Fake Banner
Chloe Kim And Eileen Gu In Media As Anti-Asian Narrative

Olympians Chloe Kim and Eileen Gu are both Americans but have Asian descent. Yet Kim competed for...

Misandry Vs Manosphere: Both Use Unscientific Woo To Advance Their Beliefs But One Sells Better

Culture wars are as eternal as shooting wars, and that means there will always be war profiteers...

RIP To Dr. William Foege, The Man Whose Math Eliminated Smallpox

In the modern world, it is easy to be newly concerned about the World Health Organisation. They...

Scholars Who Got Sold On The Academic Life Feel The Pressure

Professor Peter Mitchell got a Nobel Prize in 1978 for a chemiosmotic hypothesis of how ATP is...

User picture.
picture for Hontas Farmerpicture for Fred Phillipspicture for Tommaso Dorigopicture for Atreyee Bhattacharyapicture for picture for Patrick Lockerby
Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

Blogroll
Blood samples of pregnant women have detectable levels of chemicals and that 'chemical cocktail' may pose "neurotoxic risk", according to a paper published in Science whose senior author is strangely on the board of reviewing editors at Science.

This "chemical cocktail" nomenclature has been popular among activists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other environmental lawyers for decades, because it needs no science, it instead means science 'needs more testing', and there will never be enough testing.
A recent paper claims that even at low doses pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides are changing the behavior of insects.

Though they are not able to show how it is happening, the authors use 'needs more testing' rhetoric to call on governments to ban chemicals until it is certain there is no unintended long-term ecological harm. If that sounds very Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., that's because he and other anti-science progressives have been saying it for decades.
A whole lot of classic liberals have discovered how goofy their progressive cousins have been for 25 years. All it took for this sudden embrace of critical thinking was for a Republican to say 'maybe he is right on food and medicine' about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A recent epidemiology paper links common weedkillers to prostate cancer and further claims four of them cause death. 

Obviously they can't show that, there is no plausible biological mechanism, no increase in prostate cancers, and no evidence any of the people who got prostate cancer had contact with the pesticides at all.
GMOs had quietly been in use for decades when they became controversial - for saving a fruit in Hawaii that legacy techniques like breeding and chemicals had not.

The Rainbow Papaya became a home run for genetic engineering, the first genetically rescued organism, and that made it a target for environmental groups who had ignored it when it was saving diabetics by creating insulin.

Lawyers have not stopped campaigning against GMOs since, and are calling on all media allies to criticize Mexico for refusing to ban GMO corn, but while they fight the past, biotech may be winning another fight for the future; against malaria.
Once upon a time, environmentalists embraced biotechnology as key way to reduce pesticide use. Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring", was a fan of genetic engineering. That was before we all learned that environmental groups are only 'for' something if it means they can raise money being against something. Biotech was great - until it was real. Then they hated it. Along with hydroelectric power and natural gas, and how they will want to tear down solar energy, once it stops being a government gimmick.