Workshops

The 2020 Teaching and Learning Workshop is titled: “Teaching critical thinking about science and technology: GMOs as a case study.” It will be a two-hour round table format with drinks and desserts, from 7-9pm on Sunday, January 5^th in room 303-304. 

The workshop is being organized by Bram Lutton, Ph.D., Chair of the Educational Council, who has taught ethics in science and technology for the past ten years at Endicott college and the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. Dr. Lutton’s co-leader will be Steven Druker, J.D., Executive Director of the Alliance for Bio-Integrity; recipient of a Luxembourg Peace Prize for outstanding work to foster environmental health; a member of the food safety panels at conferences on GMOs held by the FDA and the National Research Council; and the author of Altered Genes, Twisted Truth, which Jane Goodall's foreword hails as "without doubt one of the most important books of the last 50 years."

The workshop will provide an excellent opportunity for SICB members interested in science education and/or bioethics to experience the application of critical thinking methods to one of the most important and controversial scientific/technological topics. 

 

 

The workshop will reveal that these key claims about GMOs cannot withstand scrutiny and will demonstrate how each is undercut by concrete facts.

 “The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods con­taining ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredi­ents from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.”
                                            Board of Directors, American Association for the Advancement of Science

“The risks associated with the introduction of R-DNA engineered organisms are the same in kind as those associated with the introduction of unmodified organisms and organisms modified by other methods.”
                                              U.S. National Academy of Sciences  

“Concerns have been expressed that simply inserting new DNA into a plant genome by GM [genetic modification] might have unpredictable consequences. However, as our knowledge of genomes has increased it has become clear that similar insertion events occur frequently in all plants.”
                                              British Royal Society

“For example, hybrids of S. tuberosum and S. brevidens produced not only the usual glycoalkaloids, but also the toxin demissidine, which is not produced in either parent (Laurila et al., 1996). This singular result shows that non-genetic engineering breeding methods can have unintended effects and generate potentially hazardous new products.”
                                               U.S. National Academy of Sciences

“There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their [GM foods] consumption.”
                                              Open letter signed by more than 150 Nobel Laureates

“There have been a few studies claiming damage to human or animal health from specific foods that have been developed using GM. The claims were not about the GM method itself, but about the specific gene introduced into the crop, or about agricultural practices associated with the crop, such as herbicide treatments.”
                                                British Royal Society