| | 17/June/20
| | Why are the lab escape denialists telling such brazen lies? A recent Guardian headline instructs us to “ignore the conspiracy theories” about the potential role of a Wuhan biolab in the emergence of the virus that triggered the current pandemic. The accompanying article is just the latest broadside from what the investigative journalist Sam Husseini has called the “loud crowd” involved in dangerous work with viruses, who have been busily denouncing any effort to scrutinise their work. Of these loud denialists, no one has been more vocal than the article’s author: Peter Daszak. But Daszak's claims don't stand up to scrutiny, as Jonathan Matthews shows. GMWatch Bayer scraps US plans to produce crop chemical, dicamba, blocked by court Bayer said on Tuesday it will scrap a nearly $1 billion project to produce the herbicide dicamba in the United States, but said the move is unrelated to a federal court decision that blocked sales of weedkillers based on the product. The Germany-based company is moving to save cash as it wages an expensive legal battle to fight allegations that another product, its glyphosate-based weedkiller Roundup, causes cancer. Reuters UK: Corporations do not own "science" and "innovation" The UK government left GMOs out of the Agriculture Bill. But that isn’t stopping the technology's champions from leaping into the fray with an amendment to include it. And we can’t be sure that the government won’t jump on the bandwagon and follow this rightwing-led push, writes Green Party peer Natalie Bennett. The push is justified by using the buzzwords "science" and "innovation". But "science" cannot be narrowly defined, or left in the hands of those who champion the multinational seed and agrochemical companies whose previous choice of "innovations" has left the natural world and human society in such a parlous state. The Ecologist New CRISPR'd rice study included in GMWatch resource on gene editing A recently published study found that CRISPR gene editing in rice varieties caused a wide range of undesirable and unintended on-target and off-target mutations. We've written about this study in detail here. But we've also added a summary of the study to our widely used compilation of peer-reviewed papers, "Science supports need to subject gene-edited plants to strict safety assessments", here. GMWatch DONATE TO GMWATCH __________________________________________________________ Website: http://www.gmwatch.org
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