1. > The journals-with-a-cause don't get sued out of existance as a
result of
> printing lies. They don't have to print lies. There is enough truth and
> suspicion out there to scare the bejabbers out of enough folks to keep
> these journals in business for a long time. Nearly anything is possible in
> nature, so the government and the chem companies can't refute
> concerns about what might happen.
It is at least arguable that all journals have "a cause", if one
includes maintaining the status quo (e.g. promoting resource-intensive
agriculture) as a "cause". If you have ever tried to get an article
published that concludes that organic farming may have merit, or God-
forbid, be superior to conventional agriculture in some respect, then
you will be familiar with the role of critical/negative review by
anonymous reviewers and sympathetic/compliant editors in keeping such
findings out of the scientific literature. This is changing, at
least in some journals, but is very much the norm in others.
The scientific lit reviewed by Cox in the J. Pesticide Reform was not
what "might" happen but what did happen, at least according to the
scientific literature which was cited.
> > The same is true of the very vocal concerns being
raised about
> genetic engineering. As I've said before, nature is a big genetic
> engineering experiment, uncontrolled by anyone (except, perhaps,
> natural selection). I read last night that 10 percent of the human genome
> might be transgenic -- imported over the last 3 or 4 million years by
> retroviruses -- so our genome, and that of virtually every other organism,
> is already transgenic. The problem with pre-licensing research for GE
It seems plausible that modern day genomes could well be the result
of millions of years of inter-species gene movement. But the key
point is it occurred over millions of years, in what is likely to
have been a point-source fashion (e.g. some particular happenstance
allowed a particular gene or set of genes to move into a single
organism or a small group of individual, perhaps widely dispersed
organisms, upon which natural selection could then "work"). The
individual organism(s) may well have died out as a result of the
transgene movement, just as a point mutation could result in fatal
(most common) as well as favorable (rare event) outcomes.
A key difference between millions of years of evolution and modern
day GE is that the GE transgenes are being promulgated over millions
of hectares, exposing billions of people to the outcome(s) all at
once. To draw comfort from parallels to the evolutionary example
strikes me as tenuous, at the very least.
> otherwise be the case. I think this kind of pressure has helped make
> the current generation of pesticides less malignant (in terms of acute
> toxicity, target specificity and persistence) than those of the 50's and
> 60's; in my view, that is a step in the right direction. Similarly, the
> response to the proposed organic rules showed the power of public
> opinion to sway preconceived (and heavily-lobbied) government
> positions around to a bit more reasonable stance.
You are quite right that citizen lobbying, through their various
NGO's, environmental activism, and "voting with their consumer
dollar" has been the strongest force behind the regulations now in
place. But as amply documented in Benbrook's Pest Management at the
Crossroads, risk today is no less than it was decades ago simply
because of the utter magnitude of biocides proliferating in all
facets of life, especially in agriculture. The removal of really
highly "bad actors" occurred in the 70's. Remarkably few biocides
have been removed in subsquent decades. Yes, acute toxicity is less,
but total exposure is greater - and this says nothing about the
wellknown omissions in current risk-assessment protocols, as those
involving synergistic interactions among various biocides (all
testing is done one at a time) etc.
As pointed out in my most recent biotech presentation (labelled "NAEC"
on my homepage (see signature block), it is a fallacy to assume that
government is assessing "risk" - and most certainly not benefit. The
protocols for risk assessment are fundamentally flawed, as discussed
in my talk. And as I found in researching the talk, to my great
surprise, the Canadian government at least takes no responsibility for
assessing "benefit" at all. Hence, no kind of risk:benefit analyses
should be presumed or inferred by government sanctioning of GE
entities. Ann
ACLARK@plant.uoguelph.ca
Dr. E. Ann Clark
Associate Professor
Crop Science
University of Guelph
Guelph, ON N1G 2W1
Phone: 519-824-4120 Ext. 2508
FAX: 519 763-8933
http://www.oac.uoguelph.ca/www/CRSC/faculty/eac.htm
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