Former Anti-GMO Activist Says Science Changed His Mind : NPR
“When I started off as an anti-GMO activist, it was very much an ideological position. I was scared of the new technology, you know, it just seemed to be messing with the basic building blocks of life. But what happened in the sort of 10, 15 years since then, is that I have written a couple of books on climate change, and I really fell in love with the scientific method as a way of establishing knowledge about the world. It eventually dawned on me … that I was actually being anti-science in the way I was talking about GMOs, and that there are many ways a stronger scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs than there is about the reality of climate change.”
On the ‘saga of golden rice’
“One of the case studies that really changed my mind about this was the saga of golden rice, which was developed to be vitamin A-enhanced, because something like a quarter million children per year die from a vitamin A deficiencies in developing countries, particularly in South Asia … Greenpeace has been waging a campaign to stop this rice from ever being developed … You can make a pretty strong case that tens of thousands of children have died because they were denied access to this purely because it’s GM, and there is a ideological bias against that.”
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