Do GMOs Cause Cancer?

Speaker 0 00:00:00 There's a lot of papers that are out there that say, you know, GMOs cause cancer or glyphosate causes cancer, but they're done by people who are just compiling little lines and things out of other papers, putting them together in ways that make it look like a compelling argument, but they've never done any laboratory research. They say their research, but they means they look on Google. Speaker 2 00:00:27 Welcome to another episode of GMO. Watch on your host Emily journey. I'm curious about GMOs and why I choose to eat organic and non GMO foods. My guests and I are going to break down the hype from the facts around GMOs in our food so that you can come to your own conclusions about what you want to eat. Dr. Kevin Folta is a professor of horticultural science at the university of Florida. He is also the host of talking biotech podcast. Dr. Folta is well versed in genetic engineering, biotech, and GMO's Speaker 3 00:01:06 So GMOs have been around for a long time. I bought the domain GMO watch.com more than 10 years ago. And they've been around much longer than that. And there have been claims about GMOs, probably the good things that they're capable of and also some bad things that they're potentially capable of. And it's really hard to dissect and kind of weed out. Like what can I trust? You know, what's the information I can trust. Do you have any suggestions on how do I figure out what's worth paying attention to and what isn't Speaker 0 00:01:41 Yeah, you really have to pay attention to the peer reviewed literature and the reproducible peer reviewed literature. So what does that mean? You know, websites are simple and a lot of folks have domains that they'll tell you all of the horrible things that genetic engineering of crops will do. They've been doing it for 30 years. None of their claims have come true. On the other hand, even the peer review literature, which means it's being produced by either academic government or sometimes industry scientists, they produce the li the research that goes into the public domain. And then it's tested again by independent groups. And so when you see independent reproducibility around given claims, then you can kind of put some stock in them. And that has to go for safety as well as for harm. The problem is, is that there are edges of the peer review literature called predatory publishing, and also some other places that have lower standards that will accept research, which isn't so good. But when you see research that dies on the vine, a one-off paper, that's never repeated again, a claim that like GMOs cause cancer like Sarah Leni published in 2012, nine years later, nobody has repeated that work and it tells you, you probably can't put much stock, Speaker 3 00:02:56 But those things have a tendency to spread. Hey, that's a keyword search phrase, GMOs cause cancer, right? So that's like, I can type that in and I can get lots of websites that all show up with that, with that claim, Speaker 0 00:03:10 You'll get thousands. Speaker 3 00:03:12 So does that mean then that what you're saying is that I need to subscribe to a science journal of research. Is that what I have to do? Speaker 0 00:03:21 No. I think what's your best bet is, is to do two things. Look on Google scholar or pub med. Those places have the vetted literature that currently exists. And you can look in scholarly reviews, have you put in GMR genetic engineering, the scientists, we don't use the term GMO, and it's not a term we use something has either genetically engineered or bread or mutated. You know, those are the words we use. Genetic modification to me means changing the genes from the previous generation. So a hybrid is a genetic modification. So you have to look in the peer reviewed literature. So Google scholar of med for genetic engineering review or GMO review. And usually you can find a really good comprehensive set of independent reviews from independent scientists who will review the literature. That would be a good place to start. And you might find some stuff that's kind of dubious by the way. Speaker 0 00:04:16 I mean, those are not necessarily filters. They generally are because you have to publish in a good place to get in there typically, especially with pub med, but Google scholar does pick up some things that are a little bit questionable, but that's your starting point. And what you find is that if people are citing that work, meaning they find value in it to the point where they will use it as a basis for more research or to replicate it or expand on it, then it's usually something that's trustworthy. Things that die on the vine. You see at one time and never see it again, nobody sites it or expands upon it that usually says it's not legit. The other important one is you have to look carefully. If the people who are writing the articles that are appearing in Google scholar appearing in the peer review, literature are actually doing research. There's a lot of papers that are out there that say, you know, GMOs cause cancer or glyphosate causes cancer, but they're done by people who are just compiling little lines and things out of other papers, putting them together in ways that make it look like a compelling argument, but they've never done any laboratory research. They say their research, but they means they look on Google. Speaker 3 00:05:29 They had an idea. Then they looked for ways to support it. Speaker 0 00:05:32 Yes, that kind of confirmation bias is what you see. You see that there's a claim that's made that is then supported. They use every piece of evidence they can find to support it, but nothing to challenge it or as legitimate work. We'll talk about strengths and weaknesses. And I think over 20, some years of talking about this topic, I've always come at it from, let's talk about the strengths. Let's talk about the weaknesses, benefits and risks. That's legitimate conversation, Speaker 3 00:05:58 This approach to gathering information. I think having this conversation about how we do that, the resources that we use, and then how we evaluate the information that we see and read and how we evaluate the people who put forth this information is so important and it takes effort. Well, it takes asking the question how right? So I never, Hey, I never knew there was this thing called Google scholar. And that I could use that as a way to gather some information. I still have to evaluate quality of it. I still have to make my own decision, right. But I have to take some extra steps in order to do that. I have to take extra steps to really verify the quality of information, Speaker 0 00:06:45 Critical thinking and critical evaluation. Right. And another good trick to this that's usually pretty good is if you see a claim and you look for it in a relevant scientific conference, if I go to a conference on plant biology or on agriculture, or even in, you know, medical conferences, you don't see posters and presentations on the dangers of GMOs or the Dalio, glyphosate, and cancer. What you see is ways to improve crop resistance to disease. You see what are the genes that control fruit quality. These are the kinds of things we see at scientific conferences. And the other stuff is really, um, kind of just a nonsense world. You don't see people actively studying these areas. And the funny part is is that if those claims held it any credibility, you would see mountains of money going towards them and many people trying to study them. So in other words, the person who discovers a link that confirms a link between genetic engineering and whatever cancer, autism, whatever they would give grants forever. So there's a lot of incentive out there to play against the convention. And scientists always do that. We try really hard to be rule breakers. If there is some kind of discovery like that, I hope it comes out of my lab. Speaker 3 00:08:00 That makes sense. The point that you just made about, like, there is a link between GMOs and cancer, then there are plenty of people that are willing to work hard to find that. So one of the false claims about that we've seen over time is about GMOs is the GMOs cause cancer. I mean, is that the big one or are there other ones Speaker 0 00:08:22 It's one of the big claims, but the thing that's, the problem with that claim is twofold. One is there's not one thing that is a GMO, right? Genetic engineering happens for many different reasons for making better cheese, to making insulin, to making plants that are resistant to herbicide, to plants that protect themselves from insects. There's a million different ways in which genetic engineering has been used in medicine and in plants. So there's no one GMO thing in cancer is also not one thing. It's an entire spectrum of different disorders that all have a common root of, uh, cells, lack of ability to control its own growth and development. So it's two very broad claims that one affects the other. If it was legitimate, you would say plants to engineered with the gene for BT. The one that gives them resistance to insects causes Burkitt's lymphoma deaths, how it would be plausible from a realistic standpoint, that you would have a very specific cause a very specific effect. That's what you would see. If Speaker 3 00:09:28 So, not some just generalization that GMOs cause cancer like too broad, right? That's a big sign that it's not actually founded in anything of value. So how long has this been going on these false claims, like a decade, 20 years Speaker 0 00:09:44 Even before. And it really was all a residue of silent spring and really our, our nervousness about chemistry as a society, which, you know, has some basis, right? I mean, we all want a better environment. We want fewer chemicals. And especially in the area of food, farmers don't want to apply chemistry to crops. You know, it costs a ton of money to do it. So we're trying to get away from that stuff. And so when you started to see the companies that were creating chemistry now shifting to seeds, there became this very strong nervousness about that. You know, the suspicion I mentioned before and the claims about, well, it's, if you eat this, it will cause cancer. There's no plausible mechanism that that could happen. And there's no evidence epidemiologically that it does. So here we are, 30, 40 years later, the crops have been consumed or, well, I should say the ingredients from those crops have been consumed for 25 years now. Genetically engineered enzymes from cheese have been around for our 30 insulin has been around for 30, some 32 or more than that, almost 40. So a lot of products of genetic engineering have been something we've been with for a long time with no problems. Well, I shouldn't say no problems with minimal risks and problems that we understand. Speaker 3 00:11:00 So what do you think the cost do you think people have bought into the false claims that enough people have bought into these over time that it's having a negative effect on the food that lead or the scientific process or, you know, what's the impact of all that Speaker 0 00:11:18 All the above it's impacted our ability to get technology into crops that can help people. And the biggest examples I had, the first thing, when you started asking that question, I thought about Uganda, where they have a population which could use vitamin a, they have a population where you eat a banana, like thing called Matoka. So more like a plan Tate with every meal as the basis like the rice or the, or the potato and the, this with every meal and there's blindness. And there's also a problem with bacterial wilt, their genetic engineering solutions to solve both of those problems. And I've stood under those trees and they exist. They were made by African scientists for Africans, for African farmers. But because of the fear that's created in the west and the influence of activist groups in those countries, those trees that farmers could use and that people going blind could be consuming a vitamin, a beta carotene enriched version of that banana. They're not getting, those are behind barbed wire with an armed guard. And I sat out there and I almost cried because of it because you see the need in the field. I was on farms and you're standing among the solution that can't be used because of the fear that's built in a fluent nations. And I think it's shameful. Speaker 3 00:12:36 And is it just fear among the people or is it actually the government's getting involved and creating regulations and is the local government putting up that barbed wire Speaker 0 00:12:48 It's key players in the government. So in that place, in particular, the parliament approved that you use at least to begin to study it and the president shot it down. So one person who could be influenced from the outside, by the activists or by money or whatever was making decisions that parliament approved, but the EU, the holy you won't accept genetic engineering. And now that we're in the era of gene editing, which is a much more highly refined type of genetic engineering, they are not going to benefit from it where the rest of the world is and their farmers know it. And their scientists are ticked because the science is say, we can come up with solutions, that'll help our environment. It will help the food insecure will help our farmers. We can do it. And the EU says, we have a strict policy. No, it isn't going to happen. Speaker 3 00:13:36 They'll change their mind. The European union, will they change their mind about GMOs? Speaker 0 00:13:40 Yes. And so it's already starting to happen. Certain countries have said, we aren't going to worry about it. Part of Brexit, England is they're going full steam ahead with gene editing. There are other neighboring countries that are not in the EU will put pressure on them because they'll become big producers of commodities that the European union also produces. A great example was Romania, who was using genetic engineering in potato. And they cut the amount of insecticide. They used, they against Colorado beetle, they were growing. It finally became exporters' rather than importers. And then in 2006, it ended and they had to become importers again and now start spraying chemicals. What changed? They joined the EU and they couldn't use the genetically engineered potatoes anymore. So they had to start using chemicals and start becoming importers. And it's a great example of how the technology can be beneficial for individual governments. But these sweeping across the board banned genetic engineering, it just leads to bad stuff. And it leads to bad outcomes. Speaker 3 00:14:49 I guess, one of the bad outcomes. I mean, there's even more use of chemicals and insecticides, and as opposed to, if there's GMO seeds use and there's, then you have to use less. Is that right? Speaker 0 00:15:03 Yeah. That's one of the big fallacies is you hear well, it means they're going to spray more on the crops. If you're talking about insecticides, you can show that the use of BT crops. So the crops that incorporate the same little protein that is used in organic organic production, that instead of using it on the crops is having to spread it and spray it. You actually have the plant make that compound. Now it makes them impervious to certain insects, larvae don't feed on it. If they do, they take a bite and they die. It's a compound that can't hurt. You. Can't hurt me. People say, well, it's an insecticide. How can it not hurt you? Well, you don't give chocolate to a dog. You know? I mean, I'll eat it, but the dog can't certain things are toxic to certain organisms. And the ITI is very specific to specific insects as partially it's problem. Speaker 0 00:15:52 That's one of its drawbacks. It's too specific, but it'll work on certain insects and is cut things into the United States. Cotton was revolutionized by BT, in Bangladesh, some of the poorest farmers, farmers in the world that cover three, five acres. They used to spray tons of chemistry all the time to protect their crops. And we're talking about old-school insecticides. We're talking about things that we don't use here anymore, or very rarely used here in the states. They switched to the BT brinjal so the eggplant, and when they switched, you saw it go from a few farmers to a few more, to a few more. Now it's everywhere where these farmers are not spraying anymore, or at least it's spraying a lot less. And they're seeing their yields go up. They can send their kids to school. And now the seeds are being smuggled into other countries that haven't approved them because the farmers want them and the governments don't approve it. Speaker 3 00:16:44 So you've been the target of some anti GMO activists and your history Speaker 0 00:16:50 From the beginning. Speaker 3 00:16:52 Yeah. Tell me about that. Speaker 0 00:16:53 I never have looked at people against the technology as my enemies or as people I didn't, like I looked at, there were basically people who didn't understand. And my job as a teacher is to not tell them may you're an idiot and this is how it works. It's to help lead them to an understanding. And that's what my job was. And so in the first years that I gave talks about genetic engineering back around 2000, 2001, 2002, three, it was all me going to places where they didn't like the technology. And I would go there and talk about it and we'd have discussions and they were productive. And they were with wonderful people who cared about their planet, about their food. And we had great discussions and some of them left a little skeptical, but at least looking for more information. And sometimes they would show me down as a wish, who came from Monsanto to spread false information, you would hear all the above, but you always would get a letter afterwards. Speaker 0 00:17:47 You know, you get an email that would say, thank you for helping me learn more about this. I appreciate it. And that was my role. I role was to be the level headed, uh, soft scientist, whose job it was, was to talk about science, strengths and weaknesses. And as we started to get into the more divisive areas around 2012, 2013, about labeling policy, about other more divisive issues, you saw more momentum online in the anti GMO movement. The fact that I was a nice guy who was invited to the anti-China most stuff meant I must be eliminated. And I was targeted really hard by these folks. Back then to this day, I mean, were, if you go online on Google and Google, my name or Google images, me, you would not hire me. You would not invite me. You would not want me in your school. Speaker 0 00:18:36 Even today, even today, I still get it on Reddit. There's one guy who is everyday can, well, oftentimes just pounds, the internet with false information, other websites, they put up a one in December about how my garden looks like garbage my garden. I mean, I live on teenagers and I've got, you know, my, and my wife farms that we put at the farmer's market every week. It's insane what they do to just try to knock me down a peg. And what they're trying to do is take the trust that I earned because I am the person who crosses the line and says, how can I help you understand this? How can I share this information with you? How can I help you either be appropriately concerned or maybe help you focus your concerns on the real issues in genetic engineering. And when you start coming to a contentious argument as the level-headed scholar, who just wants to share science, you must go to be eliminated. Speaker 3 00:19:32 Oh, it hasn't slowed down for you in terms of the anti GMO activists and their efforts to tear you down. That just a regular thing. Speaker 0 00:19:41 And now maybe it's slowed down a little bit in the last couple of years, because I think they realized I'm a bad target. And when you go after me, there's a community of nerds out there who appreciate what I bring to the table who go to my defense. And I think it even, even folks in the anti GMO movement, I think, look at me as the reasonable person, because I'm not a pro GMO science, right? I'm a scientist who sees it as another tool in the toolbox. It's not a solution for everything. It's one thing that we can do to solve a problem. And I've never described myself as pro GMO. I'm a scientist who looks at all the tools of technology and how we can serve people better. And I think that folks in the anti GMO movement, many of them do see that as consistent with their, we share the same values. Speaker 0 00:20:33 I want the same thing and they do. I just have a different tool to get there. And I think that they, that they realize that when they go after me, it takes me out of the schools. And I don't just talk about GMOs in my life. I talk about conservation. I talk about water. I talk about change. I talk about vaccination. I talk about evolution and not all professors do that. Okay. I was going to schools once a month and growing plants with kids, starting gardens. I, this is what I did. And when the anti GMO stuff attack in 2015, 16, when, when haywire, all of that stopped. And essentially you had a movement that was there that actually worked against their own best interests by destroying my reputation, because now I wasn't able to go out and do good work that they would agree with. And that's a real sad residue of this whole Speaker 3 00:21:23 Thing. Are you interested in getting back into schools? Speaker 0 00:21:26 Well, I do a little bit now, you know, with COVID, it's difficult and I do more of that, but, you know, to be honest, since all of that happened, it got so bad that even I was even removed from leadership positions here at the university, because I was having my bank accounts hacked. I was having my social security number, put all over the web. I had my credit card information all over the web. I mean, these folks were getting my personal information and just spreading it out. You can see what's in my retirement account. I mean, it's amazing. Well, there's no legal recourse I have. And it was causing me so much personal stress and problems that, and professional problems that the university removed me from leadership positions. And I kind of decided I was going to just kind of a sit back and let someone else take a whack at this for awhile. I'll keep going with the podcast and I'll keep doing good work in biotechnology. I'll talk about it, but it's more fun to help my wife and help her on her farm. You know, I mean, I go home from work and I work on crops. I don't get on a plane and go somewhere and talk about genetic engineering and science communication anymore. It's a loss in a lot of ways, but I'm very happy doing what I'm doing. Speaker 3 00:22:34 And you're definitely engaged. I mean, you just in a different way, just in a different way. Yeah. In different ways. And at some point it becomes not worth it to go down certain paths. Speaker 0 00:22:44 Yeah. It got to a point where we were getting freedom of information, act requests for my emails, travel records, records where I would spend an entire Monday just gathering information to send to an anonymous requester for no cost. So in other words, you could write and say, I want all of his emails that have the word thug and my university would be compelled to produce those under freedom of information. And essentially they were able to arrest my work one day a week, or I'm not able to train students, teach you to work with stakeholders and farmers in the state because I'm busy trying to chase down emails that I am compelled to produce by law. And this was part of the reason they removed me from administration. They said, it's costing our university millions of dollars to have you talking about science. Speaker 3 00:23:36 I think my listeners need to hear this, the real effect of bullying. That's what this is. It's not informing the, or exposing anything Speaker 0 00:23:47 Intimidation and it's coercion, which is what bullying really is. It's using threats, violence, coercion to achieve your political goals. I've worked in private sector, my entire life or public sector. My entire life. I've worked for the, for the universities. I've done a little consulting here and there, but for the most part, been a scientist in public sector. And in consulting is like for lights, led light companies. And, you know, in strawberry industry, you know, clam industry, I ended up getting beat up so bad from all of this where I was having physical problems, you know, feeling my heart, beating out of my chest skipping beats, where I had to go in and get complete cardiac evaluation. It turns out it was just the stress of having to fulfill foyer requests. Having my university told me to go get counseling because I was having so many problems. It really does have an effect. And I'm tough. I'm really tough. I don't Speaker 3 00:24:41 Believe it. I mean, you're still here. Speaker 0 00:24:43 And the funny part is someone who is vehemently, anti GMO could call me up and say, I want to talk to you. And I will talk to them. I don't ask, what are we getting an interview about? And send me the questions ahead of time. He said, let it rip. Let's talk about stuff. Speaker 3 00:24:55 Well, I can vouch for that because you said exactly that. And you know, just right from the get-go nothing's off the table, right? This is what you said. And it's like, we can talk about anything you want, right. So you were completely transparent. That's what we need this transparency. So that's, I, I learned something recently and that is that there is going to be in the United States, GMO labeling required next year, 2022. And I say that as if it's a question, because you know, all of this information is still new to me and I could get it wrong easily. So I'm like, is that right? And so what do you think the impact? I mean, we see non-GMO labels right now, from what I've learned, that's not required. It's kind of like marketing, but that's going to be required. If you have GMOs in your ingredients, then it needs to be said. So on the packaging, what do you think will be the impact of this labeling requirement for GMO's Speaker 0 00:25:55 Almost zero. It won't affect most consumers and other consumers. It will confuse, there will be some potential problem from this that when you put that label on there that says bio-engineered that no one knows what that means. You will have certain places that online will say, if your product has this label, it will cause cancer. If you see this label, it will give your kids autism. If you have this label, it'll make you grow. You know, a hair on your tongue, they'll say those things on, oh, that's an old one. From there. There's an old claim. Apparently happened to a mouse somewhere in Russia and caused by GMOs. Those are the things that you will likely see, but in general, people are pretty much immune to all the 80 million labels that are kind of meaningless. The problem is, is that it doesn't help us make good decisions. Speaker 0 00:26:45 And that's what we need to be doing is understanding where our food comes from and how it was produced. That's what we need to know the problem with the term GMOs and saying there's GMOs in my food is that it doesn't really mean anything. The only thing that you ever consume is the stuff from the center of the grocery store. Okay? The, all the produce, all that stuff. There's no GMO crop in your produce section, maybe occasionally a squash or compiler, but everything else has just traditionally bread. The stuff that is from genetically engineered crops is the sugar from sugar beets. The starch from corn, the high fructose corn syrup, it's soybean, solids, and soybean oil, canola oil. Those are the things that come from GE crops. And those are all found in the center of the store. They're the ingredients that go into process food. Speaker 0 00:27:38 And if I gave you a bag of GMO sugar from GMO sugar beets and a bag of organic sugar cane sugar, they would be chemically identical. There's nothing different between the two and same with soybean oil, GMO, soybean oil or rate or conventional soybean oil. They both are just oil. There's no magic. There's no DNA. There's no anything in there except for oil. So how do you label that? And if you do put a non GMO label on it, how do you prove it? Because you can't test for it. So you're relying on people in a supply chain to be honest and say, okay, well this is non GMO. You just see all the problems that it opens that now you have to have a government body enforcing and testing for something that doesn't even exist. So you can see the problems that we have there, Speaker 3 00:28:36 The money element, you know, in terms of consumers, making decisions about what to buy and what they eat, that, that won't really change. People will see the label, not understand it, maybe be confused, maybe Google something. And there will be an increase in content on the web and on social media that is talking about GMOs and the labeling, and that if you see this label on, on foods, avoid it. And so there will be some, some motivation adding fuel to a fire, there'll be this motivation to create content and put it out there, whether that content is true or not as like, that's not really going to be the point of it, it's going to be to just to get eyeballs on the content. And so when people see these labels, bio engineered, then they will Google, well, what does this mean? And there will be some, there will be someone who has created the answer, whether it's the right answer or not. Speaker 0 00:29:35 So people want to know, right. I mean about food is, you know, is it, is it safe for me to feed to my family? And is it good? Those are the things that I worry about every day of my job. I just got out of a meeting where we talked about, how do you use indoor agriculture and funny lighting to make things taste better and last longer, and how do we have more local produce production here in the state of Florida? You know, during the summer when plants don't grow well here. And so we produce our crops in the winter. And so how do we help the winter lettuce producers produce more in other times of the year and compete against other states with a locally grown product? That's the kind of stuff that gets me excited, and I want people to eat better. And those are the questions we should be asking, not, you know, tell me about the genetics of how this plant may have been produced. Now tell me about the genetics of the plant that produced this. Just tell me about what the product is and if it's safe and healthy. Speaker 3 00:30:30 I think that the truth comes out eventually Speaker 0 00:30:33 Trick is, is to be standing when it finally does. So my therapist tells me, Speaker 3 00:30:40 Make sure you're standing. I Speaker 0 00:30:42 Win awards for being resilient. That folks have said, you know, you, you paid the price for telling the truth and now you're, uh, and you know, here's a little recognition and that's been really sweet because, you know, those are really important moments to me because I remember how bad it was and still see residues of how bad it can be. You know, there was a time there that was extremely dark. I almost quit science and I almost, I almost quit everything because I couldn't handle it. Um, it was a, it caused all kinds of relationship problems. It caused all kinds of problems in my community. I got kicked off a bicycle group because of things that were written online. But then, you know, that that's the problem is that these things are, you know, communities and when the community, you know, kicks you out to the cornfield, that's it and things, you know, some relationships have never been repaired because of things that were said that aren't true, but you know, that's where we are. We're in the age of cancellation, you know, I don't want to get into that stuff, but a lot of stuff that was, you know, maybe had a seed of truth here and there was expanded to be truly nefarious and put in print. There was a whole thing in Canada about how I was harassing a teenager. And if you look at what was actually said, there was nothing of the sort, but it's that headline that sticks with you and follows you through Google to the grid, Speaker 3 00:32:00 Right? Get it gets clicks. Yeah. I think the listeners that are hearing this are nodding their head. We all see it. We see this, this dynamic that's been going on for several years now of just really more than ever. We can't trust so much of what we read online and it's just become fairly normal to not believe stuff. So I think the majority of people are of that common sense. They're just not the loudest, Speaker 0 00:32:31 But this is the problem though. And this is why it works is because a university that would hire you or want you in a leadership position, they're very conservative. And if they can find online that you jaywalk frequently, they're going to go, well, maybe we're going to let that one pass over. They don't want a skeleton in the closet. No one wants some ancient scandal emerging. You know, all that stuff really matters. And when you go, and then I'm an easy one, when you go online and you read page after page of, you know, he harasses teenagers, he's a wife beater, he's this, he's this. He says, when you see that stuff, it, it seriously changes the perception where people don't even want to take a chance. They don't even want to tie their cart to you because of the potential fallout that happens and how it's propagated through the internet. And that's why I took so much action against the New York times and others who exploit that. Speaker 3 00:33:23 Yes. But you do have people that have had your back Speaker 0 00:33:26 Yeah. Between, you know, folks like Steven novella, David Gorski from tons of other folks. I mean too many to name Dr. Ellison Bennington, and then Maria trainer. So many people and you know, my old boss, Jack Payne, people always, there were so many who, who really did and they'll take home messages. By the way, I would hate to like, leave this unresolved is that you have a choice. You either fold like a house of cards or you say, I have to continue to produce and put good stuff online to match the bad stuff and try to exceed their out. And so someone with a full-time job like me, it means I have to even dial it up more, more podcasts, more video, more media, more showing up at the school, more accepting every invitation that I get. It means that I really have to be able to outlive them and a, and I'll produce them and do work that people trust. And so that's where I'm at time will be kind, they say. And it's true because as these in movements that don't, aren't built in, in reality, whether it's taking out a scientist or whether it's falsifying information about cancer and food, it starts getting small in the rear view mirror, you have to reality stays front and center. Speaker 3 00:34:40 Well, I can't wait for people to hear this because you've been so generous with your experience and you didn't have to come on this podcast and talk about your experience. And I'm grateful that you did, and you've been transparent and you've been incredibly helpful. And given me some tools to evaluate information, at least in regard to this topic of GMOs, you've been a valuable resource. So I'm grateful to you for that. So thank you so much for coming on the show today. So tell me, Dr. <inaudible> work in people read more and reach you. And we can go to talking biotech, podcast.com and download that apple podcasts or podcast platform. What else can we do? Speaker 0 00:35:27 Yeah. Any place you consume podcast media. Uh, and don't go to talking biotech.com because some troll bought that and put up really bad stuff to counter my, so, I mean, and then put my name on it and says, it's me. And there's all kinds of stuff on there. That's good to know, but this is what I'm up against. I mean, I got other people who are buying domains that mimic my website and putting disparaging information up. So Speaker 2 00:35:51 Talking biotech Speaker 0 00:35:52 Podcast to talking biotech podcast.com. And, uh, but I also have a blog called illumination. I occasionally write there, I'll be doing some YouTube stuff in the near future. We're setting up a home studio to do some more short clips, answering your questions. And then, um, Twitter at Kevin Folta and also the science facts and fallacies podcast every week on genetic literacy project is another place. We take a kind of a soft and I hope humorous look at three major science stories every week. So that's another good one. You are busy. Well, we run our laboratory at full time and we're doing work in everything from strawberries to COVID-19 coming up with new solutions for folks. And so the lab and plenty of work to do at home when I get, when I get home from work. So I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm really grateful that you had me on, Speaker 2 00:36:44 Thank you for listening to this episode of GMO watch. If you love the episode, head over to apple podcasts and leave us a rating and a review. This helps other listeners know what you think about our show and they'll share GMO watch with more people like you as reviews come in, I'll read them and give you a shout out. So make sure you add your Instagram handle to your review. I'll see you next week.