GM plants are a sorry use of lab bench space – professor

GM plants are a sorry use of lab bench space – professor

We've received a comment on our story, "£695,933 of taxpayer money went to failed GM wheat project", from E. Ann Clark, Associate Professor (retired), Plant Agriculture, University of Guelph, Canada. She said:
"We humans are so profoundly and abysmally linear. Biology and ecology are holistic. Applying linear solutions to holistic problems - and not just with GM, mind you - is intrinsically irrational, but we keep doing it on the off-chance that this one time it will work.

"We scientists are also so astonishingly arrogant to think we could tinker with something as complex as photosynthesis and then yield, through such a coarse and intrusive tool as GM.

"We – scientists and the public – are so malleable and gullible (or is it because researchers and research administrators are just desperate for money?), that we swallow and become promoters of the mantra that GM is somehow going to feed the world: by resolving the monumental threat of burnt toast? Or browning in cut apples? Or flower colour in carnations? Really? For shame. Let's be honest. The one and only reason these people, corporations, and governments are funding this sorry use of [lab] bench space is because it may yield a proprietary product."

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