split from European Union authority over science funding, claiming that policies promulgated in Brussels risked “condemning Europe to a new Dark Age.”
Tainted
GM opposition wasn’t limited to Europe. In China—a far-left country whose politburo is now dominated by engineers but that was once famous for antiscience under Chairman Mao Zedong—anti-GMO sentiment is becoming widespread, with activists describing their cause as “patriotic.” The government seems unsure just how to manage the situation. At one 2013 protest, a group chanted slogans calling for the eradication of “traitors” who support GM food, recalling images of scientists and intellectuals being “struggled against” during the Cultural Revolution. Even though the government has prioritized GM research, it is treading cautiously when it comes to actual implementation. Only two GM crops—cotton and papaya—have been approved for production in China. “We must be bold in studying it, [but] be cautious in promoting it,” Chinese president Xi Jinping said in a December 2013 speech. Rumors abound that American seed companies are seeking to control the people of China, and that Americans want to weaken or poison China with “dodgy GM food.” These factors lead many people—including government officials—to oppose GM crops that could lead to higher yields and, in the case of golden rice, prevent blindness due to vitamin A deficiency.
A 2014 study of public attitudes on environmental issues in twenty leading countries found China at the top, with 91 percent of Chinese agreeing that “we are heading for an environmental disaster unless we change our ways quickly.” The United States, in contrast, was at the bottom, with only 57 percent agreeing. Reacting to decades of lax or nonexistent health and environmental regulations, unbreathable air, and undrinkable water, China is seeing the birth of a growing, and potentially massive, environmental movement. When it comes to trusting scientists, 75 percent agreed that “even the scientists don’t really know what they are talking about on environmental issues.” Ninety-three percent felt that “companies don’t pay enough attention to the environment,” but individuals felt that they were trying to help the situation, with 88 percent saying, “I try to recycle as much as I can.” Chinese were also at the top of international rankings when it came to climate change, with 93 percent saying that “the climate change we are currently seeing is largely the result of human activity.” Here, too, the United States brought up the rear of all countries measured, with only 54 percent agreeing.
The distrust of scientists when it comes to environmental issues appears to be a factor in other areas as well. One of the most common worries in today’s China is over food safety, a concern that dates back to the great famine under Mao’s agricultural policies, when corrupt local officials inflated food production figures to curry political favor, giving the party more than its share as millions of people starved. Even today, local officials are frequently exposed as corrupt, and are often found to be in league with shoddy businesses that cut corners in food safety and production.
The scandals have touched shores around the world with stories of poisoned food. In 2008, it was milk powder tainted with the industrial chemical melamine, which is used in producing plastics and can make milk appear to have more protein, thus increasing its value. The milk powder killed six infants and sickened more than three hundred thousand. Chinese officials tried to cover up the story, fearing public unrest. Similar melamine poisoning occurred in pet food shipped from China to the United States. Then there was the lead paint on wooden baby toys, and the frequent toxic-bean-sprout scandals, the result of growers treating bean sprouts with sodium nitrite, urea, antibiotics, and a plant hormone called 6-benzyladenine in order to make the sprouts grow faster and look “shinier.” Then there was the admission by officials in Guangdong Province that 44 percent of local rice tested was laced with dangerous levels of cadmium. After those reports, Shenzhen authorities tested foods made with flour, including dumplings and steamed buns, and found that 28 percent had levels of aluminum above national standards. The contamination was blamed on excessive use of baking powder that contained the metal.
So the Chinese public’s reticence about accepting genetically modified foods, given the track record of the agricultural and food sectors in China, is perhaps a reasonable reaction. The difference is that genetic modification is not an ingredient or chemical that can be added to food to fool consumers or slip one by regulators in order to make more money. It is a method of plant breeding—one that could help China feed its burgeoning population at a time when yields are no longer increasing from the use of nitrogen and pesticides, and when climate disruption is placing new stresses on agricultural crops.
Supreme Antiscience
By March 2014, the antiscience cancer had spread full circle, arriving back in America and the thinking of US Supreme Court justices in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores. The owners of the Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby retail chain argued they should not be forced by the government to provide employees with insurance that covers forms of contraception such as the morning-after pill and three similar pills. They believed those types of birth control cause abortions, and therefore had religious objections to them. The future of the Affordable Care Act (the US health care law) hung in the balance.
Several scientific studies have shown that the pills work by keeping a woman’s ovary from releasing an egg, not by causing an implanted egg to abort. In rare cases there is also a possibility that a fertilized egg may be prevented from implanting. Some religious conservatives define pregnancy as occurring when an egg is fertilized, but US federal law follows the scientific definition that says a woman can only be considered pregnant when a fertilized egg implants in the uterine wall. Many fertilized eggs are flushed naturally. And yet the justices repeatedly referred to the pills as “abortifacients” during oral arguments—a term adopted from fundamentalists and often used by journalists to describe the pills—even though that is scientifically false, seemingly tilting the scales of justice toward the plaintiff’s argument.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the pills “may have the effect of preventing an already fertilized egg from developing any further by inhibiting its attachment to the uterus.” In a footnote, he conceded that Hobby Lobby’s religious-based assertions were in fact contradicted by the science-based federal regulations of the Food and Drug Administration, which had studied the issue for over a decade: “The owners of the companies involved in these cases and others who believe that life begins at conception regard these four methods as causing abortions, but federal regulations, which define pregnancy as beginning at implantation, do not so classify them.” It is only at implantation that a woman can be considered pregnant, because it is only at this point that her body begins to undergo the chemical and biological changes of hosting a fertilized egg. However, the court accepted the argument for a religious objection even though it was contraindicated by the scientific definition of pregnancy and federal regulations elsewhere. The administration of the Affordable Care Act, the legal definition of pregnancy in the United States (at least in some cases), and the right of corporations to be considered “religious persons” is now based on political views rather than evidence.
That this is a problem becomes clear when we strip away politics. Consider a science issue in which ideology was not a significant factor in a Supreme Court decision. In June 2013, the court ruled on gene patents in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. At issue was whether Myriad Genetics, which had isolated two naturally occurring genes implicated in breast cancer, could patent the genes to protect their diagnostic procedures. US patent law limits patents to “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof.” Clearly, the genes are naturally occurring and so should not have been granted patents, and the High Court got this right. But its opinion incorrectly defined key scientific terms that are material to the case and showed little grasp of the underlying scientific issues being debated. “It’s troubling that the highest court in the land can’t get even the basic facts of molecular biology right when writing a decision that has such fundamental importance to genetic testing, the biotechnology industry, and health care,” wrote Johns Hopkins biomedical engineering professor Steven Salzberg in Forbes magazine. “I cannot pretend to know who they got to do their biology background research, but any genetics graduate student could have done far better.”
In a world in which advanced molecular biology will increasingly