My primary complaint was that the TED brand should stand for science and not belief. It is not a soapbox, it is not a forum for anyone claiming to be an expert to talk about what they think is true. At least that is what I thought.

I do think that compelling, well spoken people are dangerous when they speak from authority—without good evidence. That’s how we ended up in Iraq/Afghanistan. Someone was able to leverage substandard data and a political climate to whip people into a frenzy about something that just was not true. This is how I also feel about your TED talk.

In your original presentation and in the April 2 AllergyKids blog entry, there are hints that the safety of transgenic crops is a debated issue. It is not among scientists. We have witnessed the advent of transgenic crops, we watched acreage rise, and now see its impacts after fifteen-plus years. We have seen a papaya industry saved, transgenic soybeans change agriculture and transgenic cotton dramatically decrease environmental insults from conventional farming. Scientists, almost universally, see the merit of transgenic technologies. We also understand its limitations and acknowledge its drawbacks.

I’d like to address your points in the April 2, 2012 blog post on Allergy Kids. Here are some thoughts and I’d appreciate your feedback.

Your quotations from the Union of Concerned Scientists should be tempered. As far as I am aware, this is an activist group containing some scientists, but they are not actively performing science or publishing peer-reviewed work to support their conclusions. Real evidence needs to come from top-tier sources, like PubMed. It should be peer-reviewed and reproducible by independent groups. It should open new areas of inquiry. That said, there is no reliable evidence showing links between transgenic food and human disease and/or allergy.

The review by Domingo (2007) is fine. It appeared in a critical reviews journal. These journals tend to like interjection of opinion and development of a story. I publish in these too and we try to make them provocative. The author outlines many studies (he admits he can find few with evidence of negative effects) and then concludes that there are no long-term studies. It also is important to remember that all of the studies performed that showed some negative effect were dead ends. Nobody picked up that lead and found new science. Why are there not any long-term studies? Because scientists see no reason to do them. It is also important to note that it is hard to publish negative data—if you find that food known to be essentially equivalent, is equivalent, it is no big story and hard to publish.

This should be a strong point in our thinking of the issue. Transgenic crops are a huge part of the food supply. If someone showed real evidence of harm, the field would explode. You’d see scientists studying the mechanisms of toxicity, integration with biology, specific ways that the transgene/product cause the problem. It would be a new area of science (and I’d like a piece of that action!). Right now we just don’t see that science grow.

The problem is, how do you test for safety? What hypothesis do you test? To those of us that understand the EPSPS enzyme and herbicide resistance, the Bt gene, DNA, metabolism and gene function, there is no place to begin a long-term test. What could possibly be tested?

Robyn, I also disagree with your claim that such products need not be tested or regulated to be grown and sold. Your example comes from a long time ago- it could be true, but it is not the case now. A colleague of mine spent 20 years and millions of dollars to get a transgenic plant through the EPA, the FDA and USDA. Other do go faster, but it is an arduous and expensive process. I can get details, but let it stand as evidence that there are no horticultural crops except for papaya and some squash, that are transgenic. It does not pay to make transgenic horticultural crops. Berries, fruits, vegetables just never will give a return because of the high time and money cost of regulation. Only big agronomic crops are profitable.

Your quotation from the National Academies of Science is true- we can never know of unintended consequences that could be adverse. That is not the gist of the book you cite or its follow up, The Impact of Genetically Modified Crops on Agriculture in the USA. These texts recognize the great benefits, limitations and possible downsides, fairly and honestly. The conclusions are all quite positive. You can read these for free as PDFs at the National Academies Press website. They are dry and boring, but show no evidence of contribution to human disease or allergy.

Next, how do you prove something is safe? How do we know that growing plants in hydroponics is safe? Grown in rich organic compost? Nobody did the studies, at least long-term ones. Certainly the gene expression changes in such growing platforms exceed those initiated from a single transgene—absolutely no doubt. Are all of these genes, not ever ‘on’ in natural soil, beneficial, harmless, safe? Nobody knows, but there is no evidence of harm. A good scientist will never say that something is safe. We only can speak from the evidence. There is no evidence of harm. That’s just honest.

Cancers on the rise? Yes. We don’t die of heart attacks at 40 anymore. In children? The increase may be from any environmental factor. Allergies the same. You are right, causation and correlation are two different things and there is no causal link to transgenic foods. Chasing transgenic foods as a culprit takes time from legitimate pursuit of the real problems. Maybe it is transgenic food, but there is no plausible mechanism or evidence to support that hypothesis.

If you have a legitimate call for research that is supported by Congress and millions of people, then let’s give some grants to do the studies. Or not? Should activists with no scientific basis be able to steer scientific endeavors? Should we let a Republican majority in congress reallocate money from research in general to fund research in studying how humans don’t cause climate change? Should we fund Creationism research? Should we fund a NASA mission to the moon because some people are certain we were never there? We should, but ONLY if there is some initial shred of evidence that these hypotheses are likely to be supported. And there isn’t. There is no reason to fund exhaustive long-term tests when there is no plausible mechanism that can suggest transgenic food is any different than conventionally bred food.

Robyn, you’d probably not be surprised that we agree on more points than we disagree. We probably vote the same, worry about the environment and care about human health- be that our families or workers in the field. The difference is that I know science, I understand what the literature does/does not say. It does not support a conclusion that transgenic foods are harmful. The day it does, I’ll trumpet that news.

My only real complaint with your posting is that you place the UF/Monsanto article right below my blog, certainly to discredit me to the anti-GMO interests with a bogus Monsanto association. That’s weak. Nobody tells me what to study, publish, test or pursue. Nobody, except NSF, USDA and the Florida Strawberry Growers that fund the studies, but I publish whatever the peer-review process will accept. Never got a dime of Big Ag money and I’m no fan of Monsanto et al. I am a big fan of science and how it can help us make better decisions. The data show that transgenic crops can help farmers and the environment. I’d like to continue to shape this dialog with you.

A dialog worth having? Probably. My complaint is not with you—you are presenting a popular non-scientific opinon. My problem is with TED, for the reasons stated above. I handle dissenters of science generally very carefully. Nobody wins hearts and minds by banging the table. So I’m here, glad to talk and shape a dialog. Know up front that my background is science and that’s the place where all will come from.

Thanks, and best wishes,

Kevin