Below is an excerpt from an article by Andrew Kniss, posted by Control Freaks.
An opinion piece was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, written by Dr. Philip Landrigan (an M.D.) and Dr. Charles Benbrook (PhD) titled “GMOs, Herbicides, and Public Health”. I was asked to review the piece this week, and I can only assume it will eventually make the rounds on social media. So I thought it was worth commenting here since it is related to herbicides and herbicide-resistant GMO crops.
The “Perspective” piece is basically a plea from Dr. Landrigan and Dr. Benbrook for “all aspects of the safety of biotechnology” to be “thoroughly reconsider[ed]”. However, in the two page opinion, they provide no evidence that crop biotechnology is harmful. In fact, Landrigan and Benbrook acknowledge that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) “has twice reviewed the safety of GM crops” and they do not dispute the scientific consensus expressed by NAS that “GM crops pose no unique hazards to human health.” The way I read it, the entire Perspective piece seems to be a muddled conflation of two separate (albeit related) issues; the use of GMO crops and the use of herbicides.