ARTICLE: Verify: Are GMO foods safe?

The following is an excerpt from an investigative news report by David Schechter with WFAA-TV (Dallas) addressing some of the common concerns about GMOs and our food.

I'm at the Institute for Plant Genomics & Biotechnology at Texas A&M University, where scientists actually make new varieties of GMOs.

I'm tweezing embryonic plant seeds, trying to get a single gene that's living in the petri dish gel to transfer from the gel and into the seed. This is part of a much larger process that is highly complex, hands on, and takes years.

I'm talking to Dr. Betsy Pierson with A&M's Horticultural Sciences program. She loves her some GMO.

"This is a technology that's solving problems," she says.

The technology is solving problems like hunger. At Texas A&M, for example, Dr. Keerti Rathore is modifying cotton seed. It’s toxic and he wants to make it edible. He’s been working on the problem for 20 years. If he succeeds, he believes they can feed 600 million people around the world.

"That's exciting," I say to Betsy about the cotton research. "There's nothing that's not exciting about that. But people might still reject that. In this country, they might say, 'I'm not eating that.'"

To read the entire article, please visit the WFAA-TV website.