from your research, what is the typical salary of a graduate from your university? >> well, it's higher -- it depends how many years out of school a person is. what we know from the purdue index now with some accurate measurement is our graduates significantly outearn the average college graduate. we know they have less debt. by the way, today's students have significantly less debt than they did two years ago, and we hope we can keep that trend going down. we know our graduate who is had any debt at all, if they graduated, had almost never have had a hard time paying it off. the students we have to worry about is those who started purdue, had some debts and didn't graduate. some of them -- and it's just a few percent, but some of them do have some problems.

but the average boilermaker we now can say with some authority from the surveys we were just recently taken is much more likely to have a job, to have a good-paying job, to have a job they are fulfilled in and to be thriving in multiple domains of well-being than those who went to other schools. it's our job to push all those numbers further up for the generations ahead. >> we'll leave it there. mitch daniels, purdue university president and former governor of indiana. thanks for being with us this morning. >> enjoyed it, thank you. >> on the next washington journal, diane okay lee of the national institute on retirement security discusses how prepared americans are to potentially outlive their retirement savings. after that, mickey mcintyre of compassion and choices looks at laws in place across the u.s. this comes in light of a 29-year-old's decision to end her life following a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer.

plus your phone calls, facebook comments and tweets. washington journal is live at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. this weekend on the c-span networks, friday night starting at 8:00 eastern on c-span, our campaign 2014 debate coverage continues in prime time. on saturday night at 8:00, the first down ral for former "washington post" editor ben bradley. and sunday author harold holder on lincoln and the power of the press. and friday night at 8:00 on c-span 2, chris tomlinson on the story of two families, one white, one black, and the slave plantation that bares their name. saturday night at 10:00 on book tv, james mcfer son on the confederacy's president. and sunday live at noon, our conversation with michael korda.

friday at 8:00 on "american history tv" on c-span 3, one of the first african-american labor unions. the brotherhood of sleeping carporters. and saturday night at 8:00, propaganda and america's view of the japanese during world war ii. and sunday afternoon at 4:00, a 1936 film on tb in america. find our television schedule at c-span.org. let us know what you think about the programs you're watching. call us at 202-626-3400 or send us a tweet. join the c-span conversation, "like" us on facebook and follow us on twitter. next a debate on the safety of gmos. joul hear from consumer advocate jeffrey smith and biotech entrepreneur gregory stock from the vail symposium in mid-march.

this is two hours. >> our guest on my far left is jeffrey smith. he's an international best selling author and film maker. . he's the executive director of the institute for response technology and a leading consumer advocate promoting nongmo choices. his books include seeds of deception, which is the world east best seller on gmos. for those who are interested, jeff will be speaking this saturday at noon at true nature healing arts. i'm sure you can find that on the internet. gregory stock, who is to my immediate left, is a biotech entrepreneur, best selling author and public communicator. he's a leading authority on the broad impacts of advanced technologies in the life sciences. he founded the program on medicine, technology and society

at ucla school of medicine in 1997 and served as its director for ten years. while leading a broad effort to explore technologies posed to impact humanity's future and reshape medical science. dr. stock has catalyzed debate about the social and public policy implications of molecular genetic. one of you please raise your hand when dr. stock is here and ask what that means. and about how to most effecti effectively translate progress. among his books, "redesigning humans: our genetic future." with that, let me turn this over first to jeffrey smith and we'll look forward to your presentation. >> thank you.

how many of you ski? i'm in the right place. so forgive me if i have raccoon eyes today. i was in vail for the first time. how many of you are farmers? let's hear it for the farmers. how many are gardeners? how many eat? now make a note of it. there's more people that ski than eat here. strange place. we're going to talk about genetically engineered foods. soy, corn, sugar beets, alfalfa and papaya, you can ask me to say that slower during q&a. now the reason they are on our plates is because of a sentence in the fda policy from 1992. and that sentence says that the agency is not aware of any

information showing that gmos are significantly different. therefore, no safety testing is necessary. no labeling is necessary. so companies like monsanto, who had previously told us that agent orange and ddt were safe, they can determine on their own and maybe get it right this time, that their u gmo seeds and the crops they produce are safe. now it turns out that that basic sentence, which is, in fact, the basis for the u.s. policy overseas, it's for the state department, et cetera, et cetera, it was a lie. it was complete fiction. we didn't know about it in 1992, but we found out about it in 1999. because 44,000 secret internal memos from the fda were forced into the public domain from a lawsuit. not only were they aware u that gmos were significantly

different, it was the overwhelming consensus among their own scientists that they were different and of high risk. that they could create allergies, toxins and nutritional problems. they repeatedly urged their superiors to require long-term study. every time they read the policy, they noticed that more and more of their science was removed from that policy till one person wrote, what's become of this document? it's basically a political document. it doesn't deal with the unpredicted side effects. the person in charge of policy at the fda, the political appointee, was michael taylor. monsanto's former attorney. the fda was given instructions by the white house to promote bio technology. they created a position for him. his policy ignored the scientific consensus at the agency and then taylor became monsanto's vice president and chief lobbyist. now he's back at the fda as the u.s. food safety czar. now, is it true that gmos are

dangerous? well, unfortunately, one of the scientists at the fda predicted correctly that, without required safety studies, the companies would not even do the normal studies that they would do because they're not on the fda list. so we have very few safety studies, but enough for the american academy of environmental medicine to evaluate and discover that the rats and that the mice that were fed gmos had gastrointestinal disorders, immune system problems, organ damage, accelerated aging, reproductive disorders and dysfunction of regulation of cholesterol and insulin. they said this information is not casual. it is a causal relationship based on standard scientific criteria. and on that basis all doctors should prescribe non-gmo diets to every patient. this came out in may 2009. in november of that year, i went to the aam conference with a

video camera and started to interview the doctors who had been prescribing non-gmo diets. up until this point i had been representing scientist around the world. independent scientists who found that the entire approach to genetic engineering of food was completely premature. that we did not yet have enough information about genes, dna, the inversion process, to safely introduce it and expose it to the entire population who eats, which is most of you. and we could not release it with confidence into the environment with the self-propagating pollution of the gene pool without lasting effects of global warming and nuclear waste because it becomes a permanent background to the genetic pool. the only thing that lasts longer in genetic pollution is extinction. so i was interviewing these scientists and translating their concerns so that everyone could

understand. and anything i wrote in book form was looked at by at least three scientists. and when i spoke, i, you know how scientists speak. they may say, converging lines of evidence suggest that i might be chilly. nothing is definite. but when i started asking these doctors at this conference, they did not speak like scientists. they said gmos cause inflammation. gmos cause my allergic patients to have more allergic reactions. one woman said that she prescribes non-gmo diets to every patient and everyone gets better. now, i was skeptical. for years people would come up to me and say, i react to gmos. when i take them out of my diet, i feel better. and my skeptic brain was saying, how do you know? but maybe it's true, but probably not. how do you know? i was looking for sort of background scientific trends. but not individuals who would react or not react.

but here were doctors, so i was skeptical. i said to this woman, what percentage? she said, 100% get better. well maybe 98. so i asked her again how many patients do you have that you prescribe non-gmo diets to? she figured it out, 5,000 over several years. can i come to your office and talk to your patients? she said, sure. i went there with a video camera. somebody was 25 days into a non-gmo diet, they had lost ten pounds, their skin condition was clearing up, their crohn's disease had cleared up, irritable powell in six weeks. another doctor invited me to their office. so many dramatic improvements. then i started asking rooms like this how many of you have removed gmos and noticed an improvement in your health. and i've been to 95 lectures in

the last two years. and every single time i ask this, the most consistent reaction is gastrointestinal getting better. there's also headaches, brain fog, energy issues, weight loss, allergies, asthma and also behavioral problems with kids, autistic problems. now, when i ask people, as i did in the doctor's office, how did you avoid gmos? they're not labeled. and they often say they buy organic or they reduced processed foods. as soon as they buy organic or reduced processed foods because i'm representing the scientific community i throw up my hands and say, too many co-factors. maybe it's the diet. probably it's the diet. but is it the non-gmo aspect of the diet. is it the reduction of the chemicals that are not used in organic? is it a reduction of the chemicals that are not found in

processed foods? but at the same time i started visiting farms and veterinarians who had taken livestock off of gmo corn or soy and put them on non-gmo corn or soy and the animals got better in the same problems that the people reported getting better from. and there were no co-factors. so the danish pig farmer said in two days his massive uncontrollably diarrhea that he'd been facing for two years disappeared in his pigs. they called it diarrhea, in the chicago office it was called irritable bowel. you can match them one after the other. then i talked to veterinarians who dealt with pets. when gmos were introduced gastrointestinal problems and immune problems. they would tell their patients -- pet owners to take their animals off the gmos and they'd get better. i have videos of pet owners repeating the same thing. now we see a pattern in the

animal feeding study, gastrointestinal a immune, reproductive organ damage et cete cetera. people getting better from these same diseases and disorders when they remove gmos from their diet. pets and livestock get better from these same diseases and disorders when taken off of gmos and these same disorders and diseases are on the rise in the u.s. population paralleling the increase in the use of gmos and roundup which is the herbicides sprayed on most gmos. now there's a big variety of disorders and diseases that i just talked about. how is it that gmos might impact weeds. if you look at gmos there's two main traits. the pesticide producing corn and cotton. they produce a dt toxin which breaks open little holes in the stomach walls of insects to kill them. then there's herbicide tolerant crop s mostly roundup ready whih

is designed to absorb roundup and we eat it. if we look at the characteristics of these two toxins, it can explain the variety of these diseases and disorders. so let's start with roundup, about 85% of the cropsous there are sprayed with roundup or hosh ba sides so the crop doesn't die because it's genetically engineered with a viral gene that's been inserted. roundup was the subject of a review paper last year. and the authors linked it just looking at the biochemical properties, to cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, autism, parkinson's, alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, anorexia, aggression and depression. they just came up with another article two weeks ago linking it to gluten sensitivity and celiac disease and death by kidney

function. now the way roundup works is it chelates or binds with nutrients with trace minerals and making them unavailable to plants, making them unavailable to us. so that's one of the actions in our body that it can deprive us of important nutrients. it's also a potent antibiotic. how many people here have heard that gut bacteria is important for health? okay. it's like a gut bacteria revolution in the medical conferences where i give lectures these days. there's many, many talks on gut bacteria. gut bacteria is critical for digestion and immunity. now, roundup is an antibiotic. it kills bacteria. but it's selective. it kills the beneficial gut bacteria but not the e. coli, salmonella and botulism. so it might cause an overgrowth of the negative gut bacteria. and that was confirmed in laboratory studies and is linked to possible botulism outbreaks, et cetera. when it messes up the gut

bacteria, that can affect the immune system, the digestive system. it can produce something called zonulin which can cause leaky gut, holes in the gut walls. and if you have holes in the gut walls, undigested proteins can get in there causing immune reaction, inflammation, allergies, autoimmune disease, it's also linked to cancer, alzheimer's parkinson's and other diseases. roundup blocks a certain pathway called the shake and make pathaway. doesn't matter what the pathway is but monsanto says humans don't have the shake and bake pathway, so it doesn't matter if it gets blocked because it doesn't get blocked in us. but our gut bacteria uses the pathway to produce transcript to fan which is the precursor to serotonin and melatonin. this could explain the mood changes and sleep issues and depression that go away when people get a proper diet and have enough tryptophan.

so there's plenty of specific details that roundup does including endocrine disruption which it can messup the reproductive capacity possibly linging to birth defects and it also is linked to cancers. so just roundup in high concentrations in our food can link to all of these different diseases. but it has a strong competitor in the bt toxin. now, the toxin breaks little holes in the stomach walls of insects to kill them. it wasn't supposed to have any impact on human beings, but a 2012 study found that it did, in fact, break holes in human cells and the conclusion said just like as in insects. now, if it breaks open little holes in our stomach walls, our intestinal walls, it also can create the leaky gut that we just talked about. now, not just -- it doesn't just allow the undigested food proteins to get in there but also the bt toxin and the

roundup. so in the blood of canadian women that were tested, they found bt toxin and roundup. in fact, in pregnant women it was in 93% of their blood and in 80% of their unborn fetuses. now, if it gets into their blood, another study with mice showed that it caused damage to the red blood cells. so it might be causing damage to our blood cells. then when it gets to the unborn fetus there's no well developed blood brain barrier, so it might get into the brain. we have a hole-poking toxin that might be in the brain of the offspring of this generation. now, another -- i talked to a scientist, several scientists who talk about the bt toxin in the blood saying it probably would wash out very quickly. now, if it washes out very quickly, why would 93% of the pregnant women in canada have bt toxin in their blood if it washes out quickly? they must have some constant source of bt toxin.

the author speculated that the bt toxin probably came from the milk and meat of animals fed bt corn. i think there's another plausible explanation. in a 2004 study they found that part of the roundup-ready soybean gene, that's the soybeans that can be sprayed with roundup, transferred into the dna of the bacteria living inside our intestines. and that that bacteria was unkillable with roundup. this suggests but doesn't prove that when the gene from genetically engineered crops transfers to gut bacteria, it continues to function producing genetically modified proteins continuously 24/7 inside our digestive tract. now, they didn't study to see whether eating a corn chip could

turn your intestinal floor into living pesticide factories. what do i mean by that? corn in the united states is produced with bt corn and roundup-ready corn. now, the gene that produces the bt toxin is in the corn. what if it transfers to the gut bacteria and continues to produce the bt toxin? that might explain why 93% of the pregnant women tested had bt toxin in their blood. because they are producing it continuously inside of us. now, this was never confirmed, this was never tested. which is a tragedy. because we're feeding it to the entire population. but if you just look at the qualities of the bt toxin and roundup, it could explain all of the different reports we're hearing from now thousands of physicians prescribing non-gmo diets. i've actually counted about 5,000, 6,000 in auditoriums

where i spoke when i asked for a share of hands as to how many are prescribing non-gmo diets. in 2007, 15% of americans said they were avoiding or reducing gmos. last year 39%. so we are seeing a change and a lot of it is the concern by the medical community. now, unfortunately, the biotech industry has earned a reputation among observers as being underhanded and, let's say, not so appreciative of the facts when scientists discover problem, according to "nature" and other publications and interviews i've done with those scientists, they're typically attacked often fired, sometimes gagged or lose their funding, lose access to seeds, they'll be demoted. so much so that there are very, very few scientists willing to

do research in this area. and we have tracked very consistently the reaction by the biotech scientists in attacking these independent scientists and denying or distorting their evidence. when you look at industry-funded studies, however, they're designed to avoid finding problems. we call it tobacco science. i sit with scientist and go over the research done by the industry, and they point out exactly how this thing would mask this effect or this thing is not tested or they don't use the modern techniques. and if they do find problems, they just explain it away with often nonscientific explanations. so during the q&a, if you want to know more specifics about how they rig their research, there's some very humorous and entertaining descriptions that everyone can understand. now, fortunately, by educating

people about the health dangers, many of us have seen a revolution that's occurring. non-gmo-labeled products are the fastest growing label in the united states. the products that were labeled non-gmo in 2012 grew faster than any other category in terms of sales of all the 35 other health care wellness claims. last year the second fastest. in europe we saw a solution to the gmo issue not from political enactments but from consumer education. and i'll -- what i want to do is i'll talk a little bit about the way out of gmos with q&a if you like, but i want to show you some pictures for the visual learner. because some of you will take home more of what's going to be on the screen. i'm just showing some of the photographs, not the peer-reviewed published studies,

et cetera, just the photographs. here on the left side is a normal intestine of a rat, on the right side the change in the architecture and cell walls along the intestines after eating a genetically modified potato. this is a stomach lining. this is a potato that's not current on the market. see how the stomach lining is about twice as big? this is after eating a genetically modified potato. this was almost certainly due to the generic process of genetic engineering, not the particular gene that was inserted. because the process causes massive collateral damage in the dna, and causes unpredicted side effects like this. in india, thousands and thousands of farm workers who deal -- who pick the cotton that produces the bt toxin are reporting itching, rashes and other gastrointestinal or immune system problems. i went to a village in india where they allowed their buffalo to graze on bt cotton plants for

a single day. all 13 of their buffalo died within two or three days. many had been eating john gmo cotton plants after harvest for eight years. rats that were fed genetically modified soybeans their lives are on the right, you can see the difference compared to the lives of rats that were fed non-gmo soybeans. rats that were fed gmo soybeans their testicles changed from the normal pink to blue. i normally take time and drink some water so that this slide can take its toll, but i don't have much time left. i gave a talk at the european parliament where a senior researcher at the academy of sciences. she's are russian-speaking rats. she fed them genetically modified soybeans starting two weeks before they got pregnant, more than 50% of their offspring died within three weeks compared to 10% in the control. the offspring were also smaller

on average than the control that ate the johnnon-gmo soybeans. a study in france showing massive tumors and early death. i'm sure my colleague will try to pick that apart and i'll be happy to pick up the pieces and reinstate the scientific importance of this study. here's pictures of pig stomachs after they were fed genetically modified feed on the right. it's hard to see in this light, but they saw severe irritation and they also showed 25% larger uteruses and other studies showed significant ulcerations. now i'm going to flip through some of the evidence, this does not guarantee causation, but it gives you an idea that if gmos are causing a problem and if we're feeding it to the entire population and if the problems are significant enough so that when people get rid of gmos they're feeling better, we would expect to see something like this. so this is deaths from senile

dementia tracked with the use of glyphosate which is the active ingredient in roundup. this is the death of parkinson's disease tracked with glyphosate and corn. if you take out the trend line, this is the trend line before the gmo factor came into play. you see that it looks like that. this is the number of hospitalizations for acute kidney injury, end-stage kidney disease, kidney and pelvis cancer incidents, thyroid cancer incidents, liver and bile duct cancer. and if you look at the cancers that are increasing in the u.s. population, those that are in

the red, some of which we just mentioned, they're the target tissues for glyphosate or roundup. this is the diagnosis of hepatitis c, this is high blood pressure in the u.s., this is autism. this is low birth weight babies. hospital discharge diagnosis of inflammatory bowel. there's a similar one for irritable bowel. chronic constipation. deaths due to intestinal infection. hospital discharge diagnosis and pair it onitis. obesity in the u.s. population. rheumatoid arthritis. celiac disease in a canadian hospital in an area where they increased the planting around it. now obviously there are other factors that support some of

these diseases, but the correlations are rather shocking. they're very parallel. so what i would love to do is come back in about 21 minutes, after my esteemed colleague and competitor has a chance to try and rebut all of this information and give you a sense that gmos are easy -- or safe to eat, so let's be able to pick apart the argument in great detail. i want to thank the vail symposium for this opportunity, this rare opportunity for this debate. thank you so much. aup aup. >> i want those of you in the front row to notice our computer stand here. with that stead, dr. stock. >> so i'm actually not going to try and rebut these things at

this point in a case by case basis. this is the most absurd fabrication that i have ever listened to. and i didn't know anything about jeffrey smith before i agreed to come to this and, actually, i assumed that, you know, that it was less distorted than i'm really listening to. this set of graphs here, for example, about, oh, it's suggestive. i can do the same set of graphs with use of the internet to try and claim that the use of internet was potentially responsible for all of these things. anything that is increasing over time would show that out. and what i heard here was that gmo crops are the most extraordinary poison that ever existed. they're responsible for all sorts of diseases. and yet, you would have all of the major scientific organizations and medical organizations be in some sort of an extraordinary conspiracy to

deny this. it denies all of these institutions. and we have here someone who is actually profiting by -- or is in groups that are profiting by the gmo controversy and who has absolutely zero scientific training. not a hoot. and talks about speaking before medical audiences, speaking before scientific audiences. and we'll get into that in a moment. but we can discuss some of these details. so i ask you to just sort of suspend your judgment on some of this stuff. and what i want to do is to try and talk a little bit about the context of these changes with gmos. only one aspect of the way we're using technology and the changes that are taking place today. and so i want you to step back and some things that are absolutely fublment lly fundame history of life are occurring right now. there are two revolutions that

are without precedence. the first is the silicon revolution and what is really occurring there is that we're taking the inert materials around us, the silicon, silicon dioxide, and we're breathing a level of complexity into it that rivals life itself, and that's why we have all of our amazing gadgets and such that they're almost intelligent. this is just the first baby step in that direction. we're animating the inanimate world around us. if you project forward a little bit, it's mind boggle to even thing what will be possible in a short period of time. and it's not surprising that this is creating a certain angst about technology. the second revolution that's occurring, every bit as profound, which is made possible by this first revolution, is the biotech revolution. and what's happening there is that life through us, through our cerebral court isys, through

all of our devices is learning the processes, understanding at an intimate level the processes of life at such a level that we can begin to intervene and tweak them and adjust them in ways and that's something that's a central part of all the possibilities of medicine and biology and life sciences that are arriving today. it's a step that nothing will ever be the same. it's like life is beginning to control its own future and we're starting to alter the world around us to where it becomes almost intelligent. and this is blurring a lot of boundaries. the kinds of things that are occurring are the boundary between the born and the made, between life and the nonliving. here is synthetic life created by craig venter, a designed bacterium. here's claudia mitchell, the line between our tools and ourselves.

she's using this prosthesis and controlling it with her mind through just thinking about how to move it that excites the nerves on her chest which are then translated into movement of her arm. and this is just the baby steps of what's occurring. here's a guy named hugh herr. did you print up the links that i sent? i don't know. anyway, great, there's a video of him at a ted conference. you got to look at this. this guy was a climber that got frostbite. he was caught in a blizzard for three days. both of his legs were amputated. these prostheses, which are extraordinary he can negotiate from seven feet to eight feet in height. he's a great climber before and now he says he's a much better climber. he said he would never go back to climbing with legs. it's extraordinary. watch that video. and we have pharmacogenomics.

we aren't just using trial and error and poisoning ourselves. here's embryonic stem cells that are being repurposed in various ways to create tissues and various aspects of therapies that are interesting. so this is a journey to who knows where. and it's moving very, very rapidly and it's happening right here and now. and the kinds of questions we're really dealing with, gmos are a tiny one, is the cutting edge of life going to shift to another substrate, not carbon and nitrogen and biology but silicon and all of its ilk, which if you project forward 50 or 100 years, what are they going to be capable of? but right now we're talking about biology, and the next frontier isn't what they thought in the '60s out there in space

somewhere, 2001, a space odyssey, it's ourselves. it's this inner journey into what we are and what life is. and it's a very jarring thing. it's very amazing what's happening. so it comes up genetic engineering, in general and with foods, is this something we should worry about really with gmos? i'm going to give you a few examples. first of all, there's a lot of gmo angst. i think that jeffrey wasn't going to eat some of the foods that are out there because maybe there's -- some of them were created through -- had gmo possibilities. and there's a lot of angst about all sorts of things and we'll talk about it. but it is warranted? now, the areas where you could have potential concerns about gmo -- and by the way, gmo is not a thing. it's a process. it's a technique by which you can create certain kinds of plants. and that's why it's not

regulated in the same way by the fda. i'll get to that in a moment. it's not something that you can detect that, oh, this is an item that is a poison. it's a process. so there are some things that are societal and that are environmental. big business, agri-business, all these sorts of things much bigger than gmos. gmos is a small part of that. we may have a lot of issues with the way the world is organized today with multinationals and such, but that's separate, above and beyond the issue of a specific technology. so i'm not going to get into that in detail. there's environmental issues and there are much bigger fish to fry in that realm as well. you can make a strong argument that by increasing yields you really are very much in a positive way affecting the environmental footprint of agriculture, which were in a state where, if you tried to go back to a pregreen revolution

agriculture, we could have the kind of starvation and such that were feared back in the 1960s. what i want to talk about is two other things. health, the issue that, my god, this is a poison that's responsible for every ailment that we seem to see. and once again, i've never heard such nonsense. 5,000 patients have all been cured by getting off of gmo ingredients of some sort of another. a doctor is absolutely certain about that. and somehow the whole world is ignoring it. and the other is spiritual. there's the big thing. what are the limits of what we're doing? and how do we feel about it? and what does it mean in the sense of being human? and that's where jeffrey really comes from. the maharishi yogi university and the sense of the spiritual place of man. and that -- of humans. and that's what we're really

talking about. so when we're talking about anything, it's a matter of cost and benefits. and here the costs would seem to be extraordinarily high and the benefits almost nothing. but for whom? that's a real question seems to me there are two sets of people. one is the person there on the left. many of us kind of fall in that affluent category. and the other are people on the right who are actually just scrabbling along trying to survive, okay? and it actually makes a difference, some of these things, because you solve very real problem. so let's talk about some of the possibilities here. one, bt cotton, this bacillus that's used which jeffrey pointed out is, oh, my god, that's horrible. then why are organic farmers using that as their selective pesticide on everything? so if you're worried about that, you better really be careful

about sprays on organic foods. so, you know, this reduces pesticide use by about 40%. and you know, that's an abstraction for us, that's, you know, really, is that important? you can't see it very well, but if you're one of these little kids that goes around with a backpack on his back all day long spraying pesticides in the field, and the little white stuff on his stomach is pesticides, so he's like swimming in the stuff. and not to be using as much of that is a big deal. i don't see a problem with that. here's xsanthomonas, a banana wilt disease. it turns out that's affecting a huge percentage of the crops, the banana, that's a staple of a significant element of the population in africa. about 100 million people. and the only way or a very good path to trying to prevent that disease, which you see causes

this kind of oozing and destroys the banana crop, is to engineer in from rice that is protective against that disease. here's another example. flood tolerant rice. here at the bottom we have rice with a protective gene here that is able after flooding like in bangladesh to continue to produce significant quantities and yields versus the stuff on the right. and that was developed at uc davis by pamela ronald. so flood tolerant rice. citrus greening disease, something that's wiping out the citrus crops in florida. nobody knows how to deal with it. one avenue is to engineer in some resistance. actually the people who are the citrus farmers there are very hesitant to do this because of the campaign that's been waged about the dangers of gmos and you can see here what the oranges look like after they have been infected with a

disease bacterium that's associated with a cilla that lands on that. it's wrecking the orange crops there. papaya, there's no way of avoiding this ringspot virus. so in a short period of time in most diseased papaya in hawaii have been protected from the virus by this resistant. and when you eat papaya, if you can find non-gmo papaya, it has about a thousand times the titer of virus in it that these gmo papaya have. then there's golden rice. which adds vitamin a to rice. because vitamin a deficiency is a huge problem. and i have actually seen no evidence that there's a safety problem, a health problem with rice. it's so safe that, in fact, it's opposed because it might be a wedge crop that could somehow

get people used to the idea of gmos. so when you are thinking about the real danger of genetically modified organisms, let's think about what really is a danger. i can assure you that the issue is not how something was made. it's what was actually made and whether it's safe or not. and the danger is not -- and i'll tell you what the background is in a moment. maybe some of you can guess. but the danger isn't food that is actually being engineered or being created by very well meaning scientists, very well meaning. you can think they're misguided, but they're trying to do something. and as far as the testing that occurs on these crops, there is no testing on non-gmo crops which have a variety of crosses and genetic alterations, all of the crops we have today are not

the natural original crops that existed. so the basically not only is there a great deal of testing much more so than in other aspects of the food supply, but it's voluntary. if you don't think you want to be affected by it, then just eat food that's labeled as non-gmo. it's called organic foods. just stick to organic foods. by the way, it would help your health anyway not to eat processed foods. we all know that. so you can improve your diet. what about people who actually would like to modify organisms in order to really cause us harm? bioweapons. bioweaponry, things of that sort. which is going to have nothing to do with this debate. for example, what if you were to take smallpox, which has now been eradicated but still exists and engineer it so it could be transmitted through the air,

airborne, not probably an impossibility. a pretty serious thing. in case you don't know what that would be, here's a photo. you can't see it very well. but here's a young girl with smallpox. that's kind of what smallpox does. so these are the kinds of things in genetic modification that you really need to worry about. so i'm not worried about gmos at least in terms of food. i find the logic for them to be completely unconvincing and, in fact, virtually every scientific organization that has any credibility absolutely agrees with that. there are any number of health risks that are actually real and that we should be worrying about including, you know, cancer, heart disease, stroke and it is, to say the least, it's a joke it's such a stretch. the idea that these diseases are somehow all caused by gmos. it's not as though they weren't epidemic prior to gmos. so look at these other things.

flu. do you get a flu vaccine? 50,000 deaths a year sometimes. as high as that. 34,000 car accidents, suicides, a lot of them. what about just people who are having a bad diet? it's not like we don't know what we should be eating. more leafs, more vegetables, less meat, getting some exercise. these are the things that are the really going to do in our health for most people. what about dietary supplements. complete relatively unregulated, all sorts of contaminants, mercury, that should be heavily regulated or environmental toxins, something that i work in. i have a company that it is selling a genetic test or it's testing, it's finalized, a genetic test that tests individual's susceptibility to low levels of mercury, things you can get in amalgam fillings or fish, certain kinds of large predatory fish, ahi tuna if

you're eating it, but if you're in a genetically susceptible sub population which is about 20% of boys, you can have delayed development in attention and memory and learning of about three to five years. so this is something serious. i mean, there are real things out there that are associated with the environment that are a problem. or look at this. this is organic chemicals that are used in bottles, all sorts of things. there's the production of them that's gone up from 1940 to the present. just exploding. there is almost no testing of them. and you can bet that a lot of them are either carcinogens or there are problems associated with them. so it's not as though there is not a cost by focusing on something that's really an absurd issue because we have limited resources. and when we're testing and focused on one thing, we're taking our energy away from other things that are more real and more present in our lives. as for gmos, you know, here are

the organizations, world health organization, national academy of sciences, european food safety authorization, american medical association, no problems with gmos. are all of these part of the conspiracy that a person with no scientific training has just suddenly uncovered and is telling us all about? and if that isn't enough for you, here are a whole bunch of other organizations. and these are not organizations with some scientific-sounding name. these are real medical and protective organizations. in europe, which is very anti-gmo, in australia, all over the world, here's the epa, which we pay attention to when it comes to global warming or something like that. they say, would not pose an unreasonable risk to human health and the environment. and i can come up with dozens of these. the australian and new zealand food safety group. we have identified no safety concerns for any of the gm foods that we have assessed.

is this reasonable that something that is this extraordinary a poison here, this is just fear mongering, this is nonsense. and all of these organizations are just ignoring it? but jeffrey smith knows the truth. here's the editorial in "science" magazine. "science" magazine, the magazine of the aaas just wrote an editorial that was about standing up for gmos. this is nobel laureates. these are people that have extraordinary reputations. the president emeritus of the aaas, the president emeritus of the royal society. these people have no ax to grind. their careers are made. they're not in the pockets of several industrial groups that are, you know, developing these things. and here's jeffrey smith. now, there's a picture of him supposedly flying. he's a yoga flier, i don't know, he was probably hopping, and if you can actually do that, that would be a great demonstration,

but advanced meditators. zero formal science, zero medical training, and yet he pretends to go around and talk to medical groups as though they're listening to him like that. it's a joke. he runs an anti-gmo cottage industry. and believe me they're profiting from this controversy. so when it comes to conflict of interest, it's not these other people. it's the group of gmo activists that are profiting from this. attended maharishi transcendental. argued that yoga fryers would lower nationwide stress, reduce unemployment, raise gdp, improve health, reduce crime and make the country invincible to foreign attack. this is not science. and i'm not saying there's anything wrong with transcendental meditation. i think it's really great and people find great value in it but it's not science. and science is not about people,

it's a process. and it's a whole process. and in fact, if people were engaged in this sort of thing, this deceptiveness, they would be drummed out that's very clear. because individuals in science love the argue with one another about evidence and about -- that's what peer review is all about. i didn't know about jeffrey smith. i looked up "genetic roulette." i read -- i didn't read the whole thing. i read part of it. it sounds very disturbing. the argument just don't stand up to scrutiny. they're ridiculous. okay? and you can make it, throw around a lot of words and make it sound like it's very deep and very profound, but i suggest you get the book. buy it, and when you read it go online to this academic review.org site which is two scientists, and they go through a point by point refutation of

these points with suitable peer reviewed arguments, with other publications, and i think that if jeffrey were scientifically trained he simply could not make the arguments that he's making at least doing it and feeling that it was honest. and i'll just show you one example. i could have picked many, but i don't want to get into the he said, she said because you know, you actually -- it's very difficult. i'm very scientifically trained. i'm not very familiar with all of the arguments in terms of gmos, although i've educated myself recently about them. i'm certainly, you know -- i really wouldn't care how it comes out. if gmos were a problem, i'm fine with that. they're not. so here's an example. i just pulled this out. it takes a lot of energy even for me. but so the claim is rats fed bt 63 that's the corn bacillus, had multiple health problems. there's no question about that.

strong statement. this is straight out of his book. rats were fed that for 90 days. that's great. monsanto study. she showed significant changes in blood cells, livers, kidneys which might indicate disease. sounds disturbing. experts demanded follow-up. there's a cover-up going on, though. well, that's disturbing especially when there are like 90 of these or 70 of these in the book. but if you take a read through and look at the website. peer review analyses, which aren't cited, refute this. and the person that did this was seralini at the fringes of the scientific community has very poor quality of this. and the food authority not a captured organization, i assure you, they looked for comment and what did they find. the analytic presumptions were misleading, differences weren't relevant. no new safety issues and no

revision to the finding that this corn was safe. and there has been -- there are 600 studies that look at the safety of these gmos. in fact, so much is required that only big business can develop gmos now. because it costs about $150 million and takes maybe five years to get something through to where it could be marketed. so that has been the effect of all of this. it creates, means that it requires big industry. so no, gmos don't bother me. and why? because i find the idea of a gmo conspiracy at that level, at that magnitude as just not credible and if it's not credible, i mean, if you want to believe it, then fine, but if you don't think that's what's going on in virtually every medical organization around and scientific organization then it requires very good evidence to reject the body of evidence that's exists and to cause these organizations to say there is safety in these products.

and that doesn't exist. secondly, this is a hauntingly similar debate to me about things that i'm very familiar with, inhave it ro fertilization, which my own daughter was a prd of in vitro fertilization. it was said that this would be like monsters would be created. the kind of arguments that were made when this first occurred were very, very similar sounding. it happens with every new technology. and it just has shifted and shifted. and with gene therapy. even with evolution. listen to some of the anti-evolution arguments and they have some of the same sorts of qualities to them. dna. this is a constituent of every living thing. we ingest dna. we break it into fragments. of course we have fragments of genetics in our guts and transgenes, ones that are moved from one organism to another, of course they're there. they're 0.0001% of what's there,

but the dna in one organism and another organism, it's not something different. we share half of the genes with cauliflowers because that's what we are, all life processes are the same. viral bacteria genes, we're exposed to these things all the time, not only in our guts but all around us. the large kinds of life forms, mammals are a tiny fraction of the life on this planet. it's mostly bacterial. so this is stuff that we're very equipped to deal with. and, in fact, as far as insecticides almost every vegetable that you eat contains natural insecticides. why is that? because vegetables are in a life and death struggle with insects. of course they make insecticides. so the problem with insecticides that get used and sprayed on it is that you're getting it all over the farm workers and

everything or on the surface of these things. insecticides are something -- i'm wrapping up. so gmos are the most tested of plants, most don't receive it at all. in terms of arguing any specific thing, it's kind of -- well, here's the modification to the genetics that we get. of course they get modified. that's what evolution is all about. for things that sound interesting if you don't have a biology background if you're not trained but they're really very standard. it's bit like whack-a-mole, you can argue about one thing but something else will pop up. it's easy to make these assertions and you can spend all your time trying to argue about it. the real issue is is this morally wrong? i would suspect that jeffrey actually feels in his heart of hearts that it is wrong and many people feel that way. we shouldn't play god. we shouldn't reshape the natural world around us and, in fact, i

would bet that the radicals, the zealots and the anti-gmo crowd, that what their biggest fear is not that you're going to have a bhopal like accident and people will get killed by gmos because that would actually destroy that industry. it would be the perfect path. i mean, it would probably not recover from that. the real fear is, like with other technologies, that actually we will get so used to it, it will be used in a variety of ways that are very beneficial and within a generation, it will just seem natural like ivf. who would ever argue that ivf is going to create monsters? even leon cass who opposed it a the beginning said, well, i was kind of wrong on that. that's what the big theory is. and if you really wanted to run tests and there were this magnitude of problems associated with these poisons, it would be front headline everywhere because i can tell you any

number of scientists who would like to show that, it would make their careers, give them nobel prizes. so gmos are simple. loss of identity for us, what does it mean to be human, abhorrent changes, perverted values, this is what this is all about and big slippery slopes. okay? and of course we're concerned because, look at this. here is what we did to the wolf. look at this fine creature here, the gray wolf. in just a few hundred years in many cases but a few thousand years entirely, this is what we created. look at all those. i mean, and that was using very low tech tools of just natural breeding. very transformed. and now high tech tools. and guess what? we're going to apply them not just to plants and animals all around because that's what we do with technology. what about us? we're already doing selection to avoid cystic fibrosis and if you

had the capability of altering genetics, there are about 60% to 70% of people that say they would enhance the physicality or the mentality of children if they could with genetic engineering. so this is where this is going. of course there's a lot of angst about it. but frankly, the idea that we can stop is absurd. it's not like there's one little technology that is causing all these weird things. this is happening across a broad technology front. it's not one genie that's maybe out of the bottle. it's hundreds of them. and new ones emerging every day. look what's going on with the internet and sharing and the way people are being replaced by devices that are now doing work. things we thought only yesterday only we could do. this is big stuff that is happening. and here's what's really going on. and this is thucydidi the

bravest are those with the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, yet notwithstanding they go out and meet it. that's really the charge that we have today for us and our children and their children is how we deal with these incredibly chal ens and amazing and difficult technologies that are really altering our sense of who we are and what we are and what life is all about. that's where i think the situation is with gmos. thank you. [ applause ] >> i want to give each of the speakers an opportunity to rebut one another before we open it up to the audience. i do want to ask one question, though. i think in many things we presume we know what we're talking about, whether we're for or against. so if the two of you could start with the definition of what a gmo is. i'll observe that throughout human history so long as we've been domesticating animals and

plants that we've modified them. i want to know what's different about genetically modified organisms and how that's defined and, secondly, how long they've been around. jeffrey, i'll start with you. >> well, i refer to it as laboratory techniques -- laboratory techniques that insert genes typically from other species rather than sexual reproduction. so you can mix and match between species. they've taken spider jeens agen put them into goats in hopes they can milk that to get spider web vests. they have pigs with cow hides. so these are examples of crossing between different species. >> so it's very unclear what gmos are. in the definitions that are used because there are many things that are considered to be, you know, natural plant breeding that actually are moving around

genetics in a wholesale fashion that's a little less precise than if you move a small -- a few genes and their promoters around. but, you know, they've been called genetically modified organisms. there are -- so but the using the techniques of molecular genetics essentially to hone the process so that we can actually do things which are, you know, very common. for instance, many drugs are created by putting in a gene into a bacterium that then produces that and it's a much purer way than going into an animal, for instance, and taking insulin by purifying it from the organism. so there are all sort of aspects in medicine where we do the same sorts of technologies, but it's not really labeled as gmo. so i think it's very unclear and it's quite nebulous. for example, is a gmo an animal

that is consuming gmo produce, for example, does that then become genetically modified in some way. i mean, would you eat animals that are fed off of that? so there are all sorts -- to me, the slippery slope is when you come in and -- i'm sorry, i'll give you a chance to answer right afterward, is when you come in and you sort of use this kind of nebulous term and speak of it like it's a thing when it's really not. it's a whole set of processes that are used to create various kinds of biology, new biology, different strains. there are many other processes of creating them as well. and then sort of use that in a very selective fashion. >> let me give jeffrey an opportunity to answer the question that was asked. we'll do some rebuttal here. i will observe that dr. stock went a little longer than jeffrey. >> he spoke 18 minutes longer.

i do want to spend some time. >> i do want to open it up to the audience. i'll give you a few more minutes. >> perhaps you can yield me your time for rebuttal because you literally spoke 18 minutes longer than i did. i made so many notes. you made so many mistakes. >> talk as much as you want. >> yes, thank you. first of all, i'm not morally against genetic engineering. i'm not against human gene therapy as long as it's not inheritable at this point. my line, my boundary is in the food supply affecting everyone who eats or releasing it outdoors where we have no ability to recall it. now, i looked with great interest at your presentation, and there were many things in here that are the standard talking points of the biotech industry created in some places by monsanto's pr firm. and i've had an opportunity to spend years looking at these things with scientists around

the world. i actually take advantage of the fact that i'm not a scientist because i don't predispose that i know the answer from my training so i ask many scientists. then when i hear from one scientist, i run it by the other scientist and i can explain why academics review really a junk science site. we'll talk about that in a moment. you mentioned bt and said if you're scared of bt, then you should be concerned about organic because organic uses bt toxin as a spray. bt toxin as a spray washes off and biodegrades. bt toxin in crops is produced at thousands of times more concentration than is sprayed on. it doesn't wash away. it doesn't biodegrade. it has properties of a known allergen. in fact, there was an

understanding, an assumption by the environmental protection agency and the industry that bt toxin was completely safe for humans but the science advisory panel of the epa looking at my studies and farmer studies, farmworker studies said she's animals and humans are reacting appear to be reacting to the bt toxin, therefore, more study is necessary before you can declare it completely safe. they ignored their own panel what which was the most experts in the country without ever doing a research that was recommended. you pointed out that flood tolerant rice was gmo. that flood tolerant rice was not genetically engineered. it was created by other breeding. you talked about we eat plants all the time. we eat dna all the time.

well, there are reasons why plant genes don't transfer to gut bacteria. see, gut bacteria transfers genes all the time back and forth. plant genes don't tip ukly transfer into bacteria because they don't have the similarity of the genetic code. most of the genes inserted into gmos are from bacteria. so that barrier to gene transfer is eliminated. if plant genes end up in bacterial geneses, they tip beingly won't function because the on switch, the promoter doesn't work. if you plant take a plant switch from plant and put it into the back tear yashgs it doesn't work. the promoter used with gmos works in bacteria. there are two other three other reasons that get technical as to why normally if you eat plants the genes won't transfer to your gut bacteria.

all of those natural barriers are removed with gmos. the only time they ever looked at it they found gm genes and human gut bacteria even though they said it would never happen. if you look at the assumptions that were used in the industry in 1996 when they first introduced large scale soy and corn, i list them in my book. will are so many assumptions have proven to be wrong. and this is one of the concerns that i have. professor said it used to take one class in a semester, now it takes a whole semester. because we don't -- it's so much more complicated than we thought. we haven't yet understood the language of the dna sufficient to make manipulations at this level and release them to the entire population or outdoors. they discovered a new code in the dna recently. they discovered genetic effects. they're still doing tests on gmos and the most common result

is surprise effects. they sort of exposed something called double stranded rna which is using the gmos to honey bees. they figured it was a control. it would have no effect. it changed 1100 genes and their expression in the honey bee. completely changing the regulation of this insect that wasn't supposed to be faektd at all. yet, they're already putting out double stranded rma gmos into our environment. you see, there is a clock or a stop watch that goes off when they're doing gmo research. and one is the patent. the pat enlt has a certain life. now it may take 50 or 100 years or 200 years to understand the functioning of the dna to reliably and safely manipulate it for the benefit of the health and environment. but the pat eblt went out and there is a time limit as well. so of all the independent scientists i interviewed aren't world, i've been to 40

countries, they all agree that whether they're against gmos or for gmos, they all agree it was released long before the science is written. based on economic interests and political interests. the process itself, i don't agree is irrelevant. because the process of genetic engineering causes mass collateral damage, hundreds of mutations up and down the dna, far more than conventional breeding. and they don't evaluate it. so some independent scientists looked at monsantos corn after it was on the market and found a gene that was silent switched on. and that gene produced an allergen. so you may have an allergic reaction. someone you may know may die from eating the corn. it is genetically engineered as containing an allergen. the process of genetic engineering caused a switch on that dorm anlt gene and the change of 43 other genes as well as the shape in the change of proteins.

soy has a seven fold increase, up to seven fold increase in a no allergen. again, this wasn't intended. this was the background side effects of the process of genetic engineering. the process used to create the soy and corn we eat. we talked about environmental toxins just now. one of the characteristics that i didn't mention of roundup or exact ingredient is it messes up the detox fiction system in the body. cyp enzymes. normally if a toxin in comes in, they can usher it out of the body. but roundup messes that up. meaning that all of the other environmental toxins you take into your body will be amplified and increased in their impact on us. whether it's from what we eat, vaccines, from the environmental exposure. it can all be amplified. in fact, there was a research study that came out linked roundup as it is sprayed on sugar cane before harvest in sri lanka to this huge death rate

based on kidney failure. because of the way it amplified the effects of arsenic. now as far as being a conspiracy theorist, i don't have to be a conspiracy theorist. i have the quotes from the scientists around the world and the organizations around the world who agree that genetic engineering is a dangerous and side effect prone science. so, for example, the canadian royal society said the default prediction of gmos should be unpredicted side effects. and i can put up a similar list like you of the organizations that have a different opinion. but i've also talked to some of those organizations that agree with you, greg, and i was alarmed at how unscientific their thinking was. i was recently in new zealand having an hour long interview with the food standards australian new zeile land. they're not for animal feeding studies. they're for human feeding

studies. they're not even wanting to use the most up to date means of evaluating what mutations have taken place and what new proteins might be produced in the food supply. and i mean their response as to why are bizarre. i said why don't you want to use animal feeding studies? sometimes animal feeding studies don't reveal a problem. granted, sometimes animal feeding studies don't reveal a problem. but thousands of published animal feeding studies do show problems that aren't found from simple chemical analysis. but they ignore it. i said why don't you do an analysis on all the proteins being created by the gmos like they do now in laboratories for experiments? they said oh, you don't want to collect that data. because we don't have enough data to evaluate it, we don't want more data. it was completely circular logic. and many of these organizations have come under attack by nongovernmental organizations as being manned by the people

assigned by the botic industry. the food safety authority is numerous scandals because people make the decisions on gmos are monsantos people, just like the fda. so the last thing i want to refer to, there is more details. it gets into specific details. but it's beyond, i mean i love the opportunity to respond because there was so many things in there that i spent 18 years interviewing scientists about and it's like that's the -- you know, it was the misinterpretation that was presented just now which is so easy to show there is no scientific legs. and that's what academics review did. they spent years looking at my book and misquoted my book. so they actually lied about what my book said in order to knock it down. finally, i say here are the arguments, here are the ways they deal with information that

they find uncomfortable. okay. they ignore you. they attack you. if it gets to a point where you have evidence that they cannot deny, that they cannot win on a scientific basis, that's when they personally attack you. and so they spent a lot of money investigating my past and they came up with the fact that i like to dance, that i meditate, and that i don't have a scientific background. nonthe less, i interviewed scientists for 18 years and have my findings peer reviewed by scientific committees. they distort information to assume that i'm aligned with people that i have, you know, my clients et cetera. and this concept of profit motive, i have an mba and making far more money in the business world before dedicating my life at this point to protecting humanity from the dafrpers of gmos. i actually, if i wanted to make

money, i would not be in this business. if anyone knows nonprofits, just say that we're in it for the money, right. however, if you would like to make a donation, talk to me afterwards. thank you very much. >> i want to open it up to questions. that's part wave we do here. but did you go a little bit longer than jeffrey did in your initial presentation. let's give two or three minutes and then open it up. >> instead of getting into a lot of details that are very difficult to understand, let's talk about a single thing. a claim that was made. first of all this idea i interviewed a bunch of scientists and everybody is in agreement this was really premature that, is absolutely not correct. because i talk to everybody. and they think you're a whacko. okay? and they don't agree with that. okay. i mean that's just -- well, it's talk about people in the scientific community, okay, you

raise a lot of ire. i was not aware of it. but when -- so let's just take a simple thing. a simple thing which is the claim that you made that physician that you spoke to indicated that virtually 100% of her patients were basically cured when they stopped eating gmo. >> i didn't say cured. >> got better. >> yes. >> got better when they stopped eating gmos. i've dealt with physicians and that's a very, very strong claim. and frankly, when i deal with the medical community, i find it very difficult to get anything significant about any ailment that i have and get consistent treatment and interaction over a period of time, especially in the united states. the medical system is in a real shambleses. so to me, i can't even fathom how you would get that kind of data from a doctor that they would attribute, first of all,

5,000 patients is a huge, huge medical practice. and that you're going to sort of have this effect associated with going off of gmos. i find that and an extraordinary claim. and, you know, i'll just leave it. i would like you to amplify on that. that, to me, represents the state of this being a poison that is very, very dramatic and is in everybody's face. and, yet, there are a lot of people that i think you would agree are, you know, not -- they don't really -- they're not in the industry lab, in some ways. some of the people i mentioned and yet are very, very accepting of gmos not being a problem. so let's take that number. >> to answer that question -- >> okay. yeah, the doctor said it's not just gmos. she does a lot of things. she does intake form. and in the film gin etic roulette, it is emily linlder sheshgs describes this. she said yeah, i don't just

predescribe these diets, i do whatever works. that she attributes as one of the main levers. i can't stand for -- i can't vouch for how important the gmo removal was for all of her patients and repeating information from her. i made a bold step to start to repeat information from doctors and not just scientists. now there are so many doctors reporting this and starting to collect them. so i'm absolutely sure that there is some people who remove gmos and don't get better from what they're suffering from. but if it damages gut bacteria, it causes leaky gut, suppresses digestive enzymes, misses up the cyp enzymes, et cetera, et cetera, then it may get in the way of the body's own natural mechanisms and becomes part of her practice that she considers to be very valuable. >> let's open it up to questions in the audience. again, let me recognize you if

you would. charlie, let's start on this side. i'll ask two questions here, give charlie a second to get to this side. we'll run back and forth. >> thank you for a very interesting presentation tonight. and i do believe that diet and lifestyle does contribute to our health. eat organic food. not eating red diets and antibiotics in food. i'm 69 years old. i heard a doctor in the community over the years and a lot of it i don't believe. we have been told the agent orange was safe, that love canal had nothing to do with chemicals. and so i'm very skeptical about the scientific community.

my question is i would like to eliminate gmos from my diet. i eat organic. what can i do as an individual to help get foods labelled as a no n non-gmo to be hesitant to allow this labelling for some reason. and it's probably because of the money behind monsantos and conag. what can i do as an individual to get foods labels. >> was everybody able to hear the question? >> very quick response. and then i turn over to jeffrey. i think he would be expert in this. basically, i think you shouldn't be eating any processed foods. xlu that list which is a limited list of fruits and vegetable that's have possible gm -- that possibly could be gmo. eat organic foods. and i think you're in good shape. that but maybe there are more

details in that. >> organic products are not allowed to use gmo's intentionally. there is also products labelled non-gmo. a non-gmo project is the uniform standard used now by 16,000 products and 1500 companies. we have a shopping guide at nongmoshoppingguide.com that lists those 16,000 products and also available on i-phone for free at shopnogmo. download the app. and in there we have the at risk ingredients which are the derivatives of soy, corn, cotton seed oil, sugar beats, alfalfa which is food for animals. and there is also animals that have been fed gmos we don't consider them general et ukly modified, but even the fda center for veterinary medicine

said there are unique risks to health for eating milk and meat from animals that are fed gmos. as far as getting labelling goes, there's an interesting announcement that you're not aware of that there is a ballot initiative on the colorado ballot that will be there in november for you to vote for all products that are genetically engineered and sold in colorado to be labelled as such. now already the industry has started to unleash a torrent of lies, disinformation. they're going to try to tell you that labelling will cost you $400 per person per year. there are 64 other countries that require these outright. none of them increased their costs. many of the company that's sell the gmos have taken them out or labelled them in other places. they tell that you labelling is bad for farmers and small business and bad for people. they're going to tell you it's poorly written. that it is special interests, et cetera. this is how they got 51% in

california to vote against labels and 51% in washington to vote against labelling even though 93% of the population was in favor of gmo labelling. >> we grow crops in missouri. it's impossible not to grow them. if we don't use gmo seed, the seeds don't get pollen yated. we have really no choice but to grow gmof we don't grow it, it gets pollen ated and we grow it anyway. so my question is with all of us farmers growing gmo all across

illinois and the midwest where all the crops are grown, where is all this non-gmo product coming from? it's almost impossible to grow. >> let me restate the question. i think people had trouble hearing it. the question is basically that farmers who are trying to grow non-gmo crops have gmo seed blown into the fields so they sprout gmo crops. how do you grow them when you're rig not to? >> let me amplify on that. i think the challenges are very real. because what you're talking about in terms of eliminating gmos and not just labelling organic foods which are really non-gmos is really completely redoing the distribution and the food distribution system if you really want to eliminate gmos. you know, any truck has been for moving around any gmo variety of food that goes from one field to another. you need a separate food

distribution system, especially when you get into products that are, you know, that are site of orange inis not mapped into it. they're mixed together in various ways. you have to keep everything separate. i think it's almost impossible and it's a huge, huge, it would be an enormous undertaking to completely do that. >> so there is a new booklet that i can tell you about later about how to protect your farm from gmo contamination. but your point is well taken. this is one of the problems about gmos because they spread. so organic may have contaminated soy or corn. even non-gmo verified where testing is required still has a .9% con tam nance. you change the gene pool of the non-gmo species, the same species, in other words, corn to corn. but also the relatives. so canola is related to other

vegetables. so this is one of our concerns from the environmental impacts of gmos. >> you know, i have a question for you in terms of i heard of zero tolerance for any gmo. is that something that you would subscribe to? how do you handle something like canola oil, for example, corn oil that comes from the gmo corn? you would consider that to be gmo? >> so zero tolerance actually is not possible right now in canola, for example, in corn. if the non-gmo project had no tolerance, no farmer would bother growing it for the same fear that you have. because they figured if one, you know, if one colonel is general et ukly engineered they would lose the premium and all for not. so right now we have to think about what is practical.

as far as oils, the oils don't have the dna or the proteins. and so some people consider them completely safe even if they're made general et beitically engi beans. a recent study found the roundup ready produced soy bean oil has high levels of roundup in it. but the non-gmosoy bean oil does not. also the process of genetic engineering has such massive collateral damage that compounds produced in the crop may be different. so there may be some fat sol ubl tochlin' that results in the process of genetic engineering that ends up in the oil. and we have seen compositional differences between gmo and nongmo. >> let me take one more question if someone has one over here. then we'll move over to the other side. carol? carol, wait for the microphone to get to you. >> he mentioned something

earlier about tobacco science. i'm really interested in the scientific basis for both -- for what both of you are saying. i'd like you to address that toeb thing. >> the question has to do with jeffrey's reference to tobacco science and asking for an explanation about that. how that fits into this discussion. >> how many people heard of bovine growth hormone? it's a genetically engineered drug injected into cows. so fda said doesn't matter about the bovine growth hormone. 9 90% is destroyed during pasteurization. they pasteurized the milk at 120 times longer than normal. and they only destroyed 19% of the hormone. so they added powdered hormone to the milk at huge quantities. then pasteurized it for 120 times longer than normal under the conditions they destroyed 90% of the hormone.

and when the fda reported that 90% of the hormone is destroyed, they never referred to the fact that was under those ridiculous conditions. we analyzed in the book in detail pulling out excerpts from expert reports showing that blasted their studies to avoid finding problems. here's how you do it. i used the wrong statistical methods, wrong protection methods, they explain away problems. they do things that no other scientific body hefer done when they find a statistically significant event. they'll just -- like the example greg pointed out. it is completely unscientific and we show exactly why. and we quote the experts in that. >> so i would assume that this is -- this would refer to the idea that the tobacco industry for so long was in such denial about the very clear and obvious

dangers of tobacco smoke. the same thing happened with mercury. this went on for many, many decades. and there was a lot of resistance and a lot of internal effort to try and do that. i can just tell you in terms of the fda, i don't know the particular studies here, but i dealt with the fda when it comes to pharmaceuticals. and this is a very, very conservative safety sensitive organization. so much more. it's incredibly frustrating to deal with them. the reason for it is kind of obvious. here are a bunch of bureaucrats. and if they speed something to market, they maybe get a little pat on the back. it's not a really huge career advancing step for them. but if they allow something that turns out and we've seen it with the recall in the pharmaceutical industry which is common that, is career ending. it's going to be examined in a

very detailed way. so the usual attack or feeling about our technology is actually the fda is extraordinarily conservative and resistant to allowing these sorts of things through. and, in fact, if i looked at the pressure that the pharmaceutical industry could bring to bear on the fda and sort of the heft of big pharma is far bigger than biotech like monsanto. it really surprises me that you think the fda is captured in the sense that it, you know, will allow junk science as you claim it to be to be the basis for regulatory approvals. and most of the people, those kinds of scientists that i referred to that, you know, they look at that stuff and they would have no problem at all saying it's totally garbage because not everybody is captured by the monsantos in the world. >> let me get a question in the

center here. get the boom over here. >> you brought references to high blood pressure and autism. i can draw the same curves correlating with the use of i-70 on weekends or my ski days over the last five years. the experimental -- the scientific method uses controlled experiments frequently experiments, not just anecdotal accounts of somebody saying i stopped using gmo foods

and i got better. what if that -- what if you gave that person a placebo and said these are gmo foods? would they feel sick? i would just like your comment. i know you made a presentation on dr. oz's show. there was a very interesting article in the "new yorker" magazine a year ago. which is called is the most trusted doctor in america doing more harm than good? and i'll just quote two sentences from it if you don't mind. the study that you referred to here and on the dr. oz show was publicized widely throughout the world. it was denounced by the food safety authority. rejected in a rare joint statement by the six french national scientific academies and ridiculed by scores of scientists. agricultural technology is under review by the fda for decades and no agency in the united states or anywhere else has found evidence that general et beingly modified foods are

metabolized by the body any differently than any other type of food. that's in february 2013 new yorker if anybody is interested in pursuing it. >> thank you. >> was everybody able to hear the question? >> yes. >> all right. so i actually spent a lot of time analyzing published studies and translating the science for english. my book genetic roulette does that. but it also says in the beginning if this were fluoride studies, cancer studies, a number of other things, we would have thousands and thousands of published studies to deal with. but we actually have only a handful. it's not true that there are 600 safety studies. is it a few years ago the number of safety studies, animal studies that would qualify as an academic safety study was less than three dozen. and so in the book which has 1153 notes and lots of published studies and linked to, it also

says that we're not -- we don't have the luxury of just limiting ourselves to the studies. we have to be like epidemiologist that's look at the studies. the unpublished studies which is what the biotech people use to submit to the fda and also look at theoretical risks based on the biochemistry of roundup and the physiological actions of bt. so i could have bored with you the details of numerous peer view published studies and in different audience i'll do that. i go into a lot more detail. what i decided to do here was look at the epidemiological approach where we have the published studies. all i did here is hand it over to another medical organization's review where they said gastrointestinal problems, et cetera. that's all i did to handle that. what i decided to do is to show patterns. i was very clear, i think

whether i showed the causal charts. this is not causation. but if you're looking at it like an epidemiologist and see a change, you're going to ask what's the cause? and i have provided information that many scientists and doctors believe are the cause that's can help support why those grasses were so closely aligned. there are hundreds of doctors that just literally just published, signed a petition that said it should have never been retracted. it's sound science. it's very important. and i can go into that for ever. if you want the details go, to gmoseralini.org. he handles every objection with science. >> it's interesting that in the peer reviewed stud yidz, it's clear to me that you since the effects are so dramatic and the poisonings are so brad brood, it wouldn't actually take very much to do a human study where you

took a small population, suitbly controlled, take them off gmos, show the dramatic effects. i guarantee it would be published in the journal of american medical association. any publication would love to have that. it wouldn't take very long according to these results. so why doesn't the anti-gmo industry and it's not -- it is kind of an industry, simply funneled and do those sorts of studies and it certainly well within their capabilities. >> you are asking me to respond? >> yes. >> first of all, i'd like you to volunteer to be part of the experiment. it would pass through an institutional review board. typically before you get into human trials, you go into long term animal feeding studies.

and other side does not use long term animal feeding studies. the studies last 14 days, 28 days or at the most 90 days which make it impossible to have chronic problems, intergenerational problems in cancer. so before you get into the human studies, it's like, as you know from getting your products into the fda, there is a four phased deal. it starts with animal and then human. they're not done yet. there is not funding et cetera available for the long term animal feeding studies f there is a difference, if there are signs of toxicity in the rats that ate the corn, let's do more dynamic studies to find the causation, et cetera, et cetera. >> so that you're referring to is whether you try to task and use a candidate drug to prove it is safe in humans n fact, gmo materials, the consumes broadly by the population as we all know. you could go directly into that trial because of all your talking about is taking a population.

i will be happy to volunteer. >> you heard it here. >> everybody is doing that. anybody is eating processed foods is eating gmo. you were saying that virtually 100% of people improve. so all you have to do is set up a controlled group, change them in a small way, don't just remove the gmos, you don't have to, you know, get them exercising and change their diet completely and do all sorts of things that have other effects. just select them and remove the gmos. not that hard to do. and see what the results are. and track them very scrupulously. externally and it would be very easy and you don't have a problem if doing that sort of experiment. it could be done tomorrow. >> so on my facebook page you find a doctor that just took 20 seriously ill people off gmos and was astounded at the improvements and now he's doing that with 300. a slightly different model. but doctors are doing those experiments on people all the time. it's a different model. it's before and after. but that is already happening.

that is probably what i share now. >> i want to take another question over here. this lady here. >> i want to preface my question with the fact that my family and myself eat nearly 100% organically produced food. and my question is, could both of you comment on whether it's economically feasible to continue to feed our planet where the population continues to grow without using gmos? >> was everybody able to hear the question? >> so there is -- the most comprehensive study in the world for feeding the hungry plan set called the iistad report. it is sponsored by the u.n. and many different organizations, signed on by 58 countries. in its conclusion, written by more than 400 scientists over several years, was that the current generation of gmos has

nothing to offer, nothing to offer fulfilling their goals of feeding poverty or creating sustainable agriculture. according to the union of concerned scientists in the report failure to yield, they don't even increase yield. and many people realize the sexy new technology of gmos is taking money away for more appropriate technologies which have been shown to feed the world. in addition, we should be clear that it's not necessarily just in creasing yield that the experts say will feed the world. we have more food per person than in human history and yet a billion people go to bed hungry or malnourished every night. it's access to food. it's poverty issues which are more fundamental. but if you look at the nutrition per acre, then sustainable and organic methods increase over gmo. in developing countries, the disparity is even greater. there was a study done on 12 million farms and found they

increased yields by 79%. >> my understanding is that that's not true. and, in fact, the thing i'm absolutely certain of, if you were to eliminate all gmo crops, you would end up with very, very substantial increase in pesticide use. to levels that is something that is not desired by most people. certainly i would not like to see. that i'm more concerned about pesticides. and as far as yields and productivities, my understanding, is that they're substantially higher. especially when you're looking at issues like removal of crops because of various infectious agents and such like that. and, you know this is a process. the whole green revolution had increased productivity in an enormous way. it leveled off. i think there will be problems. and that we need to increase

acreage in very significant ways. i have seen commentary from people that suggest it would be very, very substantial and increases in acreage would eventually be required. i'm not sure. >> in the interest of time and not imposing on our speakers, i'd like to take three more questions. this gentlemen ja had his hand up for quite some time. >> in 1955, the fda said it is good for you. thank you, fda conservative, we believe you. that's a question and that's a preface to my statement. so let's just cut down. explain to me what is wrong with and this is very basic. so we have weeds. we have pests.

and our yield is not high. and i appreciate the drought resistant crops and things. so we want to increase our yield. and we spray poison toxins, roundup on our crops and our cotton to kill the weeds and the pesticides. am i kind of -- is this correct? >> it's the weeds, yeah. >> then we directly digest the corn or the cows and the animals, the pigs digest the products that have been sprayed with the super pesticides. so is that going into us or is it not? and that's my question. we're digesting the residues of the roundup.

we are consuming roundup. your kids are consuming roundup s this not true? >> it's true. >> there are all sorts of pesticides that are being used including roundup. one of the problems with them increasing is the fact that there are cultures going on. large amount of the same crop that are planted without a scattering of other crops so that when you get pests that arrive, there is a huge feeding ground. so there are lots of ways in which modern agriculture has become very, very reliant just not on pesticides, but on fertilizers, you know, huge amounts of fertilizers on water usage that is unsustainable. there are a lot of problems with this operation today. i think that use of gmo crops is actually par of the solution to that. because you can deal with a number of the pef pest issues and other issues associated with modern agriculture. i don't think that jeff would

deny that if you were to roll back from modern agriculture, huge fields, mechanic anized production he would have amazing food issues. because it's not an desceaccide that we've gone from 06% of the population engaged in farm work to 1% to 2% of the population globally which is why we don't have global hunger and such. it's a big operation. >> so just to respond to this. because of the herbicide to tolerant crops, the weeds are resistant to it, farmers use more herbicide. because the herbicide tolerant crops, the u.s. uses 537 million more pounds herbicide because of the gmos. now the insecticide producing crops reduce the number -- the amount of spraying on the crop by about 1 auto million pounds over the first 16 years. but the amount of pesticides produced in the crop itself is

at least double per acre. that which is displaced in a spray form. we eat that pesticide when we eat the corn. so, yes, we consume both the herbicides sprayed on and the pesticide produced by the corn colonel and the amount of pesticide produced is actually not gone down if you include that as well. >> i want to take one question over here and then i'll go way back in the corner here, charlie, so you know where i'm going. the demographic here is fairly akin to mine. we have about an 11 or 12-year-old back here. i want to give last word to her. let's go over here. i'm going to encourage everybody to ask question. >> i'd like to have a little detail. i'm hearing a lot of differences. i need to know more on the differences because there are so much going on and so much active things going on, getting gmo products labels, et cetera, non-gmo. then you have the whole organic community.

my question is there has to be a huge difference between me going and buying something that is labelled nongmo versus me going to the store and buying something that is organic. and then you mentioned something about the popcorn not being -- not being non-gmo. yet you go to the store and you see the non-gmo label. the other gentleman said that can't be right now. i'd like some clarification on the differences between labelling of nongmo versus organic and the comment about the corn. >> all right. if something is labelled 100% organic, that is 1 h00 hundred% organic. it has to be 59% organic. the other a% has to be nongmo. if something is labelled made with on beganic ingredient. it has to be 07% organic.

the other 30% has to be nongmo. now there is no required testing in organics. so smimd there is contamination in the seed, by other fields, and it's possible to buy without even knowing that it is contamina contaminated. nongmo project has testing requirement it's there are at risk ingredients. and they have a .9% threshold for food. so sometimes you'll see organic and nongmo product verified on the same package which is kind of gold standard. organic has a lot of other attributes that non-gmo doesn't. many other things, many other benefits. now you the other thing is this. roundup is now being sprayed as a ripening agent on wheat and barley and rye and potatoes and 100 different types of fruits and vegetables and grains. so it's also being absorbed into

the crop. so if you want to avoid roundup in most of the forms, then buying or began sick best. if you see organic and nongm variousfied, it's a gold standard. that means it's been tested for ton cam nation levels. >> organic is around a lot longer than gmo. it thooz do with using nonnatural pesticides, for example, bt is natural. and it's ar faz understanding this, i think it's virtually impossible for you to do. i mean you get on site, really, you get on the site and you read one thing and you say that sounds interesting. that's believable. then you read the other information and you go well i don't know. that makes sense. well that makes sense much it's really very, very difficult. i think that there is a whole pattern here of confusion. and so it becomes very simple. gmos really awful. or can you see it in industry after industry. there was a look called the product is confusion or something like that.

it was about how you create complete uncertainty about these things. so people just don't know what to believe. it's very, very, very difficult. and i think that's, you know, that's just the way it is with not just gmos but any number of these sorts of things. that when you start to get into the technical arguments, it's almost impossible. one of the aspects of that is really kind of looking at people's credentials and consistency and using common sense about what people's motivations might be and all those sorts of things. >> i apologize for those that have hands up. we're in a time limitation. if you have questions, perhaps the gentlemen would indulge you after the program. speak up in a really big voice. >> this is hard for me too, because i have adhd as well. i just have one question. is gmo good or bad? >> the question is gets to the essence of the question.

are gmos good or bad? >> that cuts to the simplest of thing ands you might think that that's a planted question because that's my daughter back there. she's a 10-year-old. and i think that there is not a problem with gmos. they're not -- they're neither good nor bad. it is a process. and as i was saying before, you can use genetically -- genetic modification of organisms to create things that are horrendous. and can you do it to create things that are quite beneficial. i think we need to think about that. that's an issue with the labelling. because, from a chg ankly, i wag makes a lot of sense, why not label these things? but whether you start thinking about it of as a process and there's a lot about food that i would like to know. i would like to know whether food uses pesticides and what kinds of food. i would like to know whether

that food has been grown where people are paid a living wage. what country it comes from. what is you're asking for is the inventory, the entire food system and keep track of all the processes and involved and in producing something that we eat. which to me you can say well let's label. that but then it's really hard once you start getting into processes to deny someone who wants something else incorporated on the label. and the reason the fda doesn't support that or the academy of science is because food labelling is supposed to be about health and safety. and they feel, you can say they've been captured by the industry, but they feel that there is not a health or safety issue associated with the process. that's what testing is about. >> excellent question. >> i think that she's good.

i think that some day we may be able to manipulate genes individually and know what's going to happen. originally they thought one gene would produce one proteen and that's all and that's exactly how it works and it's easy. that turned out not to be the case. they realized that genes are networks and families and extremely complicated and getting more complex the more they look at it. so when they genetically engineer, they mess up the dna pretty substantially right now with current technology. and they don't even know how to test to see if they've done something wrong to human health because they don't know all the different laws of nature and means that it's talking to. so i would say this. it is certainly possible that this process will become reliably safe. right now, i am extremely confident that the process itself is too fraught with side

effects. it's rushed to the market long before the science is ready. it may be a very significant health problem that we're facing. and i didn't even talk about the environmental impact. i want to add this. almost everything that was said by you tonight is mentioned in a book online called gmo myths and truths. it's very easy to read. it looks at all of the talking points from monsanto and the pr companies. every one of them. it shows what the truth is. and it shows the difference in the, you know, i would recommend going online, gmo myths and truths. and reading it. you'll see, you'll recognize manufacture the statements that were made tonight and then you'll see the scientific clarification. because i think it will show that, you know, there's a lot of wishful thinking about gmos. there are a lot of promise that's have been made. feed the world, et cetera, reduce chemicals. they haven'tua