(Science Week - Day 3!)

Around 2013, it seemed like Facebook entered a phase of hysteria over genetic modifications. Rather than attempts to help each other brush up on the chemistry and biology necessary needed to form an opinion, quick-shot memes and jarring hyperbole formed the dialogue.

Tomatoes with syringes! Isolated photos of lab animals with gigantic tumours! Monsanto doesn’t eat their own crops! Strawberries with cow heads! We have the right to know what’s in our food! THE RIGHT TO KNOW!

But still… really no chemistry or biology at all. Interesting.

Eventually it all seemed to fade, taking with it the debates over required labelling on consumer products in America.

Finally, in summer 2016, a decisive bill was signed into federal law. The online hubbub was virtually silent – it was like no one even knew. Again, interesting. What requirements were included? Well, here you are on the Internet – a good place to find out if you care to.

But I didn’t bring this up to dwell on politics and law. Science week is about wonder and our fortune as science’s beneficiaries, so my link today is to a segment on Golden Rice, a potentially life-changing instance of GMOs.

The prospect of genetic modification – even as science fiction – is also an invitation to wrap our heads around the incredible clockwork behaviour of the chemical megalopolis, the microscopic universe of the organism. To predictably modify genes seems on par with mastering and controlling the famously unmasterable butterfly effect.

And of course, the occurrence of the long debate – and the unusually low level of sophistication at which it was conducted – I think underscores smartly the value of science literacy as a personal value and a societal one. Times like that are better when we equip ourselves to rise a little higher.

Until tomorrow!

• PBS segment