“There is no GMO lettuce,” said Nucci. “It made us go: Why are we doing this? We are perpetuating a fear that something is wrong with GMOs. We didn’t feel right doing that, so we chose to take that label off.” – Diana Bradley, PR Week.
https://geneticliteracyproject.org
March Against Monsanto Denver claimed that GM papaya kills pollinators and soil bacteria.
I asked about their sources and their evidence, they asked me to do my own research.
Well, I am a biologist. I have devoted half of my life, even before I was an adult, to do my own research. I have seen all sort of ridiculous and crazy claims, and there is never evidence.
There is no research or peer reviewed papers linking GM papayas to pollinator death or to soil decay. This is simply a lie. March Against Monsanto is lying. This is not a different opinion, this is not one of those sketchy papers in marginal journals. Simply, there is no evidence, that claim is complete and utter bullshit.
I don’t know why these people have to lie to make their point. They demand transparency from others, they demand respect, yet the lie, they discriminate and they insult.
I f I am proved wrong, I will make a public apology and make a donation to an organic charity of their choice. I will record the apology and upload it to YouTube.
All I ask is hard evidence of damage to pollinators AND damage to soil bacteria by GM papaya. Peer reviewed papers will do.
This is their opportunity to shut me up, to prove I am wrong and make me pay money to a charity of their choice. The ball is in their court. Will they pass this wonderful opportunity to make me look like a moron and discredit my activism or will they ignore it because they lied?
Come on, foks! Come and teach me. Shut me up. Prove that I have no idea about what I am talking. Do it before June 1st.
Pro-science folks, feel free to share this with your closest MAM group.
This is a story about our program, the Cornell Alliance for Science, and our graduation night. Humbled to have this opportunity: Global Leadership fellows: passion to improve the planet
2016 Alliance for Science Global Leadership Fellows on graduation night.
We are almost done with the filming. I wanted to share with you this picture. We have 66 gigabytes of video. I do not even have access to it, as the Venezuelan internet speed is so slow.
I has taken a long time, a lot more than we thought, but it is a much larger project than we thought it’d be. It is a better documentary, longer and more complex, with more people.
I am humbled, it has been a long road, but we are almost at the end. I just hope that the long night that my people are going through ends soon and we can see the dawn.
The Venezuelan Government is promoting the Orinoco Mining Arch as an exit to the current Venezeulan crisis. Some people say it will give us 20 billion dollars of income.
A herd of 5000 to 10000 GM goats that make lactoferrin on their milk would igve us the same income, but since we spent the last 17 years demonising genetic engineering while not investing in research and development. We bought tons of arms and and Russian planes, so no GM goats, we’ll suck the mercury.
That’s Chávez legacy.
We could have been Singapore, but the majority chose Zimbabwe.
Recently I was able to show for the first time this trailer of Silenced Crops. This is what I said, roughly, as I didn’t write my speech, I said it as it came out, spontaneously:
Sixteen years ago we had advanced biotechnology in Venezuela. Today, we are starving.
More than 60% of Venezuelans cannot eat three times a day. I am not telling you this because I read the statistics, I am telling you this because some friends and relatives are going through this right now.
16 years ago, a group of zealots destroyed a field of transgenic papayas and managed to make fierce opposition to GMOs part of the government policy.
Now, I won’t tell you that we are starving because we don’t use GMOs. That would not be true. But there is a connection between the food crisis and the GMO rejection. Hunger is what happens when your agricultural and economic policies are not based on facts, science and evidence. It’s what happens when your policies are based on rumors, lies, dogma and blind ideology.
I am making this documentary not only to tell you what happened 16 years ago, but to show that hunger is the price that people pay for the irrationality of their rulers.
Why La Tigresa del Oriente is the future of Biotech.
First, I need to explain to most of you, readers, who is La Tigresa del Oriente, or, The Eastern Tiger Lady. She is a Peruvian singer, a YouTube celebrity, by now in her 70s. She became famous with a music video that turned viral. 10 years after her debut, she has millions of views of her videos, recorded several albums and even has had naked pictures taken and appeared in our local equivalents of Playboy, Revista SoHo. Impressive for a grandma, right? But that’s the world we live in.
30 or 40 years ago, it was very difficult, almost impossible, for a new band or an emerging artist to record a video and make themselves known without the collaboration of the music industry. The equipment that you needed to record a song and the access to the people controlling the radio playlists was hard to get. It was very expensive to buy the tools that you needed for professional recording, and making a video, nearly impossible. This changed when cellphones with cameras and sound recording were released, we were finally able to record our creations. Later, when YouTube was released, anyone could upload his or her video and make it available to the whole web. What used to be thousands of dollars and needed very specific social connections , now can be made with a cellphone and an Internet connection. The creation of content has been democratized.
I am hopeful that the same will happen with biotechnology. That in a few decades, or earlier, we’ll have simpler and cheaper methods to change organisms, to develop and improve better crops and fruits, to create enhanced foods and new combinations that don’t exist yet. To broaden the things that we eat and how we dress. I hope that in a a future not so far, the regulatory framework is changed , so it is accessible to small companies, not only to Monsanto-like giants, that their monopoly of market access ends, just like it ended for the record companies.
We are already heading in that direction. The development of new genetic modification systems that are easier to use, that might not subjected to current regulation, as they do not have genes of other species, could decrease the costs and the barriers to market access. My old company, LavaAmp, aimed to decrease the cost, speed and complexity of a common lab technique. Step by step, we are going to a world in which biology will make possible tastier food, more sustainable and nutritious. Where Monsanto is just another big company, competing with a lot small ones. We’ll see a New and Brighter Day for humanity!
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