General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: GMOs are as good as vaccines. [View all]Chathamization
(1,638 posts)beta-carotene, and it was later retooled to contain much more beta-carotene (I've often seen GMO-boosters act as if the initial variant was ready to go from its inception). This is one of the reasons why dismissing all criticism as anti-science is silly - for people who actually care about results instead of merely winning a tribalist argument, criticism is useful in order to find problems and fix them.
It's also interesting to see what issues golden rice has run into. Despite some comments I've seen, golden rice hasn't been stopped by anti-GMO activists - it continues to be developed, and it seems that a lot of the work involved breeding golden rice with the preferred local varieties of rice. The largest obstacle I've seen from my readings has been that certain types of funding are off limits to the project. Then again, the Gates Foundation has been helping out the project for years, so I imagine they're doing much better than many other projects.
I have to say too, that the fact that goldenrice.org (which seems to be the site of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board) seems to be so bothered by the fact that they need to go through biosafety assessments, and act as if the delay is only caused by excessive regulation (and not, for example, the time it took to get a decent level of beta-carotene or bread the rice with local varieties), doesn't exactly fill me with great confidence. The implication that certain regulations should be skipped if the product is beneficial reminds me of Bjorn Lomberg (who thinks that if fighting climate change costs more than doing nothing, then fighting climate change hurts poor people) school of thought.
Incidentally, Lomberg also seems to be a big proponent of Golden Rice, and also likes to pretend that it was ready in 2001 and GMO opponents have stopped it from reaching the people who need it. Again, Golden Rice 2 wasn't developed until 2005, and after that it needed to be bred with local varieties - and tested, if you're still one of those anti-Science freaks who think that food products should be tested before being made commercially available and new organisms should be tested before being introduced to the environment on a large scale.