Couple of days ago my son sent me a URL: http://12160.info/forum/topics/
monsanto-agrochemicals-cause-genetic-damage-in-soybean-workers-st.
So off I went, and sure enough there was a website
called “12160: Resisting the New World Order” with an article about soybean
workers in Brazil suffering genetic damage as a result of spraying Monsanto
herbicides. Haha, another smoking gun,
thought I, and set out to read it. BUT…
The site said that the original article had appeared in the
journal Mutation Research/ Genetic
Toxicology and Environmental Mutagenesis, but gave no further
information. I first looked up the
journal’s impact factor, because Monsanto trolls have been blogging a lot about
impact factors. (An impact factor is an
indicator of a journal’s prestige—it’s a figure obtained by dividing the number
of articles published in a journal by the number of times those articles have
been cited in articles in other journals).
The trolls were saying that anti-GMOers were pushing such “junk science”
(another troll meme) that they could only get published in journals with low impact
factors, i.e. junk journals. So I was
relieved to find that this journal had a five-year average of 2.814—not Nature by far, but at least better than
the 0.something IFs that anti-GMOers usually publish in.
The trouble was, when I looked for the paper, it
wasn’t there. I wasted a half-hour on
Google Scholar and on the Mutation Research website trying to find it, and so
far as I have been able to find out, no such paper exists. What does exist is a book chapter that has
the exact same subject matter. How 12160
got this so wrong remains a mystery.
Why is all this anything more than a petulant rant
over something so trivial that only some irascible old fart besotted with his
own self-importance could give a **** about it?
I’ll tell you.
The whole strategy of Monsanto-lovers is based on
framing the GMO issue as one of clear-headed defenders of Reason, Progress and Science
battling manfully against hordes of clueless, overemotional, sloppy, ignorant, propeller-capped
dingbats.
Trouble is, this picture, largely uncontested in our own
literature, is one that strongly appeals to the vast majority of the
uncommitted. Almost everyone would
rather be on the side of Reason, Progress and Science than on the side of
looney-tunes losers. So we have to
convince them of the truth: that the pro-GMOers are the ones who are flying in
the face of Reason, that their distorted notion of Progress will prove disastrous
for our species, and that their “Science” is in fact twenty to fifty years out
of date.
In order to do that, we have
to look like we know what we’re doing, especially when it comes to the
science. All too often both in blogs and
news reports you see things like “A recent article claims…” X, Y or Z. Sometimes it’s correct, sometimes not. Sometimes what’s claimed is true, sometimes
it’s false. How can anyone know? How can you check? So, how can anyone take such reports
seriously?
So what I suggest is, every article cited in
everything we write should be properly referenced. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Just go to Google Scholar, click on the “advanced
search” button, put the article title in the “exact phrase” box and alter the
setting “anywhere in the article” to “in the title of the article”. Then when the article you want pops up, click
on the “cite” button under it and you get the citation in three different
formats (MLA, APA and Chicago). Choose
any one and cut and paste it into your own piece (put it at the end if you feel
that in-text citations are too intrusive).
This procedure is fine so long as the article
appeared in a journal. If, as here, it’s
a book chapter, you’re out of luck. For
some reason known only to its makers, for book chapters Scholar lists only book
title and date—no publisher. In this case I got only:
Benedetti, D., Da Silva, F. R., Kvitko, K.,
Fernandes, S. P., & da Silva, J. (2014). Genotoxicity Induced by
Ocupational Exposure to Pesticides.
To get the full reference you have to click on the
article title, which in this case gave me: Agricultural
and Biological Sciences » "Pesticides
- Toxic Aspects", book edited by Marcelo L. Larramendy and Sonia Soloneski,
ISBN 978-953-51-1217-4.
Seems like an interesting book. And it's free access. I’ll look into it.
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