British environmentalist Mark Lynas was an early advocate against GMOs and, as he tells it, that meant he was an early advocate for demonizing scientists.
While most actual scientists did not give much credence to an offhand claim by researcher Árpád Pusztai in the mid-1990s that a genetically-modified potato damaged the immune system of an animal, because the results were unpublished and unverified, UK media of the scare journalism kind and British activists took off with it and the “Frankenfood” movement was born.
Lynas righted a wrong – his downside is that he is now going to be smeared with the ‘how much is Monsanto paying him?’ allegation the goofy left uses when science disagrees with their beliefs. But for most voters there is no downside in demanding that politicians stop filtering science through their world view.
Biology won a victory against anti-science beliefs this week and it won a victory last month when the Obama administration responded to pressure and stopped irrationally blocking a genetically modified fish I wrote about in 2011 and again in “Science Left Behind”. There’s no reason to think that trend can’t continue throughout 2013 as well. We just have to demand that science be restored to its rightful place, like we were promised it would be.
View the original article here: What Democrats In Congress Can Learn From Anti-GMO Activist Mark Lynas About Science
