Just One Small Problem With This Major Report on GMO Safety
By Tom Philpott,
Mother Jones
| 03. 05. 2017
Researchers allege undisclosed conflicts of interest on a National Academies of Sciences panel.
About a year ago, the prestigious National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine produced a 584-page report assessing the health, environmental, and agronomic impact of genetically modified crops. The conclusion: GMOs have so far proved to be neither a disaster nor a triumph. They haven't been shown to pose a threat to human health, as some critics have argued they do; but they also haven't discernibly raised crop yields, as some boosters insist they have.
Not surprisingly, the report did little to "end the highly polarized dispute over biotech crops," concluded New York Times reporter Andrew Martin in an article just after the report's release. He added that both sides of the debate "pointed approvingly to findings that buttressed their viewpoint and criticized those that did not."
And a new paper, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS-One, ups the temperature of that long-simmering debate. The authors—Sheldon Krimsky, a professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts, and Tim Schwab...
Related Articles
By staff, Japan Times | 12.04.2025
Japan plans to introduce a ban with penalties on implanting a genome-edited fertilized human egg into the womb of a human or another animal amid concerns over "designer babies."
A government expert panel broadly approved a proposal, including the ban...
By Katherine Long, Ben Foldy, and Lingling Wei, The Wall Street Journal | 12.13.2025
Inside a closed Los Angeles courtroom, something wasn’t right.
Clerks working for family court Judge Amy Pellman were reviewing routine surrogacy petitions when they spotted an unusual pattern: the same name, again and again.
A Chinese billionaire was seeking parental...
By Sarah A. Topol, The New York Times Magazine | 12.14.2025
The women in House 3 rarely had a chance to speak to the women in House 5, but when they did, the things they heard scared them. They didn’t actually know where House 5 was, only that it was huge...
By Frankie Fattorini, Pharmaceutical Technology | 12.02.2025
Próspera, a charter city on Roatán island in Honduras, hosts two biotechs working to combat ageing through gene therapy, as the organisation behind the city advertises its “flexible” regulatory jurisdiction to attract more developers.
In 2021, Minicircle set up a...
