Now that we all know a little bit about GM (what it is, benefits and risks etc), we can move on to the controversy which surrounds it.
There seems to be two key issues people have with GM, which appear to be largely separate:
- They don’t understand exactly what it is, what the science is, what it all means, so they become confused and/or scared of it
- They have moral or ethical issues, which most often stem from religious beliefs, although some people who are not religious have similar issues
Most of the scientific issues seem to stem around the fact that people don’t understand the science itself; in some cases they don’t even want to understand it, and they just assume it’s bad because it’s different and new. Those who do know/understand a little bit of the science, but are still against it, believe that the scientists are not doing enough to ensure that GM products are safe for consumption as well as safe for the environment. There are fears that GM food is harmful to human health, and will cause things such as allergies and cancer. This, as seen in the last post, can cause minor hysteria, with people going so far as to believe that eating food which contains GM in some way will lead to mutation.
Much of the ethical and moral issues stem from religion – people saying that it is against God’s will to change the genetic material of organisms which He created. (I will discuss my problems with this theory in another post.) Many people think it is just downright unnatural, often believing so because it is something that’s done in a laboratory. Other ethical and moral issues include: going against nature, ignoring animal rights, fears of monopolisation by large corporations and rich countries, goes against free will (largely to do with labelling issues), environmental risks... the list goes on and on. Each time someone thinks of something else that could go wrong with GM it adds fuel to the controversy.
In the next post, I will talk about how the controversy started in the first place.
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