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Penn & Teller is hardly an objective TV show, and it's already old, missing lots of the recent information on GMOs.
Normal Borlaug supposedly saved "1 billion lives" in Mexico, India and Africa by working on traditional breeding programs, not GMOs. He didn't work for Monsanto either, although he did work for the Rockefeller Foundation, which seems to be the background actor behind Monsanto.
Nor has the TV show anything to do with my comment you cited.
I admit my comment needs clarification, it's more that there was no official studies when the first GMOs were put on the market, a couple of studies were started but soon cancelled because scientists were told the studies contradicted the official motto that GMOs were "substantially equivalent" and GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe), and a few studies were conducted in very recent years, or some officials started expressing concerns, like USDA's own Inspector General in 2005. Mostly, the FDA/USDA/EPA receive studies provided by Monsanto, or rather summaries of studies (the raw material is not provided, protected by trade secret). They don't read the studies, or they would have caught the fact that male rats couldn't give birth, the studies don't show anything abnormal (sick or dead animals were for instance removed from results more than once because their sickness or death was supposedly not related to the study) or even if they read the studies and it's negative, there is nothing the agencies can do about it because it would be opposing the substantially equivalent/GRAS principles.
All the books I mentioned were written around or after Borlaug's death in 2005, there was few concerns or contrarian studies published when he started endorsing GMOs at the end of his life. I am not even sure he ever worked in the GMO field at all, so I wouldn't take his endorsement as scientific.
Edited by Chimel 1/7/2012 15:39
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Why does Monsanto have such a negative public image compared to the other seed companies?
