I got a letter from a science student in Mexico who is concerned about the results of their national election in which they elected a new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has begun appointing the various secretaries and advisors to form a government. His concern is that the appointment of María Elena Álvarez-Buylla Roces to the directorship of Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT), the state science council, is problematic.
So I looked into it. My first superficial impression is that she seems to be a good choice: she’s chair of the ecology department at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, she already has a position on CONACyT, and she’s a developmental evolutionary ecologist, a field I find fascinating. She’s qualified and has great credentials. She is so much better than anyone Donald Trump would appoint here that I’m wondering what Mexicans have to complain about.
But then my correspondent points out that she has some troubling ideas about science. In particular, she’s got things wrong about GMOs, which is one of her obsessions.
- She has mentioned that “Western Science” is the responsible of giving us the flashiest achievements but perhaps the most useless such as putting a man on the Moon.
She stated that GMOs are poison and that these can lead to cancer
She has mentioned that there is a rise in the US for autism which is caused by the consumption of GMOs
She of course links to the Seralini studies.
(The Seralini studies, you may recall, are the notorious bad experiments that claimed to show that the RoundUp Ready genes, not RoundUp itself, caused cancer when injected into rats.)
I might be slightly sympathetic to the argument that the moon landings were a superficial flash in the pan, since we haven’t bothered to sustain that effort, but it smacks of the usual ignorance of a different field of science and engineering than hers — like Sarah Palin’s ridiculous dismissal of fruit fly research. I also am not sure what “Western Science” means. There’s just science, and you can do it no matter what side of the world you live on. And isn’t developmental evolutionary ecology also “Western Science”?
“Genetically modified organism” refers only to a process for generating targeted, planned gene changes. A GMO is no more poisonous than organisms with random genetic changes…which are basically all organisms. You could argue that glyphosate is potentially toxic, but study after study has failed to find evidence of that.
There is no causal connection between GMOs and autism. This is just the worst. Autism is the default villain of so many anti-science arguments.
These claims call her judgment into question. There is good reason to have reservations about her appointment. As a citizen of the US, of course, I have no right to impose on the Mexican science establishment, so all I can do is suggest that my Mexican colleagues take a look at the Facebook page for the resistance, #ResisCienciaCONACyT, their blog at # ResisCiencia18, and follow their Twitter feed. Make up your own mind, organize and fight back!
I also have another suggestion. The US president currently has not bothered to appoint a science advisor, and in the vacuum, the default leadership of American science policy has fallen to a guy with a bachelor’s degree in political science, and in general his appointments to science and engineering positions have been jokes (our Secretary of Energy is Rick Perry, who didn’t even know what the DOE was). Perhaps María Elena Álvarez-Buylla Roces could be sent up here to do the job? Maybe even a notoriously anti-GMO scientist would be an improvement on what we’ve got now.
But still…Mexico and the US can do better.
P.S. You know the three largest cities in the Americas are São Paulo, Mexico City, and Lima, right? New York only makes it to #4. The population of Latin America needs a strong agriculture to sustain itself, so why is Mexico rejecting a key strategy for improving their crops?
“RoundUp Ready genes, not RoundUp itself, caused cancer when injected into rats”
Pretty sure that if you run around injecting gratuitous amounts of any DNA into anything, it’s going to be problematic. DNA is supposed to be in the nucleus of the cell, not floating around willy-nilly.
Those Seralini studies sound dodgy as hell. What was their control? Did they inject rats with a solution of random DNA fragments? Or more likely if they are as lazy as I think they are, saline. Pretty much everything causes cancer/autism/hair-loss/homosexuality/voting for Trump/, when you compare it to saline.
Our Minister for Science and Universities in the UK isn’t any better. He studied PPE as an undergraduate and then spent five years working for Goldman Sachs. Doesn’t appear to have any scientific qualifications at all.
@ cartomancer
He studied PPE as an undergraduate
Clearly qualification for anything. On the other hand May appointed Boris as Foreign Sec.
@ rayceeya
PZ Myers meant that Séralini &co were suspecting (OK, blaming, their opinion was engraved in stone before the study started) that the GMOs themselves were causing cancer, not the pesticides the GMO plants were made resistant to.
His description is lapidaire (it took me a few seconds to parse it) but correct.
That Séralini & co did was feeding a diet heavy on GMO maize (either 1/3 or 2/3 of their chow, IIRC) to about 200 rats, 100 male and 100 female, in groups of 10, each group corresponding to a given condition (GMO maize, non-GMO maize, spiked, or not with Round-Up, different concentrations, etc.).
So, to answer your questions: no DNA injected, and two control groups of 10 rats, one for each sex.
Then they followed the rats over 2 years and half and recorded the size of the tumors they all developed.
Yeah, they all developed tumors. Including the control rats. They were Sprague-Dawley rats, that’s that they tend to do after about one-and-half year of life. Of course, Séralini talked more about the GMO-fed rats and less about the control ones.
Surprise, the first tumors were reported among the 180 non-control rats, and later in the 20 control rats. No blinding, tumor size estimated by lay-of-hand. Also, population size, how does that work?
Surprise, the non-control rats died earlier from their tumors, for a certain value of “earlier”. How did the rats died? Actually, they were euthanized, whenever the searchers decided the rats had suffered enough from their tumors.
Funny enough, the same results which lead them to conclude that GMO maize killed female rats, would also allow to conclude that Round-Up has a protecting effect against cancer: there were less dead rats among this group, compared to the control.
Oh, and a follow-up study had one of Séralini colleagues, an homeopath veterinarian, protecting rats against GMO with his little sugar pills.
I agree with the moon shot argument. In today’s dollars, America’s obsession for going to the moon cost about $150 billion. That’s a lot of money for Tang and grainy videos of men playing golf and dropping hammers and feathers to prove Galileo was right.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has inherited a horrible mess. He may be able to clean it up a bit. His record in Mexico City is encouraging.
The appointment of María Elena Álvarez-Buylla Roces seems reasonable. AMLO is no scientist.
It may be unfortunate, giving some of her beliefs but unless she is a total nutcase, at least AMLO has a scientific adviser.
As an academic exercise.
Compare and contrast this with the government of the USA
“why is Mexico rejecting a key strategy for improving their crops?”
You still fail to recognize that among the perpetually perplexed belief always supersedes evidence and critical reasoning! To paraphrase Isaac Asimov, If everyone would just chant “toilet tissue, toilet tissue, toilet tissue” 666 times every day everything would be just fine (achieve cosmic consciousness
and inner serenity). But some people just won’t listen to this sound advice (pun intended).
I’m not sure why you are so insistent on the benignity of Roundup. The EPA considers glyphosate “to have low toxicity when used at the recommended doses,” but it is not true that “to be of low toxicity to humans, but obviously it is not true that, as you write “study after study has failed to find evidence of [toxicity]. Glyphosate is indeed toxic to invertebrates and to fish embryos, and it is a violation of federal law to introduce it into waterways. Furthermore, Roundup does not only consist of glyphosate. It contains surfactants which are highly toxic, and not just to invertebrates and fish. So-called “inert” ingredients in pesticides such as Roundup are not well-tested for safety and very well might not be. I personally don’t mind using Roundup to, say, kill weeds growing in the cracks between my patio blocks but if it’s used for agricultural purposes it’s very important to keep it out of waterways. And I wouldn’t recommend drinking it.
@Athaic #4:
Did he use his little sugar pills to block the feeder tube? That way he could protect the darling little rats against both cancer and autism!
Wow, this science stuff is easy. No wonder it’s safe to leave it in the hands of politicians.
Norman Borlaug is currently spinning in his grave.
The claim that the use of GMOs is “a key strategy for improving their crops” is as much bullshit as anything put out by anti-GMO sources. GMOs are not designed for the benefit of the population, but for the profits of the companies that develop them (who also do the vast majority of the research into their safety). They focus on the needs of large-scale commercial agriculture, not on the smallholders who actually produce more food, and need help in the less fashionable areas of storage, market access, and above all, security of tenure.
I agree with Cervantes. I can’t understand it either. Something – almost certainly associated with agriculture and related practices – is knocking off bees, butterflies and other insect pollinators, whether by direct toxicity (in pesticides) or from decimating plants many species rely on (in herbicides), and it isn’t something ‘non-toxic’. Something is also wrecking endocrine systems in a wide variety of fauna. And many GMO’s are specifically engineered to be cultivated in concert with extensive pesticide and herbicide treatment, drastically encouraging the increased use of such chemicals in the industry over the last few decades, NOT reducing it, as GMO research initially liked to promise. Over 250 million pounds of Glyphosate alone is sprinkled on crops annually. Its literally everywhere now – in the environment, in our food and in our bodies. That’s documented. What’s the point of genetically modifying crops ostensibly to resist ‘pests and weeds’ if it requires copious chemical treatment to work? Why, because it is a very profitable industry.
@KG #11
I work for a non-profit, developing virus resist crops for small landholder farmers in developing countries. We use transgenic techniques. Your claim that GMOs aren’t designed for the benefit of the population, but for profits of large corporations, is incorrect.
@anchor #12
[blockquote]What’s the point of genetically modifying crops ostensibly to resist ‘pests and weeds’ if it requires copious chemical treatment to work? Why, because it is a very profitable industry.[/blockquote]
Despite your dislike for profits, Bt crops and virus resistant crops do a good job of drastically reducing the application of insecticides. It’s true that glyphosate resistant crops increases the amount of glyphosate used, but it decreases the amount of other, more toxic herbicides.
If you have any evidence that GMOs are killing bees or other pollinators, I would be interested in reading it.
Jackson @ # 13: … Bt crops and virus resistant crops do a good job of drastically reducing the application of insecticides.
Mebbeso, for now – but when (not if) insects evolve resistance to Bacillus thuringiensis much more rapidly than they would have otherwise, due to constant exposure, then all agriculture will have lost a safe and useful pest control measure permanently – for the short-term (and redundant) enrichment of a few corporations and their investor-class ownership.
@8, @11, @12
Concerning Roundup
A broad spectrum device. Almost never good. Consider: Generally, a broad spectrum insecticide will be ten or a hundred times as effective against the predators of a targeted pest for the simple reason that the predators consume partially poisoned pests.I think it also a reasonably established fact that no person is known to have been killed by a GMO, (Not even idiots who drank glyphosate). GMOs can be considered engineered mutations. Engineers do make mistakes and should be as safe as they know how. However previous efforts at plant “adjustment” have involved selection, random mutation, and ignorance.
I do agree about specific personal use. I kill poison ivy to which I'm sensitive.
jack16
Always a bit glib to equate anti-GMO attitudes to some kind of unscientific woo. I doubt that most GMOs are directly harmful to human health when ingested. I am concerned that some aimed at increasing herbicide resistance or producing insecticides may well be. I am even more concerned about the escape of GMO plants into natural settings and either becoming herbicide resistant weeds themselves or transferring genes into related native plants.
Thanks for clarifying that Athaic. I’ll admit I was being a bit deliberately facetious.
I was really trying to point out that any experiment with a poorly designed control can’t prove anything. And the Saralini experiment sounded suspiciously like that sort of case. It reminded me of the studies that people point to to “prove” cell phones cause brain cancer.
Poorly designed experiments establish nothing and should be discarded. If what you said about their lack of blinding and quantification method is true, then this was a very poorly designed experiment. It’s wide open for bias to slip right in.
Unfortunately there are people in the world today who seem to deliberately do bad science to establish proof for selfish reasons. I.E. Wakefield. And sometimes (also like Wakefield,) these badly designed experiments, and associated opportunistic sensationalism can do real harm to real people.
I love it when something sciency grips the public’s imagination and everyone gets excited, but sometimes science should really be left to the scientists.
By “Western Science” I have found most people to mean science financed and directed by corporations with an agenda that makes the results less than scientific.