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As another lefty and sciency person, I've had this frustrating conversation with probably half my friends by now. I think the fear of it stems primarily from a lack of understanding of what GMO actually is/does, so it's become a conversation around basic intro-level education more than anything else. It reminds me a lot of having to explain the concept of evolution to someone who fought against it but didn't understand what it actually claimed.
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Actually, it sounds a lot like the anti-Smart-Meter debate, as a lot of the fear in both cases comes from a distortion of the terminology. The anti-Meter side likes to use terms like "electromagnetic radiation", because well, everyone knows radiation is bad for you, and "electromagnetic" is just a big scary word that makes it that much worse. For a lot of people, I expect the term "genetically modified" conjures images of a mad scientist hunkered away in his lab plotting the overthrow of humanity with his mind-control grains.
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* GMO as a technology could be intentionally used for nefarious purposes (engineering of more effective biological weapons, for example). This is completely separate from agriculture, though you will find some people that argue against researching GMO technology at all out of fear. This is not a viewpoint I hold.
The bottom line? GMO as a technology is not intrinsically good or bad. It has the potential to do very many good things and to avoid every one of the bad things depending on how it is implemented. It also has the potential to do just the opposite.
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And this sounds a lot like the recent anti-nuclear-power hysteria that's been flitting around since Fukushima. Nuclear power and research, similarly, are neither good nor bad in and of themselves, but of course, incidents like this trigger fear, which some people are more than happy to fuel with mis-/dis-information, including equating the safe, peaceful use of nuclear power directly to the abuse of nuclear weapons.
In the end, with ALL these topics, a lot of it comes down to laziness of people not wanting to bother REALLY researching things for themselves, but instead going in with pre-conceived fears, and then merely finding whatever they can that supports those fears.