OFF: Meat, Trains

[Dave Berry]

At 14:23 29/10/99 , M Holmes wrote:
>Sorry folks, but I just can't let it pass...
>
>GM is unpopular with folks who don't understand science.

I accept that there's a great deal of mistrust of science in the anti-GM feeling around.  Perhaps if the food industry had done a better job over previous food scares, people would trust them more.

>However there's
>scant to zero actual evidence that genetic enhancement of crops causes
>any more harm than the other unnatural means such as monoculture,
>hybridisation and mutation selection that's been used for thousands of
>years.

Well, there was the scientist chappie who experimented with GM potatoes and rats.  His work was vilified at the time, but he recently got a paper through peer review, so maybe there is something there.  And I don't buy the comparison with hybridisation.  GM allows far greater manipulation than previous techniques could ever have made possible.  That's the whole point of it, after all.  Not to mention that monoculture has its critics, too.

>There's considerable evidence that genetically enhanced crops
>provide better yields and are less harmful to the environment because
>they require less fertiliser and insecticides.

That depends on the particular modification.  I suspect that lumping all GM foods together is like treating all drugs the same.  Some modifications make plants more resistant to pesticides, so you can use pesticides more freely, which isn't good for the environment.  And I think there's very little evidence of how GM crops behave in the real world, as opposed to the lab.

>People are of course free
>to choose their own foods for emotional rather than scientific reasons
>but the rest of us should also be free to choose to eat genetically
>enhanced crops.

Which was hardly the stance taken by the GM industry, which campaigned long and hard against having GM products labelled as such.  Which just inspired mistrust, of course.

>In which case they were absolutely correct. Trains are twice as safe as
>aeroplanes per passenger mile and an order of magnitude safer that cars.

Again, I agree that it's false to say that trains are "unsafe" (implying less safe than other forms of transport) just because a major disaster occurs.  Imagine if the highways authority were held responsible for every road death...  But the statistic of accidents per passenger mile is useless.  What I care about is the risk I undertake per journey, not per mile.  Of course aeroplanes are safest per mile; if they weren't then given the distances they cover they'd be falling out of the skies like Starfighters!

Dave.
Dave Berry,  www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~daveb