censored

Is Scientific American Censoring GMO-Skeptical Comments?

The article contains outright false claims, such as the old GMO industry line, “Humans have been genetically modifying foods through selective breeding for more than 10,000 years.” In fact GM is radically different from natural breeding and entails different risks.

Shermer also writes enthusiastically of GM golden rice, which he says is engineered “to help Third World children with nutritional deficiencies that have caused millions to go blind”.

April 23, 2015 | Source: GM Watch | by

Academic physician-educator banned from pointing out errors in pro-GMO article – Claire Robinson reports

Scientific American recently published a pro-GMO article by Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine.

The article contains outright false claims, such as the old GMO industry line, “Humans have been genetically modifying foods through selective breeding for more than 10,000 years.” In fact GM is radically different from natural breeding and entails different risks.

Shermer also writes enthusiastically of GM golden rice, which he says is engineered “to help Third World children with nutritional deficiencies that have caused millions to go blind”. But he completely ignores the fact that golden rice failed its field trials and has never been shown to be safe to eat or efficacious in treating vitamin A deficiency in the target malnourished populations.

In other words, GM golden rice still isn’t ready and perhaps never will be. Meanwhile non-GMO methods have successfully reduced vitamin A deficiency in the Philippines to the point where it’s no longer a severe public health concern.

Dr Martin Donohoe, Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health at Portland State University, noticed many inaccurate and misleading claims in Shermer’s article. Dr Donohoe submitted a polite, factual, and well-referenced comment to Scientific American’s comments thread under the article (you can read his comment below).

Dr Donohoe began by correcting Shermer’s claims about the naturalness of GM: “Shermer confuses genetically modified (GM) crops (created through the insertion of a gene from another organism) with genetic modification through selective intra-species breeding based on genotype and phenotype.”

After correcting several other errors of fact on the part of Shermer, Dr Donohoe ended his comment with a mild-mannered suggestion to the self-proclaimed “skeptic” Shermer:

“I suggest Shermer be more skeptical of the claims of industry scientists, whose promulgations are (as the record in agriculture, medicine, and elsewhere shows), subject to bias, data manipulation, and over-promotion.”

However, and to his surprise, Dr Donohoe noticed that his comment was removed from the comments thread a couple of days after it was posted. He received an email from a nameless “Scientific American Webmaster”, who said, “Your comment has been deleted because it contains personal contact information, which is not permitted in our comments.”

Fine, Dr Donohoe thought. He removed his personal contact information and tried to re-submit his edited comment.
 
But he could not. His ability to comment had been disabled. Dr Donohoe emailed “Scientific American Webmaster”, politely asking why. He received a reply saying:

“Our Community Guidelines are clear about promotion and providing personal contact information in the comments, in that they are not permitted.  We sent the email pasted below to inform you of our Guidelines, however further posts from your account continued to violate our Guidelines.”

Since Dr Donohoe had deleted his personal information from his comment, that only left “promotion” as a valid reason for Scientific American to delete his comments.