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Comment by gregwtmtno | Hacker News Reader

I often see the opinion on HN that opposing GMO food is anti-science. I know this article is not about GMOs, but can we really say with confidence that the scientific research done on GMO food hasn't been influenced in the same way?

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> I often see the opinion on HN that opposing GMO food is anti-science.

Opposing GMO food, in the abstract, may or may not be anti-science.

In concrete terms, many of the specific criticisms of GMO foods (especially those of GMO foods qua GMO foods, rather than of specific foods that happen to.be GMOs) actually made are factually unfounded and reveal.a gross ignorance of the basic relevant facts (like what "GMOs" are and how they differ from modern crops that are not "GMOs", and the regulatory environment facing both types of crops), and suggest that the criticism is originally from someone who is at best disinterested in science and facts if not actively opposed to them.

No offense intended, but you could say this about anything.

-I often see the opinion on HN that opposing vaccination is anti-science. I know this article is not about vaccines, but can we really say with confidence that the scientific research done on vaccination hasn't been influenced in the same way?-

Well, Monsanto does GMOs, and this article is about Monsanto hiding the scientific evidence in a blizzard of PR. So saying we should question GMOs based on this article is reasonable. But, so far as I know, Monsanto doesn't do vaccines.

There's no evidence here of Monsanto hiding scientific evidence relating to GMOs; there is evidence of Monsanto and allies in government to hiding scientific evidence relating to chemicals, which face a different regulatory regime.

Now, this might reasonably lead one to want to close regulatory gaps that provide insufficient oversight to prevent similar actions relating to GMOs, but none of the evidence here directly implicates the safety of GMOs as such. (It does implicate the safety of an herbicide whose use is a major motivation for the use of some of Monsanto's flagship GMO traits, but it's the herbicide, not the GMO, whose safety is implicated.)

But there is still the association of: "if they hide scientific evidence for X, what's stopping them from hiding scientific evidence for Y?"

In layman's example, it's like having a friend that steals other people's things, what's stopping him from stealing your things when you're not looking?

I think that's a fair point and it's why we need much more stringent conflict of interest rules and enforcement in science.

Depends on the vaccine.

The story is pretty well in on smallpox and polio.

Harder to say about HPV.

No it is not harder to say about HPV. The HPV vaccine is one of the sturdiest linkages between atomic-level scientific understanding and social policy.

HPV produces a protein called E6, which inhibits the protein called p53 in your cell. P53 is the centralized monitor of the health of the cell's DNA. When HPV inhibits the ability for the cell to monitor its DNA, it cannot respond to ordinary damage like UV, etc. This DNA damage builds up and triggers cancerous mutations that would otherwise have been repaired were the HPV E6 protein not inhibiting the p53 protein.

By getting a vaccine, HPV cannot infect you, thus it cannot produce the E3 protein, thus your p53 protein is functional, thus when you get ordinary DNA damage you repair it rather than accumulating cancer-causing damage. If you do not get a vaccine and you get infected with HPV you now have lost a significant checkpoint in preventing cancer.

p53, E6 & HPV: https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/p53/

My meaning was more that we don't have blatant long term evidence to compare to the research used to justify HPV vaccines.

Fortunately there are a number of different ways to justify the efficacy of particular technology prior to its implementation that do not require millions of people to prematurely contract cancer. If you have a hypothesis about a particular long-term consequence that could arise, by all means let's design a system to investigate it.

I get that it is problematic to even vaguely cast doubt on something that is a big public health win, but you are ignoring the context I commented in, where someone said:

but can we really say with confidence that the scientific research done on vaccination hasn't been influenced in the same way

Do we know for certain that HPV vaccine research has not been influenced by the companies selling the vaccines?

Rephrasing, I wasn't doubting the effectiveness of the HPV vaccines, I was pointing out that there are vaccines that we can be pretty much absolutely certain about.

I'm not so sure. His claim is coming from the fact that the research was obviously funded or written by an ill-intentioned party. Andrew Wakefield received loads of money from lawyers who wanted to sue vaccine manufacturers. In this case, Monsanto paid money to academics for them to put their names on papers Monsanto had written. In this way, the pro-gmo position is more similar to the anti-vax position than pro-vax.

Most opinions like this are either sock puppets or people who drank the GMO koolaid without knowing it. For a while it was even taboo to question GMOs, and you'd get labeled "anti-science" with almost the same hatred as "anti-semitism". The propaganda campaign has been strong.

How is this article in any way not about GMOs? The whole point of roundup is that you can douse food crops with enormous quantities that would normally kill them, thanks to genetic modifications.

Roundup vastly reduces pesticide quantity.

It takes a lot more water than bleach, when imbibed, to kill someone .. bleach for everyone?

The addition of appropriate amounts of chlorine to drinking water may well be the single thing that has most impacted human health.

And it’s something that’s never been done in large parts of Europe, without any issues.

I would separate GMO, the technology and field of research, from Monsanto. I don't see why corporate corruption and dishonesty must go hand in hand with GMOs. Even glyphosate itself is not the whole story about GMOs.

roundup predates GMOs

The whole point? We still spray roundup on many of our non-GMO crops. It's inconsequential, if not desirable, to kill the crop near harvest. Roundup had a couple of decades of use in food production before GMOs arrived on the scene.

Also, most of what you see coming out of the sprayer is water. The actual amount of glyphosate used in an application is minimal.

Yeah but glyphosate is not an aliment. Why would you eat something that is not an aliment ?

The whole point of roundup is that you can use it earlier in the growing cycle, when weeds and non-GMO crops are more vulnerable. This should mean that farmers can use less chemical so long as they're using GMO crop.

"Buy our product, you'll spend more on inputs" would be a fucking stupid USP for Monsanto.

It _should_...until the pests attaching the crops develop resistance to the chosen combination of agrichemical/genetically-induced resistance to said agrichemical.

Here's a 2010 article--it's gotten significantly worse since then. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environmen...

> How is this article in any way not about GMOs? The whole point of roundup is that you can douse food crops with enormous quantities that would normally kill them, thanks to genetic modifications.

No, it's not. RoundUp was around and commercially used as a weedkiller, including in agriculture, before transgenic RoundUp Ready traits were developed.

It's true that RoundUp Ready and similar traits increase the demand for and use of the herbicides they provide resistance to, but the safety of the herbicides is orthogonal to the safety of the herbicide resistant crops.

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