Comment Re:More ambiguous cruft (Score 1) 514
Exactly. In order to become a scientist one generally has to become an expert in a highly specialized field that might not be the right field necessary to judge the overall impact of a technology on society. Nicholas Nassim Taleb gives the example of a carpenter who builds a roulette wheel. That person knows every inch of the machine, yet it is not the best person to determine issues of probability about the machine (e.g., is it a fair bet, what is a good betting strategy, etc.). For those questions, you need a statistician, or even a gambler with a very good "gut".
Another analogy is cryptography. For a good cryptographic cipher, you can't possibly brute force the math. But for any particular implementation, there might be other attacks that have nothing to do with the math, but rather, on knowing how to place a keylogger on the person's computer, or a social engineering attack. So a mathematician is probably not the best person to understand the risks of computer security, even though they are the only person who can understand the algorithm being used.
In the case of a GMO scientist, they might (will?) not know the entire industrial chain that takes things from the lab to the manufacturing plant to the field. So they can't know all of the risks involved, and would typically have a financial incentive to naysay those risks anyways.
Having said all that, I am personally not too worried about GMO in the foodchain (as a safety issue), I would be more concerned about things like patent protection and other IP issues. But I understand that people's fears are not going to be assuaged just because some scientist says they are unfounded.