Jon Entine

If one believes the backers of mandatory labeling initiatives in Colorado and Oregon, Tuesday’s vote is simple common sense: It’s about the “right to know” what’s in our food.This is the beguiling message pushed by a myriad of activists linked to such organizations as Right to Know GMO, Label GMOs and Just Label It. It’s powerful and superficially persuasive.

As happened in both California and Washington state referendums in recent years, what seemed like an easy path to victory for supporters of a mandatory GMO labeling law in Oregon has turned into a dog fight as the voting nears, while voters in Colorado appear poised to soundly reject the measure.

During the 1920s, the cartoonist Rube Goldberg became immensely popular churning out cartoons that depicted devices that performed simple tasks in impossibly indirect and convoluted ways. In 1931, the Merriam-Webster dictionary even adopted the word “Rube Goldberg” as an adjective describing making something that should be simple incredibly complicated.Welcome to Vermont’s fumbled efforts at drafting the rules for its mandatory GMO labeling law.

Greenpeace is set to launch a series of attacks against crop biotechnology this week. It has scheduled a news conference for Friday titled “Ecological Agriculture, A Climate Resilient Model of Agriculture: The Way Forward,” which purportedly makes  its case against vitamin-enhanced Golden Rice.

As the death toll of Ebola continues to rise, especially in the hard-hit West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, the need for a viable cure is growing more and more urgent. Even more concerning is the possibility that once approved, vaccines may not be widely available for several months.As often happens in times of medical crises, fringe groups come out from hiding–in this instance, organic activists in the form of the most high profile organic lobby group in the United States.

The Natural Resources Defense Council became the first environmental group to file suit 

By Jon Entine, Genetic Literacy ProjectNew genetically modified corn and soybean traits, already approved by the US Department of Agriculture, is likely to gain Environmental Protection Agency next week, the Genetic Literacy Project has learned.

Credit: Institute of Responsible TechnologyBy Jon Entine, Genetic Literacy Project It’s perplexing that strident anti-GMO critics who regularly harp on the “danger” of harvesting a “foreign” gene from one species and inserting into another to improve crop performance or nutrition are mostly silent when the exact same process is used to engineer new drugs. The Ebola crisis and the desperate search for viable treatments highlights that oddity.

By Jon Entine, Genetic Literacy ProjectVisit almost any anti-GMO website and you will find alarming headlines about the alleged dangers of GMO foods. They kill pigs, cows and sheep on farms and in lab studies! Humans are next!

Jon Entine is executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, where this article first appeared.

A new phase in the Gene Wars is about to begin—this time focused on the nexus of genetics and economics.Nature carried a provocative article last week laying the ground work for what should be a fiery debate over the nascent field of genoeconomics. The prestigious American Economic Review is set to publish a peer reviewed paper co-authored by two economists, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, that argues that a country’s economic well being could be linked to the population’s genetic make-up.

Bumbling coverage on phthalates underscores how activist journalism endangers ‘public science’Last year, campaigning journalist Susan Freinkel noted that she wrote her anti-chemical book, Plastics: A Toxic Love Story, because she was shocked about how much modern society relied on plastics. In her mind, “synthetic materials” equated with poor health, pollution and western gluttony.