David Aaronovitch reviewing
Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, Michael Specter,
But it was Specter’s chapters on biotechnology that revealed something more. They took me back to the great genetically modified media feeding frenzy of 1998-99. You may remember when Greenpeace activists dumped several tons of GM soya beans outside Downing Street, when the Daily Mail and The Guardian joined hands to call for a moratorium on the planting of GM crops, when the term “Frankenfoods” was invented, when young Tom in The Archers heroically helped to trash his venal uncle’s crop of GM oilseed rape, when the canny capitalists in the supermarkets — having seen the polls — proclaimed that this, that and the other was “GM free”, when the heir to the throne told us that, “this kind of genetic modification takes mankind into realms that belong to God, and God alone”.
I recall working on Newsnight as a stand-in presenter during this row. A lone scientist, in the best storybook tradition, Dr Arpad Pusztai, told us about his research indicating that mice fed GM potatoes were suffering. The entire tenor of our reporting was that he was probably right. Later a panel of six toxicologists appointed by the Royal Society said that his work, which has never been replicated, was flawed. “It would be unjustifiable,” the panel said, “to draw from it general conclusions about whether genetically modified foods are harmful to human beings or not.”
It was far too late. GM-free is still a badge of quality, despite its completely unscientific basis. Now, Specter claims, GM technologies will be essential for feeding the world, as will other biotechnological advances, but he fears that the activities of the denialists may prevent them from being harnessed.
In his view: “We are either going to embrace new technologies with their limitations and threats, or slink into an era of magical thinking.”
I certainly worry about that. But there is a rich irony here, which it has taken me some time to appreciate and that I want to share. Back in the crop-burning days of the late 1990s, when green activists prevented even trials taking place to discover more about GM produce, they rode shotgun on the denialist wagon. They didn’t care that they didn’t have the evidence, or that much of their support was mystical.
“The war against nature has to end,” Lord Melchett, the executive director of Greenpeace, told Specter, “and we are going to stop it.”
And now the green movement is in the camp of the governments and scientists, bitterly fighting the new denialists who must surely, in the words of John Wayne, remind them of them. Reaping, not sowing.
Climate campaigners reap what GM sowed David Aaronovitch – Times Online
See previous post: voodoo science, then voodoo history.
