Fear GM is creating anti-science nation

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

The country's top scientist says campaigners against genetic modification have created a climate of "anti-science" in New Zealand.

Dr Jim Watson, president of the Royal Society of New Zealand and chief executive of Genesis Research and Development, says the backlash against science is a barrier to investment in high-tech businesses.

He told the Australasian Research Management Society, holding its conference in New Zealand for the first time in Auckland yesterday, that delegates might have been "stunned" to see between 15,000 and 30,000 people marching up Queen St on Saturday against GM.

"We have been very successful at polarising a major debate. The polarisation is the thing that stood out to me on Saturday," he said.

"What we have done is we have actually built a climate of anti-science, and I think that is a very, very critical thing for us to look at ...

"I think today we have confused GM with science. That is a big barrier to investment."

Dr Watson's own company, Genesis, is working with US partners International Paper and MeadWestvaco and local company Rubicon to genetically modify pine trees to improve their quality and growth rates and reduce the chemicals required in timber processing.

A subsidiary company, AgriGenesis, was set up this year to develop ethanol fuels from plants.

Dr Watson said he was not against protests, but felt the ethics involved in GM were being distorted.

All the energy of public discussion was going into GM when there were other problems crying out for science-based solutions, such as pollution in the Rotorua lakes and the threat to Lake Taupo from present farming practices.

"We are so intent on this particular GE debate, and as a community we are so polarised, that we are seeing a tragedy unfolding [in the lakes] before our eyes."

The vice-chancellor of Victoria University, Dr Stuart McCutcheon, told the conference GM protesters were making "unscientific" claims, such as the implication in a billboard for Mothers Against Genetic Engineering (Madge) that women might be genetically modified to have four breasts.

"No one stands up and says that is simply not the case," he said.

"To be an anti-GM terrorist is actually quite a cool thing if you are a 13- or 14-year-old. I know because I've got a 13-year-old."

Madge founder Alannah Currie said the argument against GM was not against science.

"It's about where science is placed within society and whether a small group of scientists or science entrepreneurs should be dictating what the country wants as a whole," she said.

"There are people," she said, "who should be working with scientists to get together to work out what it is that we want.

"If there is an anti-science situation, then they have created it for themselves by not communicating with the public."