Don't destroy research
senseaboutscience.org
senseaboutscience.org
Greenpeace destroyed a GM wheat crop study by CSIRO, a government research department. It's a shame because it would have found evidence whether such GM crops had problems.
"Greenpeace says it has taken action because of concerns over health, cross-contamination and the secrecy surrounding the experiments." facepalms
Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetically...
Every day, an unique, genetically modified plant is born, because a gamma ray from the outer space hit its DNA and altered it in a non-predictable fashion. 99.99999% and maybe more of these mutants are harmless and probably simply die.
The alteration of genes can happen on your very own garden and without any safety measures. Some of these natural mutants may even be dangerous and nobody cares.
Is this randomness and total lack of safety better than a scientist armed with knowledge and a place to conduct experiments?
That being said, I think the fear is that scientists potentially have the motive to create dangerous/unhealthy strains of plants - a motive which miRNA and transposons (god-willing) do not have.
1. Monocultures are bad. GM crops don't have to be monocultures but they generally are for a number of business reasons that have nothing to do with food production.
2. GM crops cross-pollenate thereby spreading patented genes to non-GM fields. The owners of these non-GM fields are then sued and forced to switch to GM crops.
3. GM crops business models are often built around vendor lock-in. Historically vendor lock-in has been bad for software development and I think we can extrapolate these results to farming.
4. Cross pollination to wild-type is generally disruptive to the environment short term (for example consider what happens when wild plants produce pesticides from a GM gene). The effects are probably no different than introducing an invasive species. Generally people see this as a bad thing (snakes in Hawaii for example) and create laws to prevent it from happening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species
5. There is a big difference between point mutations and transgenic plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgene
I think GM crops can be developed, used in a safe manner and provide a great benefit to humanity, but that is not the current state-of-affairs. There are good reasons the EU regulates GM crops as much as they do.
The patent thing is a separate problem. Patent law in many areas is pretty bad.
Considering the scary amount of money and power Monsanto has, and the terrifying things they do with their GM patents, this is probably be best argument if you are convinced GM plants are evil.
Well, that and the fact that it's /research/ and not the industrial growing of GM foods.
What I think is needed here is to actually make security tighter - but it's a dance between putting lots of money into security or losing some experiments. Unfortunately both are what those guerrillas want.
1. Terrorist is not an accurate title.
2. From what I've read the metaphysical argument that "Things Man Was Not Meant To Know" is not the reasoning behind these actions. The argument used tends to be the same as the anti-nuclear argument. Given the facts, the danger is too great.
3. Plenty of people in the scientific community have serious objections to the way GM crops are used and promoted. It's not an anti-science movement anymore than the anti-nuclear movement was an anti-physics movement.
4. I agree with your assessment that this is a PR maneuver aimed at the general public.
5. The campaign is being managed by the PR firm 'Sense About Science' which is funded by a number of private firms. The claim that this is purely about public scientific research is PR.
Sense about science has done some good work in the past with regard to fighting science libel laws. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_About_Science
Since I didn't try, nor do I particularly care, probably not. I was talking about what this document does, not endorsing it or analyzing it beyond that. Personally I'm not a big fan of narrative-based warfare regardless of who is doing it, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize it when I see it.
So this video might be effective if the only think you know about TTFB is that they're "environmentalists," and if you extrapolate from this that they're crazy spiritist loons who hate science and knowledge. But you would be flat wrong if you did that.
For terrorists who probably can't be reasoned with, they sure are fond of using footnotes.
> We are particularly concerned about ensuring the protection of what is probably the world’s oldest classical grassland experiment. We are appalled that you are jeopardizing the integrity of this scientific inheritance by planting GM wheat metres away from it. We believe your recklessness in planting GM in the adjacent field seriously undermines your institution’s scientific credibility.
Ouch. I have to back up "Take the flour back" on this one. Now the Poor Bullied Scientist looks more like an Incompetent Sorcerer's Apprentice.
This is organized political violence, and organized political violence only exists where it's passively tolerated by the government. Suppose the NAACP learned that a bunch of yahoo skinheads were planning an attack on the National Museum of African Art. Do you think for a minute that the museum curators would be writing a cringing, please-don't-attack us letter about the important artistic contributions of African Americans? Naah - a bunch of yahoo skinheads would be preparing for a 15-year staycation at Pelican Bay.
Treat left-wing extremists the same way you treat right-wing extremists - problem solved. Not that the problem's going to be solved. But it's worth thinking about why.