This morning three Nobel Laureates presented at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. to call on Greenpeace, the United Nations and governments around the world to support GMOs. They are the public face of more than 100 Nobel Laureates who signed a letter asking that campaigns agains products like Golden Rice be abandoned. The letter condemns practices that are thwarting life-saving progress available through biotechnology.
Signers represent a variety of backgrounds; medicine, economics, physics, chemistry, literature, and peace. Their campaign was kicked-off this morning by Sir Richard Roberts (1993 Nobel Laureate for Physiology or Medicine), Professor Martin Chalfie (2008 Nobel Laureate for Chemistry) and Professor Randy Schekman (2013 Nobel Laureate for Physiology or Medicine).
At the press conference, Laureate Sir Richard Roberts stated, “In our letter we call upon Greenpeace and like organizations to end their shameful campaign of propaganda and criminal destruction of crops improved by modern genetic technologies, such as GMOs.” Roberts, added, “We call on governments and world organizations to do everything in their power to oppose anti-GMO obstruction and to accelerate farmer access to the life-saving tools provided by modern biotechnology.”
Roberts also points out the many good contributions made by Greenpeace, stating that “that this is an issue that they got wrong and [but we should] focus on the stuff that they do well.”
Nobel laureate Randy Schekman, a cell biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, says, “I find it surprising that groups that are very supportive of science when it comes to global climate change, or even, for the most part, in the appreciation of the value of vaccination in preventing human disease, yet can be so dismissive of the general views of scientists when it comes to something as important as the world’s agricultural future.”
Together the Laureates urge policy makers and the public an other to come together to support the logic of science and prevent “crimes against humanity” that are caused by needless deaths.
The movement has a website http://supportprecisionagriculture.org/ providing a list of the signers, their backgrounds and the benefits available through GMOs.