The liberal resistance to science

If this column appeared under the headline, "Massive defeat for the antiscience forces," you would naturally assume I'm talking about a setback for conservative Republicans, right? But you would be wrong.

The losers in this case are the Luddite shock troops of progressivism like Greenpeace. The winners are the children of the Philippines, thousands of whom will not go blind or die because the antiscience wing of modern liberalism finally is getting some pushback.

The Filipino government has finally approved the planting of genetically modified rice that contains vitamin A. "Golden rice," as the stuff is called, probably won't make a splash in the United States. But in the Third World, it will be a godsend.

Between a quarter-million and a half-million children go blind each year from vitamin A deficiency, the United Nations says. Half of them die within 12 months. Some studies put the figure higher.

As many as 300 million of the people at high risk for vitamin A deficiency live in countries where the staple food is rice. For them, golden rice will provide a quick, easy and cheap fix: Eating just two ounces a day will provide 60 percent of the recommended daily dose of Vitamin A.

But that hasn't stopped Greenpeace and other Luddite-left activists from fighting a scorched-earth war to stop golden rice. For more than a dozen years — or, if you prefer to keep score in the lost lives of children, 8 million dead — they've kept golden rice off the market by calling it Frankenfood and insisting it will wreck the environment and spread dependence on Western capitalism.

What role does science play in the left-wing opposition to golden rice and other genetically modified crops? None. Study after study has shown no detectable deleterious effects on human health from genetically altered foods. Two studies published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition have shown that golden rice is an even better vehicle for delivery of vitamin A than spinach, the wonder vegetable.

But liberal resistance to science is far more organized, far more destructive and far less covered in the media:

• Millions of American parents refused to have their children vaccinated for diseases like whooping cough and measles after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published an error-ridden tirade in Rolling Stone and the left-wing website Salon in 2005 linking vaccines to autism and other neurological disturbances.

Six years later, Salon retracted the article, yet many parents remain convinced of the linkage to this day. One of them sits in the White House. "We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate," Barack Obama said during his 2008 campaign. "Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person included." Obama's spurious worries about vaccines led to manufacturing changes that caused a shortage of flu vaccine in the winter of 2009.

• Virtually no nuclear-power plants have been built in the United States during the past four decades, the result of continuous left-wing scare stories. Australian physician Helen Caldicott has become a folk hero — 21 honorary degrees and a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize — for her antinuke campaign, the centerpiece of which is that the explosion at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear reactor led to nearly a billion deaths and countless hideous birth defects.

Actual death toll, according to the U.N.'s scientific committee on nuclear radiation: less than 100. Actual birth defects: zero. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences says that the chances of radiation-induced changes in human sperm and eggs are so low that it has never been detected in human beings, "even in thoroughly studied irradiated populations such as those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

But scientific consensus, invoked like clockwork whenever lefty activists and their journalist friends talk about global warming, is mysteriously irrelevant when they're discussing nuclear power or genetically enhanced crops. In 2005, the International Council for Science — a coalition of 140 scientific organizations — declared flatly: "Currently available genetically modified foods are safe to eat."