“If it squirms, it’s biology; if it stinks, it’s chemistry; if it doesn’t work, it’s physics; and if you can’t understand it, it’s mathematics,” quipped Magnus Pyke some years ago.
I’d like to add a line to that old joke: If it doesn’t make any sense, then it must be the latest publication from the Union of Concerned Scientists.
That’s what I’m forced to conclude after reading about the latest UCS report on pharmaceutical crops. And now I know why the Center for Consumer Freedom said UCS really ought to stand for “Union of Callous Scaremongers.”
The enemies of biotechnology have spent the last decade trying to frighten the public into believing that genetically enhanced crops are dangerous. By using its respectable-sounding name to gain mainstream publicity for radical ideas, the UCS has played a central role in this effort.
The good news is that apart from Europe, these modern-day Luddites haven’t experienced much success. This year marks the 10th anniversary of biotech crops being planted commercially around the globe--and every year we’re seeing astonishing rates of growth, without a single shred of evidence anywhere suggesting that biotech crops are harmful to anyone’s health. Not one. Not ever. Not anywhere. That’s why just about every reasonable group on the planet, such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, has embraced agricultural biotechnology.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, according to the UCS. A few years ago, one of its self-proclaimed experts, Margaret Mellon, predicted that farmers would begin to reverse course on biotech crops and reduce their reliance on them. She might have added that people were going to get bored with the Internet, or perhaps that they would grow weary of light bulbs and return to the good old days of candles.
If a meteorologist were wrong about the weather all the time, he would lose his job. But apparently the UCS has different expectations for its employees, because Mellon is back feeding us a new bit of hype about America’s food supply being “vulnerable to contamination” from pharmaceutical farming.
“Nobody wants drugs in their cornflakes,” said Mellon.
Now this is a needlessly provocative sound bite. Of course nobody wants to find drugs in their cornflakes--and nobody has ever found drugs in their cornflakes, either. And they won’t, so long as we stick to the common-sense principles and the rigorous science-based regulation and testing that govern “pharming”. Rather than trying to play a constructive role in this debate - whose participants include sensible scientists, government regulators and farmers, among others - the UCS has decided to call for a ban on an innovative technology.
The use of the word “contamination” troubles me especially, because it suggests that consuming biotech food will perhaps make people start to glow, as if they’re radioactive. Yet biotechnology is really an anti-contaminant. As any farmer knows, there’s one thing that threatens to contaminate our fields during every growing season: weeds. And advances in biotechnology have become one of our best friends in fending off and managing this traditional antagonist.
The UCS’s call to ban biotech is a huge mistake. Pharmaceutical farming is an incredibly promising technology. The notion of turning some fields into ‘factories’ for the next generation of wonder drugs may sound like science fiction, but it’s becoming a reality. In the future, we won’t merely produce medications through a synthetic process in the lab--we’ll grow them naturally and safely on the farm. Biotechnology is what makes this possible.
The UCS, however, wants nothing to do with any of this. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given the group’s track record. It was founded in the 1960s to protest the Vietnam War. Ever since, the UCS has associated itself with whatever left-wing cause was fashionable at the moment. A handful of people are always looking for something to complain about, and biotechnology is simply one of the latest bogeymen for the UCS.
I’m confident that there will come a day when we routinely treat afflictions with medications that are safely and economically grown in fields--everything from diabetes to AIDS. I won’t be around to see it myself, but my children probably will and my grandchildren almost certainly will.
Something tells me the UCS won’t bother to issue a retraction.
News 
“If it squirms, it’s biology; if it stinks, it’s chemistry; if it doesn’t work, it’s physics; and if you can’t understand it, it’s mathematics,” quipped Magnus Pyke some years ago.
