Nobel Laureate Campaign Supporting GMOs
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Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings307 / 340
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Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
00:14
Good morning, everybody. What a lovely crowd. I'm Adam Smith, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this session,
00:21
which is with Rich Roberts, and it's about GMOs, as I guess you know. So the format for the session is that Rich is going to give a short talk, and then we're going to have some discussion. I might ask a few questions, then I'm going to open it to the floor for general discussion. Rich Roberts is, as you know, the 1993 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine.
00:42
He discovered introns and mechanisms of gene splicing, but today he's going to speak about GMOs. Okay, well, good morning, everybody. Nice to see a friendly crowd here. Let's hope you're friendly at the end of this talk.
01:02
Could we start off? So the title I chose for this is we've got 133 Nobel Laureates now who have all signed this letter that went to Greenpeace, went to the major ambassadors to the United Nations, and it basically said that Greenpeace should stop telling everybody that GMOs were dangerous
01:24
because it was causing a great deal of problems. You might think Monsanto are dangerous because Greenpeace have mixed Monsanto and GMOs. I kind of agree Monsanto can be dangerous. I'm not a fan, but I am a huge fan of GMOs,
01:41
and I hope to tell you why during this talk. Next slide, please. Oh, I can do that, right? I have a clicker here. I got involved in this because I heard a lot of stories in Europe from plant scientists who were being harassed because they were working on GMOs.
02:02
And I'd been invited to go to the European Commission and give a talk about the future of medicine, not that I know a great deal about that, but I had a few truisms that I thought I could tell them. But then after this talk, I thought, well, I'm going to make a different point. I'm going to make the point that the future of medicine in many ways is tied up with food,
02:22
and this is because the requirements for medicine in the developing world Oh, I guess I've lost that slide already. Okay. The requirements for medicine in the developing world are very different from those in the developed world. In the developed world, we can afford to pay a lot of money for medicine.
02:41
In the developing world, they can't. And for many of them, food is medicine, especially for the people who go to bed hungry at night. And if you look at this slide, assuming you can see it, I'm particularly impressed by the little cartoon on the right which shows the different attitudes that if you're in Europe,
03:01
and maybe you're listening to this person on the left who's telling you about the dangers of GMOs, you have a very different response from the child in Africa who actually sees food as being a rather important part of their life. And I think one of the things we have to do, and which I'll reiterate later on,
03:21
is we have to think about when we say things for political purposes or for whatever purposes in the West, that these days those same messages get carried around the world, and we should be careful about what we say. At the bottom right-hand corner, there's a website. It's called supportprecisionagriculture.org, and it summarizes a lot of the stuff that I'll be saying during this talk.
03:44
It's got lots of slides on it, lots of news, lots of stuff about our GMO campaign. It lists all the laureates, and people can join us. So there is the opportunity to sign on and join us and say you agree with us.
04:01
So food, of course, means agriculture, and we started doing agriculture some 10, 12,000 years ago when the hunter-gatherers realized they didn't need to go off to the forest every day to get their favorite foods. They could actually grow them in the backyard, and this was really the start of agriculture when people started to grow the food locally.
04:21
And during that time, we've increasingly tried to get better and better plants to grow, better and better things to grow. And I like to use the evolution of maize as a good example of this. On the top left, on the far left, is this very thin, rather nasty-looking plant
04:41
that I think you would not think about eating unless you're really hungry. It's called teosinte, and this came out of Central America. And over some period of many thousands of years, it was domesticated, brought to Europe, bred by the plant scientists to get these rather healthy-looking corn cobs that we go to the supermarket and buy today.
05:06
This is something that's been very heavily modified genetically, not by GMO techniques but by traditional plant breeding techniques. In fact, it is fairly true that with the possible exception of fish, almost everything that we eat today has been genetically modified.
05:22
There's nothing very special about genetic modification, except that the modern GMO methods, and it is a method, are rather precise, and the old methods of traditional breeding are rather imprecise. This is shown on this slide. On the left-hand side, I show a cross between a couple of plants that you want to make better.
05:44
One of them has a trait that you would like to put into the other plant. Maybe it grows taller, maybe it's got a bigger grain in it. And so you typically make a cross between these two plants, and then from the crosses, you select the one that has the trait that you want.
06:01
Let's say you're looking for height, it's pretty easy to find the ones that are taller. But then, of course, when you do that, you mix all the genes, and so you end up with a mix of all the genes, really 50-50, very often, between the two plants. And so now what you do is you do a series of back-crossing with the original plant you were trying to improve to get rid of all the genes you don't want
06:23
and just retain the gene or genes that you do want. But, of course, in that process, you also pick up a lot of other genes. Usually you don't know what they are, and no one really bothers very much with what they are, unless it has some obvious defects that are visible. The other thing you can do and that the plant breeders have done quite often
06:43
is if you can't get the traits you want as a result of this crossbreeding, is you mutagenize the plant. So use radiation or use chemicals, make mutants, and then hope that you can get the thing you want. Now, Greenpeace and the anti-GMO people will tell you that this is a perfectly safe way of making plants.
07:03
On the right-hand side is precision breeding using the GMO method, in which you take one or two genes that you know what they are and you transfer them into the plant that you want to improve. In this way, you end up with a new plant that has just picked up one or two genes.
07:21
You know what they are, you know what they went, and it's pretty easy to test for. Greenpeace says this is terribly dangerous. Mutation and random breeding is okay. I like to use this as a nice analogy to show you what's going on here. Let's say I've got two cars, and I've got one car has a GPS system in it,
07:41
and I want to put the GPS system into my new car. So what do I do? Do I take the two cars apart, mix everything up, and then select the one that has the GPS system? Well, no, not quite. You take the GPS system and move it into the new car. And this is really what GM does. This is what the GMO method does.
08:03
It allows you to do this. Furthermore, if you take the GPS from an airplane, does this mean the new car is now going to fly? Well, if you listen to Greenpeace and the anti-GMO propaganda, they'll tell you, yes, it's going to fly. If you take a salmon gene and put it into a plant, maybe the plant is going to swim.
08:23
There's so much misinformation out there, it really is quite scary. And this is really what's important, that the GMO technique, it's a method, it's a way of making new plants, it's a way of doing plant breeding, that is far more precise than the old method.
08:42
It's also much faster. Typically, when plant breeders are trying to improve maize or something else, it may take 20, 30 years before they have the new breed that they want because of the extensive back-crossing they have to do.
09:03
Now, with the GMO method, you can typically do this in one to two years. And what has happened is that over the years, the plant breeding companies like Monsanto and Syngenta and the others, they have concentrated on plants that are useful for sale in the West
09:23
because here you can make a large amount of money. In Africa, where they really have a great need for better plants, there has been no focus on this because there's not much money to be made there. And so people like the Monsanto groups and the big agribusiness
09:42
have really focused on where they can make most money, and that is in the West. And this has driven the agenda. So I want to move now to tell you something that maybe I can scare you with a little bit. So plants are full of pesticides.
10:00
If you think about it, when plants see a predator coming, they can't get up and run away as we can. They're stuck there. And so how do they stop insects from eating them? Well, the answer is they produce their own pesticides. If they didn't, there wouldn't be any plants out there. And so this is something that's worth thinking about,
10:21
that every plant you eat has pesticides in it. And I like this work that came from Bruce Ames. It was published a number of years ago now. And he was looking at some of the pesticides that are common in the diet. If you look here, you'll see things like parsley, celery, mushrooms, cabbage, and so on.
10:41
These have compounds in them that are carcinogenic. And I like to concentrate on the example of celery. Celery is something we all eat. We have no problem with it. It's not poisonous. It doesn't do us any harm. And yet the ladies who used to cut up celery into small pieces so that it could be packaged for sale in the supermarkets
11:03
had a problem with the celery juice that they got on their hands. They discovered they were getting dermatitis and in some cases were getting skin cancer as a result of it. And that is because this compound, methoxysorolin, is quite carcinogenic. And so if you bathe yourself in these compounds, in these juices,
11:23
as you might do if you're cutting celery all the time, then you end up with problems. If that was a GMO, it would not be allowed. You would not be allowed to eat celery. You also wouldn't be allowed to eat collard greens and cauliflower and Brussels and these other things that have reasonably high levels of these pesticides.
11:44
But fortunately, our body knows how to deal with the small amounts that are present that we get into us. The anti-GMO people don't care about that. They just care about whether it's there or not. It's sort of an all or nothing thing. So don't stop eating celery, but be aware that this is a product of natural plant breeding.
12:05
And if you cross celery with a different variety, maybe you would up the amount and maybe you would need to worry about this. But in fact, because these things are bred by so-called natural means, it's not a problem. Everybody is quite happy to accept this. I might also mention that those of you who are diabetic
12:23
probably take human insulin. Human insulin comes from a GMO. It comes from a yeast that is programmed to produce human insulin. Not a pig insulin or anything, but human insulin. It's a GMO. You don't hear the anti-GMO types complaining about that.
12:43
They seem perfectly happy with this. And I'll mention that in another context, that is in the context of golden rice. So one of the major problems that affects children in the developing world is that they don't get enough vitamin A very often. And if you don't get enough vitamin A,
13:02
you stand a chance of going blind at an early age or you just do not develop your muscles properly. And a couple of people, one at the Etayash in Zurich, the other in Freiburg in Germany, Ingo Patricus and Peter Bayer, thought we can do something about this. A large number of people in the developing world eat rice.
13:22
Rice is a staple for them. They thought, let us make rice that actually has vitamin A, or more accurately, the precursor of vitamin A, beta carotene in them. And so they started to engineer rice plants so that they could produce beta carotene in the grain.
13:42
This became a reality in 1999. 1999, almost 20 years ago. Typically, if this had been a naturally bred plant, within three to four years, they would have made it to a point where it could be cultivated out in the field and people would be growing it.
14:01
But in fact, it is still not widely available. It was just late last year that it was approved for use in Bangladesh. It's now, this year, been approved for use and consumption in America, in Canada, in Australia and in New Zealand, and of course in Bangladesh.
14:22
This is something that could have a major effect on children's health. This is the kind of pharmaceutical that insulin is for diabetics. So why was it slowed down? Why did it take so long to get it going? Well, the bottom line is that there was opposition and the most violent opposition you can imagine
14:43
from Greenpeace and from other anti-GMO organizations. When they were trying to grow this in the Philippines, they sent out bands of thugs to actually destroy the golden rice that was growing. Greenpeace put out this pamphlet. They said, golden illusion, they said.
15:03
They said it's taken so long to get this to market that it can't be any good, can't possibly work. And here they are stopping it on every possible level, and then they have the nerve to tell us that it's a problem with the rice. It's not. It does work.
15:21
And since 2002, when golden rice might first have been available, something like 15 million children have either died or had birth defects, had growth defects, as a result of not getting enough vitamin A. I want to know how many kids have to die before we decide that we're going to do something about it.
15:40
In my view, I would say this is a crime against humanity. If this were children being mobbed by Hutus in Rwanda, we would hear all about it. This would be universal condemnation. But apparently, Greenpeace and the anti-GMO people get away with all of this. There is an interesting story underway in Uganda at the moment.
16:06
So Uganda is suffering from something called Xanthomonas wilt, which is affecting banana plants in Uganda, and actually across sub-Saharan Africa. Now, Uganda, 30% of the calories that go into the population come from bananas.
16:24
There is no natural resistance to Xanthomonas wilt among any banana plant, so you can't think about doing traditional breeding. It's not a possibility. There is no banana plant known that is resistant to it. However, sweet peppers are resistant to it,
16:41
and it's been determined there were two genes in sweet peppers. If you take those out, put them into bananas, now bananas become resistant to Xanthomonas wilt. This is something that can save a significant amount of food production for farmers in Uganda. The farmers want it. The president is very keen on it.
17:01
The parliament put forward a bill that would have enabled it to be grown. But unfortunately, the president's wife and daughter were influenced by local religious groups and anti-GMO groups, and they convinced him to slow this all down. And we don't know where this is going to end up, but it's not going to be approved very quickly.
17:22
Another problem in Uganda and in much of Africa now is something called the fall army worm. This is a worm that basically loves to eat maize. It was a problem in southern US for a long time. It turns out that by putting the BT gene, the Bacillus thuringiensis toxin gene,
17:42
this is the Bacillus thuringiensis, this is what the organic farmers use to keep pests away. If you put that gene into maize, it resists the fall army worm. This is what's being done in South Africa. The South Africans grow this. It's perfect. But a lot of African countries now,
18:01
because of the anti-GMO movement, have said, no, no GMOs here. We won't take them. And so they're losing their maize crops. And this is going to be a major problem. It's affecting most of sub-Saharan Africa at the moment. Bangladesh, one of the more forward-looking countries,
18:21
they were having a problem with eggplant, and so scientists there developed something called BT eggplant. They put this BT gene into the eggplants. That then resists the pests, and now they have more eggplants, they grow more eggplants than they can eat, and they're exporting it. This has been a tremendous success.
18:43
So what I think is a very important point is that we must realize that in the West, you don't see a lot of thin Europeans, you don't see a lot of thin Americans, you don't see a lot of thin people in the West. Go to Africa and you do. And one of the reasons here is we have a lot of food,
19:01
we have food choice here, and if you choose not to eat GMOs, then that's fine. Don't do it. That's fine. But recognize this is a choice. But for those people who are hungry, they have very little choice, and we should not pretend that we're not eating it because they're dangerous. We should pretend we're not eating it
19:21
because we have some emotional response to the words. There was a wonderful piece that Jimmy Kimmel, he's a late-night comedian in the US, did. If you look on YouTube, you can find this. He went out and asked a whole bunch of people on the street, what are GMOs? Do you eat them? Do you buy them? Oh, no, they all said. Pretty much everybody said, I won't eat GMOs.
19:42
Oh, said Jimmy Kimmel, do you know what they are? Well, no, we don't actually know what they are, but we know that we shouldn't eat them. It's terrible what has gone on. For developed countries, food isn't a problem. The developing world, they really have the problem. And we have to remember when we come up
20:01
and say things in the West, and this is perhaps something that President Trump could learn, we really need to be careful because people in the developing world hear it, too. And we shouldn't try and make pretense of something here that really isn't true. Facts are a good thing. Politicians should also listen to the scientists they fund.
20:23
One has to wonder why they fund us if they're not prepared to listen to the results of our research. I'm not suggesting they shouldn't fund us, but they should certainly listen. There's a particularly troubling paragraph that the European Union are trying to get
20:41
into their sort of charter, as it were. They're trying to urge GA member states not to support GMO in Africa. I think this is outrageous. I have never come across anything quite so outrageous as this. This should be stopped. Now, one of the things we've been trying to do
21:01
is we laureates would like to get the pope to make a positive statement. He is convinced that the technology is safe. He's convinced it's safe. But he's been convinced by some economists in Argentina that it has economic consequences for these poor farmers. It's not true. In fact, when you look at the numbers,
21:21
it is the poor farmers who've benefited most of all. But I did like this that came out of a letter written to the bishops from the Vatican. It was talking about whether gluten-free bread was okay to use in the sacraments. The church said, no, they're not. But they said specifically that Eucharistic matter
21:41
made with genetically modified organisms is okay. So God approves of it apparently. Finally, I just want to leave you with this slide, which I think summarizes the lesson that I would like to give to any of the Europeans who are here. And it's a lesson I would certainly like to give
22:01
to Greenpeace, to the non-GMO, the anti-GMO people, and to the politicians here. Recognize that non-GMO is a Western indulgent. This is something that we can afford to do because it doesn't affect us. But when we say they're dangerous, it really doesn't work for the poor in Africa.
22:20
The poor in Africa need this because they have had very little development of their local plants. And we can easily breed them, make them better, do it much better, and they can do it themselves. They don't need Monsanto, and they don't need all these big agribusinesses to do it. They can do it themselves. The two examples that I mentioned earlier,
22:41
the Bt eggplant and the stuff in Uganda, the banana wilt, this was all done by local scientists. This was not done by big agriculture. It was done by local scientists. So please just remember this. Have a heart. Thank you.
23:15
Okay. Okay, Rich. Thank you. Very strongly argued. We have a lot to discuss and not very much time,
23:21
so let's cut straight to the chase. It's clear that you think the evidence for the safety of genetically modified crops is unequivocal, that they're safe. Thus, I guess the argument from your laureate declaration should also be unequivocal. You have 133 laureates signed up. There are 290 living laureates. Of those, if you take the scientists, that's about 240.
23:44
If you take economists as scientists, it's 240. If you take economists as not scientists, it's just 290. That's a totally different discussion for a different day. But why haven't you got them all? Well, there are four laureates at this meeting who've not yet signed,
24:01
so I'm working on them. There are also a number of laureates who won't sign anything. They say, unless it's in my direct area of expertise, I'm just not going to sign it. Many of the laureates in economics who actually know about this just don't bother replying to email.
24:20
I think they have my... I ask them about a lot of things. I think they have me in their junk mail, so it just automatically goes to junk mail, so I'm working on the rest of them one at a time. Yes. Oh, yes. No, no, no. The majority here have signed, so there are 39 here, 35 have signed, four haven't.
24:40
Okay. Name and shape. I probably shouldn't tell you, but if you see me talking at length to a laureate, then that may be one of them. Are you going to recruit the mob on your behalf? That's good. Okay, another question. So we know that people find evidence-based decision-making
25:02
quite difficult out there. I mean, for instance, when the day after Britain voted to leave the EU, the most Google question was, what is the EU? So how do you think you should reach people? How can you convert people? You talk about Greenpeace, Greenpeace as this mass, but behind it are people. How do you get to them?
25:22
Well, I think these are the sort of arguments that emotion works and facts don't, and that's why I take the line of looking for the benefits to people in the developing world. I think most people have some sympathy for the plight of those in the developing world, so I try to hit the emotional heartstrings that way.
25:42
But overall, what I would like to see is for Greenpeace to just come out and admit they made a mistake. They could easily do so. There's a very beautiful argument. They can say when these things first came out, we didn't know whether they were going to be safe or not,
26:01
and we asked for experimentation. That experimentation has now been done. There is not a single case of a problem with GMOs that stands up to scrutiny. There have been some that are highly publicised, like the Cerolini study, who claimed that rats were going to get cancer if they ate GMO foods.
26:21
That's been completely discounted. Totally, it's been repeated three times now, very recently by the European Union. It just isn't true. But this doesn't stop Greenpeace and the others from doing this. So they should just come out and say, we asked that the experiment's been done. They've been done. We see that they're safe. We've been right all along, and now it's OK.
26:42
So that's what I would like to see. OK, thank you. And one more quick question. You mentioned the choices that we make about not eating GMO. You were kind of gentle. Do you think actually there's more culpability that people who go into Whole Foods and choose the non-GMO line are making a serious mistake? Yeah, well, so one of the things you have to realise
27:02
is that GMO labelling has become a big issue in the States, I think in Europe too. And this is a movement that's being funded by the organic farmers. So the organic farmers have thrown enormous amounts of money into these rules and regulations for labelling.
27:20
And why? Because organic food costs more than regular food, and they think that if people get scared about regular food with GMO labels on, then they're more likely to buy organic. And it's really quite scandalous what is going on. And I think very often when you ask why are people doing things, you have to look at the money, and especially in a capitalist society,
27:42
which is basically the society we all live in these days, there is usually a good financial argument. You may be aware or not aware that Greenpeace has an annual budget of about 500 million euros. That's the best estimate we have. They don't actually disclose it. But that is a huge amount of money,
28:01
and the anti-GMO campaign has been their best fundraising effort ever. Thank you. Okay, there's so much more to delve into. I'd love to look at the regulatory environment and the role of business, but I think I really want to open up to the audience. So questions, please. Microphone here.
28:21
Thank you for the blatantly honest and very passionate speech. My name Anjar. I'm a postdoc at Max Planck Institute. Of course, I totally agree with you that the advantage and the safeness of the GMO is totally obvious. What I wonder is why the policymaker, especially in Europe, is still against it. Even the CRISPR-Cas produce plant,
28:40
which already gets rid of all the CRISPR truncheons, it's still illegal in some of the countries, including in the federal government. I imagine you have access to talk with them. I just wonder what excuse they give to you when they're still against GMO with all this science fact behind it. Is it purely politics? Their argument is that many of the voters are anti-GMO in Europe
29:04
because Greenpeace have done a wonderful job of spreading fear, really unwarranted fear, among people in Europe. And you have to remember that the anti-GMO people have made a big deal of conflating GMO with big business.
29:21
And so the Europeans were very concerned that the Americans were going to take over their agricultural business. Well, in fact, they already have, pretty much. Monsanto provides 70% of the seeds that are grown in Europe and they really would have liked to say, no, we're going to ban Monsanto. But you can't do that. Then you would have a lot of rather thin Europeans.
29:42
And so they picked GMO as an issue to attack Monsanto. And if you go to almost all of the rallies organised by the anti-GMO people, they always have big, angry business conflated with the anti-GMO movement and the two are totally separate. Monsanto have done a good job of overtaking the agricultural market
30:03
before ever they got GMOs. Thank you. Question, please. Thank you very much, first of all, for the talk and bringing all these strong arguments on one page. Nevertheless, the Bt plants developed within a few generations already resistant to the pest species. Do you think this is just a reason of misuse of the Bt plants
30:24
or need this really different aspect also on the contra side to the GMOs? Right, so surprisingly there's been relatively little resistance. There is some, but you expect this, right? If you think of antibiotics, we've misused antibiotics
30:42
like you wouldn't believe by overusing them. But always the bugs are going to come and become resistant and it just means we need a second generation. And so for the Bt gene, which is widely used by the organic industry, they're going to have to find some alternative also.
31:01
Everybody is going to have to find an alternative. So this is good news for the plant breeders. They're constantly going to have to breed new and better plants. But in the long run, it's going to work out okay for the farmers, I'm sure. The resistance, the Bt resistance is not that high yet. But this presumably is where the regulatory environment is coming in
31:21
because if you haven't got a whole slew of small companies trying to develop new things to put out there and you're relying on some governments to do it, you've got a problem, right? You need a totally changed environment where energy can flourish. Yeah, and one of the things that's happened is that because of the anti-GMO movement,
31:42
the people who've gained the most from this have been the big companies. They're the only ones who can afford to put up the money to actually bring new seeds and to bring new plants to market. And for the smallholder farmers, this has been a big problem and for the scientists who want to develop it, it's a big problem. Fortunately, Monsanto have realized
32:02
that they're not getting very good publicity from their attitudes and so they're taking a much more lenient view towards what's going on in the developing world. And Syngenta, who hold the patents on golden rice, will make those freely available to everybody. So there are no royalties, nothing connected with golden rice.
32:21
Please. Hello, thank you for your talk. I would like to ask you because I have the chance to talk with a lot of people that is against GMOs and in some cases they are not against the genetic modification. They are against the regulation of the GMOs.
32:40
So don't you think we should talk to politicians so we could have, especially in the Western world, better regulation of the GMOs? Well, I think, as a general rule, it is good for all scientists to talk to politicians. One of the things we need to do is to convince them that they should listen to science,
33:00
they should pay attention to what is going on and what's heard. Whether that will have any effect in this particular case, I don't know. But one argument that has been made and is frequently made by Jani Nusslein-Volhard, who is a German laureate, is that because everything is genetically modified,
33:23
the rules should be the same for GM crops, the GMO crops, and for regular crops. Why would they be different? Why would you not want to test regularly bred plants in exactly the way that you do GMO? It's the product that's important, not how you make it. Okay, we have a little over five minutes.
33:41
It's not long. If people have points they really want to make, put your hand up. Okay, please, lady in the middle. Could you get a microphone? You mentioned the carcinogenic pesticides that plants have naturally. I was wondering, in traditional agriculture,
34:02
there's a lot of pesticides being used who have also been linked to cancer. Has there been any comparisons between cancers linked to GMOs and cancer linked to traditional pesticides? Well, I don't know of direct studies that would look at that,
34:21
but in general I'm not a fan of pesticides if one can avoid spraying them everywhere, but there are plants that we already know. Ricin is a particularly nasty poison that is available in some plants. There are many plants that have these pesticides. They don't necessarily express the genes,
34:41
but then when you start crossing them, maybe they do, and they're not typically tested. So I'm very much in favor. If you're going to have rules to test plants that have come out of breeding, let's do it for everything. Let's not just focus on GMOs. Thank you. Yes, please. So I was wondering, we tend to blame the public for not understanding what we do,
35:04
but what is our role here outside of GMO as well, because you see it all the time, also in CRISPR and other stuff. When a new technology comes, scientists tend to complicate things and make sure that the public does not understand. How do you see our role as scientists communicating science better?
35:20
Well, I think, as I said earlier, I think it's really important for scientists to talk to the public, to learn how to talk to the public, and typically they don't want to listen to facts unless they're just a few simple ones, and I think most of us, we tend to talk in language that is more complicated than it needs to be. I think you can look at one or two of the laureate talks here already
35:43
where the laureates have gotten very technical on issues that they could have made very simple. I think we run into this all the time as scientists. For us, it's simple to talk in technical terms, but you really have to learn how to talk in a way that other people can understand,
36:01
and I have something I call the grandmother test. The grandmother test I give to my students. I say, what you have to do is tell your grandmother what you do, explain to her what you do, so that not only she understands it, but she can tell her friends what you do, and it's accurate. That is quite a difficult task,
36:21
but if you can do it, I think now you've learned to communicate. Thank you. Lady at the back, sorry. Oh, sorry, and mic. Next one. Just wait. One lady. Hi. Over here. So question regarding, so in 2009 in the United States, as you started to roll out gene therapy,
36:42
there hadn't been enough testing that was done, and people who were enrolling in clinical trials didn't do a very good job, and what ended up happening was the United States shut down all gene therapy moving forward, and it's only potentially starting to come back. So as we're beginning to think about really incorporating GMOs into people's diets,
37:00
are you confident the amount of testing that has been done, because to me it seems if there's one mistake, Greenpeace then has the evidence that says we should shut it down and will set us back maybe decades? Well, you know, one can never offer absolute guarantees in science, but in fact there have been many mistakes with traditionally bred plants,
37:21
and that didn't close down the agricultural industry because people still want to eat. So, so far there's been massive amounts of testing in the sense that billions of animals have eaten GMOs, millions of people have eaten GMOs, anybody who's eaten papayas that came from Hawaii, these are all GMOs.
37:43
There are many, many ways in which we already consume GMOs. There's not an incident that's come up yet, but one will. I'm sure something will happen, something will go on, but hopefully by then it will become a part of the culture that this is just another more precise way of breeding plants. Mike Rosbach.
38:02
I just, I wanted to relate one tiny incident that I haven't actually told Rich about. We're on the same page with respect to the principle. I was at a meeting two or three years ago, and I'm in the lunch line, and next to me in the lunch line is an old friend of mine,
38:20
a plant biologist who I hadn't seen in a long time. I never go to the same places with those guys, and Elliot Meyerowitz is standing next to me, and I'm taking salad from the organic salad bin naturally, and he turns to me and he said, Nice to see you. What are you eating that stuff for? And I said, What do you mean?
38:41
And he said, We won't touch that. We haven't fed our children organic vegetables for 15 years. And I said, Huh? And he said to me that organic food, because they won't use chemical pesticides, they have a much higher incident of fungal toxins,
39:02
because the fungi take over when the insects are more prevalent and the insects bring fungi on their feet, and the real danger to humans are these highly carcinogenic fungal toxins. So here you have the entire,
39:21
this is a sort of story about organic food carrying its own dangers, which arguably can be much more severe than GMO food, and he said the whole plant community, all of the plant scientists won't eat organic vegetables for this reason, so it's just to give you another sort of take on the money.
39:41
Yeah, the number is tenfold increase in foodborne infections from organic food, but I always like to say, Well, you know, you grow it in shit. What do you expect? One last question. Okay, go, please. So I come from a very rural county where I was told growing up that universities are a tool of Satan
40:01
to force the liberal agenda on children, and this very anti-education, anti-science environment, it's the farmers are actually very pro-GMO, while the anti-GMO crowd is typically educated middle- and upper-class individuals. As you stated, like scientists, we have a very hard time actually communicating logic to the public. Do you think to actually change people's minds and to get them to vote for changes in policies,
40:21
we need to get more farmers and people from developing nations to speak their voices? Yeah, we almost certainly should do that, and this has had some effect in Uganda that I know of, so the bill that went through Parliament and was passed by Parliament to allow GMOs to grow, the farmers were very much behind this. In the U.S., the farmers have not been so much behind it,
40:41
so I think if you can get your family and their friends to speak out on this issue, it will help for sure. But again, the U.S. is not such a big problem. At the moment, China is a big problem because of social media. So it turns out in China, the politicians really want GMOs, and social media, the activists,
41:02
spreading anti-GMO sentiments all the time. But by all means, I think the more people who speak about this and the more people who get involved, the better. So there are so many more voices I would have liked to have heard from, but I'm afraid we just don't have time. The conversation continues when you have a session on gene modification with Tim Hunt at a Science Breakfast to come.
41:23
So you can carry on in the lobby, but not here, I'm afraid. And I just realized that it's the 25th anniversary of Richard's Nobel Prize, and I guess our silver hair is perhaps in celebration of that. So anyway, thank you.
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