Cancéropôle Lyon Rhône-Alpes

Dr. Normand St-Pierre
Dairy Management Specialist
The Ohio State University
The Buckeye Dairy News, November 2007, Volume 9, Issue 4

If you believe the headlines of most major newspapers and magazines, the U.S. consumer is against the use of biotechnology in agriculture and prefers that his/her food be grown in a natural and organic fashion.

Recently, a few milk purchasers and resellers, including the Kroger Company, used this argument in deciding to stop purchasing milk from farms that use recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST), a hormone produced by Monsanto using recombinant-DNA under the trade name of Posilac®.

Perspective

From the perspective of one who has spent over 25 years of his life working on improving dairy productivity and profitability by using modern management, nutrition, and biotechnology tools, this perception by the U. S. consumer would be disheartening if it was anywhere close to being true.

In a June 29 guest editorial in the New York Times (hardly a bastion of conservatism…), Henry I. Miller advocated “… the use of rbST to help increase the supply of milk and decrease current fluid milk price to consumers.

Miller was quick to point out that: “Bad-faith efforts by biotechnology opponents to portray rbST as untested or harmful, and to discourage its use, keep society from taking full advantage of a safe and useful product. The opponents’ limited success is keeping the price of milk unnecessarily high.”

The sad think is that no milk is free of bST; all milk contains bST and numerous other hormones, all produced naturally by our cows.

Irony

In fact, all milk contains some hormones, and human milk can contain significantly greater amounts of progesterone and/or estrogen than good old bovine milk.

But, is there really a consumer worry?

For 12 years, the International Food Information Council (IFIC) has commissioned Cogent Research, an independent survey firm, to conduct a quantitative assessment of consumer attitudes toward food biotechnology and safety.

The last survey was conducted at the end of July 2007. The study found that “consumer familiarity and overall impression of food biotechnology remains little changed from a year ago”.

Thus, the situation is certainly not deteriorating. In fact, changes were almost all in a positive direction.

Favorable

Favorable impression of animal biotechnology increased by 26% between 2006 and 2007. Nearly two-thirds of respondents answered that they were “somewhat” or “very likely” to buy meat, milk, and eggs from animals enhanced through genetic engineering.

In addition, two-thirds of consumers (66%) said that they had a positive impression of animal biotechnology when informed that “animal biotechnology can improve quality and safety of food”, up from 59% last year.

These numbers hardly support the claim by some that consumers are opposed to biotechnology in general and rbST in particular.

What must be realized is that a small but very vocal group of activists have seized this issue in an effort to divide the dairy industry.

In case you have never been a proponent of rbST and are considering its removal by so-called “market forces” a kind of a blessing, you may want to find out with whom your position on this issue associates you.

Opponents

Who are some of the opponents to the use of rbST? On the goveg.com website, you would find out that: “To keep producing milk, cows are forcibly impregnated through artificial insemination every year. The cow’s babies are generally taken away within a day of being born - male calves are destined to veal crates, while females are sentenced to the same fate as their mothers.”

“Mother cows on dairy farms can often be seen searching and calling for their babies long after they have been taken away. The mother cow will be hooked up several times a day to machines that take the milk intended for her calf. Through genetic manipulation, powerful hormones, and intensive milking, she will produce about three times as much milk as she would naturally.”

You may want to reflect on this the next time that you hook up a cow to one of these horrible milking machines.

And it gets worse.

Freegans

Freegans are also strongly opposed to biotechnology. In case you didn’t know, freeganism is the latest lifestyle that is gaining notoriety.

Freeganism is defined as a strategy for living “based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimum consumption of resources.”

The lifestyle in question consists in salvaging discarded, unspoiled food from supermarket dumpsters that has passed the expiration date but is still edible.

According to Drover’s Magazine, “Freegans claim that people sincerely committed to living the cruelty-free lifestyle espoused by vegans must strive to abstain not only from eating, wearing, and using animal skins, secretions (e.g., milk and its byproducts), flesh and animal-tested products, but must attempt to remove themselves from participation in the capitalist economy altogether as workers and consumers.”

I suppose you can meet them near your local Kroger dumpsters, although it is unclear whether discarded milk from farms using rbST - still the norm at your Kroger store - can be consumed by freegans.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep drinking my hormone-laced milk produced by genetically manipulated cows, artificially inseminated, and milked by a horrific, nasty and awful milking machine.

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Comments are closed.

Terry Etherton

Educating the public about the benefits of biotechnology, and the need for investing in research to discover the next generation of science-based products is challenging. Many in the scientific research community have as a top priority to conduct research and publish their findings in a scientific journal. Doing a lot of this is important in order to get the next grant funded so that the scientist can do more research, leading to more publications. It is an interesting cycle: get the research grant funded (which is hard to do), conduct the research, and publish the findings in papers published in peer-reviewed science journals. This creates visibility for the scientist (enhances their brand name) with the goal being to get more grants funded - an important objective for many scientists is to have a LOT of research funding. And then onward to fame! Never mind that a lot of the research conducted is never explained to the taxpayers so they can understand and appreciate what is going on, and why it is important. By the way, taxpayers are footing the bill for all the research supported by federal agencies such as the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation, among others.

My observation is that not many scientists are keenly interested in conveying the significance of their findings to the public in an understandable manner. This is unfortunate. Beyond the complexities of translating science “jargon” to easy-to-understand language is the reality that you can not educate the public about biotechnology in a 30-second sound bite. Of course, as the opponents of biotechnology have realized, you can scare folks in 30 seconds.

For those scientists interested in public education about biotechnology, both biomedical and agricultural, a major obstacle is that most Americans are not very well informed about science and technology, making it even more difficult to communicate the science, and it’s relevance. Also, I don’t think many Americans spend their dinner talking about science or how to engineer a gene. So, for many, science is not a high priority in their life. This lack of excitement reflects many things, I suspect. One of which is that many folks have had a bad experience (i.e., grade) with a science course(s) that in many instances leaves a life-long impression … and, not a good one.

How bad is the public’s understanding of basic science facts? I encourage you to read Science and Engineering Indicators 2006, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Report to get an in-depth perspective. Chapter 7, “Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Understanding” presents many germane and revealing findings from a survey of science literacy. In the last survey conducted in 2004, 22% of the 2,010 respondents missed the answer to the question: The center of the Earth is very hot (the answer is True). Amazing!! Only 54% answered the question correctly: Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria (the answer is False). The question that was the hardest was: The universe began with a huge explosion (the answer is True) - only 35% answered this correctly.

The “take home” message is that a substantial number of people are unable to correctly answer simple, science-related questions. There are far-reaching consequences. Knowledge of how science works, how ideas are investigated and what the findings mean are important for people to understand. This knowledge helps people evaluate the validity of various claims about products, science and biotechnology that they encounter in daily life. The public discussion about rbST-free milk in Terry Etherton’s Blog on Biotechnology is a great illustration of the problems that arise when consumers don’t understand the science.

One might ask, “What is the solution to the lack of science knowledge in America?” There are no easy answers or quick fixes. The solution is a generational one that includes exposing children to exciting and informative science classes in middle school as well as high school, increasing funding for science education programs for the public, and encouraging faculty in academia to participate in developing and implementing programs that effectively communicate the need for and value of the research they are conducting to the public.

Permalink

Comments are closed.

Dr. Normand St-Pierre
Dairy Management Specialist
The Ohio State University
The Buckeye Dairy News, November 2007, Volume 9, Issue 4

If you believe the headlines of most major newspapers and magazines, the U.S. consumer is against the use of biotechnology in agriculture and prefers that his/her food be grown in a natural and organic fashion.

Recently, a few milk purchasers and resellers, including the Kroger Company, used this argument in deciding to stop purchasing milk from farms that use recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST), a hormone produced by Monsanto using recombinant-DNA under the trade name of Posilac®.

Perspective

From the perspective of one who has spent over 25 years of his life working on improving dairy productivity and profitability by using modern management, nutrition, and biotechnology tools, this perception by the U. S. consumer would be disheartening if it was anywhere close to being true.

In a June 29 guest editorial in the New York Times (hardly a bastion of conservatism…), Henry I. Miller advocated “… the use of rbST to help increase the supply of milk and decrease current fluid milk price to consumers.

Miller was quick to point out that: “Bad-faith efforts by biotechnology opponents to portray rbST as untested or harmful, and to discourage its use, keep society from taking full advantage of a safe and useful product. The opponents’ limited success is keeping the price of milk unnecessarily high.”

The sad think is that no milk is free of bST; all milk contains bST and numerous other hormones, all produced naturally by our cows.

Irony

In fact, all milk contains some hormones, and human milk can contain significantly greater amounts of progesterone and/or estrogen than good old bovine milk.

But, is there really a consumer worry?

For 12 years, the International Food Information Council (IFIC) has commissioned Cogent Research, an independent survey firm, to conduct a quantitative assessment of consumer attitudes toward food biotechnology and safety.

The last survey was conducted at the end of July 2007. The study found that “consumer familiarity and overall impression of food biotechnology remains little changed from a year ago”.

Thus, the situation is certainly not deteriorating. In fact, changes were almost all in a positive direction.

Favorable

Favorable impression of animal biotechnology increased by 26% between 2006 and 2007. Nearly two-thirds of respondents answered that they were “somewhat” or “very likely” to buy meat, milk, and eggs from animals enhanced through genetic engineering.

In addition, two-thirds of consumers (66%) said that they had a positive impression of animal biotechnology when informed that “animal biotechnology can improve quality and safety of food”, up from 59% last year.

These numbers hardly support the claim by some that consumers are opposed to biotechnology in general and rbST in particular.

What must be realized is that a small but very vocal group of activists have seized this issue in an effort to divide the dairy industry.

In case you have never been a proponent of rbST and are considering its removal by so-called “market forces” a kind of a blessing, you may want to find out with whom your position on this issue associates you.

Opponents

Who are some of the opponents to the use of rbST? On the goveg.com website, you would find out that: “To keep producing milk, cows are forcibly impregnated through artificial insemination every year. The cow’s babies are generally taken away within a day of being born - male calves are destined to veal crates, while females are sentenced to the same fate as their mothers.”

“Mother cows on dairy farms can often be seen searching and calling for their babies long after they have been taken away. The mother cow will be hooked up several times a day to machines that take the milk intended for her calf. Through genetic manipulation, powerful hormones, and intensive milking, she will produce about three times as much milk as she would naturally.”

You may want to reflect on this the next time that you hook up a cow to one of these horrible milking machines.

And it gets worse.

Freegans

Freegans are also strongly opposed to biotechnology. In case you didn’t know, freeganism is the latest lifestyle that is gaining notoriety.

Freeganism is defined as a strategy for living “based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimum consumption of resources.”

The lifestyle in question consists in salvaging discarded, unspoiled food from supermarket dumpsters that has passed the expiration date but is still edible.

According to Drover’s Magazine, “Freegans claim that people sincerely committed to living the cruelty-free lifestyle espoused by vegans must strive to abstain not only from eating, wearing, and using animal skins, secretions (e.g., milk and its byproducts), flesh and animal-tested products, but must attempt to remove themselves from participation in the capitalist economy altogether as workers and consumers.”

I suppose you can meet them near your local Kroger dumpsters, although it is unclear whether discarded milk from farms using rbST - still the norm at your Kroger store - can be consumed by freegans.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep drinking my hormone-laced milk produced by genetically manipulated cows, artificially inseminated, and milked by a horrific, nasty and awful milking machine.

Permalink

Comments are closed.

Terry Etherton

Educating the public about the benefits of biotechnology, and the need for investing in research to discover the next generation of science-based products is challenging. Many in the scientific research community have as a top priority to conduct research and publish their findings in a scientific journal. Doing a lot of this is important in order to get the next grant funded so that the scientist can do more research, leading to more publications. It is an interesting cycle: get the research grant funded (which is hard to do), conduct the research, and publish the findings in papers published in peer-reviewed science journals. This creates visibility for the scientist (enhances their brand name) with the goal being to get more grants funded - an important objective for many scientists is to have a LOT of research funding. And then onward to fame! Never mind that a lot of the research conducted is never explained to the taxpayers so they can understand and appreciate what is going on, and why it is important. By the way, taxpayers are footing the bill for all the research supported by federal agencies such as the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation, among others.

My observation is that not many scientists are keenly interested in conveying the significance of their findings to the public in an understandable manner. This is unfortunate. Beyond the complexities of translating science “jargon” to easy-to-understand language is the reality that you can not educate the public about biotechnology in a 30-second sound bite. Of course, as the opponents of biotechnology have realized, you can scare folks in 30 seconds.

For those scientists interested in public education about biotechnology, both biomedical and agricultural, a major obstacle is that most Americans are not very well informed about science and technology, making it even more difficult to communicate the science, and it’s relevance. Also, I don’t think many Americans spend their dinner talking about science or how to engineer a gene. So, for many, science is not a high priority in their life. This lack of excitement reflects many things, I suspect. One of which is that many folks have had a bad experience (i.e., grade) with a science course(s) that in many instances leaves a life-long impression … and, not a good one.

How bad is the public’s understanding of basic science facts? I encourage you to read Science and Engineering Indicators 2006, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Report to get an in-depth perspective. Chapter 7, “Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Understanding” presents many germane and revealing findings from a survey of science literacy. In the last survey conducted in 2004, 22% of the 2,010 respondents missed the answer to the question: The center of the Earth is very hot (the answer is True). Amazing!! Only 54% answered the question correctly: Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria (the answer is False). The question that was the hardest was: The universe began with a huge explosion (the answer is True) - only 35% answered this correctly.

The “take home” message is that a substantial number of people are unable to correctly answer simple, science-related questions. There are far-reaching consequences. Knowledge of how science works, how ideas are investigated and what the findings mean are important for people to understand. This knowledge helps people evaluate the validity of various claims about products, science and biotechnology that they encounter in daily life. The public discussion about rbST-free milk in Terry Etherton’s Blog on Biotechnology is a great illustration of the problems that arise when consumers don’t understand the science.

One might ask, “What is the solution to the lack of science knowledge in America?” There are no easy answers or quick fixes. The solution is a generational one that includes exposing children to exciting and informative science classes in middle school as well as high school, increasing funding for science education programs for the public, and encouraging faculty in academia to participate in developing and implementing programs that effectively communicate the need for and value of the research they are conducting to the public.

Permalink

Comments are closed.

Dr. Normand St-Pierre
Dairy Management Specialist
The Ohio State University
The Buckeye Dairy News, November 2007, Volume 9, Issue 4

If you believe the headlines of most major newspapers and magazines, the U.S. consumer is against the use of biotechnology in agriculture and prefers that his/her food be grown in a natural and organic fashion.

Recently, a few milk purchasers and resellers, including the Kroger Company, used this argument in deciding to stop purchasing milk from farms that use recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST), a hormone produced by Monsanto using recombinant-DNA under the trade name of Posilac®.

Perspective

From the perspective of one who has spent over 25 years of his life working on improving dairy productivity and profitability by using modern management, nutrition, and biotechnology tools, this perception by the U. S. consumer would be disheartening if it was anywhere close to being true.

In a June 29 guest editorial in the New York Times (hardly a bastion of conservatism…), Henry I. Miller advocated “… the use of rbST to help increase the supply of milk and decrease current fluid milk price to consumers.

Miller was quick to point out that: “Bad-faith efforts by biotechnology opponents to portray rbST as untested or harmful, and to discourage its use, keep society from taking full advantage of a safe and useful product. The opponents’ limited success is keeping the price of milk unnecessarily high.”

The sad think is that no milk is free of bST; all milk contains bST and numerous other hormones, all produced naturally by our cows.

Irony

In fact, all milk contains some hormones, and human milk can contain significantly greater amounts of progesterone and/or estrogen than good old bovine milk.

But, is there really a consumer worry?

For 12 years, the International Food Information Council (IFIC) has commissioned Cogent Research, an independent survey firm, to conduct a quantitative assessment of consumer attitudes toward food biotechnology and safety.

The last survey was conducted at the end of July 2007. The study found that “consumer familiarity and overall impression of food biotechnology remains little changed from a year ago”.

Thus, the situation is certainly not deteriorating. In fact, changes were almost all in a positive direction.

Favorable

Favorable impression of animal biotechnology increased by 26% between 2006 and 2007. Nearly two-thirds of respondents answered that they were “somewhat” or “very likely” to buy meat, milk, and eggs from animals enhanced through genetic engineering.

In addition, two-thirds of consumers (66%) said that they had a positive impression of animal biotechnology when informed that “animal biotechnology can improve quality and safety of food”, up from 59% last year.

These numbers hardly support the claim by some that consumers are opposed to biotechnology in general and rbST in particular.

What must be realized is that a small but very vocal group of activists have seized this issue in an effort to divide the dairy industry.

In case you have never been a proponent of rbST and are considering its removal by so-called “market forces” a kind of a blessing, you may want to find out with whom your position on this issue associates you.

Opponents

Who are some of the opponents to the use of rbST? On the goveg.com website, you would find out that: “To keep producing milk, cows are forcibly impregnated through artificial insemination every year. The cow’s babies are generally taken away within a day of being born - male calves are destined to veal crates, while females are sentenced to the same fate as their mothers.”

“Mother cows on dairy farms can often be seen searching and calling for their babies long after they have been taken away. The mother cow will be hooked up several times a day to machines that take the milk intended for her calf. Through genetic manipulation, powerful hormones, and intensive milking, she will produce about three times as much milk as she would naturally.”

You may want to reflect on this the next time that you hook up a cow to one of these horrible milking machines.

And it gets worse.

Freegans

Freegans are also strongly opposed to biotechnology. In case you didn’t know, freeganism is the latest lifestyle that is gaining notoriety.

Freeganism is defined as a strategy for living “based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimum consumption of resources.”

The lifestyle in question consists in salvaging discarded, unspoiled food from supermarket dumpsters that has passed the expiration date but is still edible.

According to Drover’s Magazine, “Freegans claim that people sincerely committed to living the cruelty-free lifestyle espoused by vegans must strive to abstain not only from eating, wearing, and using animal skins, secretions (e.g., milk and its byproducts), flesh and animal-tested products, but must attempt to remove themselves from participation in the capitalist economy altogether as workers and consumers.”

I suppose you can meet them near your local Kroger dumpsters, although it is unclear whether discarded milk from farms using rbST - still the norm at your Kroger store - can be consumed by freegans.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep drinking my hormone-laced milk produced by genetically manipulated cows, artificially inseminated, and milked by a horrific, nasty and awful milking machine.

Permalink

Comments are closed.

Terry Etherton

Educating the public about the benefits of biotechnology, and the need for investing in research to discover the next generation of science-based products is challenging. Many in the scientific research community have as a top priority to conduct research and publish their findings in a scientific journal. Doing a lot of this is important in order to get the next grant funded so that the scientist can do more research, leading to more publications. It is an interesting cycle: get the research grant funded (which is hard to do), conduct the research, and publish the findings in papers published in peer-reviewed science journals. This creates visibility for the scientist (enhances their brand name) with the goal being to get more grants funded - an important objective for many scientists is to have a LOT of research funding. And then onward to fame! Never mind that a lot of the research conducted is never explained to the taxpayers so they can understand and appreciate what is going on, and why it is important. By the way, taxpayers are footing the bill for all the research supported by federal agencies such as the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation, among others.

My observation is that not many scientists are keenly interested in conveying the significance of their findings to the public in an understandable manner. This is unfortunate. Beyond the complexities of translating science “jargon” to easy-to-understand language is the reality that you can not educate the public about biotechnology in a 30-second sound bite. Of course, as the opponents of biotechnology have realized, you can scare folks in 30 seconds.

For those scientists interested in public education about biotechnology, both biomedical and agricultural, a major obstacle is that most Americans are not very well informed about science and technology, making it even more difficult to communicate the science, and it’s relevance. Also, I don’t think many Americans spend their dinner talking about science or how to engineer a gene. So, for many, science is not a high priority in their life. This lack of excitement reflects many things, I suspect. One of which is that many folks have had a bad experience (i.e., grade) with a science course(s) that in many instances leaves a life-long impression … and, not a good one.

How bad is the public’s understanding of basic science facts? I encourage you to read Science and Engineering Indicators 2006, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Report to get an in-depth perspective. Chapter 7, “Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Understanding” presents many germane and revealing findings from a survey of science literacy. In the last survey conducted in 2004, 22% of the 2,010 respondents missed the answer to the question: The center of the Earth is very hot (the answer is True). Amazing!! Only 54% answered the question correctly: Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria (the answer is False). The question that was the hardest was: The universe began with a huge explosion (the answer is True) - only 35% answered this correctly.

The “take home” message is that a substantial number of people are unable to correctly answer simple, science-related questions. There are far-reaching consequences. Knowledge of how science works, how ideas are investigated and what the findings mean are important for people to understand. This knowledge helps people evaluate the validity of various claims about products, science and biotechnology that they encounter in daily life. The public discussion about rbST-free milk in Terry Etherton’s Blog on Biotechnology is a great illustration of the problems that arise when consumers don’t understand the science.

One might ask, “What is the solution to the lack of science knowledge in America?” There are no easy answers or quick fixes. The solution is a generational one that includes exposing children to exciting and informative science classes in middle school as well as high school, increasing funding for science education programs for the public, and encouraging faculty in academia to participate in developing and implementing programs that effectively communicate the need for and value of the research they are conducting to the public.

Permalink

Comments are closed.