109 Nobel Laureates sign a letter slamming Greenpeace.

[Nay]

103. Lithos, you are one of the few voices of reason in this thread. I appreciate

your appropriately nuanced take on things.

I love science and appreciate how far it has taken us, but the main thing to remember is that PEOPLE run corporations, labs, feed lots, university science departments, etc. In no aspect of human endeavor is corruption, expediency, greed, ideology, fear of job loss, etc., not a huge factor in what comes out of those institutions, who is hired and fired at those institutions, and what avenues are pursued in those institutions.

The golden rice project, to me, illustrates this perfectly. I, like you, immediately wondered why a strain of rice was conceived as the first best solution to a Vitamin A deficiency. If Vitamin A deficiency is a problem, why is something like a brand-new, decades-in-development, proprietary rice the solution? It seems more like using a nuke to destroy an ant hill. Are there no universal foodstuffs in these Asian countries that could be fortified cheaply with Vitamin A, like cooking oil? For the 20 years that the rice was in development, couldn't we have given away Vitamin A capsules as a health initiative through local, trusted health providers? Now, I don't know all the history of the development of golden rice, but in all my readings I have never read anything about any other trials of other ways to get Vitamin A to the relevant population. Maybe golden rice is the only viable way, but I doubt it.

One of the MAJOR problems capitalist countries have is that we always try to 'solve' a problem not by rationally arriving at the simplest, cheapest and easiest solution, but by throwing money at corporations to come up with a years-long, convoluted, EXPENSIVE solution that only incidentally may solve the Vitamin A deficiency, but will definitely make millions for the corporation(s) involved.