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bubbathegoat

Listed below are comments made by bubbathegoat between Wednesday, 25th March 2009 and Wednesday, 25th March 2009.

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Is the green movement part of the problem? 01:17am on 25 Mar 2009 Let me start off by saying that I am an engineer and that I work in the life sciences field, thus I have particular predispositions to a wide range of topics, including GM crops. Like everyone else here, I need to keep a roof over my head, food on my table, and keep the lights on for part of the evening. All of this takes money, which I earn from a corporation. If I work at a big, evil bio-tech company developing a GM crop, and the process takes 4-7 years to develop a seed, test it for efficacy, safety, and environmental impact, and convince the relevant regulatory bodies that our claims are valid.
Having dealt with the FDA approval process, I can tell you that this is not a matter for lobbyists in suits, but rather lots of scientists and engineers meticulously documenting everything that they have done to arrive at their conclusions. I would like to add that this process is wholly different from high school chemistry, where one might fudge the data, or somehow alter the results to falsely present a more favorable outcome; someone, or several someones, is about to read every word that was written -- and question it. Why do regulatory agencies do this? because they are protecting the public -- it is their job and they take it very seriously. This process is long, and expensive, and my big evil corporation is footing the bill.
Now some years down the line every pertinent regulatory agency has been convinced that the evil corporation's seed is safe for consumption, use, and lives up to its claims. The big evil corporation can sell their GM crop seeds. Yes, they will be expensive, because there was a big paragraph above this one attempting to summarize an expensive process that still needs to be paid for. I need to get paid for every year I work on a project, and the only reason I get paid to work on something that won't be sold for years is because the potential for profit resulting from that project is enough to pay my wages back and then some to my employer.
This is the free market.

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