Constantly confronting people who think my research will harm them is profoundly distressing

Devang Mehta
Synthetic Biology
ETH Zurich

...You see, for the last four years I’ve been embedded in a Swiss research group that specializes in creating genetically modified organisms, or GMOs (scientists prefer to use the terms genetic engineered organisms or transgenics rather than GMO). And no, we are not funded by Monsanto, and our GMOs are largely patent-free.

Nevertheless, my time in GMO research creating virus-resistant plants has meant dealing with the overwhelming negative responses the topic evokes in so many people. These range from daily conversations halting into awkward silence when the subject of my work crops up, to hateful Twitter trolls, and even the occasional fear that public protesters might destroy our research. Little wonder then, that having finished my PhD, I’m part-excited and part-relieved to move to a new lab and work on more fundamental questions in plant biology: how plants are able to control the levels at which their genes are active.

Unfortunately, I am not alone. The first commercially available GMO crops were first developed in the early 1990s in publicly funded labs in Europe and the US. In the years since, as many as a quarter of European universities have shut down their GMO research programs, some due to a loss of funding and others because scientists are leaving the GMO sphere, tired of the backlash and criticism.

My first experience of the intensity of anti-GMO belief occurred during a public panel discussion about patenting crops and GMOs organized by my colleagues. The panel was interrupted by a protestor shouting about how GM food was responsible for their American friends’ child’s autism. As the panelists tried to explain, there is no causal link between autism and GMOs (or vaccines for that matter) and GMOs have repeatedly been found to be perfectly safe for human consumption. But the protestor readily dismissed these arguments in favor for what can only be described as a fervently held, conspiracist belief. It really showed how futile researchers’ attempts at science communication can be.

...Apart from the sheer hate spewed by anti-GM activists both in person and online, I also find fault with my fellow scientists. Too often, other scientists ignore the issue of GMOs, or just treat it as a technology that we can do without (we can’t, by the way. Not if we want to feed 9 billion people by 2050). For example, it is an open-secret among the plant science community in Europe that GMO-research proposals have a very low chance of getting public funding. This is despite the fact that several European agencies, scientific societies, and publicly funded studies have deemed GMOs perfectly safe and even a valuable tool to fight world hunger.

...https://massivesci.com/articles/gmo-gm-plants-safe/