100 Nobel Laureates Demand that Greenpeace Stop Killing Poor Children
29th June 2016
Good luck with that.
An open letter today signed by 100 Nobel Prize Laureates calls upon the anti-technology activist group “Greenpeace to cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general.” The laureates point out that “scientific and regulatory agencies around the world have repeatedly and consistently found crops and foods improved through biotechnology to be as safe as, if not safer than those derived from any other method of production. There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption. Their environmental impacts have been shown repeatedly to be less damaging to the environment, and a boon to global biodiversity.”
The laureates specifically demand that Greenpeace stop its attacks on Golden Rice which has been genetically enhanced to produce a vitamin A precursor as a way to prevent millions of deaths and cases of blindness annually in poor countries where the grain is the chief food staple. Vitamin A deficiency causes blindness in between 250,000 and 500,000 children each year, half of whom die within 12 months, according to the World Health Organization. A study by German researchers in 2014 estimated that activist opposition to the deployment of Golden Rice has resulted in the loss of 1.4 million life-years in just India alone.