This e-mail went out early this morning to the same teacher...
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Just Yesterday in The Atlantic
No widely accepted science supports the idea that GMOs are inherently dangerous to people’s health or the environment. To proponents, including many in the agribusiness industry, opposition to GMOs is nothing more than a dangerous mania,
and the people in the grip of it are akin to those who refuse to
vaccinate their children or who deny that human activity is changing the
Earth’s climate.Yet the grassroots fervor around the topic—driven by Internet rumors, liberal anti-corporatism, and mothers concerned about their children—is undeniable.
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The link above goes to this, by the American Association for the Advancement of Science:
There are several current efforts to
require labeling of foods containing products derived from genetically
modified crop plants, commonly known as GM crops or GMOs. These efforts
are not driven by evidence that GM foods are actually dangerous. Indeed,
the science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular
techniques of biotechnology is safe. Rather, these initiatives are
driven by a variety of factors, ranging from the persistent perception
that such foods are somehow “unnatural” and potentially dangerous to the
desire to gain competitive advantage by legislating attachment of a
label meant to alarm. Another misconception used as a rationale for
labeling is that GM crops are untested.
The EU, for example, has invested more than €300 million in research on the biosafety of GMOs. Its recent report1 states: “The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breed-ing technologies.” The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.
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