Daily News
Thursday, 17th January, 2002Closed Minds Are A Threat To The Greater Crop Of Knowledge
The destruction of genetically engineered potatoes in a Christchurch greenhouse laboratory is a blaring statement of ignorance. Worse, it is a statement of some vandalising individuals' insistence that everyone else should remain as ignorant as them. The crop of 1300 plants at the Lincoln Agriculture and Science Centre had been developed over several years to monitor the effect of genetic changes aimed at improving disease and pest resistence -- which might reduce the need for chemical sprays, as well as improve the plant's nutritional and medical qualities, and its availability to New Zealand and a hungry world. Ironically, the trials were also aimed at identifying genetic sequences linked to specific traits so that conventional cross-breeding would be more effective. The whole operation was in a secure, sealed environment, not tended as an open field trial, which could be accused of faintly raising the risk of contamination to adjacent potato crops -- if there were any.An exhaustive Royal Commission on Genetic Modification last year recommended that such research proceed with even less than Lincoln's extreme caution. The commission's sensible and widely praised conclusions from 14 months' public and scientific submissions -- hesitantly endorsed by the Government -- horrified the Green Party, which had demanded the inquiry in the first place without ever imagining that it would leave with GE egg all over its face.
The Greens want an organic, GE-free New Zealand by 2020. Party members, such as co-leader Rod Donald and MP Nandor Tanczos, flatly refused to accept the $6 million, 1200-page commission report and gave unequivocal support to militant greens planning "non-violent direct action" against test crops. The weekend raid in Christchurch is the result of such encouragement to youthful zealots, as interested in a bit of a thrill as they might be committed to Green principles. Former Wild Greens activist Mr Tanczos, while claiming no prior knowledge of the destruction, refuses to condemn it. In this election year, Mr Tanczos will succeed or fail at the polls on his clearly defined objectives. Despite the honesty and colour that Mr Tanczos adds to the political scene, his brand of environmental fundamentalism is diametrically opposed to the knowledge direction in which New Zealand should be headed.
As pioneering and Nobel Prize-winning chemist Marie Curie declared a century ago, nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood. Genetic engineering has been going on long enough for science, and even the lay public, to see that its benefits vastly outweigh its disadvantages. The greater danger is from the mindset the prevents the expansion of knowledge -- the key to human evolution and survival.
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