People will always find a scapegoat for why their loved ones get sick. Today, GMOs, yesterday, impure thoughts and moral decay, and before that, the evil eye. It's hard to make sense of an unfair and inequitable world with science; science qualifies everything with "some evidence" and "probably" and "we can't say for certain".

The only requirement for a scapegoat is that its invisible hand should be hard to prove or disprove. What makes GMOs so weird as a scapegoat is that it is so easy to disprove short- and medium-term harm. It's also easy enough to understand that normal agriculture and gardening, as practiced for several millennia, is a process of trying to create wildly uncontrolled large mutants. MUTANTS, people. Then, pick the most mutant-tastic one, and if you can reproduce it reliably, you've got "New Varieties BC 3,207: Improved, Larger Phooeyacia barbaziqux, with bigger seeds that malt at lower temperatures for beer-in-a-jiffy like you've never beered before!" in the plant catalog. Meanwhile, you have no idea what the health implications of that new DNA sequence are.

THAT is why people use the "ticking time bomb" argument with GMOs. As long as you take a halting problem stance on GMOs, you can _never_ be proven wrong.

Most people drive everywhere and work desk or retail jobs and watch tv and comment on the Internet and basically do everything BUT work up a 45 minute solid sweat 3x a week -- study after study has shown short-, medium-, and long term harm from not exercising. You'll die of something, but you'll die of heart disease from not exercising infinitely more often than you will die of Franken-fruit that suddenly GROWS TEETH. INSIDE you. And gives you AUTISM of the small intestine over forty years. Or something. Hasn't happened yet, but you know. Ticking time bomb!

I have a personal anecdote related to this topic! Not evidence for anything, but may be of interest :)

I didn't know my biological father until recently. My mom met him in the '80s protesting Reagan and Thatcher's market reforms. He lived on a farming commune. They had some stuff in common: they both smoked a lot of weed, read socialist newspapers, were in Paris for '68, at Woodstock, etc. etc.

Fast forward to 2010, and I meet the guy for the first time. Turns out that now he's a top soil biologist (skills honed by growing MJ, I guess)

He was there when the first GM experiments were happening. And he protested them, the way he and his friends protested factory farming, pesticide use, monocropping, agribusiness tactics in the developing world, etc. etc.

Until, on a trip to the US (he's British), he picked up a copy of the NY Times with a cover story debating abortion. This is sort-of a non issue in Europe by and large, so it caught his attention. Being a liberal, and a Brit, his reaction was "Crazy Americans. How could anyone not be pro-choice?"

And then it hit him: His rationale for protesting GM was based on the same tribal instinct that lead pro-lifers to reject abortion. It's God's will, no matter what science says, humans have no grounds to be meddling in nature, etc. etc.

When he got back to the UK he devoted his lab time to trialling GM crops and their effects on soil depletion and stuff (sorry, this is the worst paraphrasing ever, I'm a film editor not a soil biologist).

Nowadays, he's a staunch defender of GM technologies (with some caveats) - we could actually engineer crops that are specifically environmentally-friendly (growing tropical crops in temperate climates, for example, to eliminate air travel; nitrate-adding plants to replenish soil; plants with increased CO2 absorption).

He still smokes a lot of weed.

GMOs are one of humanity's greatest achievements and have allowed us to feed those who would not otherwise be fed. We have increased crop yields to the point that we are experiencing entirely new problems like depleted soil. Think about that for a minute, we literally grew so many plants in one spot that the plants completely drained the soil of all available nutrients. That's incredible. We're approaching the limits of what is physically possible in a piece of land.

The new Alison Van Eenennaam paper (PhD UC - Davis) looked at the 1996 changeover when animals went from eating nearly 0% GMO crops to nearly 90% to look for any deleterious effects. There weren't any, over the cases of millions of animals for decades. What else could you want?

This debate is an excellent case study in how 'educated' people can make startlingly bad decisions. We make fun of Creationists because they fervently deny scientific evidence for evolution and planetary theory, but then we take anti-GMO activists seriously. Why do we do this? Neither side has a scientific basis though both often publish 'scientific papers' that their cause waves around as sound, but anti-GMO gets a pass because it's not a religious crowd. It's the same fervor.

I'm all for science and research and generally improving our knowledge and understanding, I'm also all for applying this in new technologies and methods including the use of genetics.

However I do have a problem with GMOs for several reasons. A major problem IMO is that organisms and even genes can be patented and copyrighted. That's is not a sensible concept, you can't copyright breeding dogs with for instance a red tip on their tale, but if you locate the gene for it, you can seemingly patent that. Of course genetics makes it possible to take that gene from somewhere else if dogs don't have it in their gene pool, but basically what genetics are doing is copy/paste coding and should not be protected as IP, just like we shouldn't have software patents.

My other problem is that GMOs often are made for resistance to pesticides, and while that is great to ensure the harvest, the use of more and stronger pesticides is exactly what we shouldn't do, some pesticides are pretty harmless to humans, but those are not the ones GMOs are used to make crops tolerant against.

The third problem is that even if GMOs theoretically could actually be safer than traditional selection, because modifying specific genes theoretically makes it possible to have more accurate knowledge of the change it introduces, I'm not convinced either by regulation or that there is sufficient and qualified oversight or structure to safeguard against blunders that simply wouldn't be possible with normal breeding. Most likely something akin to letting rabbits lose in Australia. Less likely something akin to gut bacteria in ants, that alter the ants behavior so it is more likely to get eaten by ant predators.

GMOs are such an interesting issue because it's simultaneously so personal (the food that you put in your mouth every day) and so difficult for most people without a science background to understand. I'm a PhD student in biology and I do a lot of genetics, but even I don't understand all of the nuances of modern genetic engineering, nor, especially, the potential shortcoming of various studies that aim to test the safety of these crops.

In my mind, there are really two separate issues at hand. 1) Are GMOs, in general, as a technique, safe? (Yes, definitely) 2) Are the specific genes that are being inserted into our food safe (Yes, but that is not necessarily so in general). I really have no problem with increased oversight to ensure that the latter point is true, but a vanishingly small portion of the anti-GMO crowd seem to even realize that there is a difference. I was living in California when there was a referendum to try to mandate that GMO foods get labeled as such, but the proposed labels would not have actually told you what the genetic modification is. The argument I kept hearing from the pro-labeling crowd was, "Don't you want to know what's in your food?" Well, first of all, I'm not exactly in a position to be able to intelligently second-guess the USDA or the FDA regarding food safety. But, more importantly, those labels would not tell you "what's in your food" any more than saying "we use some kind of pesticide or herbicide" would do so.

GMO's haven't gone far enough. Until I can grow strawberry cantelop in my back yard I won't feel like the promise has been realized.

Disclaimer, I have a degree in biochemistry and one of my dreams is of a world where we can rationally engineer new features in plants, as an artistic endeavor, the way one might design, grow, and prune the leaves of a bonsai tree. I was seriously debating going into GMO research about 1.5 years ago (ironically while also making large purchases of organic / non-GMO foods for an organization I was involved in), but have since turned back to the more traditional sciences.

That said, I think "GMOs" as a general term pose very few inherent risks beyond those already present in industrial agriculture. Crops will still be grown in a monoculture, farmers still can't save seeds, and corn will still make you fat. The lines of doubt only appear as you look into the specifics of each plant.

RoundUp Ready crops have their critics and their use has spawned RoundUp-resistant weeds, BT crops probably won't be the end-all solution to insect pests, etc etc. There was a recent GM wheat that failed in its field trials because hey, it's technology, and sometimes technology doesn't work as expected. I have my disagreements over the exact extent regulation should control GMO research, but on the whole, I think many of the crops offset the disadvantages of their non-GMO counterparts.

On top of that, the number of approved GM crops has more than doubled since my first memories of Hubski discussions on them. So the field is changing, with new advantages, new ways of implementing changes, and new players outside of the old guard of Monsanto. People are now working on re-engineering nitrogen fixation into other plants / microbes and making drought-tolerant plants that have very clear long-term benefits in the presence of changing climates and depleting energy reservoirs.

In a separate vein, I think it is also important to consider, as the consumer, what a technology means to you. Up front, eating GM food means I might be exposed to health risks, but I weigh that against the overwhelming evidence in favor of the safety of BT / RoundUp crops, as well as the regulatory approval they require. But do I take it further and decide to dictate what technologies farmers use on their lands? What if GM crops really are the most economical for them? If they weren't I would still lend them my trust that they know better than me what works on their lands. Agriculture is far too complex for me to know what plants grow best with the microbes and chemistry of their soil.

Environmentally, I'm usually in favor of more restrictions on run-off and water usage, but within the set boundaries of inputs and outputs, I would prefer letting farmers (slash agribusiness) be the one to choose.

I'm pro GMO, in general. It's ruined the flavor of my food and moncultures are setting us up for failure. Neither of these things are the actual fault of GMO, but just people being greedy and and shortsighted.

I think why GMO gets such a bad wrap is pretty much why other myths can take hold in liberals: Their distrust of corporations and their vivid imagination. I purposely singled out liberals, as they seem to be the biggest proponents of anti-GMO legislation and labeling, and because I see parallels between that and the two other major things liberals tend to believe even though science doesn't back them up (ie Nuclear power should be banned, and the a lesser extent the cross-political antivaxxer myths). If you look at these myths what is underlying them is a fear of corporations (Monsanto wants to turn us into zombies/The corporations running nuclear power plants don't care about our safety/Big Pharma wants us to stay sick) and then an overblown sense of doom that stems from those feelings.

The main reason that I'm wary of GMOs: not enough time for testing. Any medication, any technology, anything that may affect the body, it sometimes takes a generation or more to find out the side effects. What seems perfectly sensible, logical, rational in the now may spawn unexpected consequences 40-50 years from now. I try not to be an early adopter of much anything for these reasons. Also, I'm old enough that my inchoate, knee-jerk response is that GMOs come from the devil, and microwaves are the spawn of Satan, but I know that's because of my age.

Inversely, some years ago, when I had a cat, I posted to my online blog how I was making my own cat food, listing out the ingredients, the research I'd done, how much better my cat seemed to be doing (damn, that cat's coat got glossy). And it boggled my mind, the responses I got from people saying what I was doing was wrong, that the only thing you're supposed to feed cats is pre-manufactured, commercial canned and dry food. Sometimes technology comes full circle and spawns resistance and stupidity.