Commentary to ‘The postmodern assault on science’ by Marcel Kuntz

EMBO reports (2012) 13 10, 885–889 doi:10.1038/embor.2012.130 [PMC free article] [PubMed] As a scientist, one shares the worries of Marcel Kuntz [1] concerning the increasing relativism and anti-science opinions among the general public. Perhaps the most extreme manifestation of this trend is the resolute anti-science stand of the religious right in the USA that even imprints its mark on politics. This is illustrated by the tragi-comical House Bill 819 proposition in North Carolina that forbids evaluations based on global warming scenarios for coastal management purposes. After the perhaps naive optimism surrounding science during the post-war period, there has been a clear backlash fuelled by widening scientific illiteracy and fears about nuclear war, environmental degradation and so on. These fears have found fertile ground in the general anti-expert, anti-establishment sentiments that have increased in the past decades, and on which several civic movements have capitalized. Nevertheless, these should certainly not be considered as backward-looking, populist movements that can be ignored. They are grounded in the economic and civilizational crisis that has been at work for some time and that has accelerated since 2008. They are motivated by a feeling that our way of life and socioeconomic system are not sustainable in their present form. They have also been fed by the manifest errors, manipulations or worse, made by the economic establishment. Suffice it to remind here that the subprime crisis of 2008 was born out of manipulations in the banking sector. Such errors and manipulations have also been made in the domains of medicine and life sciences. Remember thalidomide, certified at the time to be harmless by Grunenthal, the firm that developed it. Remember the manipulations by the tobacco industry to promote smoking, knowingly hiding the link between smoking and lung cancer, and using willing scientists to testify to the innocuous character of smoking [2]. More recently, and on a smaller scale, there has been the Mediator drug scandal in France, where an amphetamine-derivative, supposed to be prescribed as an anti-diabetic, seems to have been used to promote weight-loss by people who contracted sometimes fatal pulmonary diseases as a consequence. The mistrust of some anti-GMO movements towards the GMO industry should be seen in the light of these antecedents. It is certainly true that some of their objections are ideological and that their supporters often have only a superficial understanding of genetics and the way science is conducted, as illustrated by the destruction of experimental crops mentioned by Kuntz. On the other hand, the other side has also made errors, if not worse, as illustrated by the fact that evaluations of the risk of GMOs are mostly on the basis of studies conducted by the GMO industry itself. Manifest conflict of interest statements are also periodically surfacing, such as in the case of D. Banati, Chair of the European Food Safety Authority, who had to resign earlier this year when it was disclosed that she was closely linked to the GMO industry, or when it appeared that the organism setting the standards to establish the harmless nature of neonicotinoid pesticides for bees (ICPBR) was sponsored by the makers of these neonicotinoids, who also participated in establishing the safety standards [3]. Of course, an apparent conflict of interest is not a proof of actual misbehaviour. But it can, together with the absence of independent evaluations, feed suspicions and explain the present allure of anti-GMO movements. Moreover, this antagonism, given the generalized suspicion of the public towards experts and the establishment, can lead to further tensions and the rejection of reasonable advances. The solution to avoid this and possible future scandals similar to what the tobacco industry faced, is clearly not to dismiss these movements as obscurantist and postmodernist anti-science movements, as suggested by Kuntz. Instead, they have to be heard for what they are—a genuine concern of the lay public that GMOs are a potential threat for biodiversity and human health, given that their harmless nature is not perceived to be established beyond doubt. Moreover, GMOs are often seen as being developed mainly to increase the profit of industry, rather than for the common good, which obviously does not increase their acceptability. The ambiguous treatment of these concerns by the industry, regulatory bodies, experts and politicians who balance between open disdain and acknowledgement does not contribute to persuading these opponents. In fact, the only way to alleviate these concerns, and thereby make GMOs socially acceptable, is to have independent studies of their safety with publication of the resulting data and regulatory agencies that give no reason to suspect any conflict of interest. The recent publicized data by the French toxicologist G. E. Seralini [4], although highly controversial, might have paradoxically contributed to raising the awareness of the need for independent evaluations not linked to the GMO industry. One can only hope that such studies, if really set up, will clarify and pacify the field.