Cyberbullying: The Strategy To Destroy Scientists

Years later I entered journalism. And I saw breathtaking ignorance and vitriol aimed at scientists like me coming from supposedly educated people. Never in a million years would I have anticipated that our passion for science would be used as a bludgeon or as a scarlet letter.  That is the milieu in which we find the current GMO "debate," which in actuality has devolved into a vicious, relentless assault by organic food activists against the biotechnology community. It doesn't matter if you are a professor, industry scientist, journalist, or private citizen; if you support biotechnology, anti-GMO activists will harass you using their keyboards as weapons of mass defamation. Their goal is straightforward: Biotech scientists must be destroyed professionally. Failing that, they must be destroyed emotionally.  There's actually a word for this. It's called cyberbullying. Once the weapon of choice for prepubescent teens, it is now deployed, with ruthless efficiency, against PhDs who have committed the unspeakable crime of conducting research on and publicly advocating GMOs. Even worse, these activists are abusing government transparency laws (e.g., FOIA) to harass law-abiding scientists. The University of Florida's Dr. Kevin Folta has become Public Enemy #1 among this deranged group of activists, who have viciously targeted him. Stephan Neidenbach, a middle school science teacher, has had enough. In an effort to "fight fire with fire," he has issued multiple FOIA requests for e-mails from anti-GMO professors, such as Dr. Hector Valenzuela from the University of Hawaii.