[European Scientist:] Are we finally going to overcome the GMO dispute?
[Marcel Kuntz:] As Claude Debru points out in [the preface to the new book Plant Biotechnology: Experience and Future Prospects], the question of risk assessment is often associated with the aphorism “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of the absence”, which this philosopher judges to be “a quite ambiguous story with dubious logical foundations”. In addition, should the spirit of the precautionary principle not favor research rather than hamper it? This is not what happened, especially in Europe.
In one chapter, I present the different worldviews that expressed themselves on GMOs and ask why the accumulation of sound scientific data on GMOs has not made it possible to overcome the dispute. In fact, scientists, scientific risk assessment and even science more generally have been drawn into a political battle. The postmodern view, now widely dominant in the Western world, contributes to the idea that science is one opinion among many, which must be debated by “stakeholders” with divergent agendas. Thus, it has proven difficult for most people to distinguish real scientific controversies from political disputes.
