Okay, let me take a crack at this Radical Honesty thing. I resent you for oversimplifying the original article. I typed out a long bit about how lying lets you harbor very uncharitable opinions, and that to just stop lying isn't enough. You need to stop being so damned judgmental and attempt to help people. Then I read the article, and Brad actually says something similar farther down. That lying to someone when you think their stuff is crap is "avoiding your responsibility as one human being to another. [...] don't bullshit yourself about it being kind." I think you've missed the important bits here.

I have to agree with Fred. This is science exploring its worst traits. Again. We appear to need more ethics training in school, and possibly more still post-doc. It's projects like this that make the anti-GMO people toss and turn at night. This is exactly the trust issue they have with scientists, and why they want the entire discipline to stop: taking pathogenic or pest species and making them do their job BETTER will only teach us a lot if it doesn't kill us all first. I don't think I have to tell anyone here that e coli gets into humans, and it's infused into our agriculture. You can kill it by cooking, but you can't kill any pathogens it leaves behind.