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he crowd stretched entirely around the front of the downtown Reno federal building. Protest signs attacked transgenic food. “Your food—brought to you by the makers of AGENT ORANGE.” “It’s a SAD day when ‘NORMAL’ food is hard to find!” “HELL NO GMOS.” There were also angrier signs attacking Monsanto, and for other causes—Native American, veterans, the National Defense Authorization Act. It would have been easy to assume this was a group of flat earthers, and I suspect they were being characterized that way by plenty of observers on this day of coast-to-coast anti-transgenic food protests. But I knew some of these people as smart and sensible. Like a lot of scienceoriented people, I didn’t understand why some of them were present. This was another sortie in what scientists have begun calling “The Liberal War on Science.” OPINION
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panel that upheld the safety and usefulness of transgenic foods (www.nap.edu/catalog. php?record_id=10977#toc).
Many in this crowd cite the fact that there’s no known instance in history of death caused by marijuana but endless deaths caused by booze and tobacco. But they reject the fact that no one is known to have ever died from transgenic foods but plenty of people in history have died from natural, organic foods through salmonella, E. coli., etc. “Transgenic” is the scientific term for what activists call genetically modified food or organisms—GMOs. Many of those present are frustrated by the refusal of climate change critics to accept the findings of a scientific panel that has examined all the science and found that climate change is real and mostly caused by human activity. But most of them ignore the findings of a similar
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SCIENTIST Grant Cramer is a biochemist at the University of Nevada, Reno. He began his work on the campus studying cold tolerance of plants. At some point he got into grapes. “Some years we’ve had a little trouble because it’s cold, but for most years we’ve grown them and made grapes and made wine from them,” he said. “That’s the feasible part. Then, with time, we’ve started to realize that we were giving them too much water. That |
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was part of the problem. So we started reducing the water and found out that … we can get by with 12 times less water and produce better quality grapes than alfalfa requires. So from a point of view of using our water wisely in a state where water is a critical issue, it’s an ideal crop to grow.” Now he consults with Nevada vineyards to help them with their crops. It’s a small contribution to economic development in Nevada. He doesn’t use genetic modification. “In my laboratory we can genetically modify plants,” he said. “We don’t do it, for the most part. Sometimes we do it just to understand the function of a gene. But our goal is not to go out there and create a new grape.” But he doesn’t want modification removed from his tool chest, either, pointing out that while
“The Organic Food Lie” continued on page 14
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