As I’ve mentioned before, I’m an Australian. But us Ozzies get to meet a lot of Americans.

American author of Seeds of Deception and public speaker Jeffrey Smith’s of Fairfield Iowa, first came to the attention of Australians when he was rolled out by the anti-GM activists to try and prevent Australian farmers being given the freedom of choice on crop technology in late 2007.  Fortunately this effort by the anti-technology lobby groups was unsuccessful.

At most meetings organized by these activists that I have attended since that time — and there have been quite a few — stacks of his more recent book Genetic Roulette book were available for purchase, and I snapped up one early on.

A brief perusal of the articles revealed the book was highly biased. Nowhere in the book was there a mention of any of the major good outcomes from GM technology—such as decreased risk of cancer from mycotoxins in moldy corm (see this link for Chassy and Tribe’s efforts on this important topic at Academics Review). On the topics that I was most familiar such as antibiotic resistance in bacteria, Genetic Roulette was deeply misleading and factually wrong.

I decided late 2007 to investigate its claims thoroughly, little knowing how huge the task would be because as it turned out every one of the 65 claims in it — better called myths– was distorted, misleading, plain wrong, or based on misrepresentation or misreading of the sources it quoted.

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