My current objection to GMO's has to do with the incredibly bad and overly politicized science surrounding the whole issue.
Definitions:
Establishment medicine consists of mainstream medical thought. Examples: regular hospitals, vaccines, US government medical agencies such as the CDC and the FDA, Monsanto, GMO food, etc.
Alternative medicine consists of the natural, organic, non-mainstream medical thought. Examples: doctors who refuse medical insurance and post up-front prices on their websites, everything-organic-is-better folks, Dr. Mercola, Monsanto-is-public-enemy-number-one folks, anti-vaccine, anti-GMO folks, etc.
My problem is this: these two medical camps are so highly politicized, and regularly employ such bad science (and the media is about the worst offender of all,
regularly blowing even careful scientific discoveries all out of proportion) that I've come to a rather singular conclusion: we know almost nothing about anything medical.
Case Study #1: Dr. Mercola. I'm not going to link to his atrocious webpage; if you're feeling particularly inclined to inundate yourself with self-referential fallacies, go ahead. On his website, you can be 99.9% sure that anytime Dr. Mercola references another paper, that paper is written by... Dr. Mercola. This is not good science, because you are shutting yourself off from all discoveries made by other scientists. This is kind of basic, but it seems to have escaped Dr. Mercola.
Case Study #2: The Monsanto GMO corn rat study. For context, the
alternative side believes that GMO corn causes infertility, at least in rats. So, when Monsanto did their
90-day study, they should have done one long enough to convince their detractors. The rat life cycle is significantly longer than 90 days (barely time for rats to reach sexual maturity), hence the Monsanto study certainly didn't investigate multiple generations. In addition, the Monsanto study had too few rats taking the GMO corn: 20 male and 20 female rats taking the GMO corn, and the rest of the 400 rats in control groups. This is incorrect experimental design, because there aren't enough rats taking the GMO corn to be statistically significant.
Conclusions:
1. Do not trust the media
at all on anything medical. You can pretty much guarantee that they're wrong about every single pronouncement they make on medical matters.
2. If you want to learn about things medical, and get as straight a story as you can, follow this procedure:
- Take a course, or refresh your knowledge of statistics.
- Avoid Google, and go to Google Scholar. Search for scholarly articles on your subject of interest.
- Once you find articles that aren't behind a paywall (or if you are in academia, and paywalls aren't a problem), find the money trail. Scholars these days have a bad habit of not always revealing their funding sources. All scientists are biased, so the only honest thing to do is come out and say what your bias is. Good scientists do this as a matter of course.
- Evaluate the studies you find on the basis of the quality of the statistics employed, and the biases revealed in the previous step.
That's the best you can do.