Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years we have witnessed the rise of considerable resistance to genetically modified (GM) food and crops around the world. This has led to a moratorium on the planting of new GM crops in Europe, and regimes for the mandatory labelling of GM foods in more than 30 countries, including Japan and Australia. By contrast, the Canadian regulatory system has approved 51 “plants with novel traits” and “novel foods” since 1995, almost all of which are GM, and any demands to require labelling of these products have been resisted by the federal government. Working with theoretical concepts developed by Michel Foucault, this essay examines this situation in Canada. The author traces the way in which facts and values have together given shape to a biopolitical struggle between those scientists who would frame genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as a manageable risk and those who have adopted a more precautionary framing. Three specific terms used in Canadian “science-based” regulation - “novelty,” “familiarity” and “substantial equivalence” - can be seen to represent ambiguous compromises in these ongoing struggles at the international level. In Canada these concepts have been mobilized to narrow the horizon of what can be expected to be risky about genetic engineering, allowing swift approval of many GM crops. High-level scientific critiques of this system, however, buoyed by public concern, point towards the need for a more open-ended regulatory process in Canada, one that would acknowledge that decision making in this field is inevitably both technical and political.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".