Yes, we know.
We’ve heard it a million times.
Guys who believe in genetic engineering (GE) are the science guys. Anti-GE guys are the anti-science
scare-mongering wingnuts. To which all
that us anti-GE guys can muster in the way of rebuttal is the wimpish whimper,
“No, no, we’re not anti-science, it’s just that there’s science that says
different things, look at X, Y and Z.”
After which it’s just a he-said, she-said, which they win by sheer force
of numbers.
Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, has ever gone
to the root of things and asked “Science?
What science?” So, for the first
time, let’s ask it.
For starters, let’s get our definitions straight. GE isn’t science. It’s technology. And if you think that’s wrong, you’re suffering under an inability
common among even educated Americans to distinguish between science and
technology. Even NPR can’t do it—their Science Friday should be renamed Technology with Some Science Thrown in
Friday. So here’s the quick
Cliff’s-notes-type definition: science is finding out how things work and
technology is finding ways to make things work differently (hopefully
better). True, technology often uses
science to assist in that. But two
things have to be noted. One, there’s an
inevitable time-lag between the science and the capacity to make use of it, which
often means that by the time the technology’s up and running, science has moved
on in a different or even contrary direction.
Two, the technology is only as good as the science it uses.
And the science GE draws
on is not good. It’s an
eclectic mix of old sciences all past their sell-by date, ranging from mid-twentieth-century
genetics all the way back to sixteenth-century toxicology, when there was
hardly anything you could call “science” at all.
Before GE advocates have an apoplectic fit, let me
elaborate.
Anti-GEers often moan about how government agencies
leave pesticide toxicity testing to industry--conflict of interest and all
that. That’s a nonstarter because both
Monsanto and the EPA use the same “science” as the basis for their protocols:
the dogma from a sixteenth-century astrologer and alchemist that “the dose
makes the poison”, meaning that for literally every substance there is a NOEL
(no-observable-effects level) above which harm may occur, but below which no
harm can possibly occur.
Astrology is
still around in daily newspaper columns, so we skeptics know how much that’s
worth, but alchemy is little heard of nowadays.
It was the sixteenth-century equivalent of Nigerian scams, and it had
the same basic ingredients: a big pot of gold (in alchemy it really was gold)
at the end of the rainbow, but a considerable expense on the part of the sucker
to get there. The only significant difference
was that while no Nigerian scammer ever believed in a multi-millionaire Swedish
businessman who died in a plane crash intestate and without issue, some
alchemists (and I’m sure Paracelsus, an alias for Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, was one of them)
genuinely believed that with the right chemical procedures you could turn base
metals into gold. Indeed the belief that
this was possible, at least in principle, formed part of the sixteenth-century
scientific consensus.
Alchemy had been thoroughly
debunked by the seventeenth century (most notably in Ben Jonson’s comedy The Alchemist (1610), which though
seldom performed nowadays is one of the funniest plays ever), but toxicology’s
dogma remained without serious challenge until the eve of this century. By now, of course, it’s been shown to be
invalid for many, perhaps most chemical substances (see my post “Unsafe At Any
Dose”) but because of this same time-lag between scientific discovery and
technological application, we’re stuck with sixteenth-century toxic-substance
testing for probably another decade or so.
But what about GE
genetics? We have to start by
remembering the scientific orthodoxy that followed the mid-century unravelling
of the DNA code, because this was what dominated the 1970s when GE took
off. This orthodoxy was the
genes-conquer-all, one-gene-one trait science of Dawkins’ Selfish Gene, which resulted, among other things, in the
commonsense belief that the more complex an organism, the more genes it would
have to have. Now we know how wrong that
is. And evo-devo has taught us that
genes “are not the leaders, but the followers” in the development of any
organism (West-Eberhard, Developmental
Plasticity and Evolution)—in other words, that epigenetic factors, both
organism-internal and environmental, play vital roles in determining what genes
get expressed when and how, and that in any case very few traits are controlled
by a single gene.
What this all boils down
to is that GE technology has been blindsided by scientific change. Nothing in Dawkins-type genetics led you to
expect the emergence of superweeds and the consequent “pesticide treadmill” in
which more herbicide-resistant weeds would mean spraying more (and/or more
toxic) herbicides which in turn would select for more pesticide-resistant
weeds. Nothing in Dawkins-type genetics
led you to predict that most attempts at inserting genes would be doomed to
failure; for instance, the University of Hawaii hasn’t brought out a single
successful transgenic crop since the ringspot-resistant papaya of the
1990s. Forget for a moment about the
overblown issue of possible harms— the sheer complexity of the process turned
out to be orders of magnitude harder than anyone could have imagined in the
1970s. But anyone who had kept up to
speed with science would have known to prepare for these things at least a couple
of decades ago.
Bottom line: GE advocates'
claim to represent science is simply a version of Goebbels’ Big Lie—the one
people end up believing if you just repeat it often enough. It’s sheer stupidity to suppose that “a
consensus of scientists” has proven genetic engineering to be harmless, or
anything else for that matter. New
science trumps outdated science every time.
Who was right, Wegener who said continents had moved or the consensus of
geologists who said they hadn’t?
Hayflick who said there was a strict limit on cell longevity or the
consensus of microbiologists who said there wasn’t? Margolis who said that eukaryotes resulted
from symbiosis or the consensus of evolutionary biologists who said that was
nonsense? Never forget Haldane’s Four
Stages of Acceptance:
1. This is worthless nonsense.
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so.
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so.
And never forget
either, that we were told DDT was safe, stilboestrol was safe, smoking
was safe, thalidomide was safe, Agent Orange was safe. You’d think we’d have learned some sense by
now, wouldn’t you? But those who ignore
history are condemned to repeat it.
So, next time you hear
someone saying they’re scientific and you’re not, you know where to tell them
to stick it, right?