Why do biotech companies knowingly create genetic mutations that harm people? More importantly why is greed the leading proponent as to their is a complete disregard for public health. After all cancer is a genetic mutation..

Expert response from Steve Savage

Consultant, Savage & Associates

Thursday, 28/04/2016 13:45

As someone who has interacted with biotech companies for decades, I’ve personally known hundreds of the individual scientists and business people in this field. I’ve never met even one person who was driven by anything like the greed or disregard you are suggesting. I’ve also never met anyone who would have hesitated to raise the alarm if they had been aware of wrong-doing. Many have now retired or moved on to different fields so they would be perfectly free to speak out. I sincerely wish that you could meet some of these real people in person so that you could see that they are the polar opposite of what you appear to imagine. You are talking about my friends and colleagues, so it is deeply disturbing to me to see them falsely accused. I’m sad that you have been convinced of something so dark.

I’ve never seen or heard of any cases that involved something even close to “knowingly causing harm.“ On the contrary, the biotech industry worked very hard to establish a rigorous system of regulations long before the first GM crops were sold. This was a very public, transparent process involving academic experts and government regulators. The intention of those steps was specifically to prevent there being any harm to human health or the environment. In 1988 I had the opportunity to attend just one of the many public forums that was part of that process, and I’ve yet to see an issue raised that was not already being seriously considered at that time - still eight years before biotech crop introductions. In the U.S. these efforts resulted in the “Coordinated Framework for Biotechnology Regulation” involving the USDA, the FDA and the EPA. Similar systems were set up in other countries such as Canada and Australia. That voluntary process of developing and then submitting to regulatory review was as different as I can imagine from “disregard.”

What has motivated everyone I know in this area has been the desire to solve real-world problems so that farming can be more productive, safe and sustainable. For their products to result in sales for the company, they had to deliver tangible value to the grower-customers. Farmers are highly independent business people who don’t keep buying or using a technology unless they can see real benefits for their operation and its bottom-line. In a free market system, some degree of profit is entirely appropriate as long as the benefits to the customer are even greater. Both large and small-scale farmers around the world who have been allowed to grow biotech crops have enthusiastically adopted them and safely employed them for more than two decades. That is the ultimate measure of whether the people who developed the crops accomplished something good.