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Differences between men and women

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Genetically modified crops
James Watson Scientist
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There’s already a future for it, I mean, you know, it’s, and, you know, now, what was it I saw? You know they found GM genes in Mexican corn, supposedly there’s no- The difference there it’s that the Mexican farmers like it, want to use it, and think the regulations are crap, and they’re not going to follow regulations which seem to make no sense. There’s a sort of protect the ignorant. I mean to allow the ignorant, you know, to sort of pay attention to the dummies, so you can't control genetically modified. If it works people are going to use it. If you ban it people will use it.
So where did Europe go wrong do you think in this regard?
It was partly because Monsanto was stupid and didn’t license it to British firms, they didn’t, so people could object, we don’t want Americans to control our food source. So anti-American feeling was probably as important as anything else in keeping it out of France. Whereas if it, you know, been three or four French, large agro-chemical companies had had that, so it’s all Monsanto. The President Shapiro, he was a goose, you know. He got slaughtered. You know, in the way, you know, I fought; I just didn’t want patents to confuse the human genome. I just thought, God! And, you know, it was patents, I think it was the money aspect which kept it out. There was going to be a transfer of money to the United States, not an improvement of the French economy. And then, you know, the usual leftist, Marxist, communists who, when they can't fight for communism, became environmentalists, because, you know, as an environmentalist the chief evil was the rapacious corporation, which is going to destroy the air, the soil, the oceans, etc. So it was, you know, Marxists need bogey enemies.
Well, I guess corporations aren’t a bogey enemy in the sense that their only motivation is to make money. By law that’s what they have to do, it’s if they’re a public company it’s -
Well, to make money, they’re supposed to listen to their shareholders and that was crap when you really get down to it that shareholders were the only things that were important. Your employees are as important as your shareholders. So it was, you know, ideology, the usual sort of crap you read in The Wall Street Journal.

American molecular biologist James Dewey Watson is probably best known for discovering the structure of DNA for which he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins. His long career has seen him teaching at Harvard and Caltech, and taking over the directorship of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. From 1988 to 1992, James Watson was head of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health. His current research focuses on the study of cancer.

Listeners: Walter Gratzer Martin Raff

Walter Gratzer is Emeritus Professor of Biophysical Chemistry at King's College London, and was for most of his research career a member of the scientific staff of the Medical Research Council. He is the author of several books on popular science. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard and has known Jim Watson since that time

Martin Raff is a Canadian-born neurologist and research biologist who has made important contributions to immunology and cell development. He has a special interest in apoptosis, the phenomenon of cell death.

 

 


Listen to Martin Raff at Web of Stories

 

 

Duration: 3 minutes, 38 seconds

Date story recorded: November 2008 and October 2009

Date story went live: 18 June 2010