Nobel Science Prize Ain’t No Proof Ya Got a Brain
By F. William engdahl
5 July 2016
According to a report in the Washington Post, precisely 107 of the living Nobel Science Prize awardees have done just that. They foolishly signed a letter urging Greenpeace to stop opposing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The letter specifically asks Greenpeace to cease its efforts to block introduction of so-called “Golden Rice,” a genetically manipulated rice variety that allegedly “could reduce” vitamin A deficiencies in infants in the developing world. This demonstrates either that those 107 Nobel laureates are not truly intelligent or that they are yet another group of scientist prostitutes willing to whore their reputation for a few shekels from Monsanto & Co. Or both
The not-so-noble Nobel scientists’ letter states, “We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against ‘GMOs’ in general and Golden Rice in particular.” The letter is addressed, “To the Leaders of Greenpeace, the United Nations and Governments around the world.” Their letter closes with a gut-wrenching appeal, “How many poor people in the world must die before we consider this a ‘crime against humanity‘? ” That’s heavy. It’s also bullshit
There’s one flaw in the appeal of the 107 Nobel Science laureates. Their letter is scientific nonsense from beginning to end. Everything they write about GMO has scientifically and repeatedly been proved false. Let’s focus on their main argument about GMO beta-carotene “Golden Rice.”
Golden Rice failed
Some brief history is needed to grasp how idiotic are their claims about Golden Rice that it will mitigate Vitamin A Deficiency in poor countries of Asia and Africa, and save millions of childrens’ lives thereby
The world of GMO is a creation of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1985, the Rockefeller Foundation initiated the first large-scale research into the possibility of genetically engineering plants for commercial use. At the time they termed it a “major, long-term commitment to plant genetic engineering.” Rockefeller Foundation funds provided the essential catalyst for the worldwide scientific research and development which would lead to the creation of genetically modified plants, the “Gene Revolution.”
Over the following two decades, the Rockefellers’ tax-exempt foundation would spend well over $100 million directly, and several hundred million indirectly, to catalyze and propagate research on the development of genetic engineering and its application to transform world food production. Clearly, it was a very big issue in their strategic plans. Notably, the same Rockefeller Foundation funded Hitler’s eugenics research during much of the Third Reich until outbreak of the war in 1939 when it became embarrassing. After Nuremburg trials at the end of the war, an intimate Rockefeller associate and then-president of the American Eugenics Society, Frederick Osborn, announced, “Henceforth the new name of eugenics is genetics.”
Simply said, this eugenics–culling of the human breed as Prince Philip once so elegantly and chillingly put it–not feeding the world, is the true agenda of genetic manipulation. I refer skeptics or the curious to my book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, (Saat der Zerstörung) for detailed sourced discussion of this entire grotesque “scientific” operation of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Reductio ad absurdum
The Rockefeller Foundation’s President during the 1930’s, Warren Weaver, a physicist, headed the foundation’s new biology program. The foundation’s largesse in giving funds to scientific research projects gained the foundation enormous influence over the direction of science during the Great Depression by the mere fact they had funds to dispense to leading scientific researchers at a time of acute scarcity. From 1932 to 1957, the Rockefeller Foundation had handed out an impressive $90 million in grants to support the creation of the new field of molecular biology. Molecular biology and the attendant work with genes was a Rockefeller Foundation creation in every sense of the word. The same Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller family have been passionately committed to global population reduction by any and all means since at least the 1920’s.
In 1982, a group of advisers from the Foundation urged its management to devote resources to apply molecular biology for plant breeding. In December 1984, the Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation approved funding for applying molecular biological techniques to the breeding of rice, the dietary staple of a majority of the planet’s population. This is the origin of the so-called Golden Rice that allegedly mitigates Vitamin A Deficiency (VAD) according to the 107 Nobel laureates.
The GMO rice methodology went back to what was termed “reductionism” by René Descartes, and to the method of Charles Darwin, namely that living creatures were machines whose only goal was genetic replication—a matter of chemistry and statistics. The Rockefeller methodology was an extension of the belief that a complex life form cold be reduced to a basic building block or “elementary seed,” from which all traits of the life form could be deduced. It was of little interest to Weaver and others at the Rockefeller Foundation that scientific reductionism had been thoroughly refuted. As the internationally recognized biosafety expert, Professor Philip Regal put it, “…Weaver helped create a network of what would one day be called molecular biologists, that had little traditional knowledge of living organisms and of communities of organisms. It shared a faith in the theory of reductionism and in determinism…It learned to use optimistic terms of discourse that brought grants and status.”
The research monies were channeled through a new entity the Rockefeller Foundation created, the International Program on Rice Biotechnology (IPRB), into some of the world’s leading research labs. Over the next 17 years, the Foundation spent an impressive $105 million of its own money in developing and spreading genetically modified rice around the world. Furthermore, by 1989 it was spending an additional $54 million a year—amounting to more than $540 million over the following decade—on “training and capacity building” to disseminate the new developments in rice genetic modification. Their pet project was to develop a strain of GMO rice–named Golden Rice for the sickly orange color of the genetically inserted beta-carotene–that allegedly reduced vitamin A deficiency in infants.
The Philippines-based Rockefeller Foundation-created International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), with a gene bank containing more than one-fifth of the world’s rice varieties, became the prime vehicle to proliferate the Rockefeller Foundation’s new gene revolution in rice. IRRI had illegally seed-banked every significant rice variety known. In 1993, a Convention on Biological Diversity under the UN was agreed upon to control the theft of such seed resources of the developing world. Washington, however, made a tiny alteration in the original text. It demanded that all the genetic resources held by the CGIAR system (of which IRRI is part) remain outside the rules. That affected 40% of the world’s unique food crop germ-plasm held in gene banks. It meant that agribusiness companies like Monsanto or Syngenta were still free to steal and then patent them.
IRRI had been used by the backers of the Green Revolution to gather control of the irreplaceable seed treasure of Asia’s rice varieties, under the ruse that they would thereby be “protected.” Golden Rice became the symbol, the rallying flag, and the demonstration of the promise of genetic engineering, even though the promise was based on black lies and deliberate deception
The real truth
Indian biodiversity campaigner, Dr. Vandana Shiva, pointed out in a stinging critique of the Rockefeller Foundation Golden Rice promotion that, “the first deficiency of genetic engineering rice to produce Vitamin A is the eclipsing of alternative sources of vitamin A.” Shiva pointed out, “there are many alternatives…for Vitamin A supply. Vitamin A is provided by liver, egg yolk, chicken, meat, milk, butter. Beta-carotene, the Vitamin A precursor is pro- vided by dark green leafy vegetables, spinach, carrot, pumpkin, mango….”
Moreover, the quantity of rice which a person would have to consume daily to meet the full quota of Vitamin A was staggering, and not humanly possible. One estimate was that an average Asian would have to eat 9 kilograms of cooked rice daily, just to get the required minimum intake of Vitamin A. A typical daily ration in Asia of 300 grams rice would provide only 8% of his daily requirement.
Rockefeller Foundation’s President Gordon Conway sheepishly responded to these criticisms in a 2001 press release: “First it should be stated that we do not consider golden rice to be the solution to the vitamin A deficiency problem. Rather it provides an excellent complement to fruits, vegetables and animal products in diets, and to various fortified foods and vitamin supplements.” He added: “I agree with Dr. Shiva that the public relations uses of golden rice have gone too far.”
The curious and as yet unanswered question is who is truly behind this new attempt, after some 16 years of failure, to commercialize Golden Rice, and to make the utterly discredited GMO Golden Rice the focus of an alleged miracle in human life-saving nutrition? The Nobel signers’ claims are an utter scientific lie. What money is behind the effort to convince 107 Nobel Prize science laureates who clearly ought to know better–and if not should hand back their Nobel prize money–to sign their names to such a prominent piece of propaganda lies?
Is this an effort by Syngenta, now coming under the acquisition of ChemChina, to revive the failed Golden Rice project? Is it an attempt by Monsanto, soon to vanish under the eugenics umbrella of Bayer AG to do the same? Whatever the answer, and we will undoubtedly know soon, the signing of the Open Letter to Greenpeace, the United Nations and Governments of the World is at least proof that a Nobel Science Prize ain’t no proof ya got a brain…
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”