Food Fight!

I must say, I am enjoying this Brawl o' the Brainy immensely. The only thing hotter than a libertarian scientist and a public-interest NGO lawyer duking it out over federal regulation of genetically engineered foods is. . . well, really, nothing else comes to mind. Sexy!

Richard Caplan, U.S. PIRG's Clean Water and Food Safety Advocate, responds below to GeneThug's earlier post entitled: "Sniggering Little Men Wearing Latex Gloves" Respond (itself a response to "GT Gets Served.") Thread your way back, if you're new to the discussion-- this one's a doozy!

Enjoy!

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I’ll respond briefly to GeneThug’s latest self-admitted mega-rant in the order he ranted it out.

First of all, I’m under no delusion that you’re under no regulatory burden, even though I have no idea who you are nor what you do. But your comment is entirely improper: you’re not developing genetically engineered crops and foods, are you? The analogy is therefore meaningless. Many fields are overregulated, many are properly regulated, many are underregulated, and some are unregulated. But comparing scientists doing job A to scientists doing a different jobB gets us nowhere. And you’re talking about writing a grant as regulation? Dancers write grants, are they regulated? NGOs write grants. Does writing a grant make you regulated? Again, your point is meaningless and off topic.

Sorry I didn’t provide links. Tracking down articles takes seconds, so I trust you’re capable.

You do not seem to understand the difference between: (a) the existence of something called a framework and (b) a regulation. They have a different legal significance. And as I said before, and am still right about, the FDA has no regulations in place regarding genetically engineered food. The Office of Science and TechnologyPolicy issued a paper in the 1980s called a Coordinated Framework, but the FDA never issued regulations under it, merely a Statement of Policy. This time I will refer you to a paper I wrote that can befound here: http://pirg.org/ge/GE.asp?id2=4781&id3=ge&

A link! Enjoy it.

Your next paragraph again misrepresents my point. I am not attacking science, nor the use of genetic engineering. I am not even attacking genetically engineered crops. I am merely pointing out the insufficiencies in oversight of genetically engineered crops. Good luck finding a cure for cancer. My job has nothing to do with you, and I don’t try to convince anyone about anything that you do.

I look forward to your “refutation” of the CSPI piece. You erroneously claim that I cherry picked a quote from it, but if you read my comments more carefully you’ll notice I didn’t quote the piece at all and that I also noted that CSPI supports biotech. But I look forward to your refutation regardless. How do I feel about this administration lying to the public and taking us to war for oil? Not so good.

Again, you then go back to comparing two different things entirely to try to make your point, which is intellectually dishonest. I don’tcare if you’re self-regulated, nor do I want to blow you, thank you very much. I’m not talking about the work you do. I’ll unground my assertions (and feed your need for links!): http://pirg.org/ge/reports/GERegulations.pdf
Enjoy. I look forward to another attempted refutation.

Then you pick a one paragraph LTE to refute a well-researched article. The LTE itself has an error (thanks for the link). Will we have to wait until people starve in the US?, it asks. What arrogance! People do starve in the US, in the land in which we supposedly have a food surplus and grow so many biotech crops. You said you’d refute the article. Please do. The LTE you quote is not a refutation.

You then claim that no one has gotten sick from a biotech food. You’re a scientist, right? Tell me: who has looked? That’s normally necessary to make a sweeping statement like that, right? The NAS said no one has looked at environmental impacts. Have you looked? The FDA doesn’t look at human health impacts. Have you looked? Why was Monsanto fined $1.5 million a few days ago for bribing officials so that they would not have to conduct tests in order to get their crops approved? Does that worry you? Here’s another link (boy, it is easy to provide them!): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4153635.stm

Then you’re back again to your personal experiences which, while fascinating I’m sure, are largely irrelevant to this discussion as you’re not employed by a company engaged in research on geneticallyengineered crops and foods. The Jane Brody piece does help your argument, but is filled with the same assertions I have been addressing throughout this message. You conclude with another nice misdirection, talking about other threats, all of them very serious. This is not a competition, about whether some threats should be addressed and some shouldn’t. Are there worse things in the world than genetically engineered crops? The answer to that question shouldn’t determine whether we deal with preventable risks from genetically engineered crops.

--Richard Caplan