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Comment by sebleon | Hacker News Reader

Great article! Curious to see how GM industry will react, same-ness has been one of the big arguments against labelling GMO food.

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They will criticize the research with hired 'thought leaders' and point to the 'overwhelming evidence' that proves GMOs and roundup is safe.

I'm confused. Your argument appears to be that GMO corn and roundup is unsafe for corn? This paper doesn't have anything to do with human consumption.

Let me be more specific: the question was "how will the GM industry will react"

‘substantially equivalent’ is a proxy for food safety and it's also a tricky standard. When interpreting this study's results the public and policy makers will look to academics:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/us/food-industry-enlisted-...

Just by selectively funding academics that agree with them they can distort the debate.

So do you have evidence it is unsafe or just are you simply against any organization that uses lobbyists? (Teachers unions, ACLU, Climate and Gay rights organizations, etc)

I didn't say anything about lobbyists. I do have an issue with supposedly unbiased experts being on a private payroll without full disclosure all-around. Would you be okay with a NY Times reporter getting funding for a story from Monsanto (without disclosure)?

If I'm understanding you correctly, I think you might be blurring the lines here. A NYT reporter is a journalist, not an expert. They may use experts as sources for their stories. I agree that it would be a serious breach of ethics for a journalist to take money from Monsanto. It's not the same as an expert receiving funding from industry. That has it's own ethics issues, which I think are the ones you're getting at.

" point to the 'overwhelming evidence' that proves GMOs and roundup is safe"

You can't prove with absolute certainty that any food is safe, only what the risks are.

And yes there is a lot of real scientific and independent evidence that GMOs are no more risky than other foods.

http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/the-s...

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