For more than twenty years, many eminent scientists and scientific institutions have routinely claimed that genetically modified foods are safe. And because of the perceived authority of their pronouncements, most government officials and members of the media have believed them. But when the arguments these scientists employ to support their claims are subjected to scrutiny, it becomes clear that important facts have invariably been misrepresented — either deliberately or through substantial negligence. And when these facts are fairly considered, the arguments collapse (1).

A prime example of a purportedly scientific — but in reality, inaccurate — publication on GM foods was issued by the UK’s Royal Society in May 2016 (2). Titled “GMO Plants: Questions and Answers,” it claims to provide “unbiased” and “reliable” answers to peoples’ most pressing questions. However, analysis reveals that it not only displays a strong pro-GMO bias, but that several of its assertions are demonstrably false. The following paragraphs examine these defects and reveal the surprising extent to which that document, as well as previous publications of the Society about GM foods, conflict with the truth.

This analysis has major implications, because if the world’s oldest and most respected scientific institution cannot argue for the safety of GM foods without systematically distorting the facts, it indicates that such distortion is essential to the argument.

Obfuscating the unnatural nature of the GM process and ignoring its unsettling features

The document’s bias is evident from the outset, and the authors fail to furnish a forthright answer to the initial question: “What is genetic modification (GM) of crops and how is it done?”(3). Instead, their response is significantly misleading because it omits the most unnatural and unsettling features while downplaying the unnaturalness of those that are mentioned.

Failing to note the randomness and disruptiveness of the insertion process
In one of the biggest obfuscations, the authors avoid mentioning that biotechnicians have been inserting foreign DNA into plant genomes in a haphazard manner — and that the insertions not only disrupt the region of DNA into which they wedge but cause disruptions throughout the DNA strand, a well-documented phenomenon that some scientists call “genome scrambling.”(4)

Concealing the need to artificially induce gene expression
The authors are equally evasive regarding how the foreign genes are induced to actually function, and they fail to disclose a crucial fact: that inserting a new gene does not in itself endow the plant with the desired new trait. That’s because it’s essential to convert the information encoded within the gene into a protein or other molecule, and in almost every case, that won’t happen without artificial alteration of the inserted genetic material.