GMOs: Why the Disconnect?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post bemoaning the reluctance of the general public to catch up with the science of GMOs; it puzzled me as to why a technology that is so clearly a force for good in the world should be reviled as a kind of dirty, leprous freak. I have every confidence that in the fullness of time the public will get onboard and we will begin to reap the multifarious benefits such as increased crop yield, decreased pesticide use, increased drought resistance and increased nutritional content; in the meantime, though, we need to think of ways to push understanding forwards. A good place to start would probably be to try to understand what is at the heart of the distrust aimed at GMOs.

A paper published last month in Trends in Plant Science by a group of Belgian philosophers and biotechnologists may begin to do just that. They attempted to explain why there is such a wide gap between public opinion and the scientific evidence and why it is so persistent. The initial premise is that most people have no clue how GMOs are produced or what they even are. If you have no actual knowledge on a subject then you are far more likely to rely on intuition, folk biology and emotions. These can feel very compelling inside us and are easy notions to communicate to others.

One concept they proffer is that of psychological essentialism. This can make people think of DNA as an essential, primal, inviolable part of an organism, something intrinsic to it that makes it what it is, sort of the physical counterpart to a soul. If you take some of this essence from one organism and add it to another it can provoke a feeling of disgust. People also believe that the second organism will have some of the traits of the first. For example, an opinion poll in the US found that more than a half of recipients believed that a tomato that had fish genes incorporated into it would taste of fish. Which it wouldn't, by the way. This doesn't stop anti-GMO organisations playing up to such fears, however.

The paper looks at the disgust angle in some detail. It appears that many people think of the addition of genetic material more of as a contamination. Given that one of the main reasons our sense of disgust evolved was to stop us eating potentially harmful foodstuffs, this would be a compelling feeling in the absence of hard knowledge to counteract it. Once you feel that something is disgusting or amoral then it is very easy to believe almost anything else negative about it. I think this is very much a part of the strategy on immigrants today; first you make them seem sub-human, then you can treat them any way you like. Because the feeling of disgust is a subconscious one we will tend to look for a reason to justify it, and so we will grab on to any reason at hand, even a false one, as we all like to believe we're rational, sensible people.

These kind of primal intuitions about a topic are the most difficult to fight against. You can't use logic and reason to argue someone out of a position that they didn't arrive at through logic and reason. In terms of changing attitudes the authors best suggestion is that we just have to do our best to educate people as to the facts, starting with children of course. The problem with that is that the science of the classroom normally lags a decade or two behind the science of the laboratory and there are a lot of hungry people around the world that won't be able to wait that long.

Image used with permission