The Limits Of What We Know

by Natasha Chart

category: Gene Modification

Published June 01, 2009 @ 10:02AM PT

Genetically engineered crops, or genetically modified organisms, whatever you want to call them, are in the realm of the scientific. Though I think you could make a case for saying that they're more engineering, as practiced, more application than discovery.

With the application of any aspect of scientific knowledge, more questions come into play than usually will during the research phase. A research question is on the order of, 'Why does this happen?' or 'What happens if I do x?' or 'Is it possible to do x?'

Presuming that you get your answer and want to make use of it, should you? If so, how? These questions are harder.

Is it right to build an atomic weapon? Should we use reproductive cloning techniques on human beings? Should we allow IVF clinics to screen embryos for gender? The science of how you might do these things tells us nothing about whether it's right to make use of that knowledge in a particular way.

Even climate science doesn't tell us what we should do about global warming. It just makes predictions about the likely effects of certain courses of action. I mean, I think it sounds undesirable for global climate to go up by several degrees Celsius, prompting extreme weather and the reduced ability of the world to feed itself. Maybe you think it's hunky dory. The fact of the behavior of the atmosphere in response to elevating levels of CO2 isn't a moral argument in itself and doesn't say whether it's good or bad.

Right now I'm going over the part in Michael Pollan's book, In Defense Of Food, where he talks about the erosion of the lipid hypothesis; the idea that fats are inherently bad for you. Well, turns out they're not. Unless you mean the hydrogenated oils, the trans-fats, that the food industry created in their labs and told us all for years were a healthy alternative to saturated animal fats. Trans-fats are the only kinds of fat that can be well proven to cause heart disease after many years of study.

When it comes to nutrition, as Pollan notes, what's been found is that if the food industry is paying for a nutrition study, that study is very likely to find a health claim.

Though they don't seem to know for sure what makes us healthy in food anymore than they seem to know for sure what makes us sick. The evidence is abundant. Pollan talks about their inability to come up with a nutritionally equivalent replacement for breast milk, everyone knows that diabetes and heart disease are epidemic now. Everyone can see the deterioration in public health for themselves.

But when we question them, we're anti-science.

So I'll say about the food industry's science the same thing I'd say about economic philosophies that have ruined the public's well-being: your obvious and repeated failures should indicate to anyone that you don't know what you're doing and that your claimed motives are suspect.

Which is to say that whatever scientific knowledge is behind their work, it's likely either incomplete or wrongly applied. Incomplete in the sense that they don't fully understand the consequences; our collective adventures in nutritionism lean towards this explanation. Wrongly applied in the sense that even if the technologies could do some good, they've been so recklessly deployed that it's hard even to estimate the damage they may have caused.

The people who would like to sell more genetic tinkering with our food before they figure out what's wrong with the food they've been providing for us over the last several decades, would like us all to believe that the weight of scientific opinion is in and it's unanimous. That's just not true. They haven't even answered basic questions of effect and safety to where we should skip on to an ethical conundrum, which they'd like to breeze right through, of whether we should use GMOs or let superstition and fear keep us away from the new hotness in plant technology.

Though when Dr. Arpad Pusztai, one of the few and earliest researchers to have done any safety testing on GMO products, says he thinks genetically modified food is unsafe, a person could get to wondering if this was more than a fight between science and superstition.

The sort of consensus that exists around the topic of global warming doesn't exist around the safety and effectiveness of genetically modified foods. Crop science departments at public universities have increasingly relied on agriculture industry funding to stay afloat, and most of the jobs after graduation are to be had working for a series of organizations that have heavy investments in the continuance of these products. Meanwhile, the science of nutrition is discovering that they don't have as much of the health world mapped out as they thought they did - how many 'everything you know is wrong' moments can one discipline have, anyway? - and that's supposed to be the foundation for saying that these 'equivalent' foods are just as good for us.

I smell a skunk. Call shenanigans. Whatever. I don't trust them.

(Photo credit: James Tan Chin Choy on Flickr.)