Review: Steven M. Druker, ALTERED GENES, TWISTED TRUTH:
How the Venture to Genetically Engineer Our Food Has Subverted Science, Corrupted Government, and Systematically Deceived the Public
Altered Genes, Twisted Truth
Steven M. Druker is a public-interest attorney who initiated a lawsuit that forced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release its files on genetically engineered foods. As a result, the way the agency had covered up the warnings of its own scientists about the risks, lied about the facts, and then allowed those "foods" onto the market in violation of federal law. He has served on food safety panels held by the National Research Council and the FDA, presented lectures at numerous universities, met with government officials throughout the world, and conferred at the White House Executive Offices with a task force of the Council on Environmental Quality.
Druker discusses the politicization of science and the Institutionalization of illusion; the expansion of the biotech agenda and the intensification of the politicization; how the facts about a deadly epidemic caused by a genetically engineered food have been consistently obscured; the governmental faud that put GE foods on the market; how food safety officials in Canada, the EU, and other regions also sidestepped science and sound policy; multiple risks accompanied by minimal caution; media accomplices in cover up and deception; oversights, anomalies, and delinquencies; how the research on GE food has failed to show that they're safe and instead confirmed that they should be off the market; the inescapable risks of altering complex information systems, whether electronic or biological; the devolution of scientists into spin doctors, genetic engineering's most malignant mutation; and abandoning genetic engineering and advancing to safe, sustainable, and sensible modes of farming.
This is a frightening book. Nobody wants to find that the products that they eat and depend on for life itself are laced with hideous toxins that have killed pets, sickened and killed humans, caused cancer, and a host of other things right out of the Inferno. The instinct is to push that information, ward it off, deny it holds and can hold any validity, a very human thing to do. The instinct is to sneer at that information and remind people of the story of Chicken Little, who cried, "The sky is falling!," scaring everybody for no good reason.
But there is good reason. The sky, metaphorically speaking, has fallen, and the fallout has already entered our bodies and those of our children, our pets, and our farm and work animals, doing endless mischief which, in many cases, as altered genes in our food take up residence in our DNA, will continue for decades, even centuries, if not millennia, spreading Satan's largesse of misery and sickness and death for all. For your own sakes, and those of your children and later descendants, please read this book and see what you are risking from lack of good information on this evil, and what your descendants are likely to suffer from it, as well.
Altered Genes, Twisted Truth
Steven M. Druker is a public-interest attorney who initiated a lawsuit that forced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release its files on genetically engineered foods. As a result, the way the agency had covered up the warnings of its own scientists about the risks, lied about the facts, and then allowed those "foods" onto the market in violation of federal law. He has served on food safety panels held by the National Research Council and the FDA, presented lectures at numerous universities, met with government officials throughout the world, and conferred at the White House Executive Offices with a task force of the Council on Environmental Quality.
Druker discusses the politicization of science and the Institutionalization of illusion; the expansion of the biotech agenda and the intensification of the politicization; how the facts about a deadly epidemic caused by a genetically engineered food have been consistently obscured; the governmental faud that put GE foods on the market; how food safety officials in Canada, the EU, and other regions also sidestepped science and sound policy; multiple risks accompanied by minimal caution; media accomplices in cover up and deception; oversights, anomalies, and delinquencies; how the research on GE food has failed to show that they're safe and instead confirmed that they should be off the market; the inescapable risks of altering complex information systems, whether electronic or biological; the devolution of scientists into spin doctors, genetic engineering's most malignant mutation; and abandoning genetic engineering and advancing to safe, sustainable, and sensible modes of farming.
This is a frightening book. Nobody wants to find that the products that they eat and depend on for life itself are laced with hideous toxins that have killed pets, sickened and killed humans, caused cancer, and a host of other things right out of the Inferno. The instinct is to push that information, ward it off, deny it holds and can hold any validity, a very human thing to do. The instinct is to sneer at that information and remind people of the story of Chicken Little, who cried, "The sky is falling!," scaring everybody for no good reason.
But there is good reason. The sky, metaphorically speaking, has fallen, and the fallout has already entered our bodies and those of our children, our pets, and our farm and work animals, doing endless mischief which, in many cases, as altered genes in our food take up residence in our DNA, will continue for decades, even centuries, if not millennia, spreading Satan's largesse of misery and sickness and death for all. For your own sakes, and those of your children and later descendants, please read this book and see what you are risking from lack of good information on this evil, and what your descendants are likely to suffer from it, as well.