Latour, Science, and GMOs

"And, yet, I know full well that this is not enough because, no matter what
we do, when we try to reconnect scientific objects with their aura, their
crown, their web of associations, when we accompany them back to their
gathering, we always appear to weaken them, not to strengthen their claim
to reality. I know, I know, we are acting with the best intentions in the world,
we want to add reality to scientific objects, but, inevitably, through a sort
of tragic bias, we seem always to be subtracting some bit from it." (237).

This passage of Latour's article definitely struck me as something important. He makes such a good point, that the point of doing science studies is to figure out what makes science "real", but we end up obscuring that reality in some way. I sort of feel this does a good job of summing up what we are doing in class. Throughout the semester, we have really looked at certain issues in the contemporary science debates, and have tried to sift through them and find out who is really telling the "truth". In a way, at least for me, it has done exactly what Latour is talking about here. Science has gotten weaker for me because now I always think about the complexity behind an issue that led to the results that I am looking at. And we do have good intentions! Maybe we are a little bit biased towards exposing bullshit but at the same time I think we are trying to understand how this science gets made and what the consequences are.

GMOs are catching a lot of flak in our class. The Monsanto issue is definitely a problem, and like everything else in this world GMOs are not perfect. However, sometimes I think we get caught up in how GMOs are bad and forget all of the good things they can do. I understand not wanting to eat something a guy in a lab coat came up with. Totally fine. This is why I liked Seven Deadly Sins poster project quite a bit. It really laid out the ways GMOs are helping with this increasing complex world we live in. I think it went to the reality of the issue. The bottom line is that there probably are not going to be any more perfect little farming communities that can sustain themselves. There are too many people in the world and our society just isn't set up that way. For all of the bad surrounding GMOs, there is a ton of good as well.

There is a connection to Latour here. For all of our class work on GMOs, it is hard to sift through the information and make a decision. We always get the bad a whole lot more than we get the good. This is the critique that Latour is discussing, and also the way we obscure the very thing we are trying to study : science. Some how with more information on the subject, things become less clear.