GMO/ Herring (Cornell University): too much power to the media, too few facts

In the field of medicine and other sectors (e.g. pharmaceutical), genetic engineering has introduced significant and fundamental innovations that have been accepted by the public. In contrast, the question of genetic engineering’s applicability in the realm of agricultural and, thus, food, has created and still creates many doubts, limiting the spread of biotechnology and the acquisition of its advantages. There are two predominant positions which contrast sharply on the question of the production of genetically modified plants and food: one of acceptance and the other of rejection. According to Ronald J. Herring, an American sociologist at Cornell University in Ithaca (New York), the difficulty of accepting genetic modification in an organism, especially in plants, is due to the way that the scientific discoveries are disseminated and also to the political-economic interests of both industrialized countries and poorer countries.

Herring has worked extensively on the issue of the adoption and rejection of technological progress, in particular on transgenic cotton in India. He went on site to try to understand what was happening and he studied both the opposition movements and the enthusiastic adoption of new technologies by small farms. In doing so, he focused on some questions and highlighted some key words contained in the title of an interesting report published a few years ago in Nature Genetics ("Opposition to transgenic technologies: ideology, interests and collective action frames") and echoed in a recent meeting at the University of Milan. How do ideas gain power? Why is public opinion in favor of genetic engineering in medicine, in pharmaceutics and in industry, but not in food? Why do more people reject it than favor it?
His answer is clear: the acceptance of such advanced technologies in medicine and other fields and not in agriculture is explained by the content of the message disseminated by the mass media and social movements, such as Greenpeace, which is that genetically modified food is dangerous to human health, that it is toxic, allergenic and carcinogenic.

Therefore, the question that must be answered to better understand the purpose of genetic engineering in agriculture and to shed light on some specific aspects of the issue, is: "What does it mean to genetically modify an organism?". Genetic manipulation of an organism, especially a plant, involves the insertion of exogenous genes in its genome, genes that the organism does not possess but that come from other living beings (animals, bacteria and viruses), resulting in the acquisition of new plant characteristics (the genetic improvement of the species). This is possible because reproductive barriers of incompatibility are overcome not by using the traditional method of intersection, but by using cell transformation. The plants obtained from these manipulations are called transgenic and these technologies are based on recombinant DNA (rDNA).