Bill Nye the Scinece Guy on GMOs

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

32. I don't see that we're 'fine'.

We have all sorts of health problems that have spread over the population, without ANY particular reason being identified as to how they're on the rise. So what does that mean? Despite scientific studies on anything and everything, we haven't figured out what's going on. According to the GMO proponents, the fact that we haven't yet found a way in which GMO is contributing to those problems with all the studies we've done, that makes them 'safe'. But the problem with that line of argument is that means everything else we've studied is 'safe', because we haven't found out how these problems are happening. But we have the spread of these problems, so obviously something, somewhere, is not 'safe', despite our studies to date.

And it's like doing math - not every link to a problem is direct. And life is incredibly complex, with not just a few variables, such as are present in the vast majority of scientific studies. Life has thousands of variables that all work together, and can't simply be plotted easily just because you change one, such as 'subjects eats GM food', but haven't tracked all of the other factors that feed into the response. Your example points that out. GMO may not directly affect bats, but indirectly, it alters the ecosystem, causing all sorts of secondary problems throughout the system.

There was a study somebody posted about a month or two back that suggested that some changes from ingesting GM food could actually be inherited. In which case, pretty much any study that depended on having a test subject who 'didn't eat GM' as a control could have skewed data if the subject's parent had eaten GM in the past, before the conception of the subject.

No matter how much people want to believe we already 'know enough', the reality is that biosciences are still in their infancy, and we've barely begun to scratch the surface of how incredibly complex life systems work at the micro level. There are still vast stretches of the genome that we have no idea about what biological processes they control or how altering them will change the animal/person in whom they are changed.

The hubris in claiming we 'know' things are 'safe', simply because we've tested for the most obvious and direct problems over and over and not found links among the things for which we've actually tested is amazing, and reflects a poor understanding of how science works. A scientist who actually knows what they're talking about would say 'Within the range of problems *for which we've tested*, GM appears to be safe', not 'simply 'GM is safe'. 'GM is safe' is a lazy, non-scientific statement made by people who simply want to arrive at a specific conclusion.