Despite everyone’s apparent addiction to technology—just note the use of smartphones or the way people line up to buy the newest iteration of Apple’s iPhone—there is a definite vein of anti-science and technophobia running through the American public.
Despite everyone’s apparent addiction to technology—just note the use of smartphones or the way people line up to buy the newest iteration of Apple’s iPhone—there is a definite vein of anti-science and technophobia running through the American public. It’s not terribly consistent, but three areas where this is obvious is climate change, vaccines and genetically-modified organisms, particularly in terms of foods.
Largely outside of the scope of this article, the climate change denial is primarily political and its origins can be traced back to at least 1992, after the signing of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, and in 1996, when a fossil-fuel-industry-funded group, the Global Climate Coalition, began attacking the authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Politicians, largely beholden to Big Oil and businesses opposing any kind of carbon tax or restriction on emissions, took it from there.
Much more obviously linked to biotechnology, is the furor over vaccines and autism. This too rose to prominence in the 1990s (which, probably not coincidentally, is when widespread use of the World Wide Web began), largely attributed to a UK gastroenterologist, Andrew Wakefield. He and colleagues wrote a study that was published in the journal Lancet arguing that in 12 cases they studied, they found measles virus in the digestive tracts of children who showed symptoms of autism after receiving the MMR vaccine. The media took it from there.
Although the paper could not state that an actual causal relationship existed between MMR and autism, Wakefield argued that the combination MMR vaccine should be suspended, and instead children should be given single-antigen vaccines separately over a period of time.
What Wakefield didn’t reveal at the time was he had filed for a patent for a single-antigen measles vaccine in 1997. He had also been paid by attorneys filing lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.
For at least a dozen years after the paper, the topic was studied exhaustively in better-designed and larger trials, with the conclusion of Wakefield’s paper being thoroughly debunked, the majority of the co-authors retracting their interpretation, and in 2010, Lancet formerly retracting the paper itself.
Three months later, in May 2010, Britain’s General Medical Council banned Wakefield from practicing medicine in Britain, stating he had shown “callous disregard” for children in his research, as well as various conflicts of interest. A later study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published in 2011, found that Wakefield had also committed research fraud by falsifying data about the condition of the children in the original paper—including that some of the children had shown signs of autism prior to receiving the MMR vaccine.
As The History of Vaccines, an educational resource by The College of Physicians of Philadelphia concludes, “Most scientific and medical experts are satisfied that no connection exists between vaccines and autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. … Researchers continue to examine these questions, but there is no evidence that these factors play a role in autism development. Most autism researchers hold that the causes of autism are many and include genetic and environmental factors, but do not involve vaccines.”
Which brings us to another boogeyman of biology, GMO foods. A 2017 poll by the Pew Research Center of Americans found that 49 percent worried about the effects of GMOs on health. About the same number said they thought GMOs would harm the environment.
Journalist McKay Jenkins wrote a book, “Food Fight: GMOs and the Future of the American Diet,” and in a 2017 interview with The Washington Post, said, “On this issue there’s a lot of stuff that is tossed around that’s confusing on both side. And when I say, ‘both sides,’ I realize there aren’t just two sides to the GMO issue. You have industry that is trying to convince you that all GMOs are fine, and then you have anti-GMO groups that have quote-unquote science they’re reporting that’s not necessarily reliable, and you have global debates, and local debates, and debates over labeling, and debates over health, and debates over ecological impact.”
Part of Jenkins’ research is that GMOs are only a part of the U.S. and possibly developed world’s agricultural problem. “The short version,” he told The Post, “is that GMO technology, along with synthetic fertilizers, has allowed industrial-scale farmers to grow a very small number of crops incredibly efficiently. These firms are not out there making GMO zucchinis and broccoli and red peppers and all that—they’re making corn and soybeans and canola oil and sugar beets. They’re making components that either go into processed food, or are used to feed processed, industrial meat.”
If it comes down to: Are GMO foods safe to eat? The answer, based on thousands of studies, often long-term and independently funded, is yes, they appear to be. One study published several years ago looked at those who predominantly eat GMOs—livestock. Researchers from the University of California at Davis studied health data of more than 100 billion animals and found no ill effects related to the shift from non-GMO feed to GMO feed.
Tamar Haspel, writing for The Washington Post in 2014, noted, “There is a consensus on the safety of GM crops. Consensus doesn’t mean every last person on the planet; there are people who still say GMOs are dangerous, and some of those people have advanced degrees. But siding with those people, in the face of the consensus, just makes it easier for others to dismiss you as an anti-science zealot.”
Another factor that should be taken into consideration about GM foods is how it seems to be a developed-world issue of contention. The Genetic Literacy Project points out, “The crisis now is that hunger, poverty, malnutrition, and sustainable agricultural growth disproportionately impact Less Developed Countries (LDCs). And solutions like biotechnology are often inaccessible where they are most solely needed. Biotechnology is at the heart of this discussion, inciting a debate fueled by misinformation and dominated by anti-GMO activists. Meanwhile, those whose lives would be impacted by advances in biotechnology are left out of the global conversation.”
According to the Food Aid Foundation, about 795 million people worldwide do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life, or about one in nine people. In short, people who don’t have enough food to eat to stay alive, don’t spend a lot of time complaining about GMOs.
What should be said is that there is a line, and not a terribly fine and narrow one, between being skeptical of scientific data—that is what science is all about, testing, researching, looking at new data, evaluating data—and being technophobic. An awful lot of the skepticism appears to be politically motivated, with various players pushing agendas and twisting and repressing scientific studies to do so.
Ensuring good scientific literacy, so the public, media (and even many politicians, who sometimes sound like blithering idiots with their statements on science, such as sea-levels rising because of rocks falling into the oceans) can intelligently evaluate scientific studies, is crucial. It’s also important, and probably no less crucial, that scientific consensus drives public policy, not the other way around.
