied by the product developed by Monsanto.
But Monsanto made a...
Oh, hang on, hang on.
That sounds like we just did a bump in the car.
I think we should stop and look at what we hit.
So, of course, Agent Orange, for those who don't know, was an exfoliant, if I remember rightly, that was used in Vietnam in particular as a way of stripping the cover from the Viet Cong in that conflict.
And, of course, it's had some significantly negative, and I think long-term, health effects.
So if we could just pause on that and just circle back, because that seemed like a really important thing to break out a little more.
And also, to put it in context, there was a problem with Agent Orange, but it wasn't with the formula itself.
It was with the fact that it's made up of essentially two different major chemicals.
And one made by Monsanto at the time and one made by another corporation and the one supplied by the other corporation were actually corrupted.
They were contaminated.
And that's what caused the problems related to it, not the fundamental product created by Monsanto.
But you know something?
Monsanto knew it had this legacy and was a chemical company for a lot of its history, decided in the late 1990s that it wanted to move out of chemicals and essentially it became a seed company.
So they actually made a corporate decision, a wrong one, in the late 1990s.
Should we retain the name Monsanto with all the brand problems, but also brand equity that it brings with it, or should we not?
And they decided, wrong choice, to keep the name Monsanto.
Now it's nothing like the company that it was before.
It's essentially a seed company now.
Well, and of course, they probably looked at the example of BMW, who has obviously survived its supplying of machinery to the Nazi war machine in the Second World War and has gone on to become a manufacturer of high-end cars.
So maybe they just looked at, hey, if BMW can get away with Nazism, perhaps we can get away with, but, you know.
At the time, I think they were facing a $5 million rebranding charge.
And Monsanto of 1999 didn't feel it wanted to absorb that kind of hit.
Now it would have been piddling because they've grown so much.
And they've emerged as the single largest supplier, not only of GM seeds, but of organic seeds.
They're the largest supplier of seeds of any single company in Europe.
But worldwide, Monsanto supplied 5% of the world's seed market.
And the anti-GMO crowd say, oh, they're going to take over the world food supply.
This is this big megacorporation with tentacles everywhere.
And then when you say to them, look up the revenue charts, Whole Foods, the favorites of the anti-GMO crowd, It has the same revenue, essentially, as Monsanto.
It's much smaller than, let's say, Starbucks.
One company, it's just not that big a company, and we have a very diversified, not only a seed supply, but a food system that's the organic industry, frankly, at $400 billion a year, if you add in the so-called natural foods industry, It's multiples of ten times larger than Monsanto and its other large corporations.
So the debate is more symbolic and emblematic of corporations are evil.
Monsanto represents technology gone wild.
It's the frankenfood metaphor.
And it's become an easy way to crystallize public opinion.
Instead of talking about the science or debating corporate power in a really nuanced way, you just throw out the word Monsanto, the debate is over.
Either because you're for it or against it.
Right.
And if you're for Monsanto, clearly you must be in the pay of Monsanto.
We'll get to those sort of economic incentives in a sec.
Yes.
But of course, like most intellectuals, I try to do as much research as possible by watching left-leaning lawyers' shows.
And I was watching A Good Wife, where they had this idea that the seeds, the Monsanto specialized, or I don't think it was Monsanto in the actual episode, but that the seeds that are genetically engineered...
You know, that they give them to the farmer and either they spill over onto somebody else's farm or the farmer becomes dependent on it.
They can jack up the prices.
Like, it seems to be this sort of tentacle monopoly or this spillover effect.
Couldn't find much evidence for it in the real world, you know, even though, of course, for a lot of people, television comes pretty close.
What is the science behind that?
Is this sort of a possible scenario?
Yeah.
Well, I think one of the biggest things, I think you just touched on it, is that you've heard this, Monsanto controls the food supply because they sell patented seeds.
And you buy patented seeds, one of the requirements is that each year you have to buy a new seed.
And to some people it sounds horrible, we're patenting nature, why would you patent a seed?
You should give seeds year to year, bequeathed by God, or nature with a capital N. The fact is that patenting has been going on since 1930, And it started with hybrid seeds.
And the reason they're patented is because farmers do not want to keep their seeds because seeds year to year decline in their specificity.
And after one or two years, the traits that most make the seed valuable, which will increase production, let's say, growing potential, essentially are bred out.
And after two or three years, it's basically a worthless seed.
And each year, it's less than it was the first year.
So farmers are business people.
They make financial decisions.
If using seeds year after year after year were better, they would do that.
They were willing to pay a higher price for patented seeds and were for 50 years for hybrid non-GM seeds because the extra amount of money for a patented seed is more than returned with the extra yield and the money to keep their farm going.
So it's a business decision.
No one puts a gun to a head of a farmer.
And GMO seeds are no different than hybrid seeds.
It's the same system.
Well, and this idea that that which naturally occurs in the world should, even if mirrored by human ingenuity, should not be charged for.
It's like, you can go live in a cave.
There's tons of them around the world.
It's just you pay for a house because the house is difficult to build.
And these seeds are difficult, at least in the research and development stage, to engineer.
Plus, you've got to spend, I don't know how many millions of dollars to shepherd them through this almost decade and a half long regulatory approval process.
Which in my view is way too long, but that's a whole other issue.
So there is a lot of time, effort and energy that goes into bringing these crops to market and the idea that people should not be able to profit from some sort of exclusive deployment, at least in the short run.
It's a tough case to make economically.
And it's also a tough case to make politically.
It's not like Europe or other countries haven't examined the patent system because each country has its own set of rules and there's been the international court on patents which overwhelmingly endorsed the patent system basically saying it's incentivized agriculture but we see it in medicine too.
I carry a patented gene, I carry a breast cancer mutation that was identified by a company through very very hard and expensive research That allowed targeted screens to be able to be developed, which never would have been developed if it wasn't for the fact that the identification of that gene was patented.
So we see it in medicine, pharmaceuticals, and we see it in crops, and we see it, of course, in electronics.
There's no reason farming should be excluded from that.
If you look at the trajectory of increasing yields, beginning with the introduction of hybrid seeds in the 1930s, and then another sharp uptick beginning in the 1990s with GM, it's clearly the result of high technology, research-based patented seeds.
It's proven to work.
Scientists have put a lot of effort and time in it, and farmers love it.
If they didn't want it, they could easily go back and still today use heirloom seeds, That yields 60% of what modern technological seeds yield.
They're not going to do it because they go out of business.
Right.
I mean, I have issues with the patent system as a whole, but if you accept it, then you have to accept this area as well.
Now, some of the economic drivers for the farmers, and to our environmentalist friends out there, I really, really want to reinforce that economically efficient decisions generally involve fewer resource consumptions.
Because when we're talking about economics of farming, people just think, well, the farmer just wants a gold tractor, you know, or something.
But generally, when something is economically efficient, it's because it uses fewer resources.
And some of the things associated with GMOs, of course, lower water use And non-tilling, you don't need to turn the soil, which of course means fewer, less machinery, less consumption of oil and so on.
Fewer pesticides and insecticides, which of course, you know, bad for the farmer even to be out there spraying all this stuff.
You don't need these repeated sprayings and so on.
And so it is the fact that it uses fewer resources to produce the food means that, you know, per calorie produced, it's much more environmentally friendly.
Again, if I'm not going out too far on a limb with that analysis.
No, I think you are.
The people, though, that are opposed to GMs are opposed to it to a large degree because they're opposed to fossil fuel-based, chemically reliant agriculture.
The fact is that they now call it GMOs.
Before GMOs had been developed 30 years ago, this opposition still existed.
It was directed at agribusinesses and big ag.
It just didn't have the GMO association with it.
But it was the same kind of basic concept.
GMOs has become the...
I think a major flogging point, it crystallizes the issues to them, but it's the exact same thing.
No one wants to use more chemicals than they need.
As you said, it's expensive, and so there's an actual drive to be more sustainable because it's economically incentivized, let alone environmentally incentivized.
So, plus, believe me, there's regulations all over the place to address a lot of these concerns.
And on the flip side, looking at organics, assuming that might be considered an alternative to high chemical industrial agriculture, the fact is, organics use Chemicals all the time.
It's a very chemical intensive kind of agriculture.
It just uses natural chemicals, which unless you believe Listeria is safe and E. coli is safe, natural does not equate to safe.
It's, you know, putting copper sulfate Which is a proven carcinogen on your crops which you allow to do in organic farming and is used all the time in organic farming.
A conventional farmer would be horrified at that because they wouldn't apply a proven carcinogen on their crops.
But here it is approved as a natural organic practice and yet conventional farmers would never do it.
So there's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about organics equals safe, natural equals safe, conventional equals corporate and bad.
Well, and I don't know that there's much of a consensus on what the word organic even means.
I mean, maybe people confuse it like I have a garden, a vegetable garden, and we have some fruit in the backyard, and I'm not out there, you know, spraying, pretending to be a biplane flying over my little garden spraying stuff.
That, of course, is, I guess we'll say, pure organic, no pesticides, no insecticides or whatever.
People don't even know what organic means.
Organic doesn't mean that you can't apply pesticides or insecticides or anything like that.
It just means that you're applying them, you know, usually through the air, if I understand it correctly, rather than triggering some sort of baking in the defense against pests into the plant itself genetically.
Yeah, organic is really a set of principles, some of which are 100 years old and are what we call grandmom's wisdom.
But we know grandmom said a lot of stupid things as well as had a lot of wise things to say.
So organic is a defined system developed over the last 100, 150 years, some of which is very thoughtful and does make you rethink some practices.
And I think it's had a very positive impact.
On making large scale industrial farmers rethink the way they do things, but some of it is just crackpot stuff that just happens to be codified in what we call organic farming.
But when the organic legislation was passed in the United States in the 1990s, It was very clearly set out that there is no definable, documentable benefits to organic farming at all.
That it is a marketing concept following the regulations of the organic farmers who dominated the organic board.
It's following these principles.
The best farmers today who want to break out of the, let's say, the constraints of this GMO organic debate are conventional farmers who adapt Agroecological practices to some degree that embrace organic principles and to some degree take the best from conventional farming.
That's the third way agriculture, much more sustainably focused.
The goal is sustainability, not some artificial concept called organics.
Right.
Now, I've often, of course, had as my dream business plan that a large group of scientists would come out and say to people that not listening to free-domain radio caused brain tumors.
That, to me, would be the ultimate.
Because then, you know, I wouldn't need to go out and publicize or advertise or anything like that.
Because the articles would drive people to my show and to our interview in particular.
And so...
Adding to the list of things I never thought I'd say on this show, John, let's talk about lumpy rats.
Because, of course, one of the things that drives this, what is it, $130 billion or more of the organic food industry, what drives a lot of their business is every time some disaster scenario comes out about GMOs, people go, and I think you can even see this, Dr.
Oz and I think Food Babe or some YouTube personality comes out with some Anti-GMO thing, people flock to the GMO, drive up the prices, and so on.
And a lot of it is these rats with tumors.
I wonder if you could help people to understand the background behind that experiment and why we might approach it with the Spock-like raised eyebrow or something like that.
Well, again, I want to set the context for this is that There have been over 280 independent global agencies from the National Academy of Sciences to the American Medical Association to the Royal Society of Science in Germany.
Every single major independent global organization has put out a statement saying GM crops and food are safe or safer and more sustainable than organics.
So from a scientific point of view The issue is not there.
But there are a handful, and literally a handful, of scientists that are avowedly anti-GMO and have really set their life's career to try to find ways to discredit the mainstream science.
There's been over 2,000 independent studies.
About 1,300 of them have been independent, helping to document the safety of GM crops.
There's a group of scientists and non-scientists, numbers in the 50s, which get together and they meet and they're activists, they're members of activist groups, and one of them is a very famous, or infamous, I would say at this point, French geneticist, Gilles-Eric Ceralini, and he put out the famous lumpy rat study that you referred to,
which was released a number of years ago, and purportedly showed comparing rats that had eaten GM corn and rats that had eaten non-GM corn And ones that had eaten traces of this chemical called glyphosate, which is an herbicide, used commonly on GM crops, but also on non-GM crops, and looked at them compared side by side.
A number of them developed tumors.
And he put these pictures out on the web, he released a book, and he published it in a science journal all on the same day.
Scientists looked at the data and said, this data is just a mess.
We don't know how this got published, but it did get published.
When they explored the data, they found actually, for instance, the rats who had eaten the most glyphosate, the chemical that is now the punching bag for anti-GMO activists, actually had the fewest number of tumors.
But he didn't put those pictures in, but it was in the data.
It was reviewed by science committees around the world, rejected by every major science organization because they don't want to be put in the position of approving something where they're here as demonstrable, even visual evidence of problems.
And within a year, the article was repealed, retracted by the journal, and it was republished without peer review.
In what we call a predatory journal, which is called a pay-for-play journal, where you can buy your way into it.
So Ceralini bought his way into a new journal, and the article was not peer-reviewed, and so you can actually see it with the pictures now scattered throughout the internet forever, but it doesn't prove anything.
It's not scientifically accurate.
And aren't there mice, because I'm thinking about cancer researchers, of course, and they want tumors to be able to experiment on, aren't there ways of breeding mice to produce tumors?
Didn't he use some of that stock for his experiment?
Yeah, there's a certain type of rat that he used that is commonly used in certain experiments, which has been bred to be tumor prone.
So it helps because then you can compare rates of tumor growth because it's very well mapped out in the genetics of this one.
It's called a Sprague Dolly rat.
And so when he's showing rats with tumors, every single rat experimented on in those experiments got a tumor.
So basically that was kind of the null hypothesis here.
Yes, all the rats get tumors.
If you just show the rats that have tumors are the ones that were experimented on with GMOs, you're not proving anything other than you're great at cherry picking your own data, which is why it was retracted.
Right.
Okay, so let's switch a little bit as well because there's The intervention between GMOs and human beings are livestock bellies, in a lot of cases, because a lot of the GMOs are not produced, if I understand this correctly, for human consumption, but are produced for, of course, livestock consumption.
And so animal feed, and of course, there are other processed ingredients that are sourced through GMOs, but the protein, which is the part that's genetically modified, is removed anyway, like high fructose, corn syrup, and so on.
So what is the path from the source crop To human beings and where are the ways in which the GMOs can not even end up in your belly?
Yeah, well, there are certain crops.
First of all, GMOs don't end up in the belly.
I just want to get the image of that there's this organism called a GMO. We just got to erase it from our mind.
It is literally just a process.
And one of the reasons that the United States handles GM analysis and approval process the way it is, is because there is not a such thing as a GMO. They have to look at each individual example of a crop that's up for approval and say, is this process Does it lead to any potential danger points?
Are there any residue left over that could be in humans that we have to look at?
And you rightly brought examples of one GMO product, sugar, which by the time you get to, which it's made from, sugar can be made from sugar cane or can be made from sugar beets.
We have GM sugar beets, but when you get to the final product, sugar, and you look at the DNA molecule, when you analyze it in a laboratory, there's no DNA in it anymore.
It's been wiped out.
There is no way a laboratory, let alone a human being, could determine that a GM sugar is Any different than organic or non-GM sugar?
No possible way.
Oddly enough, that is called a GM by regulations, but people don't know this.
95% of hard cheeses in the United States and the world, frankly, are made using genetically engineered bacteria because we found that the way the clotting mechanism had worked years ago, we used the interior, the linings of animals.
It was very, very expensive.
They developed a genetically modified, genetically engineered bacteria.
Essentially, all cheeses today, 95% of those wonderful Vermont cheeses, which recently passed a GMO banning legislation, are essentially genetically engineered.
It's not in the final product because there's no DNA from the clotting agent, but it's no different than The GM sugar.
GM sugar is required to be labeled.
Vermont cheeses, which are using a genetically engineered bacteria, genetically engineered wheat and so forth used in making beers, all those things not regulated and not labeled.
So a lot of inconsistencies here.
We rarely consume Anything that would have any residue related to GM products at all.
And to the degree that we would, it's been analyzed ad infinitum, unlike conventionally bred products and mutagenized products like ruby red grapefruits, which have not been analyzed at all.
I don't think they cause harm because the body is very adaptable, but the disparity in the perceptions is really notable, I think.
Now, you've gone through a laundry list that really struck me powerfully about the amount of natural resources that would need to be consumed if we had to go back to even the loose definition of organic farming.
I wonder if you could help people understand this is not a neutral thing.
It's like, well, we could have one beetroot that's been genetically modified, or we can have another one, and there's no difference between the two.
Why wouldn't you go with the more natural one, so to speak, as if there's any natural crops left in human existence at all?
But it's not neutral.
I mean, there are significant resources that hang in the balance based upon the decisions of what we choose to consume.
Yeah, I think there's a disjunction between how we in an affluent society where food is not only available and abundant, it's really an oversupply at a very, very cheap price in a place like North America or Europe, versus food available in parts of Asia and Africa, where it represents 60 to 70 percent of their Of their income, family income.
Here it represents for an American 5 to 6 percent at a historic low.
It's maybe 9 to 10 percent in Europe, partly because they pay higher prices because of lack of GM crops.
But let's say we heed the warnings, scare stories Of GMO opponents and we say, okay, let's institute organic agriculture worldwide.
What would that mean?
Well, we know immediately we have a 40% yield lag.
This isn't something created by the GM propagandist community.
USDA just last year put out its data for the last prior 10 years, 10 years of data showing the drag yield on organic crops range from 5% to 60%, depending upon the And that's just fewer crops produced per acre, is that right?
Few crops produced per acre.
And you get the issue of how much input.
Because again, that's a big issue.
Are you using more water?
Organics use more water.
Do you use more high cost machinery?
Organics does, ironically, because a lot of GM crops are what you refer to no-till.
Meaning you don't have to bring these combines in to till things, which has huge consequences from a carbon sequestration perspective, because every time you churn up the soil, you lose carbon into the atmosphere, which creates pollution.
Wait, wait, hang on, sorry.
Just want to make sure, just again, I'm not a farmer, but at least, so you basically till to hide the seeds from...
Insects and birds and other things that can...
So when you turn the soil, you release CO2. Is that from the machinery or is there something in the soil turning that releases CO2 as well?
The soil itself that you're releasing.
Really?
You're losing the machinery.
You're expending more because you have to fuel them with fossil fuels.
We don't have battery-operated combines, unfortunately, and combines are used more extensively in organic farming Than in conventional farming on a per acre basis.
Organic farming is much more labor and machine intensive.
That's just the nature of the beast.
But you also, by churning the crops, by tilling, you're releasing carbon into the atmosphere, which is really problematic.
And we're talking a large carbon impact.
And it's, I think, compounded by, and you referenced this earlier, it's almost funny to say in a certain kind of way, but to make organic farming go, the fuel to organic farming It's cow shit.
I mean, let's face it.
It's manure.
And to create manure, you need cows.
And when you're in the process of creating manure, you create methane.
Believe it or not, the single largest source of methane gas, which is 20 times more carbon intensive than what we have otherwise, is cow manure.
So essentially, you're creating a carbon disaster.
So from a sustainable point of view, if you don't buy the We're good to go.
Letting crops go fallow.
All those things absolutely have proven value.
But they have to be looked at in a wider context.
And many of those practices have been based by conventional farmers as well because they make sense for all of farming.
They're not exclusive to organics.
So do we want to have this organic future?
It would be basically the ag and science community say it is literally putting the gun to the head of the developing world and ultimately to the developed world as well.
Well, of course, and that's not dissimilar, at least from my perspective, from this debate about banning fossil fuels and so on.
Well, it's one thing for the developed world to do it, but it's quite another thing for the developing world, which could cost millions of lives over the long run.
And of course, denude the forests as people just burn stuff inside their house, often without adequate ventilation.
But probably a topic for another time, but it's not.
These things aren't just sentiment followed by legislation is usually a recipe for disaster.
And the amount of extra Cows that you would need just to put the manure into the ground to need to grow these organic crops would be far more deleterious for greenhouse gas emissions than what is currently going on with any expansion to do with GMOs.
Plus you have to feed these cows, you have to maintain them.
The whole system is really much more complex.
We have to learn how to feed 50% more of the world's population on about 20% less land than we currently farm on.
You don't do that by snapping your fingers and saying, I'm going to Whole Foods Market.
It just doesn't work that way.
Where is the 20% shrinkage coming from?
Well, the fact is that arable land is being snapped up by industrialization, population expansion.
And organic farming would actually require more confiscation of forestry lands because you have to get farmland from somewhere.
If urbanization is currently occurring on the fringes of farmland, then you have to go to other places to get new farmable land.
And the classic way of doing that has been to cut down forests.
So there's been some, again, hard analysis by Left-wing think tanks who are, I mean, it's agonizing recognizing the hard choices that we have to make going forward.
But the fact is that an organic-based agricultural system, which we can't have anyway because it's so inefficient, but even if we try to pretend that we're going to go in that direction, would be, from a sustainability point of view, catastrophic.
Right.
Even Mother Jones, probably one of the more left-wing websites on the planet, has been very accepting of GMOs and pushed back against this sort of fear-mongering.
Now, let's talk a little bit, I'm always fascinated why people reject reason and evidence.
I mean, that's always been, because, you know, my job is to sell reason and evidence, so of course you need to figure out why people aren't buying what you're selling in order to help overcome resistance.
So there is a general meme out there to do with global warming or climate change, and it goes something like this.
The left accepts, you know, let's just say global warming, right?
Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming only solvable by massive government regulation and intrusion into the market.
That's a whole other discussion.
But the left says, well, we accept global warming because the scientists say this is what the data shows and so on.
And so they accept that.
Whereas those on the right, you know, those crazy Christian conservatives, well, they just wave things away.
They ignore science.
They reject the evidence because they have their own particular peccadillos.
And I can think of a number of instances where on the left, they reject science.
So the science of racial differences or ethnic differences, as we talked about in the last show.
There was, of course, a huge amount of fearmongering that, you know, one in five people was going to die from AIDS as it jumped from the gay population to the straight population and so on, where there was no evidence for that kind of transmission and so on.
So it seems to me on the left, they do kind of cherry pick the science that they accept.
And this, of course, occurs on the right.
The right is more open to racial differences in IQ and abilities.
The left completely rejects it.
I think you've got a great theory about the pattern behind this.
Like, why do people have particular cherry pickings?
Sorry for the longest question in the known universe.
But why do people, you have, I think, a good theory, at least why people on the left accept certain science as irrefutable and then reject even more established science as fearmongering.
Sure.
It's actually fascinating.
I think you've laid out some of the Some of the breadth of the interesting inconsistencies on a number of issues.
The fact is that most of our beliefs are tribal beliefs, meaning that we share them among a group of people who are like-minded on a lot of issues.
So we don't have to always...
It saves us from the challenge and the difficulty of analyzing every little subject that we're We assume that since we have a common set of values, we think about that on liberal politics and the importance of education, the importance of support and welfare programs.
We don't always analyze each individual program.
The tribe supports this.
There might be devils in the details, but overall that's the reason for doing it.
But again, as you suggested, there's this mem that has emerged on the GM issue Which is that liberals have been rejectionists of it, and a lot of scientists say, look, how could you be rejecting the science of GM when the same organizations, National Academy of Sciences, World Health Organization, European Commission, all those who have put out statements on anthropogenic global warming have put out identical statements endorsing GM safety.
And yet the liberal community rejects it.
And yet the liberal community still says, we're science-based.
Why is that going on?
Well, I think the idea that the liberal community is science-based is basically bogus.
It is really a tribal identification system more than anything else.
And it really is rooted in one very fundamental difference between, I think, the left on the right on certain issues, which is the left, the animating principle of the left is suspicion of big business.
The animating principle of the right is suspicion of big government.
So on the left, you have big businesses Who were involved in the energy field, the ExxonMobil's, the Chevron's, cooperation of big business to some degree, big government on these issues.
So the belief in the science of climate change to a large degree wasn't always based on their understanding Of the sophisticated science issues, because again, if it was, they'd be embracing these organizations that support global warming, the science of global warming, and the science of GM safety.
But no, they rejected the conservative viewpoint because they believed that corporations were bad, corporations supported fossil fuels, therefore climate change was real.
The GMs, their argument is very consistent.
They see GMs as the product of Monsanto and Syngenta and DuPont and agribusinesses.
They reject it because big corporations are inherently evil.
So it has very little to do with liberals are smarter in science.
It has a lot to do with they hate corporations.
Again, this is huge overgeneralizations, all bell curve distributions.
And as I said, most of the science community is liberal, so it clearly doesn't apply to thoughtful, critically-thinking scientists.
But the idea that somehow the left is right on science, and therefore, hmm, maybe we should be concerned that many on the left are anti-GMO, that is bogus.
That is clearly a tribalistic, anti-corporate, philosophical belief, very, very little to do with science, as the science community has made clear.
Yeah, of course, on the left they say that you're in danger from big corporations and therefore we need a kindly government to protect you.
And on the right they say you're in danger of a big giant government, therefore we need more free market principles so you have more liberty of action and so on.
And this seems to drive a lot of how people ingest and excrete the sort of facts of the matter.
And again, because it is, you could argue that, you know, obviously it's been an old As old as religion, the idea that if you frighten people enough, they'll cough up money to feel safer.
I think this occurs both on the left and the right, that they have their particular demons.
But it's like, okay, but surrender stuff to us and we'll keep you safe is a very old scam, I think, in human society.
And science, to some degree, does follow at this.
Again, as you say, there's a lot of leftists in science, which, you know...
They generally put out information that the politicians say, well, you know, this is scary stuff and we'll keep you safe from it.
And the scientists don't necessarily say, that doesn't follow.
There's no policy that follows from data.
And that's something I really wanted to get across to people who are watching it for you and people who are watching it for me.
Data does not drive policy.
And the degree to which people say, global warming, therefore, we need cap and trade.
Or, you know, this information, therefore we need to ban GMOs.
None of that follows.
There's no way that you can get an ought from an is in this context.
You cannot get policy from data.
But people seem to think it's just domino, domino, domino.
Because of this data, we need X particular political...
And I think they're just working backwards.
They want the policy and they'll just go and get the data.
Sorry, that wasn't even a question pretending to be a question.
So that was just a rant.
I'll let you take it from here.
It's a great insight on how people think.
And to show you how broad this disjunction is, I've talked to plenty of farmers who think of themselves as very science-based because they support the science of GMOs.
And then you bring up climate change and they say, ah, but to look at the way that issue has been distorted, of course climate change doesn't exist.
So they wear one hat that they think is science on GMOs.
And then they put on their tribal hat when it comes to climate change.
So it happens on the left and the right.
But I think the saddest development is that so-called liberal politicians have embraced the skepticism, and I would say to some degree the demonization, and on the flip side, I would say the false hyping of organics as what the true situation really is.
So the left-wing politicians, unfortunately, whatever the liberal Conservative base, how it breaks out on these issues.
Left-wing politicians have been carrying the water for the demonization campaign by Big Organic.
And it's been very successful, unfortunately.
And just to give people a perspective, we've gone from individual genetics to the broadest conceivable social phenomenon.
That's the kind of Zoom you get in this kind of show.
Now, in line with that, there's another sort of, I guess, question or issue around this sort of stuff when it comes to genetically modified versus non-genetically modified.
And that is sort of the fallacy.
I don't even know if there's a technical name for it, but it's the fallacy of naturalism.
You know, natural, mmm, that's perfect.
Anything man-made or interfered with with nature is somehow bad.
It's sort of this Garden of Eden thing, you know, like it's like, oh, it was all great until there was, you know, you ate the tree, the apple and so on and things kind of went downhill from there.
And it is a fallacy.
I mean, it is a fallacy because there's lots of things in nature that are perfectly natural that you'd never want to encounter, you know, all the way from god-awful brain-rotting germs and flesh-eating bacteria and so on, all the way to, you know, a hungry great white shark off Australia.
Does this drive this, do you think, this idea that the purity is in nature and that which is man-made has somehow corrupted the pure natural Ansel Adams view of nature that people have?
Sure, I think that that is absolutely the animating principle that runs through this and you pointed out some examples of how naive that is, but on a fundamental sense, Agriculture is about as unnatural a thing as you could ever imagine.
The whole concept of a farm, whether it's the garden farm, the 10 foot by 10 foot garden plot in the back of your suburban house, to a large mega farm that's growing soybeans or wheat, both of them are equally unnatural.
The difference is the size, not the fact of it.
And let me just, just before you continue, I just want to mention, like, how many people say, I'm starving, let's go to the woods?
Exactly.
You know, nobody, you can't find, you can fall four berries, and if you're really fast to squirrel, but that's about, you can't find food in the woods.
It's completely unnatural to find food coming out of the ground.
Sorry, go ahead.
I've seen charts over the past few hundred years, and you can see the absolute correlation between sophisticated, high intense farming techniques with population increases.
There's other correlations as well, like health issues, but the jump in yields, specifically the huge jump that occurred Beginning in the 1950s was the result of what people consider, many people consider awful, industrial agriculture in quotes, usually written in black, with a little asterisk on the bottom that says, brought to you by Monsanto.
And yet, if you look at agricultural So, production brought about by the use of chemical fertilizers and higher use of sophisticated genetics, not GMOs, because GM technology did not really come into play until the 1990s,
but the use of high sophisticated genetic wheat breeds, for instance, Introduced in the 1960s, led to a quadrupling of production in farming, which has led to a population boom that's been utterly dramatic.
All totally unnatural.
Do we really want to go back to the time when the average life expectancy was 25?
100 years ago in the United States, our life expectancy was less than half of what it is now.
Almost all of it the result of increased food supply.
And there is this weird thing that happens where people somehow have this creepy background obsession that the modern world is bad for them.
And I think that's partly, people say, well, cancer rates are up.
And it's like, yeah, that's because we're not dying of tooth decay in our 20s long before cancer is ever going to show up in your system.
Because we live for so long these days, and because we're generally so much healthier, then whatever disease has come across is like a highly visible anomaly.
And there's this weird belief that the modern world is somehow bad for you.
It's carcinogenic.
It's polluted.
Of course there are things that need to be cleaned and let's work to minimize resource use as much as possible, but I'll start to believe that the modern world is bad for me.
When life expectancy stops increasing.
And there's just this weird thing where people have just, I don't know if it's like, we've become too good at something, and we're no longer used to illness, or I don't know what it is.
But do you have any thoughts as to why people think that the healthiest environment in the West, at least that human beings have ever experienced is somehow bad for you?
I definitely think it is the psychosis of affluence to a large degree.
The more affluent we are, the tinier the problem that we isolate as being catastrophic.
Look, we have Let's say an obesity problem in the United States.
It's very, very real.
And it is linked to some degree to processed foods.
No question about that.
We also have the healthiest food supply ever in the history of humankind in the United States and in the developing world.
Could there be things that we want to improve?
Absolutely.
Do we miss the days of a luscious tomato because tomatoes are now bred to be boxed and sent around the country in trucks?
Absolutely.
But that doesn't mean we don't have local farms who are not necessarily organic, who are not developing those kind of luscious tomatoes.
Everything needs to be a balance.
We have to recognize that we have an affluent world in the developing countries, but we have another part of the world, a majority of the world, Who are barely subsistence level societies even today.
And it's not oh so yesterday that hunger is an issue.
It is oh so today if you happen to live in much of Latin America, Asia and Africa.
And we need a set of food strategies that embrace agroecology, organics, conventional agriculture, modern technology including Biotechnology that gives us many, many tools in our toolbox that's specific to each individual country or region.
What we have in the anti-GMO crowd is not a belief that there's all these tools available.
Let's pick the best one for the circumstances.
It's let's eliminate a whole set of tools, not based on their efficiency or sustainability, but based on the fact that we personally have decided that they don't fit our value system.
That's scary.
That is naked ideology.
And we need to get to the point where, and I think a lot of farmers are here and a lot of scientists are there, let's look at farm techniques in terms of sustainability, health, progressiveness, long-term impact, and devise one about that.
In that case, Biotechnology is just one more strategy among a group of others, and it's not isolated and pounded on as a demonization punching bag, which it is right now for a large part of the anti-science, I would say, anti-GMO community.
Yeah, no, it is.
I mean, people in the West genuinely and generally seem to care very much about people suffering in the third world.
And you can see that just in terms of the receipts sent out for foreign aid.
Whether that works or not well is a topic for another time.
But the idea that...
Give them the technologies that they need to be able to grow in harsh environments and support themselves and at least have enough to eat.
People seem to freak out and it seems to me, you know, I don't want to get all kinds of moralistic, but it seems to me extraordinarily selfish for people to indulge their fears of, you know, giant robot cucumbers taking over the future or something like that.
To indulge these fears and to push back against the availability of stuff that is the difference between life and death.
And political stability.
You know, the Arab Spring driven by increasing wheat prices in many good arguments that political stability, general sustainability, having enough calories to breastfeed enough milk to feed your babies.
I mean, these all depend upon good food technology and the fact that people's paranoia about this stuff of entirely unfounded in even the tiniest shred of legitimate science that their paranoia is taking food out of food.
The mouths of third world people and creating political instability and conflicts all around the world.
People have got to stop indulging their selfish paranoias at the expense of an increasingly dependent and helpless and starving population.
That really bothers me how little compassion there is for that.
We have a whole generation of new GM products coming out.
Vitamin-enhanced rice, vitamin-enhanced cassava, which is a staple, brinjal, which is eggplant, which is being developed with a 95% cut in the use of insecticides.
You go to farms in Bangladesh where this what's called BT brinjal has been approved.
These women are in tears, mostly female farmers who do these farms.
They were spraying sometimes six to seven times a week, this disgusting insecticides, now because of the use of this GM product that they might spray four times a season instead of six to seven times a week.
I mean, look at the deaths and illnesses that that's preventing.
There's so many things.
We have the ability to save The American orange crop, Florida oranges, which are being challenged by a disease.
We did save the Hawaiian papaya, which was on the verge of extinction.
The coffee beans in the United States are ultimately under assault right now, and there's fears of spreading infections that's going to bring down the California wine industry.
There are products everywhere in the world that are staples of communities.
That are on the verge of being approved or have proven themselves in laboratories that are being blocked by anti-GMO hysteria mostly by very, very wealthy activists in Europe and the United States.
That is scandalous.
That is killing people.
Yeah, and nothing gets my ire up more than people who mess with my coffee supply.
That is like oxygen to me in many ways.
All right.
Well, thanks, John.
Always a great pleasure.
We could talk more, and I'm sure we'll chat again because there's so many topics that you pursue that I also happen to have quite a bit of interest in.
But just a reminder, please go to johnantin.com.
J-O-N-E-N-T-I-N-E, geneticliteracyproject.org.
These are issues that people need to inform themselves about.
And it does make some very lively...
It's one of the few times when you can talk at a dinner party about the very food that you're eating.
That's kind of a cool synchronicity that you...
You have a good opening.
It's like, hey, look what we're eating.
Wouldn't it be great if Third Worlders could eat that as well?
So thanks very much for your time.
Thanks for your efforts in...
Engaging and bringing this information to the public will link to your speech that you gave in Australia, which I think is underviewed at the moment and needs to be viewed more.
But thanks very much for your time.
Always a great pleasure and we'll talk to you again soon.
