 I bring the mouse all the way over and then I see the clicker over here. So yes, I have done this before and I have given two previous lectures along the lines of this one. Now this is much less chemistry that I am used to teaching and so I'm not going to dig too much into the biology because I don't want to embarrass myself. This leads more heavily into the other parts of this sort of scholarly research that I do that crosses science with pseudoscience and social media and so I'll be showing you pieces of that. I will say that I am a heavy Facebook user. I use Twitter. I get most of my news online. I probably have not watched an evening news broadcast in months mostly because I have a three-year-old son and that sort of thing doesn't really allow it at 5.30 in the evening when I'm trying to cook dinner and so on. So most of the information that you are going to see, memes, articles, other pictures comes from online and that's part of the issue. Most information, particularly if you are under a certain age, is gathered from the internet and we all know that everything is on the internet for better or worse. But first I want to talk about Interstellar. How many people have seen the movie Interstellar? Less than I thought. I am not going to try to explain the movie. The people who have seen it could probably not explain the movie themselves. That's an entirely different time-space issue. The premise is sometime in the near future and I think most estimates, even though it doesn't say specifically in the movie that somewhere between 2040 and 2060, most of the world has become farm culture because a blight of some kind is slowly destroying every farmable crop and they go through, I think at the beginning of the movie they say they've lost okra, they're down to basically corn. And so to feed the world, everyone has essentially become farmers. They've abandoned technology. In the beginning of the movie there is essentially a denial that anyone ever went to space. So what do you do? Well in the movie there is, NASA still operates in secret with apparently endless money and they have a plan to send the entirety of the human race up in a big spaceship through a wormhole to a planet that's orbiting a supernova. I am not joking. Those people have not seen it. I am not joking. That is the premise of the movie. Now I don't know how many billions of people were left in this movie but what would you do? If there is a something, a bug, a parasite, something that is destroying crops, what would you do? Well farming and going to other crops would be one thing particularly those of you that have grown up in farm culture that is something you would do. Well apparently you go into space. Ok, good science fiction. Why not spend some of that money on a crop that resists this blight? Because we have the technology. So there is a, I guess you could call him a celebrity, he is also a scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson and I have been a fan of his for a while. He basically says that we are smart enough as a society, as a group of people to solve any problem. And look at the things that we have been able to solve. Look the technology that I can use today and use today to get basically any information that I need. So if you ask me a question right now if I didn't know the answer all I would have to do is unlock my phone and get you the answer. Now that's part of the problem which I will explain later. But as a scientist I would say and now that there is a biologist in the room I would say well let's just engineer a crop that is resistant to this blight. And someone who is a science fiction buff with this movie would say well maybe they tried that. Well, the filmmaker never said anything about that. So that's what I think. So what is a GMO? GMO genetically modified organisms. Now more specifically in current parlance they are talking about any organism whose genetic material has been altered using genetic engineering techniques. So a more directed scientific way. Scientific I am going to put in air quotes because it depends on your point of view. But there is a lot of different ways to do this. What I am showing you is a picture of golden rice versus normal rice. I will talk a little bit more about golden rice later but you can notice the difference. They are both based on simple rice, grains of rice and obviously this is a little bit different. Now those of you that are just looking at this for the first time, some of you I am sure have seen this, have studied this, would look at this and say well I wouldn't eat that. It's yellow. What's wrong with it? That's just a gut natural instinct. You are used to white rice, brown rice, wild rice, a lot of different colors but probably never that unless it's been cooked with butter and saffron and all sorts of things. The other default is well did someone throw some food coloring in there? No. This is fortified with vitamin A or actually I should say more specific a precursor to vitamin A and it's four areas that have deficiency of vitamin A in their diets. This is where I am not going to go into deep especially with biologists in the audience. We've been altering crops for thousands of years and I usually try to avoid the word literally but literally thousands of years we have been altering crops. Since the beginning of arable land and actually farming and taking care of crops it's always of well there's not enough fruit or the yield is too low or this year it seems like we're to get less water can we make a better crop that it can deal with less water. So my favorite of these is what the banana used to look like and yeah I think we could kill the lights more. We know what bananas look like. We go through a dozen of them a week in my house and I don't eat any of them because I don't like bananas. My wife eats them my son eats them that's what bananas used to look like. Does that look like a banana to you? No. So we have carrots that's not orange, corn that's not what I eat in the summer, watermelon is not red, there's a lot of other things here eggplants those look like like unripened tomatoes. So one of the things that I wanted to mention as an aside paleo diet well guess what this is paleo fruits and vegetables can you find these anymore? No. Only in very very isolated areas where there hasn't been any manipulated breeding. So cross breeding and selective breeding so you can attempt to cross two different species in order to get the best traits of both or you can selectively breed by taking the best plants from a crop and using those seeds in order to increase your yield over time of course both of these things take time. What do we have in modern times? No patience none because now we can get our information instantaneously. We can order dominoes from our phones I do it all the time. Anything that we need we can basically get right away but if you were to use these methods it would take a lot of time. It's not as though we went from corn like this to the huge thick wonderful ears of corn that we have right now in five seconds. Technically now we could. It wouldn't be five seconds it would still be years but it wouldn't be a thousand years it might be two or three. So crops that gave the best yields were always kept and improved over time and we can continue to do that but now because we have such a greater understanding of science that's one of the problems with the situation is that we can have a better idea of what specifically causes the best fruit the best taste and we can focus on those. So things that we want to focus on if we want to get better crops and I'm focusing specifically on crops you could do this with organisms also but I'm going to focus on crops for now. Improved quality such as increased nutrition so going back to the golden rice while rice does have a little bit of vitamin A most of the vitamin A or the vitamin A precursors is not in the part of the rice that we eat it's in the rest of the plant. Improved flavor or greater beauty you want to like the way your food looks a lot of people do. I don't really care as long as it tastes good I don't care how it looks I'm the cook in my house so I'm the one who's making that determination. Increased yield of the crop so where are we at in terms of number of people on this earth 7. something billion and by 2050 it's supposed to be 9 or maybe it's 2030 it's supposed to be 9 billion there's we've got still space but we don't necessarily have the arable land to support all of these people. Increased tolerance to environmental pressures so we can have a whole other conversation about climate change whether or not you believe it exists whether or not you believe it's man-made or not but stuff is changing and so we have the drought in California and in terms of this spring we've had the deluge of rains in the southern part of the United States specifically around Texas and Louisiana and the states around there that have just gotten feet of rain but we're also talking about extreme temperatures we've had a warm winter is particularly in comparison to the last two years when you talk about climate change you're talking about extremes not necessarily just the straight-up increase in temperature but extremes and then drought in particular then when also you have climate change you also have viruses fungi bacteria parasites all those other little critters that we have to deal with and if you think about a crop or a tree or something like that around here there's going to be something that's going to be attacking it since I'm not a farmer I can't come up the only thing that's coming to my head is the Emerald Ash Borer right now and the reasons why we don't transport firewood across areas even in Wisconsin so we can develop resistances to these things. Insect tests so that's the Emerald Ash Borer and tolerance to herbicides so here's where I can talk a little bit about chemistry herbicides chemical herbicides we'll get to Monsanto later on but back when it used to be you treated your crops with things like urine and feces not necessarily as herbicides but fertilizer people get a little bit upset when they when we talk about chemical herbicides but how much different is it to do a synthesized chemical to try to keep away bugs then to use urine and feces to fertilize your plants you're still using chemistry so what's the difference what's the one word if I were to say using urine as a fertilizer and then using an herbicide what's the one word that someone would probably invoke to say oh this urine is better because it is yeah hey some of you have heard me talk before I'll get back to that word yes that is a keyword longer storage period for the harvested crops so not only we we are talking about more and more and more but storing it so great thing we have refrigeration we have freeze drying we have all these interesting things but we still have to get these crops to that point and we still have these things that are trying to destroy the plant even after we've picked the fruit or whatever else so all of these things can benefit from modifying these plants this is the what I will call quote unquote natural way although I take issue with it this is what we were referred to as genetic engineering so when we talk about genetically modified organisms this is rarely really where we're focusing so I was going to try to describe this in words but you know I took the lazy way out and just found a picture that explained it better than I could so genetic material from one organism isolating it and putting it into another and usually it's selective towards a specific trait now you have to imagine what is behind all of this what this means is that we have the ability to take any organism or most organisms and be able to isolate how a trait is represented genetically so every species has a genetic coat down to DNA and we can determine so the genome so if you've heard of the genome project you know being able to understand our genetic makeup we can do this for most organisms now I think I think and if someone if I'm wrong about that someone can correct me so being able to isolate a trait via the genetics is a process that may not specifically be easy we can do it so you take that trait you put it into a cell of the organism that you want to alter you grow that organism to see if you get that trait to reproduce and if there is a bit of trial and error to this it doesn't always work for the first time but eventually you create a new organism a plant that has the resistance that you want the better fruits the greater tolerance to droughts you get its seeds and then you now have seeds of that organism that you can grow and you could reproduce it that's what we're going for so now we have come to the difference between natural genetic modification quote-unquote natural when you talk about crossbreeding selective breeding thousands of years beginning of time not that's an exaggeration but and this and people look at this and say I'm not eating that because it's bad some scientists in a lab made that and that means it's evil and I have used that I have seen that word that's a pretty strong word evil because when you think evil you think see who would be who would be really current no actually I wasn't going there I wasn't going based on what is happening today at other places no I was thinking I was thinking superhero so the next superhero movie coming out is Avengers another Avengers movie Civil War so well actually yeah which I didn't see because DC okay there we go so that's evil is this really evil is it unnatural that's a debatable point because natural is such an all-encompassing word do we really know what that means I'll get back to that so the first on market genetically modified food for human consumption was a tomato I love tomatoes so it's called a flavor saver so first developed in 1992 and approved for human consumption in 1994 just so happens that you will no longer find flavor saver tomatoes because production ceased in 1997 so it allowed for ripening on the vine so rather than on the vine the fruit going soft dropping off rotting it would resist growing too large too soft it would stay firm and so it could be picked right off the vine so when you hear vine ripened tomatoes that's what you're talking about you're not talking about anything that's quote-unquote natural you're talking about a genetically modified tomato where the fruit could grow on the vine be picked and be fresh so also it was resistant to fungi that were specifically attacking it aiding this softening and rotting process so no doubt that a lot of the fruits that you would get a lot of the tomatoes you would be getting these days are not flavor saver but similar because the technology worked and we want tomatoes that look like this not shriveled soft things that are kind of mushy that you would never want to touch see it becomes if you think about something like this like oh that's delicious so if I didn't tell you if this was a genetically modified organism what would you think about it oh that's I love tomatoes as long as you love tomatoes but then you see a picture like this which is something I was able to easily find with a needle going through a tomato and you can tell what the source might be for this with someone injecting steroids into a tomato no that's not how things work it's not as though it's you know those evil people that try to put razor blades into chocolate for Halloween that's what it that's the kind of image the emotions that this is supposed to invoke by the way that company that originally developed this was bought up by a company I'll name later golden rice so here's golden rice again it's the same picture as before so if you look at this map you can see the red areas and large populations so the largest populations that we we know of India and China China is not so bad but India is in the red most of Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa Papua New Guinea the Philippines large parts of South America these are areas that had deficiencies in vitamin a so engineered to provide a much higher content of the precursor to vitamin a so vitamin a is beta carotene beta carotene is what we associate with yellow orange color so like carrots the orange is from beta carotene and other carotenoids so it's the precursor to that but eventually the body can make the vitamin a that it needs so again the vitamin a that you would see in rice is actually from the plants not from the grain now it's different so what you're talking about here is helping people with basic nutrition so if you think about a deficiency of vitamin C particularly in this time of year we're talking about oh you just have a lot of vitamin C and you'll not get a cold well that's bunk too because if you take a lot of vitamin C the only thing you're getting is expensive urine because your body can only process so much the rest is going to be excreted what's the what's the disease for deficiency of vitamin C scurvy and so if you go 500 years ago and I forget the sailor who originally discovered this and I just and I was reading this recently and of course now I'm blanking said oh well just take citrus fruits all of a sudden you have a better voyage because you don't have scurvy because it was depilitating for ships traveling around the world at that time but you think about that that's five that's four or five hundred years ago and we're still dealing with large parts of the world that have deficiencies for certain vitamins something else iodized salt again large parts of poor areas of the world have deficiency of iodine if you don't have enough iodine you have problems with your thyroid and so that's why we have iodized salt you put a small percentage of potassium iodide in sodium chloride regular old table salt the problem goes away now that's not genetic engineering it's chemistry but a lot of people would say well think about the salt craze that we have you have your Morton salts whether it's iodized or non-iodized but then you have five of different kinds of Himalayan and salt from the coral reefs around Australia I would assume that oh taste amazing except that what you're getting is still mostly sodium chloride with other chemicals in it that are not so different than for potassium chloride in iodized salt as you can those of you that have not seen me do this before this is how animated I get I get very like it's a little it's I realize I am on a soapbox I am pontificating I am not sorry because this is important so put me you know if you want to equate me to one of the screaming men or women that you see on the TV a lot these days mostly the two is screaming older men from both you know both sides that's I know how I'm getting like that right now I just don't have a New York accent although I will say I am from the East Coast but I've lost whatever I had I now sound like I'm not from anywhere so here's the evil company so I think evil empire when I think evil empire to myself and this dates me a little bit I go back to Austin Powers and when when they bought Starbucks so I associate Starbucks with an evil empire but this is really today's evil empire it's not even the government although the government like if you just say the government that is invoke a lot of ire these days but it's Monsanto now Monsanto is not the only company out there that is making genetically modified organisms they do a lot of things so if you think about their rent of venue it's 15 billion dollars that seems like a lot of money but then you compare it to people to have a lot more money than this that are pouring all that money into a lot of other areas so it has a long history I did this is this is not a commercial from Monsanto but they have split into multiple companies they divested their chemical companies into a spin-off and this happens with large corporations so their focus really now is on biotechnology and so that is that is the nicer way of saying genetic genetic engineering biotechnology so when you think of Monsanto the first thing that most people think of is roundup that's their big herbicide so I think there is roundup in my house so kill weeds that's fine but what they have done is they have developed crops that are resistance to roundup so it's sort of like the one-two punch you plant the seed of these crops that are resistance to this herbicide so this chemical will not touch those crops then you use this product and then you get rid of all sorts of other plants that you don't want around weeds other crops that you don't want there so it is a system it is not simply they make the genetically modified seeds they make the roundup it is a system that they have developed so this is one of the reasons why they have so much hate is because they have in cornered the market but for a while this was the thing to use and I have no doubt in my mind that there are farmers in this state that have used this system large farms in particular what they're they're always companies like this that are this large that have that high of a profit margin are always developing new products they want to be on the next big thing so they continue to make money so what they're working with one of the things they're working with now is drought resistant crops and they don't have any drought resistant crops on the market none of them have been accepted yet because they don't function as well as they'd hoped but if you think about what is happening on the West Coast the last couple of years with the extreme drought that has been occurring this is what we want because and this is happening in another country in Europe to what's in danger wine grapes it's not the thing that should be on the top of our list these days but when people say you know there are certain segment of the population that would just lose their mind if they couldn't get their wine I am not one of these people I'm beer I'm beer not wine and it's a heyday for me I get overwhelmed while I go to the liquor store with so much beer so if if they start talking about something that is going to be going after hops or other grains then I'm in trouble but this company has sort of built it has built itself on developing genetically modified crops for the benefit of everyone yes it's their benefit to their bottom line too but it's not as though a company like this is trying to control your mind via the food that you eat by the way the government's not trying to do that either I'm really I am 99.8% sure now I have I am a science fiction person I've read enough science fiction to think that that is the slightest bit possible but I don't really think that is technologically possible right now like no tinfoil hat here so this is the corporation that if you look online gets the most means specifically GMOs now note that I am not going to go into vaccines which I could have easily just scrap this and brought up my vaccine lecture because of what happened at the Dry Beckett Film Festival but two weeks ago so if you want to talk about that we could save that till afterwards so memes if you don't know what a meme is that's okay picture with words that tells a story instantaneously this is what the internet is sort of built on these days if you spend any time on social media you're going to see a meme within the first 25 seconds that's just the number I came up with but if I if I open Twitter I can see something like this or if I look at Facebook like these memes will even be trending so these are pro and con and some of these are not really memes are just just just graphics so the the breeding one on top of the cows so breeding the best stock you know and we can get into the whole growth hormone thing but find the best bull find the best cow make the best babies more milk more meat same thing works for animals I like the one in the middle you know and memes often you know take the same picture and use different words so I don't even remember what the name of that one is philosophy after okay so these memes have names you just change the words that are present so if Monsanto's GMOs are safe why does their cafeteria only serve organic food I don't know if that's true it's an interesting thing but I'm sure there are a lot of people who work at Monsanto that don't believe in what's Monsanto is doing they just want to get paid and then it came from Monsanto the giant bug it's interesting to see the change in chickens the change in practice for for edible animals where it took 68 days to get to that and then 47 days to get to that to my rotisserie chicken that we had once a week in our house but memes can go both ways so describing information against something for something you don't trust the FDA when they say GMO is safe but you want the FDA to label GMO food wanting both sides there we wanted both ways a lot do you trust the government or not are you against the government and still want the government to do something for you for less common theme these days particularly if you listen to politicians so what do you want do you want to know and I'm you don't have to raise your hands this is rhetorical question but do you want to know when there is a genetically modified organism in your food because I can tell you right now you've been eating them your entire life regardless have how old you are you've been eating them because we have been manipulating our food for a long time the first genetically modified organisms were developed in the 70s with mice we've been using those mice to test a variety of things so even if you haven't been eating GMOs you've been benefiting from them because what do we test things on first mice we use them as a surrogate for us because the genetics are not very different so we can get some sense of how our bodies will react to any certain thing by using mice so how far is your ethics going to go if you are going to be against GMOs are you going to be against genetically modified mice that are testing drugs for you so I remember when I was in high school we were tasked with writing something satirical and I don't think I got called like I don't think I got in trouble for this but it was pretty serious I suggested that if people were upset about testing chemicals on rabbits or dogs or mice that we test them on people who do you test them on if you're going to test them on people will you take death row prisoners and who cares about them you know regardless of whether or not you're for against the death penalty there's some people that have caused a lot of problems why not just test test stuff on them you want to see how long it takes for arsenic to kill someone just throw this arsenic is that ethical I know there's philosopher in the audience so where do you draw the line my comments about that is people arbitrarily draw lines that are convenient for them it allows them to sleep at night it allows them to be comfortable with their lives but there really is no logic when it comes to the lines that they draw am I guilty of this absolutely I have arbitrarily drawn lines that's just human nature you have to make your own world comfortable so are you going to make your world more comfortable by not eating something that is genetically modified sure can you avoid it completely no can you avoid it mostly probably so then it comes down to what we're talking about is psychology so I know this may not have been what you were expecting when you came here but I was thinking about this talk and I'm like I really not getting into people's heads here but that's what I want to do to get him out of my own and into someone who's going to have an argument with me so where is this coming from because it's not simply about GMOs that's why I've had three different iterations of the talk and the really all about the same thing so ignorance simply not knowing anything about or very little about science again this is not judging people who have shown no interest haven't had formal education that's fine but ignorance willful ignorance is not seeking information so it's difference between not knowing something and not wanting to know something to get the proper information anti-education again this is personal to me because I am an educator so I get fired up when we when I see attacks on education and we are seeing a lot of them these days particularly in politics but when someone comes at me and says well you're a teacher you're an educator you're in you know you are whatever I am I am PhD educated in organic chemistry that is what I am that's one of the reasons why I'm here I enjoyed organic chemistry there is in some sections a resistance to any person who is educated and if you feel that way I'm sorry but no doubt you have seen this whether it is someone at my level or it is a teacher at a high school that kind of sentiment is rampant anti-government that's even bigger the man don't put your hands in my business and again that's another thing that we're hearing these days today just turn on the radio the news anything you're going to hear it anti-pharma again it comes this is related to anti-science but also large corporations so how do you reconcile these two things so are you for things that are quote-unquote public or things that are quote-unquote private because what is the third option here small local business I guess that would be the third option but those small local businesses are not really able to generate things like crops for a large number of people resistance to any authority so you know add up all three of those previous things and you just get a general resistance to authority but what does it come down to it is a psychological resistance to any argument so I have seen this discuss to not any real real studies associated with this that I've been able to find but if you try to convince someone who would say anti-vax and this is my most recent experience there is no way you are going to get anywhere with anyone who is anti-vax 100% there's no way because those beliefs are held as tightly or tighter than religious beliefs so if you think about anyone if you are religious person has sort of had a discussion with you about faith and immediately you feel attacked just by someone trying to present you new ideas and you get defensive and you say no no no no this is what I believe don't talk to me triple it and that is the resistance that I've come across personally now I realize that's a mcdotal I'm cherry-picking but personally it's stronger stronger than any religious beliefs I've had quality discussions about religion with a variety of people who are very religious when it comes to anti-vax I get it I have gotten I have gotten accused of being a lot of things but recently I've told and my wife has been told she's also a scientist that we are we are going to end up divorced that our son is going to be a drag on society and probably going to be mentally subnormal and might be violent because we have given him vaccines and that we ourselves are vaccinated and this is this is this is not exaggerating of course this all happened on social media which makes it you know different it's not as though I was conversing with people like I'm talking to you right now this is all done through a computer screen because that makes a lot easier doesn't it it's it's anonymous except that we know exactly who these people are family oh I hope my wife doesn't mind me saying this but seriously like like we were told these things that were bad people yes the word evil came up in that discussion so I'm evil you may think that of what well yeah it's the eyebrows my students know this half of them are here it's the eyebrows so if you look at a poll again this is not a scientific this is just a survey 88% of scientists think that GMO food is safe to eat that's not surprising but only 37% of the public does so that's yikes I'm not going to go through this whole thing but if you think about the psychology of this the philosophy of this I can tell you you know if you feel pro or against something you are not going to be able to as an anti-vax person convince a provax person to change their mind and vice versa it's just not going to work not unless something really serious happens and even not even then so DNA is the essence of an organism so if you change the DNA by altering the genetic structure by inserting a gene from another organism so you extend that out and people talk about if you dig enough online the fish tomato so if you take a gene from a fish and you put it in tomato it's going to take what tastes like fish that is not the way genetics works nor is it going to become scaly or anything else like that that's just not the way it works then of course you're the subset of people who think oh it's not natural because it's in a lab it's scientific you're mixing test tubes you've got your little epipypet you're putting it together you're growing it's not natural there's that word again is it well if that's not natural then your phones aren't natural because that's all technology that was developed in a lab any of this the stuff you're sitting on by the way the particle board the plastic that was all developed in a lab so if you're going to be natural go out and cut a tree and and get out the lathe and get out the plane you know because you can't use anything that was developed technologically like a miter box or anything like that see where the slope goes with this if you try to extend that out picking and choosing and then going back to the other thing that I was accused of you know GMO GMOs cause disease and sterility and contamination of food and the world is going to end because some reason so there's different ways different counter arguments that you get if you try to argue or discuss even if you keep your temper under control which you can imagine I can't keep my temper under control when it comes to this stuff so what it comes down to is GMOs are dangerous and immoral or chemicals or anything science-based so chemical free and all natural this are slides picked from my previous talks and I thought they were they were applicable here so the the vitamin A precursors that are in the golden rice are they different than the vitamin A precursors that are in any other like natural carrots is it different though it's not it's the same chemical sugars whether you are sucking on sugarcane or you're pouring it from a container it's the same chemical structure so vitamin C same thing plant and animal extracts layers stuffs natural crude oil that's natural poison ivy anyone who's ever tried fugu puffer fish you actually have to be specifically trained to cut it so you don't have a lot of the neurotoxin that can kill you but we certainly like to inject versions of botulinum toxin into ourselves arsenic and rice and apples I just saw something that the FDA is now making a mandate to reduce the amount of arsenic in children's baby rice mercury and fish so fish Friday fish boil you're eating mercury sorry there's no way around it so our GMO is natural the internet consensus if you believe the internet it's not it's evil it's unnatural so again back to the social media thing it's now a force social media justice social media warriors so get the pitchforks out that used to be the thing right you see that you see the villagers get out the pitchforks so you're going to go and chase down the heathens or the vampires these days it's a whole bunch of anonymous people on the internet bending together to take down corporations so pressure has led the general mills to use only non GMO cane sugar instead of beet sugar for Cheerios not its other products just for Cheerios because it is there I believe it's their highest selling cereal the rest of them yeah who cares what's in you know that sugary thing because it's about the sugar it's not about the grain most cereals again another cereal how cereals for some reason so was Kashi removing GMO ingredients from their products not just cereals but all that stuff so this is an interesting graphic how many Twitter users engage brands so 30% I know the text the text is small here so I'll read this out 30% of active Twitter users share opinions about products so tweeting about products I see I do more sharing of products via Facebook I guess I'm not good enough with Twitter yet 32% of active Twitter users make recommendations about products so you buy something you like it you tweet about it that's what you do these days those of you that are not familiar with this that's how that's how things get spread around it's not as though you're telling your friends by actually talking to them you're saying it on Twitter 30% of active Twitter users asked for record asked for recommendations and then ten ninety percent of active Twitter users seek customer support for companies via Twitter so engaging the company there are hundreds of millions of Twitter users hunt billions I think when you get to Facebook and that's how things are being discussed these days it's not calling up your friend and saying you know I need this kind of product you know something that's good it's too slow you know we've gotten to a point and I see this with students it's not about talking on the phone anymore I don't have to worry about students answering their phones in class I have to worry about students texting in class that's what the issue is because using the phone talking using your mouth is too slow fingers are faster apparently not the way that I'm talking you can tell I talk fast I talk faster that I can use my fingers so what about product labeling so a lot of this social media force is now driving the call to label GMOs the number of states to do it free and why is it an issue because it involves state legislatures and we know how well they can function national legislature to depends on who's in charge whether things get done or not and again depending on what side of the aisle you are it's going to be pro business or anti-business or pro choice or not when it comes to these sort of things so Connecticut Maine and Vermont's way far away have dealt with this but other than that there is no requirements it's voluntary so you can see for marketing purposes the bottom line for profit that's what kind of a cynic I am companies are labeling there's no GMOs in this why because they know that people will buy it and what else will people do for that product pay more jack up the price no GMOs is it actually cheaper to get more expensive to get some of those things actually yeah it is a little bit so that's another thing that it comes with GMOs cost so you will see labels like this depending on the company since we live in a state that doesn't have a mandate you will see products but that is the choice of the company can you believe them oh can you because we're not trusting Montana and Santo they're evil but I can trust this other corporation because they are selling me something I want but wait a minute wait a minute that's selective line crossing yeah so who do you believe you believe what you want to believe because this label is gonna make a lot of people feel better about themselves but is the food any difference to their body no not based on current studies there's no difference between what GMO genetically modified organisms if you say genetically modified corn non genetically modified corn it goes through it comes out the same way because right in here it's very strongly acidic and it's gonna eat through most things and eventually it's just gonna pass it all on through yes I do because even though a lot of these companies are for-profits they have a vested interest in keeping us alive and growing and if we are dying off that means there are less people to buy those products it's the ultimate cynic in me they might not necessarily keep want to keep us alive because they want to keep us happy they want to keep themselves happy because they need people to buy their products well that is that is a different issue with the testing process and sometimes things don't become apparent with the testing process and but the number of times that occurs is generally in a very very small percentage one of the things that is an issue not only with that but also with GMOs is long-term and it then it does play into the short amount of time it is for testing we don't know what long-term effects these will have if any the likelihood is that there won't be any but we do have things that come across chemically speaking usually like freons that cause damage to the environment that we can't see because we haven't done 30 or 40 or 50 or a hundred years of testing we've just done five ten fifteen and we don't see on that time frame so it's a balance between best for the public and best for the bottom line I think it's a balancing act you know and again you could come on both sides of that I believe a lot of companies there is money in there is money in for the greater good because the money for not for the greater good is war and that's that's what you could consider evil so killing people yes there's a profit in that too keeping people alive is a greater profit because you have more people so I'm gonna go through this quickly because I I talk as you can tell so peer review so this is a process that process that not a lot of people are familiar with and it comes down to who is looking at these products so when you are genetically modifying something if you are releasing a new chemical releasing a new drug who is checking people who are experts in that field so when you want to get FDA approval the FDA has scientists that can go over all the specific science that is associated with these projects be able to reproduce it be able to see well what is happening to make sure that if you are eating something that's genetically modified your P is good seriously so when I publish a paper what I did publish a paper when I was in graduate school the reviewers were people who are familiar with a very specific chemistry that I was doing so that's the ACS the American Chemical Society this is the Journal of the American Medical Association again FDA approval or USDA approval that's where we're talking about consumable materials but there are experts that are approving these so whenever a private company like Monsanto Monsanto wants to release a new crop for edible use they have to go through the government so then it comes down to who are you trusting you trust in the government or you trusting private enterprise well in this case you have to trust both because that's the process to get from the lab to the table so Monsanto funds their own enterprise the government has to fund their enterprise through taxes otherwise things don't get approved or they get rushed you see where I'm going with so I am not supporting either one officially but where are you going to throw your support who do you trust or do you not trust anything well it's healthy to be skeptical but you have to draw the line somewhere when it comes to the medication you're taking the food you are eating who do you trust almost sounds like who you're gonna call okay so the controversy is not going to stop it's going to continue as long as there is there are people in white coats doing things in labs that are separated from day-to-day society people are going to be skeptical those people in lab coats doing things whether they're working for the government whether they're working in academics or whether they're working in private enterprise you are not going to be able to convince you so if you are you are listening to me and saying I don't believe a worthy you're saying I don't care you are not I'm not gonna be able to convince you I'm sorry about that but nothing that I could say whether I'm using a nice voice or using the voice I'm using right now which is not really that nice nothing is going to change and that's that's kind of sad there are GMOs are very beneficial and I picked a couple specifically the golden rice but I could have listed at least a dozen different situations around the world which genetically modified organisms are helping subsistence farmers cassava root eggplant cotton in areas where those crops were suffering significantly and then you need to be able to trust the information that you are getting and that comes down to who you are and what your experience is and that's not something that is very easily changed and it goes back to point number one it relates to the controversy there are always going to be people that are going to be upset about something and so they're focusing their efforts here but what's interesting is if there's a person who is talking to you and the contrary opinions contrary opinion anti GMO anti-vaxx what is the information that they are presenting to you are they presenting to you scientific information they talking from an emotional basis are they using anecdotes are they cherry picking their information are they using discredited scientists because there are scientists and doctors who are anti GMO anti-vaxx and the first source that you are going to get from someone who follows those views is this doctor okay so let's say that person has five doctors I have 10,000 so who are you gonna believe there are people who are psychologically wired to believe the five over the 10,000 because the 10,000 is a conspiracy or they're paid by the government even though those 10,000 are government academic and independent and private and so you can't bring them all together again the differences you can make specifically in the corn it's all you know the difference you can see very easily in corn between genetically modified and growing in healthy corn and not so I want to leave you with a challenge because you are going to leave this room believing me or not thinking I'm a quack or not but you have the ability to find your own information even if you don't if you're not internet savvy we have a library here there are books magazines you can talk to an expert I am not the expert biologist here Mark Schmitz is the biologist here not that I want to put him on the spot but he would know a lot more about this than me especially about fish there's genetically modified fish genetically modified salmon so there that area too you have to make the best judgment for you health wise psychologically where wherever you lie on this but I by implore you to make sure that you get all of the information both sides and don't just stick to the people that are telling you want what you want to hear because that's not the way to look at a situation I have to dig deep into stuff that really makes me upset if I want to talk about this reading anti-vax anti-gmo pages because to me these people are not using scientific information to support their arguments I am I read papers I go to peer-reviewed science so it's very frustrating but I still have to go to those places and try to understand what these people are coming from that's why I wanted to include the psychology because that is a very significant aspect so get the information before you make a final decision