So lecture's on thursday, and I'm almost done my preparations.
30 minutes is nothing. You can easily do 30 minutes just on Norman Borlaug. But I don't recommend you do this. Judging from what you have said. I think you should keep in mind the instructor's probable intent. I imagine he is bringing you in to inform the students and frame the arguement for further discussion. He is probably going to lead a discussion after you are done and college students are fully capable of sitting and listening to a speaker intently for 30 mintutes so I wouldn't put in any breaks or ask the class any discussion questions.
Yeah, my problem now is fitting all of the information into 30 minutes. There's some stuff that's necessary, and some stuff I'd like to leave out, but the teacher asked me to go over a few specific things. So far, the general outline is basically:
-What is genetic modification? This will cover older agricultural methods, and talk about what's different about recombinant technologies.
-Existing GM technologies. Bt, Roundup Ready, and some of the cool things I'm sure people will like, such as glow-in-the-dark plants.
-The effect on health and the environment
-The possibilities in the third world. This is my area of focus, and it's the one I'm most enthusiastic about, so it'll probably be the most interesting.
-The opposition. I'll talk about some of the vandalism, misinformation, etc. out there. I'll go over some of the unethical things GM proponents have done too.
I'm going to finish by telling people how to deal with the claims they hear. This is basically advocating skepticism - I'm going to tell them to always verify the things they hear, to make sure they understand it, and I'll probably give them some places to find information.
There'll also be a Q&A session after, and during that, I'll hopefully be able to address any concerns the students have.
Bringing in some sort of snack I don't know how many students are in the class but bringing in some sort of snack made with GM food and inviting the instructor and the students to try it would be a great way to grab interest from the start. You can challenge people to try the GM snacks before class and challenge the people who declined to eat the snacks at the beginning for your talk again after you are done. I doubt you are going to change many peoples belief in 30 minutes but it will definetly generate interest and suspense in the class.
I was thinking of doing this, but I think it'd end up taking up half of the 30 minutes. I might just ask people to raise their hands at the beginning to see how many people oppose it.
Because you are very knowledgable in the subject the risk you run is going too indepth: A student asks an interesting question and oops you've spent your 30 minutes explaining enzymes to them.
I'll keep that in mind. I've borrowed the textbook for the class (which is written by the teacher), and it's very basic in terms of the science. So I'll try to stay pretty basic, but I'm bringing a binder with all the references I used in case people don't believe me.
I would start off by talking about different kinds of genetic modification old and new. I would be sure to mention that farmer have been modifying crops through selective breeding for thousands of years. Wild mustard being the common ancestor of brussel sprouts, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower is the classic impressive example of this. You could then give some examples of modern GM techniques.
Actually, I was planning on using just that example
My examples of GM crops are: Bt, Roundup Ready, Golden rice, sentinel crops (glow in the dark when they're low on water), edible vaccines, and the proposed method for saving the Cavendish banana from extinction.
Finally, I would challenge the myths about GM crops. Point out that people fear that GM crops will harm their health with no clear idea of in what way they will do this. Talk briefly about how people often irrationally fear new technology will harm them. History is littered with examples. Off the top of my head, concerns microwaves and mobile phones give people cancer because they use RADIATION! Or the riots in England in 1752 when they skipped 11 days to adjust for lost time on the Roman Calendar. People were convinced that their lives had been shortened! Then point out the danger of such myths with GM crops. I forgot the details but last year an African country refused a food aid shipment of GM corn because anti-GM activists convinced the government officials that GM corn was poisonous. As a result tens of thousands of people starved. I am sure you can google the detailed story if you want to use it.
I think the examples I'm going to use here are some of the examples of vandalism, including some funny ones where the vandals destroyed whole fields of non-gm crops thinking they were gm. I have a few not so funny ones too, like fire bombings and such. Then there's the famine relief that was blocked, and I'll finish with misinformation. I'll talk about some of the experiments where rats were killed by both gm and non-gm crops, but the headlines read "gm crops kill rats." I'll talk about deaths due to tryptophan, and I'll mention Vandana Shiva.
There is more than enough for a 30 minute presentation there if you flush it out. If you want to talk about some of the legitimate concerns about GM crops, like resistences being transferred to native relate species, you can do that too if there is time. But I would be sure to challenge their unfounded fears first so they do not grab on to the legitmate risks as an easy defense of their unfound fears.
That's a good point. I'd like to mention the contamination issue, but I don't have time to go into great detail. Maybe it would be acceptable to say something like, "If proper regulations considerations are taken, the risk is pretty much non-existent." I'd like to explain what the regulations are, but I doubt I could fit that all into 30 minutes.
Jorghnassen said:
While supporting GM food and debunking myths about them, you need not spread misinformation of this kind.
Here's a link about that story. According to this link, in the end, enough non-GM corn was sent to avoid disaster, and this rejection of GM crop was not due to some belief that it was poisonous but out of fear of being banned from exporting to Europe (who has bans on imports of GM crops, because "modern farming techniques" have caused some problems there, though they may have legislatively overreacted on many counts, you can't really blame them for being suspicious).
It's hard to tell what exactly was the motivation. The president is quoted as saying, "Simply because my people are hungry, there is no justification to give them poison, to give them food that is intrinsically dangerous to their health" (
Source). I did read that the government was warned by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth that the Zambian farmers would take the seeds from the food aid and replant them, which would block their corn exports to Europe. However, Zambia doesn't export corn to Europe, and they wouldn't have been able to replant the seeds anyway. From my understanding, a few countries initially declined (Zimbabwe and Malawi as well), but after it was pointed out that their concerns weren't justified, those two countries accepted. The Zambian president still refused, stating what I quoted earlier.
