I have extensive personal experience with GMOs being that I am a medical researcher; I have created GMOs myself and they are unquestionably useful. It's not something you can blanket label as good or bad. There are risks involved with some, terminal wheat is always the one that comes to mind for me and I do absolutely agree that there are all kinds of handling issues that circle around the corporate side of the technology but that is generally the case for anything that deals with large amounts of money, GMO or otherwise, correct?
There are huge numbers of perfectly harmless and practical GMOs out there, the vast majority of which I would wager are of great benefit- even life saving- don't believe me? Meet someone with diabetes who survives by supplementing insulin, which is produced by a GMO rather than giant factory farms full of pigs like we did in the dark ages...far more environmentally conscious to use bacteria to make this for us and with obvious benefits to the human population as well... or double producing crops that literally saved millions of lives in Africa during the incredible drought related famine a couple of decades ago.
I am not a promoter in the way that you accusingly describe, I do not work for private industry and I have no other motivations in my professional investigations other than to understand the mechanisms of disease on the molecular level by characterizing cellular chemistry- specifically protein signaling.
BT is actually a great thing, it keeps synthetic pesiticides out of your diet and high probability that you are exposed to it all the time anyway. It's insect specific, in fact specific only to certain kinds of insects even, and so far has not been found to to cause any health issues despite being suspected and investigated on several occasions. So generally unless you are part bug you have no need to worry. Does that mean you should eat it? Not at all, you can chose to eat what you wish and I personally feel that if you don't need something then why eat it? But I also don't think making BT out to be some invisible monster is a bit far fetched and ultimately is counter-productive because the alternatives are either less available food or more use of synthetic pest control measures. A real, public-interest and highly credentialed institution in one of our most reluctant states (UCSD and Davis) has a very nice synopsis here, one specific and one regarding the anti-BT claims:
http://www.bt.ucsd.edu/index.html
anrcatalog.ucdavis.edu/pdf/8180.pdf
They are fair, they indicate the potential for allergic responses (for both BT and natural occuring products like peanuts and lactose).
I am not going to argue about it because I know that people will chose to believe whatever they want and shoud be allowed to make dietary decisions for themselves (note that means not trying to subject others to your dietary decisions by bludgeoning them with latest propaganda on your side of the issue, which ever side that is). However I did want to at least mention, being that I am highly educated and directly involved in this type of work, that it's important to take ".orgs" and the like with a few grains of salt and to be more judicious when you review literature. It's frankly a bit offensive to me personally because the type of language you use literally demonizes me and the work that I do which is entirely in the spirit of trying to improve the quality of life of the people around me, not to make money for some big company subverting and hiding information so they can sell something to you.
I realize not everyone has access to scholarly literature because it requires expensive subscriptions and institutional access to reputable journals, but next time you want to spread anti-GMO propaganda by quoting some random .org or a single study think of me. Think of the catastrophe of the anti-vaccine movement from that now debunked, by the author's own admission, single European study- children died because of that nonsense and we are still combatting the after effects even though it is now known that the study was flawed and the data was intentionally fudged.
Like I said, I am very aware of the potential dangers for the handful of GMOs that are always waved around to scare people away from benefitting from technology they do not understand. I'm as liberal as they come, really. But I will keep making recombinant organisms in the pursuit of understanding the root human diseases and I will not feel like I am a bad person for doing so. Please be conscientious and be aware that there are untrustworthy sources of "social media" on both sides, just as wrong and equally dangerous. Just because something one reads or hears agrees with the emotional way one responds to the world doesn't mean it is valid.
