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Preaching Objectivity – Practicing Obfuscation


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1 Centre for Ge-netic Manipulation of Crop Plants, Uni-versity of Delhi South Campus, Benito Juarez Road, New Delhi 110 021, India
 

This is in response to a Commentary by Gutierrez et al.1 on my review article2 that was written as a critique of some very flawed analysis of plant breeding technologies and their impact on food security and the environment by Kesavan and Swaminathan3–5 . So far, the debate on the use of GM* technologies, at least in India, has been mostly in the newspapers, television and social media. Barring some exceptions, there has been very little investigative journalism on the GM crops. In most of the debates on the television and I have participated in some, the anchors put anti-GM activists and scientists together and let them quarrel – a scene very similar to the way Ideologues and party spokespersons get at one another every evening on the major news channels of India. The other site for the debates has been the social media where invectives are used freely, and prejudices are flaunted without any restraint; any in-depth analysis on this platform is simply not possible. It is a welcome change that a scientific journal of considerable historical relevance is devoting pages to a very critical issue – whether we should use some of the new tools of genetic manipulation to breed better crops for meeting the avowed goal of low-input, high-output agriculture? Hopefully, this will bring some objectivity and a sense of responsibility to the discourse.
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  • Preaching Objectivity – Practicing Obfuscation

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Authors

Deepak Pental
Centre for Ge-netic Manipulation of Crop Plants, Uni-versity of Delhi South Campus, Benito Juarez Road, New Delhi 110 021, India

Abstract


This is in response to a Commentary by Gutierrez et al.1 on my review article2 that was written as a critique of some very flawed analysis of plant breeding technologies and their impact on food security and the environment by Kesavan and Swaminathan3–5 . So far, the debate on the use of GM* technologies, at least in India, has been mostly in the newspapers, television and social media. Barring some exceptions, there has been very little investigative journalism on the GM crops. In most of the debates on the television and I have participated in some, the anchors put anti-GM activists and scientists together and let them quarrel – a scene very similar to the way Ideologues and party spokespersons get at one another every evening on the major news channels of India. The other site for the debates has been the social media where invectives are used freely, and prejudices are flaunted without any restraint; any in-depth analysis on this platform is simply not possible. It is a welcome change that a scientific journal of considerable historical relevance is devoting pages to a very critical issue – whether we should use some of the new tools of genetic manipulation to breed better crops for meeting the avowed goal of low-input, high-output agriculture? Hopefully, this will bring some objectivity and a sense of responsibility to the discourse.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.18520/cs%2Fv118%2Fi6%2F863-867