Should emotional issues like GMOs require higher standard of conflict of interest disclosure?

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

GMOs are an emotionally charged issue compounded by incomplete understanding of science by some consumers, and a mistrust of the corporations that some say control our food supply. GMOs, and their opposition by a growing customer base of the increasingly profitable organic food industry, have seeded a strongly polarized climate of seething and unrestrained savagery and rhetoric.

The recent uproar about ties between academics and industry, conflict of interest disclosure, and FOIA requests that was covered in Eric Lipton’s recent New Your Times piece, Food Industry Enlisted Academics in G.M.O. Lobbying War, Emails Show has put this issue in the spotlight and produced much commentary.

Journalist Amy Harmon, a Pulitzer prize-winning writer for The New York Times, distilled the problem of public perception above and beyond formal reporting rules: “The difference is the appearance of trying to appear to have no industry ties to public when subject is so charged.”

Michael Eisen, PhD, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, nicely put this episode in his thoughtfully considered perspective that’s deserving of complete publication.

Folta is a long-time researcher and science educator who got a bit too close to the third rail of agricultural issues (Monsanto), and wasn’t completely candid about that relationship. However, he did not break any laws. He did not even violate any existing COI guidelines. He did not take any money for himself… He also did not adjust his opinions on anything to suit Monsanto… But his real crime is that he works and speaks about GMOs.

Read full, original post: What The New York Times Missed On Kevin Folta And Monsanto’s Cultivation Of Academic Scientists

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