There is no question that American academia is driven more by politics and cultural agendas than being trusted guides for the public, and a new paper by the European Society of Medicine shows that militancy is a key reason why countries which could benefit the most from Golden Rice are terrified of science.

Golden Rice, fortified with β-carotene that becomes vitamin A in the body, should be prized by progressives who mask their hatred of science behind "distrust" of corporations, because it has no corporate control. It is entirely public domain, created by academics to help the world.

Instead of embracing it, environmental lawyers in groups like Greenpeace were giddy at the opportunity to block it easily. No corporations mean no lawyers to oppose them, just hapless scientists who believe environmental groups care about people and a few small nonprofits. They pulled out the usual arguments, like that Evil Science would taint Government Organic food, except countries like the Philippines don't grow organic food. 


Does the picture on the right make you think you'll get cancer? I know how you vote. Credit: Golden Rice Project.

Yet Dr. Adrian Dubock, Executive Secretary, Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, Switzerland, says US academics are as much to blame as greedy lawyers and the Useful Idiots who parrot their claims.

Dubock should know. Switzerland is one of the most anti-science countries in Europe. Like Ireland being the most anti-Semitic, to be number one in a continent famous for being anti- really takes some doing. Not only do nonprofits like Swiss Public Eye lie about scientists, they are paid by their government to do it, and get anyone who shows they lie banned and unable to be seen in Switzerland by order of the Swiss government - just like China and Russia do.

His article is about a study where kids in China were fed basically a vitamin-fortified rice, no different than we fortify milk, and the trial was conducted because activists said it didn't work at all. 

The results were published showing it worked just as stated, so Greenpeace started promoting the ethical review certification, and then got Obama's National Institutes of Health, which really means the epidemiology-driven and therefore science-hating National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, to get out the knives against Tufts University, where the primary author had worked for 25 years. There were 72 kids who ate the stuff, there was no problem, it's just vitamin-fortified rice, but a whole lot of US academics who may have been on the payroll of China (a lot of that wouldn't come out until later and they are under no obligation to disclose it) piled on and tried to claim it was unethical.

Well, the three Chinese researchers who set it up had all of the boxes had been checked and when Tufts did an investigation they found no evidence of the supposed fraud that China and American environmentalists who also want to see American agriculture in Asia discredited insisted had happened. The trial was registered with ClinicalTrials.Gov. Yet the school needed to feed the beasts in culture so they claimed they found 'insufficient evidence' that they Dr. Guangwen Tang had met the ethical review standards in China. Which could mean anything. The primary scholar sued to block its retraction but lost in court.

Yet activists claim that because the paper was retracted it was fraud. What do they say about Gilles-Eric Seralini and his goofy claim that GMOs cause cancer being retracted, or Andrew Wakefield claiming vaccines cause autism? In the cases of their side being pulled down, Science Is A Vast Corporate Conspiracy and Big Companies pressured the journals.