My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The old lie, “There’s no studies that show GMOs are safe.” has been put to bed in a stunning way. Alessandro Nicolia, an Italian researcher at the University of Perugia in Italy (currently at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) and three others have put together and reviewed a list of 1,783 studies written in the last ten years.
The list is available in Excel format here. The paper (PDF) is here.
This is interesting because, as you know, Europe has pretty much abandoned GM crops. Although, it has been suggested that this is for reasons other than food safety. So, what conclusions to the Italians come to?
We have reviewed the scientific literature on GE crop safety for the last 10 years that catches the scientific consensus matured since GE plants became widely cultivated worldwide, and we can conclude that the scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazard directly connected with the use of GM crops.
That pretty much says it all.
Now, only 30% of those studies are not environmental impact studies. Still, that’s 570 papers… 57 papers published each year for the last ten (on average). Anyone who says there is no research is lying or has been lied to and allowing their personal bias to curtail their skepticism.
According to reports, this list of papers will be imported into the GENERA database maintained by Biofortified. When that’s done, the GENERA database will have over 2300 peer-reviewed research papers, more than 50% of which are written by independent researchers.
The science is clear. GM foods are safe.
That’s not to say we stop testing or just let anyone do anything. We maintain the research, we keep testing new products, and we keep publishing the results. But, unless something major happens that completely discredits these 2300+ papers (and that would require something like a completely unknown genetic/translation system or other fundamental misunderstanding of biology), GMO foods are safe.
