Dogapillar
I don’t really want to jinx it, but when was the last time you read anything about GM foods? You remember, the Frankenstein variety of tomatoes that were going to to turn vegetables into animals and children into monsters.
It’s funny how fashions come and go so quickly.
Obviously, climate change is the science debate du jour, with occasional side dishes of politically charged abortion discussions and a dessert of selective embryos.
Humans, it appears, are unable to hold down multiple debates at once, especially as far as science and the media are concerned.
This could be an advantage… I think scientists should create a dummy issue. Something so terrifying and horrible that everyone will have to object to it.
Something along the lines of a study to see if it is possible to capture flesh eating monsters from another dimension to put in zoos where they are fed on kittens…
Something they have no intention of ever even looking in to, but that would at least take some of the flack away from research into life saving techniques.
Maybe a cure for religion – ‘Scientists find believer gene… plans to deactivate it’.
Something like that.
justine on 
I like that believer gene idea. If there is some genetic predisposition towards irrationality and we can isolate it we could wipe bull-shit from the face of the Earth!
if we could do that, there would be no gullible people to play silly tricks on…by the way, did you know that they took the word gullible out of the dictionary?
And we’d lose half our dang math.
hahaha wtf!? i wish my dog would have done that..
LMAO.
Well you know, theres the claim of the gay gene, why not a believer gene. or maybe they link the believe gene the crazy gene.
I would rather they just find the cure for cancer and aids. or maybe just stupidity…
yeah, i think the cure for the common stupidity would be awesome. I would pay for that.
Darwin was working on wiping out the stupidity gene.
Unfortuently, we developed warning labels.
Curse you product warning lables…
May favorite is a Swedish made chain saw that says don’t use on genitalia… if not for that warning label, whole generations of stupidity could have been stopped
hehe… I remember reading that one somewhere.
Something like “Do not attempt to stop moving chain with hands or genitals”
I’m guessing either someone attempted it, and sued, or that the warning-writing person has an odd sense of humour… that or it’s a bad translation from Swedish. Who knows, their word for “genitals” could be really similar to some other word.
Adam, if you run for supreme ruler of the universe, i’m totally going to vote for you.
idk about the GM produce, but here in the states tomatoes are giving people salmonella. it’s not exactly turning children’s into monsters, but we’re heading in the right direction. go USA!
I would, but I’d probably end up as ’supreme set square of the universe’ instead.
There wa a big outbrak of food poisoning in San Francisco about 6 years ago… all the local takeaways were blamed, but it turned out that it originated at a salad bar. No one suspects the salad bar.
Haha, that pun was FANTASTIC.
NO ONE *expects* the salad indigestion!
I never knew what the big issue with GM was… aside from the irrational fear of the Frankenstein’s monster image that the media created.
Actually thinking about it, fear of the media image wasn’t so irrational… they painted a scary picture.
Amend that to *misguided* fear of the media image
I think it was the idea that you could somehow catch genes, like diseases.
And that would be pretty scary. It would also be a major change in how genes work on the whole.
I think they rationalised this because viruses (which can insert DNA into organisms) were used in the creation process.
I’m all for GM foods in principle, but I think there’s a good economic argument against them as they currently exist. The frankenfood argument gets all the attention because killer tomatoes are far cooler than accountants.
If there’s no economic benefit, there’s no point to them. But the way some people reacted to even the research was… shall we say a little hostile.
I suppose there was concern that a GM version could contaminate the “natural” crops and out-compete them… or that if a plant were engineered to be resistant to everything and able to grow in any conditions then it would be almost impossible to eradicate if it were to escape (like the ultimate weed) and take over all available growing space.
Hehe… it would make food very boring if a modified form of corn did that. But if it was cotton, we’d really be screwed.
No, no, if they were afraid of that they’d just have to build in an Achilles’ heel, so when the Doctor shows up and they have to kill the plant they can reveal that it has a special weakness at a crucial moment and he’ll be able to implement the weakness in a clever way and THE PLANET WILL BE SAVED ONCE AGAIN!
I’ve been fascinated lately by the highly cookie-cutter nature of the plots of Sci-Fi TV shows. There’s a good Star Trek version of that plot, too, I bet.
And of course the weakness would have to be a common and easily obtained thing, like water or toothpaste or something.
That, or a highly scientific rare compound that just so happens to be found in trace amounts in a common and easily obtained thing like water or toothpaste.
I bet it’ll be kittens.
coincidentally, my tomato plants are doing suspiciously well
Oooh, I do hope it’s broccoli!
If there is a believer gene it would be unwise to get rid of it. Sure, it might get rid of the evil parts of organized religion, but it would also get rid of entertainment entirely. The same thing that allows people to believe in a deity also, on some level, allows them to suspend disbelief and enjoy Lord of the Rings or the Flowfield Unity.
So, dude… if you want to cut out your own fanbase…
I want to make it clear… I’m pretty sure there isn’t a ‘believer gene’ and even if there was I would not advocate removing it just as I would not advocate removing any gene really… but suggestinbg that ’scientists’ are doing that is just the sort of thing that would grab media attention and deflect it away from some of the more useful, but ‘controversial’ research.
I’m using a lot of inverted commas today.
Sirtheyarecalled”singlequotes.” British should learn Amenglish.
Oh, what if they discovered the can’t detect irony gene, and tried to remove that!!!
But I think if you add up all the good and bad results of deactivating the believer gene the net result would be an improvement over existence as it stands today.
You could turn it off, but no one would believe you’d done it.
But doesn’t this already happen to an extent. This is from as anti-GMO group, talking about Golden Rice, the genEngineered rice with pro-vit A added:
“But at the end of the day, the main agenda for golden rice is not malnutrition but garnering greater support and acceptance for genetic engineering amongst the public, the scientific community and funding agencies. Given this reality, the promise of golden rice should be taken with a pinch of salt.”
They’re really down on that idea, and not necessarily for bad reasons — after all, I’m not sure I trust Monsanto or DuPont or AstraZeneca to do the ‘right thing’ all that much… the larger the company, the more likely that they’ll forget about people to think about money. But at the same time, PR has to happen so that science can move forward, and scientists aren’t very good at PR. So, it gets left up to the corporations that are trying to benefit form the science, right? How can we fix that?
popular media might offer some help. unfortunately, all the scientifically themed fiction i read seems to wag a finger at the scientific community and suggest advances that are made will spawn some kind of horrible violence. sometimes without any positive effects at all.
i’d like to read a historical fiction about those who were persecuted for heresy by the church.
Golden rice? Pinch of salt? What sort of a GM recipe is this?
A recipe for disaster, obviously. Didn’t you read it?
I did, but I had no answer to your question of ‘How can we fix that?’, so I just made up something snarky to make myself feel better.
Golden Rice Cannibal Casserole
Ingredients:
3/4 Cups Golden Rice
2 Cups Cubed Chicken (crossbred with PEOPLE)
1/2 Cup Radioactive Onion Chopped (handle with lead gloves)
1/2 Cup Flesh-Eating Celery Chopped (also handle with lead gloves–do not ingest)
2 Tablespoons Butter Or Margarine or Super-Margarine
1 Can Cream Of Brain Matter Soup
1/2 Cup Low Fat Sour Cream (LOW FAT!)
you find a bunch of people like me, for whom a job in the field of science communications seems ideal. scientists/companies employ me (well, not quite yet, but hypothetically) to relate in laymans terms concepts and inventions and complex things, so that people can understand them and begin to judge the benefits for themselves.
That’s the most important part of science, communication, and it is one that is often sadly lacking.
Scientists, as smart as they are tend to be so at the expense of interactivity. They’re not good communicators and tend to speak in jargon… and what use is something really important if no one understands it?
I was thinking about that recently.
The next page of my comic to go up will be a remake of one of my originals, based on the Frankenfood idea. At the time I drew the original there was huge uproar about GM foods. Now there’s pretty much nothing. The media seem to have a case of ADHD to be honest.