Andrew Bolt: They're trying to scare you
Herald Sun (Australia)
Andrew Bolt
November 30, 2007
THE campaigners warning us we might end up with two heads after eating GM foods are ignoring the science that says it's good for you.
Let me prove how dead to reason are the state politicians now screaming that genetically modified crops could kill us.
These Greens and soy-milk Labor panic-merchants actually got their scientific advice from Jeffrey Smith.
Now there's a laugh -- or would be if it didn't confirm we're losing our minds. Unreason rules.
Smith, an activist and author of Seeds of Deception, was brought out from the United States to convince us Premier John Brumby was toying with our lives by deciding now to lift at last Victoria's ban on GM canola.
And how glad our greens, anti-capitalists and conspiracy-theorists were to hear him. In fact, he got the kind of reception we normally reserve for that other Profit of Doom, Al Gore.
The ABC gave him lots of air time, without expressing the slightest doubt about his evidence or credentials. Same story with The Age, which ran a typical Smith polemic.
"There is irrefutable evidence that GM foods are unsafe to eat", Smith roared. "Working with more than 30 scientists worldwide, I documented 65 health risks of GM foods. There are thousands of toxic or allergic-type reactions in humans . . ."
In fact, GM corn had a gene that "if transferred from corn snacks, for example, it could turn our intestinal flora into living pesticide factories".
Gosh. Your guts turned into poison factories. Think of that.
Think also how useful to a professional alarmist like Smith are words like "if" and "could" -- especially when none of the millions of people who have snacked on GM food have found their stomachs actually converted into Mortein plants.
And think, too, what it says about Smith that he fails to add that the Food and Agricultural Organisation says the rat study he relies on "is unlikely to present a public health concern".
Yet the most astonishing part of Smith's visit was that he walked into Parliament House on Tuesday last week as the guest of anti-GM politicians who wanted a briefing on the science behind his scares.
What was so astonishing about that, you may ask? Astonishing is that Smith walked in, rather than floated.
You see, Scientific Smith not only thinks GM foods are dangerous, he thinks also he can fly.
Smith has been for years a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (guru to the Beatles) and, like the Yogi, has preached the virtues of yogic flying.
Working on the Senate campaign of the Maharishi's Natural Law Party in 1996, he publicly claimed there were 500 studies proving that yogic flying and transcendental meditation cut crime and increased IQ. He even demonstrated some flying himself, although he did little more than bump up and down on his undercarriage.
I wonder why no journalist who feted Smith on his trip felt that needed reporting, or why no politician asked even whether a man who thought he could fly was likely to have a firm grasp of scientific principles.
Maybe the answer is that the opposition to GM crops is led largely by people who don't care about the science -- not really -- and are likely to be up for a little levitation themselves.
If reason counted, they might actually concede that GM crops are now grown in 22 countries, in some cases for more than a decade, and no one yet has yet reeled away from the dinner table, clutching their new second head or the smoking patch where their genitals used to be.
Indeed, look as hard as they can, scientists just haven't found proof that these crops do anything but good.
That's why our federal Gene Technology Regulator gave the green light to GM canola six years ago.
That's why Australia's chief scientist, Dr Jim Peacock, says GM food crops are not only safe, but essential to the future.
That's why Food Standards Australia New Zealand has approved the GM foods on our shelves, which Australians have munched through happily without exploding.
And that's why the World Health Organisation summed up: "GM foods currently available on the international market have passed risk assessments and are not likely to present risks for human health.
"In addition, no effects on human health have been shown as a result of the consumption of such foods by the general population in the countries where they have been approved."
Indeed, it wasn't science but pure fear that prompted the Labor Government to ban GM crops four years ago.
Not fear of the crops -- but of the rage of superstitious green believers who read wild books like Smith's and consult their prejudices against science, business and modernity to conclude the scientists are all wrong. That there's a conspiracy to poison us. (Er, but why? Why kill your clients? And isn't it time for your pills?)
How that dumb ban on GM crops has hurt us. A panel appointed by Brumby and led by scientist Sir Gustav Nossal has found it would soon be costing us $29 million a year. Worse, it had already driven away researchers and forced farmers to use many tonnes more of herbicide than they'd need for GM canola. This green policy is actually poisoning the earth.
So Brumby -- a rationalist -- said the ban on GM canola would go. The NSW Government announced ditto.
And now these brave politicians must withstand the fear campaign whipped up by the most superstitious of their colleagues, fed by eco-profiteers like Smith.
Yes, Smith does profit from the panic he helps to sow, and not just by selling his books.
He is also a vice-president of Genetic ID, a laboratory that specialises in testing for traces of GM crops, which it does for many activist groups.
And what is Genetic ID? A lab long run by John Fagan, a professor at the Maharishi University of Medicine and author of Genetic Engineering: The Hazards, Vedic Engineering: The Solutions. Yes, a Maharishi follower.
The lab's religious objections to GM crops are clear from the blurb of Fagan's book, which claims genetic engineering offers only short-term partial fixes with damaging side-effects, while Maharishi's vedic engineering offers comprehensive, life-supporting solutions.
Sure, a scientist may be a religious crank, yet also know his GM onions.
Except it seems that Smith, for one, peddles a string of scary claims that don't stack up, including one repeated by an Adelaide academic on the ABC's 7.30 Report on Wednesday.
That was the allegation that a Russian scientist, Irina Ermakova, fed GM soybeans to rats, only to find they gave birth to pups that were runts and often infertile.
More than 500 activist groups -- and our own anti-GM politicians -- have seized on this study as the proof they've long needed. Yet no other reputable study had found anything of this kind, and Ermakova never put up her study for peer review.
So the Nature Biotechnology journal recently sent Ermekova questions on her study and got several scientists to review her answers.
Those reviewers concluded, among other things, that Ermakova seemed not to have fed or housed her starving rats very well at all, which was probably why so many died and so many others were malnourished.
Moreover, she'd been unclear on how much GM food she'd used, hadn't given evidence for her findings and even had doubts in her own mind about her results, which "depart so dramatically from previously reported findings as to be remarkable".
Ermekova's study was proof? Only to someone who'd take a science lesson from a human hovercraft. But so mad are our times that plenty now do, including even our own politicians.
So mad are these times, in fact, that . . . well, global warming. Say no more.
