One of the big problems we always forget in the moment is that problems do not always present themselves in obvious ways. Leaded fuel is a great, and very recen

One of the big problems we always forget in the moment is that problems do not always present themselves in obvious ways. Leaded fuel is a great, and very recent, example. It remained legal for the better part of a century with numerous government declarations of its safety. One part of this was extensive lobbying and "research" from the industry players claiming it was safe, but the actual problem is that its problems manifest in very difficult to measure ways and over very long periods of time. You're not going to start wheezing and coughing around leaded fuel, at least not anymore so than unleaded fuel. And generally you'd seem to be completely unaffected given typical exposure levels. Yet of course you aren't unaffected. Even today we we're not entirely certain of everything that leaded fuel fume exposure causes, let alone the exact mechanism for such. What we do know is that there is an apparent causal relationship between leaded fuel exposure, particularly during one's developmental years, and increased criminality, lower IQ, and other such things. But you're not going to show this in any sort of brief experiment and even over longterm experiments it can be difficult to discern the issues. I mean if we didn't already know as much, the idea that inhaling negligible amounts of gas fumes (in terms of parts per x) over years could somehow cause increased crime rates or even low IQs sounds pretty absurd. But our bodies react in ways that often belie intuition. So you're left to look at things comparatively. How do people who do 'x' compare to people who do not do 'x' over years or decades? How do their children do? With GM crops we have a pretty ideal test suite since most of the world adopted these crops sparingly or not at all while in the United States near 100% of crops of certain crucial types are now genetically engineered. So how do young Americans, especially those born after the mid 90s, compare to those from other nations in terms of physical health, mental health, and other behaviors? Of course there are a million confounding variables here, some such as the growth of the internet can be controlled for but others cannot. So this is something that would require extensive research and work to actively study. Presumably this would be the purview of agencies such as the FDA. Unfortunately, with our government this [1] was the last head of the FDA. A Monsanto VP lawyer who argued for things such as allowing corporations to knowingly allow at least a small amount of carcinogens into processed foods. That man determined food safety in the US for the majority of the last administration, and I doubt the current administration would have much interest in such research either. So instead we get no meaningful oversight, negligible or poorly formulated longitudinal research, and instead are left to rely primarily on the ethics of companies such as Monsanto. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_R._Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_R._Taylor