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Golden Rice
thue writes: "According to this story (reg. required) in the NY times "golden rice", ie genetically modified rice which contains beta carotene, could save a million children each year who would otherwise have died from malnutrition. The main reason golden rice is not yet in use is that the methods used in the creation was covered by patents, and getting a deal with the patent holders has delayed them one year (1,000,000 dead as a result!?). But the article also describes great resistance to everything GMO, even something as harmless and beneficial as this. Caution is understandable when dealing with powerful traits such as various kinds of resistance, but beta carotene...?" What I liked about it was that the developers hadn't crippled the strain's ability to reproduce. Genetically-engineered wheat is generally crippled, forcing farmers to buy new seed from the company year after year.
Erm, right, but we're talking a WHOLE different set of scale here. Not that i don't approve of GM foods, but there really are serious risks involved. I dunno, whassa good analogy? rm, vs rm -R?
Ah, yes, but then you'd have to deal with the issues of the sovereignty of nations, that is, their right to deal with domestic issues without other nations telling them what to do or how to do this or that. I seem to recall the UN having told, or even scorned, the US for various things that violated various UN charters, and the end result was having people like Sen. Strom Thurman tell the UN to get lost. So, taking this precedent, us Americans would then become hypocrites in the eyes of the world if we were to do things as assasinate politicians who disagree with us.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. -Friedrich Nietzsche
Well, without any hard figures, I am pretty sure that the number of people harmed by or because of other energy sources (coal and oil mainly) is at the very least the same and most likely more than those harmed by nuclar power generation.
Of course, I don't know what those numbers would show if we include the nuclear bombs...
I'm also weary of GE as a solution (see my top-level comment), but I find your argument somewhat disturbing. I agree that we need to avoid "polishing symptoms, giving people a pseudo good conscience while everybody is making money fast." However, saying that it's ok for us to let millions of non-white people starve is very sketchy. If really want to look at the "root" of the problem, look at North Americans (and Western Europeans). Our consumption levels are ridiculously higher than those of people in most parts of the world. Educate us! Not that I don't agree that population levels in more exploited countries don't need to come down. The problem is that what appears to have the strongest correlation with small families is affluence. In other words, if we want to reduce world population we need: (1) some education; (2) a whole lot of wealth re-distribution.
All that to say that it's not ok for us to view this as a problem of poor countries that we can solve by starving colored people, this is our problem and we need to start taking responsibility.
In other news from the rice front...
Apparently, Monsanto has developed such a rice, too. This article (in german) says they intend to provide it to farmers without demanding royalties.
This paper claims golden rice is a hoax and will not alleviate vitamin A deficiency.
Propaganda, by the look of it, but then I'm no biologist.
What I liked about it was that the developers hadn't crippled the strain's ability to reproduce. Genetically-engineered wheat is generally crippled, forcing farmers to buy new seed from the company year after year.
But *if* this modified strain of rice should have some nasty side effect, it would be a really bad thing if it reproduced.
Yes - but just because GMO wheat can't produce viable seed from a reproduction standpoint (it's still edible) does not mean that it can't cross-pollinate with other plants, and pass it's attributes on to a plant with reproductive capability. There are a number of cases where a farmer whose 'natural' fields abutt a GMO crop have been sued by Monsanto (in another masterpiece of PR) for having wheat with the Monsanto-engineered attributes as a result of cross-pollination. I wait with interest to see what the courts make of this.
From a personal standpoint, I have little problem with GMO crops where the alterations would have arisen naturally sooner or later during normal reproduction. This is little more than weighting the dice, so to speak. Where you introduce a new protein into the DNA code to make it more resistant to, say, pesticides I have more concerns because this strays a lot further than evolution would have acheived simply by rolling the evolutionary die.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
A lot of responses to this article are of the nature "GE foods are just fine, and anybody who disagrees is a luddite."
I have a lot of faith in science, but very little faith in human nature. We are prone to make mistakes. And when are dealing with something as powerful and potentially damaging as GE foods, I get a little concerned.
Not only do we have scientists running around altering genes when they can't possibly know all of the effects, we have greedy corporations pushing GE Foods through the FDA. We've got Monsanto trying to convince the Feds that in-house testing of their products was complete, and that their products are safe, the Feds listen because Monsanto has the cash to fund the lobbying (and campaign contributions).
The point is, how far are you going to trust someone who's main interest is pro fit ? Potrykus' motives may be humanitarian, but, then again, who knows what biotech companies he holds stock in?
> Okay, so advances in genetic engineering seem to offer us the chance to do a lot of good for
/.
> world hunger, but the trouble is that we just don't know what effects this stuff will have on
> us. When it comes to new medicines we insist upon years and years of scientifically conducted
> trials before allowing them to be used on people, and even then look at the things that
> crop up years later.
The problem is that we at least allow testing. If it's a new experimental medicine with only a dozen or so side effects (look at the medicine commercials lately and tell me I'm wrong), it still actually gets to get tested.
Whereas if it's something that may feed millions of starving people it can't be let out of the labs for fear of "Kudzu: The Plant that Walked Like a Man" taking hold of the hysterical public.
> The wholesale introduction of GM foods into our food chain is just too risky at the moment. It's
> a new technology and mistakes are part of the learning process, and will inevitably be made.
Yes, but as with above, with other technologies, we at least allow testing. What is the problem here? Hey, we test new drugs on dozens if not hundreds of people per new drug. New techs are tested on user-study groups all the time. Why the big uproar over a new food? (Which it isn't, really... it's just rice with a lot of beta-carotene.)
> If history has taught us anything, it's that no new advance comes without teething troubles.
The problem is, we're shooting the child before he even teeths. God, I hate Neo-Luddites... I just never expected to see any on
> And given this, the last thing we should do is push for them to be used by the general public -
> a mistake now could cost millions of lives and contaminate other crops, making them tainted as
> well.
What, just because it can breed true? Come on, it might be able to cross over to other types of rice. I can believe that. But what other crops are you worried about? I can't see this even possibly crossing over to any other crop food, like wheat or corn.
And I find your use of terms like contaminate and tainted pretty damn loaded. You're already assuming that this golden rice is a Bad Thing, even before any testing has been done.
> Things like this seem innocuous enough, but you can't let one thing go through because it "seems
> harmless". Without investigation it could be even the smallest of changes that goes bad, and
> when it's something as fundamental as food, we can't afford a single mistake.
Bollocks. We have plenty of food. It's the starving people who can't afford a single mistake. And frankly, unless you're one of them, you don't have the right to speak for them. Maybe it's a bit harsh, but look at it this way. If the GE rice works, then they live. If it doesn't work, then they die. But since many of them were going to die anyway, shouldn't we at least find out if the rice is good? It might save people. We can't afford not to take that chance.
> GM food is just not ready now. We shouldn't let the greed of a few corporations and the advocacy
> of technology fetishists blind us to the very real potential for disaster.
Yeah, the inventory is so greedy he's trying to give the rice away. And speaking as one of the "technology fetishists", I'd rather we know what the rice may or may not do rather then blindly speculate on it while people die. Even if the golden rice doesn't work exactly as planned, it may give us some insight into a GE'd food crop that does work.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
If these people are going to die anyway.. let's test everything on them.. that way if there are mistakes made.. they aren't made here!! woohoo all hail GM foods!! let's get that shit started.. also put those poor bastards to work farming the shit..
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Great idea here. Kudos to the Scientists. BTW, if there are any Microbiologists out there, see if you can get the nitrogen fixing bacteria Rhizobium (found in root nodules of clover, peanuts, etc), to work on corn, wheat or even rice roots. The result would be self fertilizing plants. (Fertilizer as in for theroots, not as in flowers).
"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life." Terry Pratchet
The reason genetically-engineered wheat is generally crippled is not just for the company's sake, but to prevent a genetically-engineered strain from out-competing natural strains
No, the reason is that the gene tech company doesn't want the farmers to use their crop without paying royalties. If this 'golden rice' were genetically crippeled in that way, it would make sure that the 3rd world farmers will have to buy new seed every season. Domesticated crop isn't competitive in natural conditions at all. Many can't even reproduce without the aid of man. Having to spend extra energy making a protein that it doesn't need for itself (the protein that makes beta-carotene in this case) makes it even less competitive. A plant engineered to have resistance against a herbicide is only competitive if the herbicide is present. In natural conditions, without the herbicide present, it still has to spend energy making the herbicide resistance proteins. Genetic engineering is NOT random trial and error, testing in the field, and hoping for the best, like traditional crop improvement techniques.
The poster wonders why we need to exercise caution about introducing something like BC into an organism that doesn't regularly carry it. It's impact on humans may be beneficial, but it is substantial as the poster points out. That alone shows that the impact to other organisms may be as or more profound.
people aren't starving or suffering from malnutrition because food isn't constructed properly, they're starving because not enough people care to do anything about it. Don't blame the food, blame society.
Like most complex social issues, you can't place the blame on just one thing.
Consider famine, for instance. The most popular view of famine is that it's caused by lack of food supply, and that the solution to it is supplying food to impoverished regions. But according to Nobel winner Amartya Sen , famines are not caused by lack of food supply, but due to economic and social factors - mainly purchasing ability and electoral feedback.
Famines never occur in democracies, because elected officials are responsive to feedback since they want to be elected again. During the 59-61 famine in China, between 14-40 million people died - a staggering number - yet nothing was done because a totalitarian system prevented the feedback loop between victims and govt. officials. In cases like this, genetic engineering or a better supply chain doesn't really help much.
The root cause of starvation is economic and social. Even China and India produce enough food to feed their entire populations - it's the way their system is structured that causes the problem. Of course, this doesn't mean that a more nutritious supplement doesn't help. IIRC, thiamine supplements in wheat/bread are required or encouraged by the FDA, in order to save American lives on a statistical scale. In large scale trials, thousands or millions of lives can be saved even with vitamin supplements, but that's not the main solution to nutritional problems.
The root cause is the underlying social and economic infrastructure, and that requires a bigger fix, and will save more lives in the long run.
However, because of the size of the problem, even a "minor fix" such as genetic engineering can save human lives on a massive scale. So it may well be a good solution in certain areas, providing the domino effect and technical details are resolved.
w/m
I've not seen anything assuring that it won't do any harm either.
And how are you supposed to prove that this rice (or any GM food) is 100%, all-the-time, in-all-circumstances, goddamn you-bet, safe? No matter what the product or technology, someone will be harmed by it. I'm sure that some fool out there in the world, at some point, has managed to seriously harm themselves with a Q-tip. Does that mean that the benefits of Q-tips must be denied to everyone?
Look, the issue is, as always, a matter of tradeoffs. Do something (that is, allow those who need it to have access to the rice) and a few people might get sick or die. Do nothing, and hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people will die. It's that simple.
For most of the people in the poorer parts of the world, I suspect that the choice is self-evident...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
I'm curious if any of our neo-luddite friends out there are aware of the approval process any food must go through before being labeled fit for human consumption, both in Europe and the U.S.
Biafrans act as if it were software going from the first development build that ran to a final release in one step. News flash for those who would prefer to be scared than informed: If Microsoft went through a software development process similar to the food-approval process, we'd be bitching about the fact that, while Windows 2001 is supremely stable, it would be nice not to have to be limited to the 8.3 filename limitation. It's actually quite slow but with an emphasis on safety.
Any food, GM or not, has to go through an arduous, expensive, long approval process that addresses the very concerns the Know-Nothings bleat about. In fact, it checks for things they have never publicly considered.
Maybe we should make sure this stuff isn't going to kill millions before we unload tons of it on a third world country?
Maybe you should actually read what happens before whimpering in fear. From Are Bioengineered Foods Safe? from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration:
No matter how a new crop is created--using traditional methods or biotechnology tools--breeders are required by our colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct field testing for several seasons to make sure only desirable changes have been made. They must check to make sure the plant looks right, grows right, and produces food that tastes right. They also must perform analytical tests to see whether the levels of nutrients have changed and whether the food is still safe to eat.
There are areas where they could be improved in terms of safety (but Biafrans choke at additional animal testing), and other areas where they could improve time-to-market and affordability of the process to increase the number of innovations made, make them cheaper (and thus available to people other than First World consumers). I'd be the last to say that governments are immune to criticism. But for Pete's sake please RTFM and get informed to what the real issues are instead of reading a headline and spewing off based on something you saw in a 1950's Sci-Fi flick whose science was written by English Lit majors.
Adding beta carotene may indeed have all the temporary benefits stated, but one has to remember that nature is famous for adapting to changed circumstances.
Even 20 years ago, the thought that nature would come up with resistances to almost all our antibiotics was regarded as almost unthinkable, yet here we are with strains of TB, malaria and E.Coli with just one or even no antibiotics which are effective against them.
My caveats against Golden rice, are that whilst it will be almost certainly effective in the short term, it will add several million people to the hungry nations of the world and 10 years or so later we will have to come up with something new. Even more importantly, introducing a single crop which most of the world will be critically dependent on introduces a single point of failure into the crop system, so anything which adversely affect that crop would devastate the Third World.
The Real Solution IMO, is to educate and encourage diversity in the eating habits of the rest of the world. This is a solution which doesn't have a problem with patents, but is obviously unpopular as no one is willing to fund it, whereas the GM companies are probably salivating at getting this idea as the 'foot in the door' to get GM products acceptable to the rest of the world.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Uh, I meant "pesticides".
Oh, sure. Just get the P.O. Box of a hundred indigent rice farmers in Bangladesh, put rice seeds in a bag with a note for explanation, and send 'em on their way through the good old Bangladeshi Postal System ('...through typhoon, through dysentery, through malaligned chakrim, the mail must go through!')
Get real. You can't simply mail the truly poor regions of the world -- in general they have no address. And since their NY Time subscription tends to be a little late, they don't know about Golden Rice and what it can do for them. And why would they trust a letter from a foreigner that tells them to eat strange-colored food? This is assuming that the rice even gets into the country, with most 3rd world countries having a corrupt import system that snatches cargo for themselves more often than not. And the doctor only gets one chance, as he'll be put in jail by the European anti-GM Food sentiment soon after he tries to mail some of this stuff to anyone.
You are being really, really, really naive.
The only way to get this rice to where it will do some good is if it can get into the distribution mechanism of the humanitarian organizations of the world. And the only way to do that is legally, through whatever export/donation system he's now fighting with.
I wish Herr Doctor the best of luck, and I hope his creations become widespread -- legally -- as soon as possible.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
No, No, No... Modern crops are breed to not reprogduce in order to increase their yield. Energy a plant spends reproducing is energy not spent producing more edible portions. The fact that this requires the farmer to buy more each season and that the strains will not "get out of hand" are side effects. The only difference between genetic engineering and selective breeding is that genetic engineering is more precise. Rather than bobmarding plants with radiation, cross -breeding them and hoping that they produce a useful mutation, Genetic engineers insert the exact mutation that will get the desired result. As far as unknown long term effects, if you analyze golden rice and detirmine that it is scemically identical to normal rice, excelt that it also includes beta carotine, then we know it is exactly as safe as feeding people normal rice with beta carotine supplements mixed in. Anyone who thinks that peolpe will will all of a sudden grow a third arm from eating genetically modified food has been watching too much TV.
I agree. So now the millions will live only to cause a shortage of the special rice and then they will start to die anyway.
*sigh*
Thank you. Drive through. (:wq)
This comment is definitely worth a read.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
press...
There is concern about agri-business, but the high emotions seem to
be mostly about GM foods, and equal standards are not being applied to
both. Look at the furore about the Monarch butterfly, and compare it
to the list of species that have become endangered by pesticides
Sure, there are dangers to GM foods, but they also promise to end
one of the great environmental crimes of the modern day: drowning huge
areas of land with dangerous bioactive chemicals, which cripple
biodiversity and poison water supplies.
All very well written and all... but look guys...
It's the 21st Century. You shouldn't need to spend billions to create weird assed Frankin-food to feed the "millions". Just kill all the evil militaristic assholes that starve their own people for profit and distribute grains fairly. Honest, that's all you need to do.
Remember, they didn't create genetically engineered food to feed the starving... they created it to corner the market on food. Gen-foods are more expensive. Once the market is dependant on it, more will die. Your milk will be more expensive. The world will continue turning.
I promise you...
Now when we have weddings and throw rice on the bride it will be a golden shower!
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
Bob Geldof then went in with eyes wide shut, and secured aid for famine relief. A noble man, but ill informed and painfully naive.
Of course, the Ethiopian government was grateful. How do you think they fed their soldiers? Money from Live Aid was used to support the Ethiopian government in the civil war against rebels. Since rebels were indistinguishable from the general farming population, the government decided to drive out and persecute its own people. Hence, the famine.
Some of the most vivid footage I saw was of an Ethiopian fighter jet bombing a farming village. Damn.
The media has to shoulder a large part of the blame. There was at least one reporter who was trying to give a picture of the real situation but she was ignored and accused of trying to crash the party.
Sorry, I couldn't find a more informative link to Channel 4's informative program.
The raindrops patter on the bamboo leaf, but these are not tears of grief;
This is only the anguish of him who is listening to them.
I apologize if anyone has already made this point, but we (humans) have been genetically modifying food for thousands of years, and we aren't all dead yet. Corn used to be 2-3 inches long, before native americans began breeding better strains. Have you ever seen a seedless orange? Drank French wine that was grown after american cuttings were grafted on? Smoked a cigarette? Plants aren't the only things that we have changed, either. Dogs are the most obvious example, since everything from a tiny terriers to great danes came from wild dogs that were domesticated. However, everyone panics when we use some of the devil-spawned modern technology that we have available to speed and refine this process. I certainly agree that genetically modifying food, especially with modern techniques, can be dangerous, but I am actually more concerned about people genetically modifying diseases. Seriously,what do you think we are more likely to be harmed by: a terrorist with genetically modified flu, or rice with added beta carotene?
But pennicillin can be grown from molds...
Kierthos
(Also allergic to pennicillin, but luckily not ampicillin)
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
zebra muscles weren't added on purpose...they were added by some trans-Atlantic freighters dumping ballast water that should not have been dumped in the Great Lakes
this lets you read the article without signing up to the NYT
--
two different issues:
1. GE for resistance to pests will reduce insecticide usage
2. RoundUp-Ready soybeans are engineered to be resistant to a HERBICIDE. Two very different things. The obvious reason to be resistant to a herbicide is to USE a herbicide
Now the question: why RoundUp?
Because it's the best freaking herbicide ever! It kills everything but then quickly decomposes into inert substances (like 2 days or less in a standard ecosystem). Better yet it's not even toxic to animals (unless you chug a quart or so)
By using RoundUp to quickly burn down the weeds, they don't have to use other more toxic and more persistent herbicides that do pose a threat.
Not while it's heading toward Earth -- it's only a meteorite after (and if) it survives atmospheric entry.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Sterility does not help. Genes pass from one organism to another across species. Especially among bacteria, but also between plants.
I didn't believe that when I first heard it, but I was researched it and it's an accepted fact.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I think most of this starvation is in fact genocide. Some group gets government power and starves their enemies. Didn't we Americans encounter this recently in Africa? As I recall some of our soldiers were killed off. And it was just a food operation. We had plenty of food to deliver to the hungry, we just couldn't get past the warlords.
I like the idea of this new rice. If he can start producing and helping people that's great. But this solution doesn't address the true problem.
Credit Cards If you make the minimum payment you pay twice as much for everything you buy. This puts the average middle class household below the poverty line all by itself. $50,000 provides only $25,000 in buying power when you use credit cards. Visa/Mastercard is a TRUST. Needless to say, like Microsoft, they are not looking out for your best interests.
Insurance When the government mandates that money must leave your pocket that is called a TAX. Since low income/bad neighborhood/poor driving records pay much high rates for a given value of car, Insurance is a tax inversely proportional to income. When was the last time you had representation in the insurance company?
Money Buys Government Corporations have won every election and ballot measure for the last 25 years. Is it any wonder we have corporate welfare and lesser of two evils choices for candidates. As long as corporations control the government, YOU DON'T
Dollars = Lives The US gross national product per capita is $31,746 SO, if you work from age 18 to 65 on average you will produce about 1.5 million dollars in a lifetime. Therefore the average US life is worth 1.5 million dollars. When someone accumulates vast wealth they are in fact harnessing the output of other people for their own gain. 100 billion dollars is 66,000 lives. The creation of 100 billion dollars requires 66,000 people to born, work their entire lives and die. Despite Bill being a nice guy and donating 3 billion to charity (there is that less than 3% again) He is personally responsible for 66,000 deaths. Take these figure out across the NYSE and NASDAQ and you will have Billions of people dying To benefit a select few.
You may not buy all my arguments but as you can see 1,000,000 people dying because of one patent is ludicrous. For those of you who are part of the system that destroys lives, saying "that's just the way it is" is not an excuse. "I was just following orders"
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
"this was all done with idea of helping poor countries, research was payed by tax-payers, and no-one will be asked to pay any royalities"
Very strange: i wonder if it is the same project? The one I'm talking about was developed in Europe (Switzerland if i remember it correctly). If only this story would not require registration.Honestly, I'm not sure mankind, as a whole, has advanced ethically at all. Ever. We've just gotten really good at euphamism.
Meet the new Man, same as the old Man.
DNA just wants to be free...
... It's PEOPLE! Golden Rice is made out of people...
What's not to be worried about? Everything!
Yes, it's true, "Higher yield implies less land required". I was acknowledging that, but my point is that this is not the issue at all. We can already produce enough food for these people. And while a smaller plot does become more viable, bigger agribusinesses also become more viable. Corporations see this and force the farmers off of their land (this usually works doubly to their advantage, because they will then be forced to live in urban slums and work in sweatshops making our Nike[TM] Airs[TM]). Add to that the fact that most of these people don't own their own land to begin with, and are forced to sell their labor to the corporations who do own the land and we can see who really stands to gain.
I'm no luddite; I would be all for this if the economic system were set up so that it benefitted starving people, unfortunately, that is not the case.
Thank god the wheat can't reproduce. Think about it.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
That sound a lot like the irish potato famine. The importance of biodiversity is well know and is certinly not a new issue with the introduction of GM crops. If anything the GM crops will be more diverse than the standard sterile hyprids that seed growers now sell... simply because people will want strains that will grow in their climate.
Because we have several hundred years' experience with the several hundred year old technology. That technology and its consequences are relatively well-understood (for example, we now know not to cross-breed american honey bees with african ones :). We know a lot less about GMOs.
"Too much vitamin A is bad for you. In high levels it is a known teratogen (can deform a foetus)"
Yes, it's why a polar bear's liver is inedible, and why several Vitamin-A derived Acne medications have warning labels.
That's one of the reasons why the the Vitamin A in Golden Rice is in the form of Beta Carotene, which can be taken in doses 100's of times greater than the RDA (Vitamin A is considered to be toxic at around 20x RDA). BTW, Beta Carotene overdoses happen in real life every so often, usually with individuals who consume too much (up to several gallons) of carrot juice. There are no toxic effects, although in cases of severe overdose, your skin may turn orangish for several months.
Snipping in beta carotene is a little bit different than adding some DNA from a moth that makes wheat glow blue when it's sick. We know what beta carotene will do in the human body to a reasonable degree. I feel comfortable saying that it's a sure thing this enhanced rice will behave like other sources of beta carotene in the enviroment. It's not like you can't figure out if you snipped a sequence for producing beta carotene in the wrong place. Wrong place no beta carotene. Beta carotene doesn't make the rice supersmart and capable of developing artificial intelligences that will keep us forever dependent on fossil fuels. Fortified rice will not create locusts that swarm Greenpeace boats and hit them with Ode Teargas. It might help developing countries get a leg up, which could lead to more stability and thus less war and terrorism. But who the hell wants that?
Excellent point about there being need for a better distribution system though. All we need now is a way to help people in developing countries produce a crop that they're familiar with and yet would add much needed nutritional value. I wonder if anyone thought about using something like rice as a base (it's a staple food in many locals), and then maybe enhance it in some way. And then, if they gave this enhanced rice to say, farmers in the afflicted areas and let them grow it, so they'd only need the seeds. That way we get a solution which takes a truly minimal investment and creates new prosperity. That would be brilliant.
That's the beauty of the system, it's self organizing. We, for a pitance of an investment, get to ease the social pressures facing many of the poorest regions of the world, increased stability (both socially and economically) in those areas, new markets with more reasources, and most importantly a warm fuzzy feeling reminiscent of ABC after school specials.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
monoculture, whether for disease resistance or corporate hegemony or whatever, is the scary thing
The exact same thing happens today with pesticides. People become too dependent on one pesticide, the pest develops resistance, and the crop is wiped out
Don't oppose disease-resistance, oppose monoculturure.
You basically have two scenarios:
1. put the disease resistance in the plant, the disease overcomes the resistance, manufacturer releases new strain
2. depend on a pesticide, the pest develops resistance, the manufacturer releases a new pesticide
It's essentially the same thing except when the resistance is put in the plants, a lot less is released into the environment than by whole-field spraying
i was joking. thanks for coming out though.
Guliani was stunned, "I did'nt know that anything could grow around here and I thought it was a joke until the fire cheif reasured me in person. I'll bet those Green Peace nuts planned this one."
Senator Rodham feigned absolute prescience, "I knew this would happen one day and now I'll do my best to make sure all working families will get their fair share."
Experts at NYU were considering plans that had something to do with great heat, marshmallows and sugar but did not expect results soon.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
A couple of years ago several farms were allowed to grow fields of GM crops in the UK to test them on a small scale. Greenpeace thought that this was too dangerous and destroyed much of the crop. (When they were tried for criminal damage they were aquitted.) Greenpeace have not (AFAIK) proposed any alternative form of testing of GM foods.
This is going to happen with "Golden" rice, too. People pay a lot of attention to taste, consistency and appearance. It's unlikely they'll eat Golden rice unless they're starving, and if they are starving they won't be able to afford to grow it anyway.
If yellow milk were more nutritious, would you drink it? Be honest.
If you watch TV news, you know less about the world than if you just drank gin straight from the bottle.
it's well known that he fudged his results to get the outcomes he desired. so do the pharma companies that make this rice. why? b/c there is no better PR for them than "golden rice" to "save the world". it reminds me of the cereal these firms makes: tons of calcium and other nutrients of the month plus enough sugar to choke a cow (cows would actually die from the amount of sugar in breakfast cereals). the sugar probably injures more kids than the calcium helps (see ADHD disorders). but then selling cocaine to kids (Ritalin is almost identical to cocaine chemically) is yet another market with big profit margins. world hunger now offers a new opportunity: get all those africans hooked on our rice. of course we'll give it away... for now. later we'll send the bill to the WHO. i am disappointed that Slashdot is now a mouthpiece for pharma food companies to build their mindshare to support their market share. i thought /. was smarter than this. so here's to the Monstanto Corporation!! the Microsoft of the food world.
This issue is really ridiculous. Things that are cause suffering and chronic hunger include:
If we attack malnourishment problems one vitamin at a time, we will never solve real issues like lack of viable social infasturctures for countries with chronic hunger problems, (including the UNITED STATES!). The best way to solve a problem with as many causes as malnourishment has is not to throw at it an expensive, narrow soloution that will be merely a remedy for one symptom of chronic hunger...
CHECK OUT for more info:
FOOD FIRST
PUBLIC EDUCATION NETWORK
World Health Organization
What the heck?.....BIOTECH!
Instead of shipping new GMOs to various poor countries, why doesn't the US government
stop paying farmers not to produce food, and ship the resulting excess to those self same
countries?
This wouldn't be as nice as it sounds. Doing that, you ruin the local economy there. Farmers in the 3rd world cant hope to compete with the dump prices and high quality of the goods we don't need, and are forced to give up their work, and move to the city to live off the garbage.
The problem this vitamin A enriched rice was meant to tackle wasn't a complete lack of food (in that case food aid like you suggest would be more in place), but a lack of vitamins caused by a diet of rice alone...
"Pennicillin doesn't reproduce."
Actually, Penicillin reproduces very well. Give it a loaf of bread and a warm, damp place and you'll see just how well it reproduces. The original strain of Penicillin was a contaminant in a petri dish, with later strains coming from such exotic locations as a rotting canteloupe.
Extraction and purification is the tricky part.
So genetically modifying a species with unknown results is OK if you use several hundred year old technology (selective cross breeding and breeding with mutant strains) but genetically modifying a species with unknown results is not OK if you use a newer technology. Interesting. Why?
We have already increased agricultural productivity, yield, and nutritional value many times over over the last few centuries. Initial improvements gave us the free time we needed to build our civilization. But beyond that point, productivity improvements have not stopped hunger, malnutrition, or overpopulation.
At this point, we don't need more productive or more nutritious crops. If we had the political will, we could already feed the current population well with the crops we have. What we really need to work on limiting the size of earth's population through social progress and access to family planning, as well as a more uniform distribution of wealth throughout the world. If we don't accomplish that, huge numbers of people will continue to die from hunger, malnutrition, and war, no matter what genetic gimmicks we invent.
just don't throw this rice at a wedding.
"Ask me about Loom"
As a biologist, I usually avoid reading /. discussions on anything biology-related. Usually it regresses to simple-minded discussions about nanobots from people who don't understand the difference between DNA and RNA. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see a rational response (for the most part) to the golden rice story. As far as social issues go, I think a good analogy is to compare vitamin A deficiency to heart disease in the US. Yes, it's not a genetic problem, it's a problem of overeating, lack of exercise, etc. However, heart medications save lives. Golden rice does not answer the questions of world poverty, but it will save many lives and prevent many many more cases of blindness, which is a huge strain on many third-world economies.
However, the real reason I'm posting is that many people are still misinformed about the technical aspects of genetic engineering. Everyone should should have their own opinions on social issues, but the underlying technical information should not be incorrect. Misinformation stems largely from distribution of information that caters to naturalistic ideas and human arrogance, which love to have us believe that "life" is this thing of complexity too grand for mere mortals to ever understand. Well, to be honest, most biologists (myself included) get a little pissed off when people keep telling us over and over again what we don't understand, how we "tinker" mindlessly, "play god," etc. I'm not saying there are no dangers to GMOs whatsoever. But as biologists, trust me when I say that WE KNOW WHAT WE'RE DOING. Just as it is beyond my comprehension that people can split atoms, make rockets fly to the moon, or build skyscrapers, what we as biologists do is also completely beyond the comprehension of the general public. I truly wish this were not the case, but it is, and everyone must accept this. As a biologist, I have to say that the dangers of GMOs are greatly outweighed by the potential benefits. And the vast vast majority of biological scientists I know agree on this (and I am in nonprofit academia, not in industry).
I can't remember all the dangers of GMOs people usually talk about off the top of my head, but trust me that they are all things that can be controlled. As far as the general ones, here's a link on antibiotic resistance:
http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/opa-armg.html
There's also the issue of allergenicity...I don't have a link for that one. It is a potential danger, but it will not be a problem if we do safety testing for it. Plus, we can predict which proteins would be likely to cause allergic responses. Opponents of GMOs love to say that this will be impossible to control for because of fusion proteins, upregulation of endogenous gene products adjacent to the promoter inserted with the transgene, etc., but it is easy to check where the insertions occur if we do them randomly, and more importantly, we do not have to do them randomly.
Those are the only two dangers I can think of that would apply to ALL GMO foods including golden rice. The rest are common sense things like don't plant herbicide resistant oats across the street from wild oats. I'll find a couple other scientifically sound URLs on this and post them later.
Amen, brother. Too many people here on slashdot are a little out of touch with the very concept of extreme poverty. If I had mod points.
People who eat less, reproduce much, MUCH less, maybe even uncapable of reproducing, are smaller in size, so they require less external energy spendings and occupy less space etc.
BTW, is General Motors aware of any of what's going on here?
You can't handle the truth.
Companies today like Pioneer have entire fields devoted to this same practice of aggressively cross-breeding various staples in efforts to yield more disease-resistant, larger, tastier foods. Why, oh why, do people not get just as worked up over aggressive cross-breeding as they do over laboratory-based genetic engineering? Is it our obsession with the whole natural = right, artificial = wrong? If so, just keep reminding yourself that glasses are extremely unnatural, whereas the Bubonic Plague is 100% pure Mother Earth
The prospect of disease resistant foods gets rather scary if you think about it... What if someone produced a breed of rice that was immune to every disease we put before it and whose seed was cheaper than any other? Farmers across the world would pull up their crops and plant this new rice. Now, what would happen if finally a disease did break through it's barrier? Because, you know it will happen, just as in computer security, uptime estimates, or any other more slashdotty term, no one can ever state any sort of 100% guarentee about anything. It might be 100% disease proof up til now, but later on a disease might mutate to the point where it can decimate crops of rice. And that's what could stand to happen... Some virus could come along and kill off all the worlds rice crops. Or not even the worlds, but a specific region of the worlds.
It's not FUD from luddites, et al, that's causing any holdup. It's pure concern from across the spectrum of people who think and care about it.
Here's a link to "Ingo Potrykus' Response To Golden Rice Critics", a page containing some comments from the head of the group that designed Golden Rice. I'm not going to quote the contents of the page here, but I recommend you read it if you're interested in what the professor himself has to say.
Just wanted to write a quick note that, contrary to industry statements there are definite, negative effects by certain GMO. That's a pretty broad statement, but I'm talking specifically about commerically available wheat in the USA. It has been proven that the pollen from this wheat actually kills a whole mess of insect and - directly because of this - can impact on other mammal and plant life.
Also, the Soviets(!) had done some preliminary research on this subject but I don't know what their conclusions about the then (I presume) mostly theoretical field. What I read at them time, there were a good few scientists warning about the problems we are starting to experience today.
(By-the-by, I believe in science and not popular opinion; I've come out against GMOs because there is proof of their 'flawed design' - I haven't come out totally against nuclear power or things like that.)
8)
Concrete analysis...
I am all for producing modified food which will save children's lives. Surely anyone would be. But I am dead against making ANY changes to the DNA of something like rice, upon which the survival of a large percentage (majority??) of the worlds population depends.
Yes on the face of it this is a minor, harmless modification. But let me put this into a context more slashdot readers might understand. You're a developer. Somebody gives you the source too a huge complex application. This application consists of a huge number of individual modules, many appearing to do much the same thing, but slightly differently. The is a huge (and almost totally undocumented) amount of dependency between the different modules - any one could take input from 100's of others, and in turn supply output to 1000's of others. Now you spend a couple of weeks reading through some of the source - you manage to figure out how maybe 1% of the modules work. Are you REALLY in a position to say that making a couple of seemingly small changes to one of the modules' output will cause no ill effect anywhere in the system? Of course you're not.
And unfortunatly, we don't have a debugger for the ecosystem.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Can't really prove it.
But GM food is a young technique. I don't think there have been studies on long term effect of GM food.
Those vegetable are mutants. Fine. But who knows if and/how they'll continue to mutate in the future.
As for myself, no GM is coming into my stomach before a long time. I don't want to take risks.
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
What a surprise that humans, in an attempt to support each and every soul stumbling about this planet, may be damning it to further failure. Man, we sure suck.
---
---
Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
Of course this won't substitute for a lack of greens & fruit, but as other posters have noted, the problem is distribution & economics, not biological or technological.
How will the poor & starving aford GM rice if they cannot afford natural whole grain rice?
Not to nitpick, but zebra mussels were almost certainly introduced into the Great Lakes accidentally, via the bilge water of European ships traveling through the area. There's really no reason to intentionally introduce them into an area, especially an area where they have no natural predators like the Great Lakes, since they are the most useless creature on God's green earth.
;)
Well, that's not entirely true - they do an excellent job of filtering out pollution from the waters where they live - the Great Lakes today are much cleaner than they were 10 years ago, due partly to their work.
See, there's always a tradeoff...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Your analogy's a bit wrong.
You see, they're not giving away the source code at all; this is more equivalent to a binary. Genetic engineering has more in common with reverse engineering than it does with looking at the source code.
Genetic engineering, therefor, is more like a crack or patch for a piece of software. Just try and tell me that you've never used a crack or hacked piece of warez before.
Want to take this a step further? How about comparing it to an RFC? He's essentially said that hey, this is what we've done to rice. We've added some beta carotine. Cool. If you want it, to test it out, be my guest. Just, could you help me get these patent lawyers off my back..?
Of course, your argument is more about the ecosystem, and how introducing this may cause side effects.
It's true that the ecosystem's a pretty fragile system. But you've also got to remember that it's pretty sturdy, too. Look at this crop of Zebra Mussels, for instance, that have filled up the great lakes. Everyone in the industry thought this'd be the end of the world... so why haven't we heard about them in ten plus years?
Granted, not everything just disappears, but there's a reason our ecosystem's survived this long. Survival by any means is built into everything we see. How long have trees been around, anyways? If you think about it, the most disastrous thing that could possibly happen would be that humanity'd be wiped out. And considering the type of people that exist today, I should think it'd be about time for a little shake-up.
To all of you who think frankenfood is wrong, let's put this in perspective. He's trying to manufacture genetic code to help people stay alive. To do this, all he's done is mix some beta carotine into rice. Very straight-forward. Yet in the US and Canada, there are currently researchers pulling apart human embryos, trying to "find" the cure for cystic fibrosis, and several other notable diseases. To do this, they aren't pulling apart rice embryos; they're pulling apart human embryos and protoplasts.
Forget for the moment the fact that they're using human genetics to accomplish this. Now it isn't that I say the goal isn't noble, but why do I get the feeling that, should a "cure" be found tomorrow, people aren't going to worry so much about polluting the human genetic code and the effects on the ecosystem as they are in making sure these people get Nobel prizes..?
How about those who attempt to benefit from these discoveries directly? Are people who get genetic alterations to combat illnesses going to be called frankenpersons, and be relegated to second-class citizens with special emmigration requirements? Will they have to pay the patent holder if they want to have children?
My charge is this; are we really so bold that we believe only we humans should benefit from genetics? Are we so arrogant that we believe only ourselves to be capable of handling the side effects properly? And lastly, are we so arrogant that we believe that more damage that can come from genetically engineering one grain of rice than can come from genetically engineering the single most destructive animal on the face of the earth?
Actually, zebra mussels were introduced by accident, as described here. Maybe you could substitute the mongoose in Hawaii, or the cane toad in Australia.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Well, to do this right you need to understand
what your engineered product might do. As it
stands we do not know all the genes in all
living things, we have no model for our Earth
eco-system, we have don't even know how genes
interact with each other to steer organism
development. Do you know of a system that
looks at your genes and predicts your facial
features? Can you claim that all genes that cause
diseases are understood? Even just in humans?
How do you "engineer" without knowing safety
margin? As it stands, GE reminds me of old
definition of hacking: modifying source code
without understanding how it works as a whole
(e.g. Linux kernel development for most
developers). With that, you are bound to have
bugs. I just don't want the system to ever crash,
that's all.
I'd personally ban all commercial GE applications
for a few hundred years until we understand things
better.
The would otherwise be successful had it not been for Christian groups opposing such activities by causing their respective home countries to withdraw funding to the organization (our US Congress is among those governments who made provisions not to have money they contribute go to family planning programs.
agreed. religion has done alot for humanity.. not much of it good. this comes down to petty shit that we all need to get over in order to survive. we need to stop trying to enforce our morals/social customs. if we provide them with the proper education they will find the solutions for themselves. people from 3rd world countries have just as much capacity to learn... they just don't always have the opportunity.
i can only think of the monty python song: every sperm is sacred
john
-- john
The biggest problem we have now is that the kinds of changes are so completely artificial and the rate with which we can make those changes are so accelerated that the potential for serious unintended side effects may vastly outweigh the benefits.
That's exactly the point! At least with older selective breeding techniques, all of the initial genetic strains are known to be genetically viable. They never add an entirely new gene to the genome, just recombine existing ones and select for preferred qualities. They especially don't turn recessive traits dominant. In most cases, we can take comfort in the fact that if new strain is fertile and it crosses with 'wild' strains, the new traits will likely not be expressed. Furthermore, if the new trait turns out to be a problem for plant survival, it will be quickly removed from the genome by natural processes.
On the other hand, fertile GM plants can have harmful traits that are more likely to be dominant. Then there's the instability of the modifications. Fertile GM plants often have less stable genetics and can have their modifications mutate or become lost (to be replaced with ?) one or more generations out.
The real problem is that it typically isn't as profitable to produce something poor people need as it is to produce something rich people want.
The reason why I (as a scientist) disagree with this line of reasoning is that there really is no unified scientific community. If I could think of any way to prove that golden rice was dangerous, I would in a second because my career would benefit GREATLY as a result. There are many scientists who would love to prove that GMOs are dangerous so they could be on the cover of Time magazine too, but so far none of them have been able to do it.
Wealth is produced by DOING SOMETHING USEFUL FOR SOMEONE ELSE. If you do something more useful, you get paid more. Just because you wouldn't pay someone X dollars to do Y doesn't mean that other people won't. I'm not even going to talk about how you derive the value of a life, that's just garbage. If you can't see past that, I suggest you return to your Sociology classes, and continue to rant with the International Socialists and other idiots who couldn't see daylight in front of their faces.
As usual, most people just can't seem to see that the value of money is arbitrary.
Cyano.
As for the rice - its great for low-income asian nations with stable environments, but for the places with real development issues (development, democracy, etc. come from within - they are never successful when imposed from the outside and not understood inside the nation) it will not help one bit.
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
Given the yelling and screaming about FrankenFood(tm), I can really appreciate the need for extraordinary caution. But there has GOT to be some way to do this sort of thing right.
... either to force farmers to pay for "licenses" every year for grain or to sell at a low price now then hike the price... whatever the way, it's still horrible... Stop the overfeeding/fattening of the 1st world countries and feed the poorer countries.. we'd all live happily ever after (more or less)...
Considering that there's enough food in this world to feed every single person sufficiently, there is NO need for FrankenFood whatsoever... of course, as other posters have already stated, companies are creating these genetically modified foods to "corner the market"
Yes, the bubonic plague is 100% mother earth. But thats got nothing to do with an apple or something, we know that something like an apple is safe. Letting mother nature do most of the work is alot safter, because only very small changes happen. It's not a sudden modification. Infact we make genetic modifications when we sex/reproduce.
Cross breeding is alot differnt to what we are talking about here.
I think when we talk about GM, were talkng about directly messing with the genes. Not cross breeding 2 similar subjects. If you where to cross breed a toad with a potatoe. It wouldn't do anything. But this has been done geneticly.
Do you realize the risks with using GM crops? If something like that rice that dosn't reproduce is accidenly modifed, and as a result, fertilizes other, normal rice crops. It would be a total disaster. And there would be no way of stopping it.
To absorbe beta carotene, you must digest it in oil form.. dry or wet rice with beta carotene in it will not necessecarily mean that you will be able to absorbe it. I believe this has been tried already, but most rice eaters pick out the orange colored rice because it does not look 'natural'.
In my mind, the evolution creeps to imperfection.
Saying that we should not use our knowledge to fix the things the evolution has screwed up is like calling airplanes "frankenbirds" and ranting about how the man was never meant to fly.
http://www.monsanto.co.uk/discussion/discussion_li st.html
Probably not from carrot juice though... beta-carotene is often used to dye lemonade
It amazes me that the same technology adoring users of Slashdot are still frightened by the thought of modified food. Genetics is seen as a scary business of freak producing madmen. In truth, that is the perception of the masses. The enlightened Slashdot visitor should know that, like all technology to come before, it will come to be accepted. There is no reason to say thatwhile all the other tech is good, this is not. For some reason, the Amish decided to stop advancing, and there they stay. Well let's just pick here to stop. We don't need better food. We're afraid of that new-fangled gene splicing and such. For better or worse, technology will continue to evolve, and that includes every farming enhancement, from the plow, to the combine, to DDT to GM. Get used to it. Embrace it completely or don't embrace any of it.
The people developing this stuff know what they're doing and wouldn't produce it if they thought it was going to turn around and kill us all. The wonder of lawsuits will keep them from releasing potentially dangerous foods. Anything that reduces the chemicals required to grow a crop of food is clearly an improvement.
XeoMage
"people aren't starving or suffering from malnutrition because food isn't constructed properly, they're starving because not enough people care to do anything about it. Don't blame the food, blame society."
Amen to that. I don't know whether GM foods are a Good Thing or not, but the I do know that they are not the solution to world hunger. Any company which attempts to promote them as such is engaging in propaganda.
The fact is that despite our best efforts to despoil the environment, the world still produces enough food to feed everybody. What's more, the food we produce contains all of the nutrients and vitamins we need, and does not need to be improved. The problem of world hunger occurs because food is not distributed globally according to need, but is subject to the constraints of capitalism and various other political and economic systems.
In Europe, for example, we produce massive surpluses of food which never reach our supermarket shelves, not to mention the food wasted through overconsumption. However, we have so much at stake in capitalism that redistributing this food according to need is considered anathema.
Okay, by now you may think that I'm engaging in propaganda myself. That's fine, I'm not going to try and change your mind about capitalism. But if you go along with the idea that this GM product could save lives, be honest with yourself: this product is not the only way of saving lives, it merely offer a possible way of doing so while preserving the economic system we love so much.
Somehow, nature forgave us for introducing things like horses to North America and tobacco to Europe, even though these things were -clearly- never intended to happen through any 'natural' means.
Like Nature is now forgiving us for feeding animal products to sheep by gifting us with BSE? There are examples either way. But what I'd like to add to the discussion of "luddite crackpots, weepy Sally-Fieldsesque mothers and pseudo-scientists stoping us" is that we need to separate the argument into one argument about Science and another one about Morals.
The philosopher Ken Wilber has put forward the idea of three major knowledge spheres, namely Art, Morals and Science. They correspond to The Beautiful, The Good, and The True. And they refer to I, We and It respectively. So Science is a study of "Its" (objective Truth), Art the study of the "I" (subjective Beauty), and Morals the study of "We" (intersubjective Good).
One of Wilbers' key points (if I'm representing his ideas right), is that none of these areas can be "reduced" to any of the others. For example, when a person feels hate, certain chemicals flood their brain. When they feel love, a different set of chemicals are released. Scietifically we can measure the chemicals, but science cannot tell us that one chemical is "better" than another chemical. Objectively Its are all just "stuff". But intersubjectively, We can agree that love is better than hate. And We can develop social systems that promote the Good.
So the luddite-crackpots are not really "anti-science" (although they may misguidedly aim their action in that direction). It's not a scientific problem. Its a problem of Values, social systems and social needs. Is it Better to develop new technologies, with their risks and benefits for our world, or to try to solve these problems of famine with other means?
I hear scientists in the media talk about the need for their work -- ie. famine etc. but they seldom talk about the possible abuses of their technology. I think perhaps they are getting Science and Morals mixed up also. The point of splitting Science, Morals and Art is to allow each to proceed unencumbered by the others. Science can say what can be done. Morals say whether it should be done.
GM food is indeed quite ready now.
Scientifically, GM food is indeed ready. We literally have the scientific technology. What we haven't worked out is whether we Morally, intersubjectively, socially, can make good use of it. Remember that it's the scientists themselves who say that their work is about finding Better ways to feed the world.
So the debate is a Moral-social-intersubjective one: is this technology really the way to feed the world, or is the problem not about technology at all, but rather social systems? And if it is about social systems, are not both the scientists and the anti-scientists missing the point?
But that, in itself, does not create a risk sufficient to outweigh the demonstrable advantages of GE in reducing other risks - like the risk of starvation, or the risk of environmental damage from pesticide and fertiliser run-off and overspray, or the risk of mass extinctions caused by people practising slash and burn agriculture in ways unchanged for 25,000 years. GE offers solutions to these sorts of problems.
How does GE offer solutions to these sort of problems? People can slash-and-burn land to grow GE crops, and can use pesticides to deal with all the pests which the crops don't deal with themselves.
In other words, just because we grow "better" crops doesn't mean we've won. If we alter food so that they're twice as nutritious, and the population of the earth doubles (due to all those people who no longer die of starvation or malnutrition) then what have we gained? Oh, I forgot, there's a new beetle which eats those new GE crops, so pesticide use has doubled until they manage to modify the crops again (and yet again every time a new pest evolves). On many levels GE is just like antibiotics - build a better disease-killer, and all you get are better diseases. GE does not by itself offer a solution to those sort of problems, though of course it can help. And of course, there are risks.
This is why the social part of the problem is so vital. Slash-and-burn techniques won't stop being used just because the crops being grown are now GE. And if those new GE foods aren't shipped to places that need them, but rather appear in supermarkets in the U.S. (fetching higher prices than the "less healthy" non-GE equivalent, of course), then we haven't achieved anything.
I'd say moderate this one down. It is the WORST sort of analysis - first it tries to label something perjoratively i.e. 'Frankenfoods' and then tries to apply an analysis that is irrelevant i.e. malnourishment occurs in contries with agricultural surpluses - with the small missing fact that this material is not addressing a caloric malnourishment issue, but rather a dietary deficiency.
It's time we start to read such articles critcally, and think carefully about how and what they say, even if we have political misgivings about the other side. It does no good to put forth specious arguments.
Why don't we hear the same screaming and yelling about pesticides and fertilisers, which are *proven* to cause long-term damage to the environment
The screaming is going on all the time, but it's not as sensational and buzz word friendly as FrankenFoods, so the media doesn't report it.
I have noticed that organic foods grow in popularity by the day (now available at the regular grocery store), and there are now products that claim to more effectively wash the pesticides off of fruits and vegetables. A lot of that is health consciousness (particularly the fruit and vegetable wash), but some of it is environment and sustainability consciousness as well.
Here are two sites where you can search (www.webofscience.com, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed) for evidence of health or other problems caused by genetically engineered foods AS PUBLISHED IN PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS. A poster above linked to a site that speaks of a Cornell study on the toxicity of GM pollen to moths or butterflies (can't remember which), but in a quick search I can't seem to find that that study was ever PUBLISHED. Lots of people have strong opinions on this subject. How about replying to this post with some evidence as published in reputable, PEER-REVIEWED journals as to the dangers of this technology. For keywords, try "genetically engineered food health." And remember: articles that have titles like "Genetically engineered foods: But what about ethics?" don't count.
If this search results in very few examples of health or other risks as published in the PRIMARY SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE, it's either because A) scientists like me are actively covering up a potential health/environtment apocalypse or B) because there are very few documented examples of scientifically valid health risks SO FAR. And I do emphasize SO FAR, as there may be unforseen consequences of specific applications of this technology. Golden rice may indeed have unforseen negative consequences--I just don't believe any of them as presented by people in this thread. Anyone, including me, can pontificate about how a particular technology makes us feel. Why not search for some EVIDENCE and not how some USA Today writer or Scottish Parliament member FEELS when he hears about something new and different?
What is scary is how many people agree with the author of the original message (it got moderated to 5).
So far there has een no demonstrable ill effects from genetically engineered plants. There was that business with butterflies in England, but there is no agreement on it either.
And how is genetically engineered food different from hevily engineered foods of the past? They used mutagens, radiations and what not to try to find beneficial mutations in the last 50 years. But not when researchers finally do hove some idea on how to look for them, people are crying frankenfoods...
Never said it would be easy, but considering the extra "fattening" food is already being made (for us), the world powers could easily get together and actually TRY to feed the poorer countries (save the billions from useless genetic engineering like Golden Rice)... But of course, that would mean taking some food away from the people who are used to going to McD's to eat those 3 burgers and then heading over to the pub for a huge plate of fries and beer... then having a pizza that same night with more beer to watch the hockey game... THAT would be the hard part (since most people, unfortunately, just don't give a damn about the poorer countries).
Ronald McDonald house?
e s/monsanto7-99.html
s .asp?category=http://www.thecocacolacompan y.com/scholars/main.html
Monsanto: http://www.shrinershq.org/shc/chicago/news/archiv
Coca Cola:
http://www.thecocacolacompany.com/sitemap/frame
hmm, I do believe Nike is an Evil company though. Searching on Google didn't help either.
Later
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
It's only because we have weak regulatory agencies that these companies can foist a relatively untested technology on the public.
Nobody asked me if I wanted to eat GM foods. If I had my choice I'd say no, but there are already hundreds of foods in the US that are GM. The food industry is doing an end run around people's concerns, people who want simple labeling so they can have a choice.
I'd like to see these starving children fed by a willing public rather than by the decision of the marketing department of Monsanto, etc.
"Polar bear's liver is poisoned becuase of high quantitys of vitamin D, not vitamin A."
From Emazing Science Facts:
"Polar bear livers have such high levels of vitamin A that they are highly toxic to human beings."
From The Alaska Cooperative Extension:
"While most people do not have a ready source of polar bear liver, it is a well known, even notorious source of vitamin A. That is, vitamin A is toxic marginally above required levels and polar bear liver is exceptionally potent."
From Discovery Online:
"Although the extremely high vitamin A content in this fatty diet would be toxic to humans, the polar bear's liver can process it just fine. (When traditional Eskimo hunters killed a polar bear, they would drop its liver through a hole in the ice so nobody would be tempted to eat it.)"
From The Encyclopedia Britannica:
"The polar bear is sought for its trophy value and (especially by Eskimo) for its hide, tendons, fat, and flesh; the liver, however, is inedible and often poisonous because of its high vitamin A content."
Thank you, drive through.
One issue is that peasants eeking out a living from the land are notoriously risk-averse, to the point that early observers often felt they were making `irrational' decisions economically. For instance, subsistance farmers in south-east asia often will refuse to grow varieties of rice which on average produce almost a factor of two more per year. Why? Well, the yield was more variable from year-to-year; so while on average it will produce twice as much, in any given year there might be a shortfall. When you're just barely surviving, you can't afford that sort of risk; so you don't take it.
So I can't wait to see these researchers, proud of their new spiffy rice, hurt and confused when people from a culture they don't understand refuse to grow it -- particularly when it's a disturbing orange color, very very different from what their fathers and fathers fathers grew.
The worst part is, however, that leafy greens -- rich in Vitamin A, the main benifit of this golden rice -- grow plentifully near rice paddies, but historically aren't an important part of the peasant diet. Education programs here and there have been fairly successful in getting those incorporated into the diet; this is clearly an easier, more sustainable, less costly approach to the problem then genetically modified foods; and yet, it's not as sexy, so getting funding for the programs is difficult. Oh, well.
"Probably not from carrot juice though... beta-carotene is often used to dye lemonade"
Beta Carotene was first isolated from carrots, and is the main pigment that gives their roots an orange color. At lower concentrations, Beta Carotene can give a yellowish appearance, as it does in Golden Rice.
From WebMD.com:
"...Your friend's yellow-orange skin hue is a tell-tale sign of a beta carotene overdose from his hefty carrot juice consumption."
From Mywellness.com:
"Drink too much carrot juice and your skin will begin to turn orange. This won't harm you, Diekman says, but it's a sign that you are probably getting more than your body needs."
From Hallelujah Acres:
"Carotenemia is the medical term for increased blood levels of the pigment carotene, a vitamin-A precursor found mainly in the fruits and vegetables, especially carrots and sweet potatoes. The excess carotene is deposited in the skin, where it imparts that distinctive hue. High blood levels of carotene are harmless, and enzymes in the body limit that nutrient's conversion to vitamin A so the vitamin won't reach toxic levels. If you don't like the orange color, cut down on the carrots or supplements. Your skin color will return to normal after a few weeks."
dogs (ever watch a terrier shake a rat?)
cats (they eat millions of birds every year, and birds eat bugs)
maize (corn)
yeast (there are more kinds than you can imagine)
wheat
rice
tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, peppers, tobacco and other nightshades (their spread also spread genes for producing all kinds of deadly substances)
starlings (introduced to N Am because they appear in Shakespeare)
horses (will compete with the buffalo when we're gone, but on the other hand horses are originally American aren't they?)
dandilions (introduced on the Mayflower but proved uncultivatable)
just kidding... actually the idea of ecological equilibrium is an illusion caused by the brevity of human life...
Serious about ecology? cut subsidies to farmers and tax unroofed parking lots. I spent my youth helping my father with the breeding bird census and I can testify that loss of habitat, not introduction of new species, is the prob
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
This means, if this little number of a genetically modified rice kernel is extremely harmful (similar things have happened before with frankenfoods) we may be unable to stop it from growing with disasterous consequences.
The whole 'grow once and never again' isn't just a good business model for the corporations that make this stuff, it's a safety precaution.
As jello biafra said, "We're incompetant as human beings, even worse at playing god"
I tend to agree.
Additionally, people aren't starving or suffering from malnutrition because food isn't constructed properly, they're starving because not enough people care to do anything about it. Don't blame the food, blame society.
If you think for a minute that the people making this crap aren't spinning the "Look how many people are dying because we can't distribute our product' angle out of pure greed, you're got another thing coming.
:)
Yea I also think "Encomeny" is spelled wrong and am pretty dam certain that "betterment" isn't even an actucal word. I think I just spell "actucal" wrong in that last sentence.
Let's not even go into grammer.
The sad thing, the real irony is that ever day I get flamed atleast once a day on my grammer and spelling from someone on slashdot. My spelling and grammer does suck, I am not den(y?)ing this, I am just wondering when slashdot turned into a spelling bee.
But that is only half of it, the real kicker is that I get paid as a techinical writer. After I submit my work to them, they run it though an "editor", whose sole job is to fix grammer and spelling errors. I guarnette he hates me. I am certain he has detailed plans on how to kill me.
I get less flames on spelling and grammer from my employeer then from slashdot.
One of my freinds is Korean and only has lived in the United States for less than 5 years and only started learning english 6 years ago. The second irony is that my Korean freind has a way better grasp on the english launage, spelling and grammer than I have ever had! I think he also has a way better vocabluarly^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H, err "list of words stored in his head that he can use in every day converstation"
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
This is the same kind of thing that's keeping AIDS drugs hideously expensive and out of the hands of alot of the people that REALLY need it. I think what is needed is a global fund that would buy patents/whatever from the companies that own them, for things that are a benefit to all mankind.
It's time you read such articles not only more critically, but also past the first couple of paragraphs. It might also do some good to think that even with all the great intentions that the good doctor had in developing the Golden Rice, it may not be the best thing in the world. Read the ENTIRE article and then look back at your own statements and see the foolishness.
Do you have any idea how many carrots you would have to eat to ingest a high enough dose of beta carotene to stain your skin orange? :)
It _is_ commonly used to dye foods that people do ingest in great quantities, like lemonade.
Lords of Poverty is a fascinating look at the sorry state of international aid to developing countries. It explains in detail how the sudden appearance in a poor country of cheap, abundant foreign food aid can destroy the market for locally grown crops. This puts local farmers out of business, so the following year there is again no crop, and famine is exacerbated.
It tells you he doesn't know much about DDT and dioxin (he did say "generally"), but your answer shows you chose to pick one minor nit rather than contest any of the bulk of his argument. Not much different than a spelling flame -distract from the real issue.
/. amount to spelling, grammar, or usage flames. Something tells me you're a bureaucrat, or, worse, a network admin or sysadmin. Someone who finds petty reasons to deny things to people.
Maybe it's coz you've got nothing to useful to contribute.
Most of your comments on
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
...participating in a coverup. it's not unheard of for a community of scientists to reject new ideas that conflict with current pushes in research. because of this i wouldn't be surprised if someone had a hard time finding information in peer-reviewed journals. espically if the information conflicted with alot of the research goals of a community.
john
-- john
Ok, I read the article and I summarize the salient points:
1: It probably won't do any good. (People want white rice, greens are better, etc.)
2: The plant probably won't work (as well) anyway.
My answer is: these arguments are all speculative. Why not try it and find out? The cost is little. There is no risk of this rice supplanting white rice. Sure, maybe people won't use it, but it's worth a shot. And the only way to find out if the plant is less hardy etc. is to try it and find out.
If the wholistic approach means sitting back and saying "Here's the problems that might exist" and making no effort to actually try something out, then I'm glad it went out of fashion along with Aristotilean science.
zebra muscles in the Great Lakes, introduced to prey upon some 'bad guy' or other, and now taking over the niche of native clams and muscles
Zebra mussels are an accidental import, coming over attached to ship bottoms.
In any case, none of your examples have anything to do with the food chain.
Given that the problem of malnutrition is not the result of a lack of resources in the world, but of a flawed distrobution system
Commonly held, but erroneous. It takes resources to move food, resources that sustenance economies do not posses.
rather than inventing one more expensive, monopoly-controlled food source and peddling it to the world's poorest countries
Sigh. Did you even read the article? Golden rice is not more expensive, and the plan is to provide free to third world farmers.
Kudzu also makes a tasty treat. Ask any japanese. Instead of distributing rice, we should just plant kudzu in famine zones...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
GM Tabacco is widespread and very people know about it. It appears that its spread predated the FDA's rules or maybe its just exempt since its not a drug and its not food.
Keep in mind that Watson and Crick at Cambridge and Rosalind Franklin's work at Kings College was paid for by research grants from tabacco companies. Looks like thye've been working on GM crops since least 1950. The've been doing tricks with adding fungi since before WW I when American tabacco was much prefered over the other options.
By the way Franklin looks like one of the orignal Geek girls. Too bad she died of cancer at age 37 or else she would have been in the running for a Nobel prise.
People with an altruistic mindset would do better sending the 3rd world surplus things that can't be produced locally at this time. Medicines for instance.
The newer OS ideas also seem to be copies of the older one. BeOS with it's Unix-like OS, Microsoft poaching any good ideas, adding Visual/Active in front of them and then claiming innovation, Apple using a hacked version of BSD as the core of their next release, need I go on. And in my experience, Unix people hate mainframes because they still haven't managed to get their favourite OS-type to do I/O as fast as an IBM mainframe can.
Old doesn't necessarily mean useless though, unless you're driving about in an electric car, have a solar-powered house with low-power lightbulbs in every room and a widescreen plasma TV. I'm not a neo-Luddite, but I am dubious of corporations telling me their product is wonderful, being the cynical almost-thirtysomething I am.My cynicism on GMO being no different to that on cars, computers, drugs, operating systems etc etc.
Time to sue for the thousands of deaths (in Africa) that could have been avoided?
Not to mention rabbits. . .
Think of it. "Microsoft Eggplant 2.0," complete with a EULA, service packs, and bug reports.
One TV show was talking about the insects of the world. And they talked about how people were 'starving' (ie: more people than the land hand traditionally supported) So, the US Ag specialists brought in our 'super rice' - a hybrid with alot of rice gains per stalk. And, with artifical watering, they were able to have full-time planting, as opposed to leaving the ground fsalow during the dry season.
The super rice was perfered by the local insects. Solution - insectiside. And, to increase growth, fertilizer. And, for a few years, better yeilds. Eventually, the sick field workers, costs of fertilizer and insectized caused these people to move back to more traditional methods.
Intergrated agriculture is important. Sometimes, this will mean the introduction of GM. Other times not.
But at this time, with our consumer economy, our 'needs' for electricity, etc....we humans will poison our way out of a home. This is more of a concern than GMO's.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
or should we start worrying about the balence of nature and the rights of the smallpox virus (which is basically extinct except for a couple of vials under tight security in a couple of research labs)?
this really bothers me given the apparent lack of ethics of the seed companies, vs the wanna be a luddite attitude of some of the protesters.
there are valid points on both sides, and rash stupidity as well.
We should be able to include this sort of thing into a strain of seed, etc. if we do it right. This turbulent fear of "we'll always screw it up" is rather unproductive. since apparently we need a better way to catch the "bugs" in the process.
Open sourcing the process is probably not a good idea though.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
They don't seem to have a very good idea on how such a beast might survive in the rice patties of the third world.
A superior rice is fine.. so long as it doesn't require more pesticides or fertilizers that are expensive and potentially dangerous for 3rd world farmers to use.
I would be concerned that these rice plants would naturally attract the attention of all kinds of pests equally interested in their nutritional value.
Anyways... I get worried when I hear the words "rush" and "hurry" in the same sentence with "genetically modified".
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Betcha didn't know that people for decades used lead to turn oranges a nice color.. ahhh, the ignorant masses.
Fortunatly, since the trees weren't genetically modified to naturally extract lead from the soil and deposit it in the orange, it was easy enough to 'get the lead out' when it was found to be a problem. Imagine if everyone had been growing trees that DID naturally transport lead into the orange!
Nobody is saying that there isn't potential for more conventional techniques of food production to go wrong (mad cow anyone?), just that conventional techniques are easier to reverse if something does go wrong.
Consider that there is no technical reason that the many and various starving masses can't employ 21st century methods, starting from stone age tools and working their way up if necessary (humans as a whole did that without the benefit of books and roadmaps after all). The problems are lack of education, political factions that prefer turf wars and power plays to prosperity for all, political will on the part of wealthier countries, corperate desire for a cheap labor pool, and low short term profitability in helping poor people (the market development tome for the third world for most consumer goods well execceds the next quarterly report).
Yes, it is all speculative, what the article says about the problem with the Golden Rice. But then, so too, are the benefits of the Golden Rice. Just because it has beta carotene now doesn't mean that it IS good for those who are Vitamin A deficient - it is speculative to think that adding beta carotene will definitely do them good.
It is also speculative that the Golden Rice won't do any harm to anybody or to the environment.
You see, being speculative is two-edged.
As far as trying it out, I agree that it's worth a shot - you could try it out if you want, and the doctor could certainly try it out if he wants. I think that it's unreasonable for people targeted by the Golden Rice to try it out though - I refuse to think that people have to be guinea pigs first just to see if something might help them and might not have any harmful side-effect.
The wholistic approach is not saying sit back and not try things. The wholistic approach is saying, there are ways to help these people out without resorting to drastic "silver bullet" solutions that don't consider the whole picture of the possible effects of the Golden Rice. The approaches are simpler and better for the people in the long run. In a way, what I am saying is that giving them the Golden Rice is like giving them the fish, whereas teaching them and enabling them to farm more diverse foods and help them build distribution infrastructure for the foods that they already have would be to teach them how to fish.
Give them one Golden Rice, and they will have other problems that need fixing - what's next? Vitamin B deficiency? Vitamin C? Do we go down the entire alphabet?
It's really too bad that people don't eat brown rice and instead insists on white rice - it would do them a world of good.
By no means do I think we shouldn't try something just because it's new and scary sounding. No. But if the solution to the problem is already there, then why not use it?
The bigger picture, if you choose to see it, is that many of these places are suffering because of the global economy. Think about it, we in the western world that have abundant capital and resources can always get whatever we need, and therefore our diet can be balanced and sufficient (though it is not balanced and is overabundant, but I digress). Those in the developing countries grow cash crops to be exported out because it is more valuable to use their land to grow such crops (whether the crops are destined for food or other things is pretty important too) because they get more money out of it. But they still get relatively little money and they remain poor, and with poor distribution infrastructure, even it they have the money they couldn't get the foods they need very easily.
What they don't realize is that growing a variety of plants for food, they will be more wealthy, nutritionally, while being poor in cash. They need to be educated on such things.
And the western world is also to blame for such problems because of the way it exploits the developing countries to grow these crops relatively cheaply, just so that it can import it all to people who end up throwing it all away because they can't eat all of it!
So the wholistic approach is to teach people how to survive and subsist on their own effort without requiring western aid. And the funny thing is, while the western world is trying to help on the one hand, it is enslaving and exploiting these people capitalistically on the other.
What I liked about it was that the developers hadn't crippled the strain's ability to reproduce.
We are now polluting the genetics of certain species of plants. This is a type of pollution that is difficult for us to control. Perhaps impossible. What will rice be like in a hundred years? We have introduced a new element of uncertainty.
Rice might never be the same. This genetic change might suit us fine, in the short term. But will it suit the rice itself? Is there a chance that this change will weaken the rice plants ability to survive in some way?
When a single species in an environment changes, all other species around it adapt to that change. What kind of changes in other species are we encouraging? Maybe certain species of bacteria or fungus will find this geneticly modified strain of rice to be a terrific food source. It might take a few years to find out. By then, how many other strains of rice will be 'infected' with this man made trait?
I really think you miss the point. You focussed on one example I pulled out, and misused it. Yes, it's just possible that if Thalidomide were invented now, that booboo wouldn't happen. But some other booboo would have, in order to get the knowledge and procedures in place to save us from Thalidomide!
The point was, that humans of Western societies have always had a forge-ahead attitude, one of "we didn't know enough then but we know enough now" despite the fact we've always thought that way, and that a moment's rational thought would show that it's as false now as it was at any earlier time. The problem is not advancing technology, the problem is our attitude. Our thinking is far behind our knowledge, and our knowledge is now dangerous on the global scale.
Certainly I can compare those things... And you, yourself, became an example of why.
Okay, so advances in genetic engineering seem to offer us the chance to do a lot of good for world hunger, but the trouble is that we just don't know what effects this stuff will have on us. When it comes to new medicines we insist upon years and years of scientifically conducted trials before allowing them to be used on people, and even then look at the things that crop up years later.
The wholesale introduction of GM foods into our food chain is just too risky at the moment. It's a new technology and mistakes are part of the learning process, and will inevitably be made. If history has taught us anything, it's that no new advance comes without teething troubles. And given this, the last thing we should do is push for them to be used by the general public - a mistake now could cost millions of lives and contaminate other crops, making them tainted as well.
Things like this seem innocuous enough, but you can't let one thing go through because it "seems harmless". Without investigation it could be even the smallest of changes that goes bad, and when it's something as fundamental as food, we can't afford a single mistake.
GM food is just not ready now. We shouldn't let the greed of a few corporations and the advocacy of tecnology fetishists blind us to the very real potential for disaster.
From a New York Times article on August 22 2000:
"In a stunning new result from what has become one of the largest agricultural experiments ever, thousands of rice farmers in China have doubled the yields of their most valuable crop and nearly eliminated its most devastating disease -- without using chemical treatments or spending a single extra penny.
Under the direction of an international team of scientists, farmers in China's Yunnan Province adopted a simple change in their rice paddies. Instead of planting the large stands of a single type of rice, as they typically have done, the farmers planted a mixture of two different rices. With this one change, growers were able to radically restrict the incidence of rice blast -- the most important disease of this most important staple in the world. Within just two years, farmers were able to abandon the chemical fungicides previously widely used to fight the disease. (August 22, 2000)"
Now, I believe that genetic engineering and solve a lot of problems, but I also believe that it should be used sparingly and not when other viable alternatives are found, such as in this case.
BTW, I was alerted to this article from a great newsletter on the consequences of technology at Net Future
- *Normality Is The Root of All Evil*
But *if* this modified strain of rice should have some nasty side effect, it would be a really bad thing if it reproduced.
Dunno. My feelings towards GMO crop is like my feelings towards an unknown binary.
It might do wonderful things, but I don't want to test it on a system that I need for a living, computer or biotope.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
"Do you have any idea how many carrots you would have to eat to ingest a high enough dose of beta carotene to stain your skin orange? :)"
Sorry, I can't give you a number. I do know that the amount varies greatly depending on a person's ability to excrete or break down the excess beta carotene, and I've heard of it happening in people who consumed a single glass (8 oz.) of carrot juice a day.
I don't know what or how much testing has already been done on this crop. But neither do you.
Of course that this also fits like a glove to the industries that produce those seeds. :-)
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
The rice uses fish genes. Millions around the world are allergic to fish. Has there been antiquate testing to find out if golden rice can produce an allergic reactions in people that can eat normal rice?
The world doesn't need the internet. It just needs a better fleet of carrier-pigeons that implement the IP-over-carrier-pigeon protocol. If we all worked together to make it happen, then we wouldn't need the internet.
Actually, they were creeping in the bushes looking for you.
I thought your post was funny.
Sounds like warfare to me. What if I had a weapon that could turn an entire country sterile?
I'd like to believe that in future more and more food will be available organically but this is unlikely to be the case if GM strains of crops are allowed to spread their seeds naturally - if organic crops get contaminated it will cripple the organic farmers!
I know that there is more risk from the pollen than the seed but I believe that if the scientists working on these products can stop the plants from re-producing they should find a way to make GM pollen inert so it poses no danger to organic crops.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
This is an awful lot of effort simply to insure we have more mouths to feed. And if you think that the whole world can eat and live like the US you are mistaken. The US has about 7% of worlds pop and consumes almost 40% of its food. About 20% of the total energy consumption in the US is for the production and manufacturing of food.
OTOH 1 million children a year is 0.1% of the number of people who don't have clean potable water to drink. Also, while the birthrates for the bottom 5th of economies is high, the corresponding rate for slightly more advanced economies is only marginally lower. Combined with higher survival rates post age 5 you have a population pyramid that explodes at the bottom, pushes the media age down and provides an enormous base for another population explosion from the next generation. So while the poorest contries may have a birth rate over 4% and media life expectancy of 44, the next poorest countries may have a birthrate of 3.5% and a life expectancy of 59. The excepts most of sub Saharan Africa which because of AIDS is expected to have a net negative birthrate, a decrease in life expectancy to 40 and an absolute near elimination in the population between age 14-60 in the next 10 to 15 years.
So while we argue about engineered corn and rice, pest resistant fruit and enhanced protein water plants let's keep in mind that feeding someone is life long proposition. Developing economies do not have sustainable models - at least none that anyone has been able to apply yet. So the notion that all you have to do is feed the children is wishful thinking. With all of those now-fed children come a host of other problems like urban density, sewage treatment, public health and hygiene, education that no one who's screaming about the evils of genetic engineering is prepared to think about. The argument so far seems to be a debate about who is more fearful of being ignorant. We have the "it's an unknown we don't know what mutant we'll unleash on the world" argument. Or we have the "it's against Gods plan to mess with fertility" argument. On the other side of the aisle we have the "technology will save us" battle cry. Neither argument really takes into consideration what happens if you are successful because in both cases you have a world filled with miserable starving fecund people.
I think we should listen to the talking plant, it sounds pretty smart. I mean, when was the last time you could say which of your genes were good and which were bad?
Seriously, we have a very good idea of how cells produce things. We've had bacteria making extra compounds for a long time, they help produce antibiotics. The concern is how people and ecosystems will respond...
It's a little unnerving that most of the concern is from people who don't understand the issues. It means any real problems there might be are hidden under a thick layer of phobias. And lives are on the line.
this is a rather important feature of Genetically Engineered plants. it controls the spread of these plants into the wild. crippling the plant prevents the GE modifications from disseminating into the population as a whole, or mutating into something ugly.
until we are real experts in genetic modifications, (or maybe never,) no GE plant or animal should have the ability to reproduce. tampering with the germ line could be very dangerous - and we might not realize it for a thousand generations hence.
WARNING The prior post pegs the bullshit meter. Please try a balanced site for a more informed view.
Summary: are there risks in GM foods? yes. Are they anything like what our loud, screaming friend intimates? NO.I challenge tippergore to cite, with supporting link, a single example of an "extremely harmful" GM prodcut ever making to the food supply. (Yes, there was a problem for some allergy sufferers when a Brazil nut gene was inserted into soybeen, but this was halted while still in research.)
please please educate yourself before lobbying for 2 million children a year to die of B1 deficiency.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
So they have a ways to go until it ships.
So for example if you are one of two groups that are contesting a piece of land for a few hundred years or so if one side can't overcome the other through specific means then it can just as easily displace the other through overpopulation. And anyway it was only a modest proposal. Maybe this is another urban myth but one of the pet food companies in the US wanted to introduce contraceptives in their pet food to do their part for reducing the stray animal population. Until they discovered that about a third of it is consumed by people.
Sunny Delight has an advert where a snowman drinks it and turns orange. It was reported in the news that a few kids had turned a bit orange from drinking too much of the great "stuff" that kids go for. (Stuff, why dont they call it orange or juice, hmm?)
A quick google search turned up this link http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/12 /26/stinwenws01016.html
click here
Informative underatted and funny? (Hint, hint moderators)
Both of my biochemist parents have very strong misgivings about GMO. You're not going to tell me that they don't know what a gene is.
A specific example, my father (plant biochemist and physiologist) is disturbed by the effects, in practice, of genetic modification in corn to include genes from Bacillus Thuringiensis to produce thuringicides for purposes of supressing the growth of caterpillars in the plant stem. Instead of attaching the gene in such a way that it is expressed only in vegetative growth, or whatever (ask him-), the gene is expressed throughout the corn including in the harvested kernels themselves. More or less approximating his opinion, this is reckless overkill, indicative of an overall "just insert the genetic material somewhere and let what happens happen" mindset among the scientists employed by Monsanto et al... who are taking something of a half-assed approach in their cutting and pasting of genetic fragments with only partial control over the process.
--
keete
When I went to S11, one of the speakers at the Sunday protest was Dr Vandana Shiva who spoke about this "new" Golden Rice. (She an Indian Eco-Feminist.) The amount of Vitamin A is delivers to the body is much, much smaller then what other forms of food can provide.
In short, it was a con by the company who developed the product to use the WTO and health reasons to take over the market of locally grown rice for a profit.
You can read all about it here.
-- Huh, what?
Hey! Prior art!
MSK
So how would this GMO food affect people who eat generously. Say perhaps Ghandi?
And what would he have to say about it all? *grin*
Phthalidomide is a safe drug. It does not cause birth defects. However, it has an enantiomer (mirror image) that does. The pharma companies making the drug commercially were negligent in their purification process.
I believe that a pure form is now available under a different name.
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
A report, with references even, entitled "The False Promise of Genetically Engineered Rice"
h tml
.de, the study is in English. Non-English readers... sorry.)
http://www.netlink.de/gen/Zeitung/2000/001015a.
(Non-German readers, don't worry about the
--
___
Cognitive Overflow
more than yo
If you can buy the patents, you can more than afford to buy the people to develop "X" which will be beneficial to humanity. Why don't you invest the proposed global fund money in basic and applied research, and Open Source the results?
I'm standing by while thousands of Africans die of starvation. I'm doing nothing about it. I don't consider myself to be depravedly indifferent. The companies that are involved exist to make money for their customers. They hold patents under the laws of whatever countries they hold them. They are therefore due the royalties that those patents are worth, and it is their duty to collect those royalties. Having your property confiscated under such circumstances is not, IMO, acceptable behaviour.
Also, there are huge safety concerns with genetically modified food. Maybe we should make sure this stuff isn't going to kill millions before we unload tons of it on a third world country?
We need to slow way down with our adoption of these food products. There have been far too many disasters unleashed by our arrogance already.
While I agree that testing is good and you can't rely on any manufacturer to perform self regulation and due dilligence, I have to wonder what world the people who single out GE foods as the great evil live in. In my lifetime I've lived through one toxic food/chemical/additive/drug story after another from Alar to Paraquat. Some have been real some have been misinformed or hoaxes while other are just plain inconclusive. And while we're on the subject let's not forget that even according to the WHO - DDT has saved more lives than all medicine and medical technology since the dawn of time. This really speaks to public health and not just DDT specifically. If you have clean water to drink and educate people how to avoid infectious diseases you will go as far as anything else to insure that if or when you are able to feed these people using GE crops or better fertilizer or whatnot that they will actually survive into adulthood so that they can breed another generation of mouths to feed.
So in the end you have to decide whether the risks inherent in using GE foods is worth what you yourself deem to be the overarching critical need to do so. And if it is are you talking about taco shells in the supermarket or are you talking about basic foodstuffs in far off Bangladesh where just thinking that you are concerned is sufficient.
Then again, technology (by itself) isn't our enemy either.
I don't understand exactly what patenting type of gene gives you. Specifically, if I have some of this golden rice, do I need to pay licensing fees if I want to use it to grow more rice?
I'm probably not allowed to make the same modification myself because of the patient, but making seeds and making more copies of itself is what the plant *does*. Once I *own* some of this rice, I don't see why I wouldn't be allowed to grow more rice.
Also, does that mean that once some company has patented human genes, those specific humans need to pay licensing fees before they have kids?!
Gene patenting seems to be even sillier than software patenting...
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
The poor and starving will afford the vitamin-enhanced GM rice because the Swiss professor who developed it negotiated a deal that will let them use it at no licensing cost, while farmers in the industrialized world pay the usual (higher) prices.
Of course, all GM food is the spawn of the devil. Poor peasants in Asia should thank their enlightened protectors in the West, who ensure that their children will continue to sicken, go blind, and die from vitamin deficiency.
They came here in the hulls of European freighters illegally dumping their ballast here. A better example would have been the 'introduction' of Europeans to the New World
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
But, "most horse species, including all the ancestors of Equus, arose in North America." "Most of the one-toed horses in North America also died out, as the Ice Ages started. (The causes of these extinctions are unknown.)"
Get your facts right American AC in Paris.
More on the evolution of the horse.
Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, grass grows by itself.
You apparently have difficulty either reading or applying basic logic. My challenge was for an " extremely harmful." example. That was the claim being made in the orignal post. You're example was "wasn't approved for human consuption (sic.)"
While the taco shells may ultimately be found to be "extremely harmful," I am unaware of any data that indicates such to be the case. Indeed, it took an exquisitely sensitive laboratory procedure to even realize the issue existed. With something truly dangerous, like arsenic, no such sophistry would be required.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
P.S. So you require me to contribute something useful, yet you don't require that of your own posts, eh? Hypocrite.
Can we really trust that corporations will only proceed with what they know "is safe", and not perhaps something that "is not" (while downplaying or concealing known risks), in the name of profits? Oh, we can? Like the tobacco industry?
Perhaps we should feel lucky that RJ Reynolds never genetically engineered a tobacco plant that was 10000 times more addictive than regular plants. If strong restrictions arent placed on GMO immediately, surely similar forms of abuse in food products can and will happen, i.e. products that are more saleable while known risks are concealed from the public.
People who don't know much about genetics are always very sure that we don't know enough about genetics to know if it is safe. Very convinced that the people who do know enough about genetics to know what is safe and what is not, really don't know enough.
You seem very sure about this.
I'd say that people skeptical to genetic manipulation have one point on you; even the people who are experts in the field of genetic engineering don't know nearly enough about it to make the perfect food.
If they did, they'd be boasting about it like heck, and maybe we'd have it (for a price), too.
It is a sign of immense hubris to believe that we -- at the current state of human science and technology -- can indeed know everything we need to know in order not to goof up with the building blocks of life.
Heck, even if someone had that knowledge, chances are that many genetic engineers would still dabble with things they don't really know enough about, just like we've seen in virtually every science so far.
Humans tend to be arrogant and narrowminded. You pretty much have to be arrogant and narrowminded (of the kind produced by the excessively fine focus required for discovery in and advancement of specific fields) to be a scientist or an engineer, or a company president clawing for profits in an expensive, competitive business. Such people are not motivated to explore all the little side effects of their accomplishments, they push ahead and leave some details for later. It's happened, historically, in virtually every human endeavour. Even in well-developed fields, little oversights creep in that cause major disasters (eg, the collapse of the walkways in that Kansas City hotel). Do you read Michael Crichton? A hallmark of his books that some tiny little thing goes wrong somewhere in a carefully engineered system, and it snowballs into major problems. Yes, strictly, it's fiction; but it's also the way the Real World works.
Some goals of GE (I mean the modern, high-tech kind; ol' fashioned cross- and in-breeding etc. seem to have natural limits which keep them safe "enough" from a global perspective... these limits being one reason for the "direct" manipulation methods in the first place) are, I will admit, probably benign in their long-term effects (such as this beta-carotene modification) but others are not; and I don't trust big business to objectively do the testing necessary to be even half-sure of global long-term effects. And government, historically, imposes requirements for testing on a reactive basis; something has to go wrong, usually several times and/or spectacularly, before standards are developed and enforced. (Americans, it seems, insist on it being this way - they want to keep Big Gov't out of Big Business. This is scary to us of the Rest of the World.) And without global enforcement of strong regulations, which is essentially impossible, a company that wants to develop and release GE organisms can simply move to a lenient locale.
Remember Phthalidomide (sp?)? That was tested to the standards of its time, and deemed safe. So was DDT. Antibiotics were supposed to free us of bacterial infections; instead the bacteria have evolved to the point some nasty ones of them thrive on antibiotics (eg I think a streptococcus was found in England that ate Vancomycin, one of the strongest ABs we have). (This evolution was not unforeseen; but those who spoke up were poohpooed as paranoid. And again, American mismanagement, with over-the-counter sales of ABs, accelerated the problem.)
So... (where am I? oh yeah...) Some of us who are fearful of GE are not fearful merely because it's a Something New or Something Mysterious. We are fearful because we know that time and time again humans have decided they know how to do a thing and then fallen flat on their faces, as it were. We have no reason to believe this habit has changed; in fact we have some reason to believe it's getting worse (examine the profit motives), and with more dangerous toys (eg Chernobyl). We believe that humans have managed to survive, decently, for many thousand years already, and that there's absolutely no reason to rush into anything like GE. Note I don't say, "no reason to have GE ever ever Amen;" I just say that there's good reason to be Fucking Cautious! We're playing with some core machinery of Nature, and She has a way of turning on you with great decision and irony.
Forgive me if this read chunkily in places; I've always hated reading for proof my own output and almost never do so.
While I certainly believe that a company/individual who develops something worth patenting (not patents from obvious stuff) like this deserve to be able to make money, there has to be a line drawn.
/. interview with the Pinkerton people who were doing commercial "geek profiling" for schools on the premise that people like US need to be identified because we may be the next Columbine murderers?).
But then, the corpratist mentality has no concept of morality (IE, remember the
There needs to be some kind of control on patents such as these that makes it manatory for the patentholders to be reasonable and expeditious with licensing. How this can be done, I don't know.
But then, if the patentholders had a brain among them, they might understand that releasing a product cheaply that may save a million lives is better marketing for your company than any slick sleazy annoying Madison Avenue firm can do for you, at ANY cost!
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Reductio ad absurdum is a way of showing the flaw in an illogical argument which is masked by its lack of magnitude.
Genetically Modified Food - Is It Safe for You?
Is genetically altered food safe for you? Do the scientific techniques used to produce GM crops pose any threat to the environment?
When the genetic makeup of a plant is altered, and its seeds planted, you're essentially introducing an alien organism into the environment. At least by crippling it, you are in a sense isolating it from its biological surroundings. What if the plant crossbreeds with another plant and creates a new breed that has unknown (i.e. possibly dangerous) nutritional properties? What if the plant proves to be too resilient and ends up killing all the crops around it?
There are many more issues involved with genetically altered plants. I personally am all for it; the possible benefits are simply too great to pass up. But in the meantime I'll feel safer knowing that these things cannot reproduce.
Unless of course, like in Jurassic Park these plants were implanted with African Toad DNA, and end up growing functional reproductive organs. On second thought that would be pretty damn funny.
4 > 5 is FALSE
4 > 500 is FALSE
The first is not "less false" than the second and in no way is it "true".
There are plenty of reasons why GM technology should be approached with caution; however I have to say I'm pretty repulsed by the means Greenpeace and similar organisations take to it. Their campaigns are almost entirely based around fuzzy, emotion-based appeals to anti-science sentiment. I am actually a member of Greenpeace, because I happen to think climate change is an enormous problem, but I nearly resigned over this.
Sorry if the links are screwed, this mozilla daily build is a bit flakey.
--
If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles
G,golden r-rice is made from PEOPLE!@#!
these risks could take a long time to surface. an example of a substance like this is thalidamide. women were given this drug to help with the discomfort of their pregnancy-they had no idea that their children would be horribly deformed.
at the time thalidamide seemed to be harmless and there was no doubt little evidence in the SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE to suggest otherwise
should we be patient with gm-food, or should we throw caution to the wind and not worry about the possible side effects?
i think that in this case patience is the better course of action.
john
-- john
There has been a lot of uproar about Geneticaly modified foods, has anyone actualy seen any harm from this yet? Medicaly I mean?
Dirty Pirate Hooker
i'm sorry but this doesn't absolve us of responsibility either. i.e. it's still our fault. it's not as if poor people are saying to themselves "I'm going to starve to death, but I still can't be bothered to reduce corruption and get priorities straight." They want desperately to get their priorities straight; unfortunately, the good ol' U.S. of A. has interests in having corrupt governments in place in poor countries. it supplies them with an enormous supply of cheap labour: starving farmers will work cheaply (they have to in order to survive), the world bank and the international monetary fund force export oriented economies onto them and PRESTO- tons of cheap food. when poor people do make attempts at overthrowing their corrupt, brutal governments, uncle sam sends guns to the regime to make sure that the threat to profit is kept at bay. please read this article in the U.K. press which announces the U.S. admitting to these types of activities in Latin America. You would be hard-pressed to ever find an article like this in the U.S. press.
MSK
Here in the States we deal with Gypsy Moths every year, which were introduced in a sort of deliberate accident -- they were suppose to remain captive until cross-bred with silk moths, but slipped out with a forged note from home or something and have plagued us ever since. Starlings came here because some idiot wanted examples of every bird mentioned in Shakespeare.
There was an SF story I remember reading sometime ago, told in the form of letters from an ateroid miner or somesuch to his suppliers on Earth. He's trying to maintain a small biosphere and keeps bringing in new organisms to deal with previous ones -- I think it starts with ladybugs and ends with elephants. There are a fair number of SF readers here on /. -- can anybody jog my memory as to title and author?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Genetically-engineered wheat is generally crippled, forcing farmers to buy new seed from the company year after year.
For God's sake! - The reason why it is not only good but necessary to have it crippled is the preservation of the existing biota. One thing is creating artificial speacies/variants (which I do not frown upon), another is to let them run amok in the environment risking the results that occurred when Australia was colonized. read your history book, Michael.
--- "I didn't think anyone would understand it" -Prof. Bob Muller
So after several hundred years we're making totally random mistakes (like cross breeding amarican and african bees) and you say we should keep doing the old random breeding techniques?
where some seeds washed ashore - everybody got real excited about being able to grow their favorite crops like carrots, corn, etc. instead of the usual staples of coconuts and fish. When their gardens started fruiting they got real strange looking vegatables, and when they ate them, they got superhuman powers, like the carrots gave Gilligan the ability to see ships way off in the distance, the spinach made the Skipper really strongs and could lift boulders, etc. Turns out the seeds were experimental irradiated mutant breeds. So if that's what happens, bring on the FrankenFood!
If only real life had good script writers...
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
... and you think that speaking from the perspective of the "uninformed mob" is a justification for what you're saying?!!
Become informed. Don't use ignorance as an excuse, and especially not as a justification of an insupportable position.
C
--
Democracy would work just fine if
C
--
Democracy would work just fine if people weren't so goddamned stupid.
Yeah, but there is a certain irony...
The norwegians are developing a "better" salmon. It grows faster, and has more muscle mass compared to the "wimpy" natural salmon.
The salmon will be infertile, or at least 99.8% of it.
Now, what will happend when a fertile salmon escapes into the nature ? (I have worked on a salmon farm so I can tell you that those things are not uncommon)
The natural salmon will have less change in the fight over who gets to seed the eggs from the female salmon.
Will it be "safe" to replace the natural salmon with the geneticaly modified one ??
Nobody knows for sure, but it's a thing very few are willing to do anyway.
And absolutely nobody is claiming it to be safe!.
--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I have heard this problem mentioned numerous times in the media, but no-one ever seems to explain why it is that farmers are forced to buy new seed. Surely, if they don't like that deal they could simply stick with their current crop strain? Obviously, they may get a lower yield and thus lower profits with the old crop, but they can grow their own free seed each year. This seems to be a simple "will this extra cost give more more profit" question such as most small businesses (such as farms) make every day.
Or, is it the case that the big multi-nationals are bribing governements in the third world into making non-GM crops illegal? I would certainls not be surprised if this was the case!
Why modify rice ?
Maybe there is a reason why so many children die of malnutrition.
In case you didn't know the earth cannot support infinite number of people.
All those stupid scientists should stop playing god.
Polar bear's liver is poisoned becuase of high quantitys of vitamin D, not vitamin A.
Thomas Berg
Mundus Vult Decipi
I know the so-called "terminator gene" gets very bad press, and rightly so for it's possible economic (mis)uses. What people don't seem to see though, is that it's potentially a very useful brake on other potentially harmful genetic modifications. If you design some hypothetical pest resistant rice say, and then you find that it kills all insects in an area (or has some other terrible environmental consequences) the potential for disaster might be mitigated, if you could guarantee that that strain would be gone in one generation. I don't think controlling the spread of seeds/pollen etc. by mechanical or chemical means is very reliable.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
They could just stop planting it. Or, in an extreme emergency, drain the fields.
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
As a result of 10 years of eating beta-carotene enhanced rice, the majority of human beings are now healthy, disease-free, and ... orange.
----
IV
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
Remember Phthalidomide (sp?)? That was tested to the standards of its time, and deemed safe
You can't compare these things. When we still thought that the earth was flat, we had absolutely no clue what was on the other side. You can't use that to argue that now that we can fly all the way around it, we still can't be absolutely sure about the shape of the earth, because me made false assumptions about it earlier.
Anyway, I am not arguing that genetic engineering is perfectly safe, but neither are traditional crop improvement techniques. My point is that people will only listen if you talk about the potential dangers, no matter how far fetched, and they are willing to believe any story, even very very rediculous ones, as long as they are negative. No wonder that as a result people are scared!
Thalidomide probably was one of the reasons for this. It was one of the first chemically engineered medicines (as opposed to derived from plant material), but done in a time when not a lot was known about the structure of molecules at all. It is sad, but not surprising that as a result people will not believe us anymore when we claim that we do know enough about the structure of molecules now...
"What I liked about it was that the developers hadn't crippled the strain's ability to reproduce. Genetically-engineered wheat is generally crippled, forcing farmers to buy new seed from the company year after year."
That is terrible. The reason genetically-engineered wheat is generally crippled is not just for the company's sake, but to prevent a genetically-engineered strain from out-competing natural strains. The reason is simple - ecosystems containing these organisms are extremely complex and even tiny changes may have far-reaching effects. By "crippling" genetically-engineered organisms' reproduction, you always have the option of returning the ecosystem to its former state simply by stopping shipments of new seed.
To release genetically-engineered rice without crippling its reproduction is irresponsible and probably unethical in the pertinent scientific community. If you are unconvinced, try taking an important piece of an application of yours, making some changes, perhaps to the public interfaces, and then putting it back in untested for the next build without version control or backups. Now see what happens to your application.
I am all for using genetically engineered whatever, but only if appropriate safeguards are taken. The easy and obvious safeguard is crippling reproduction, at least until effects are observed for several decades. That is, unless the impact on every organism in the ecosystem is evaluated prior to release, which is nearly impossible, except in extremely closed systems, without computational anNum) resources currently beyond our means.
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
Postponing the inevitable is what being alive's about.
This tells me that you don't know what you're talking about. DDT and dioxin most certainly are organic compounds--DDT's got chlorinated aromatic rings, and dioxins are a group of compounds, also containing chlorinated aromatic rings.
it just needs to better distribute what it
already produces and to transfer technology to
poor contries that suffer from salinisation, desertification, etc, simply because of poor
agricultural methods.
The solutions this planet needs are very simple, and they all start with education for third world farmers.
You're thinking of the fungus Penicillum, not the extract penicillin.
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
Have a look at
- --------------
... well, just about everything. Fixated
http://www.oreilly.com/~stevet/netfuture/
This guy produces a newsletter, he's a true hero.
Here's what he said about Golden rice in #108.
It's a bit long, but I think it's worth it.
Beyond Frankenfoods
-------------------
Transgenic golden rice does not yet fill the bowls of hungry Asian
children. But the possibility that it will is the bright hope of
scientists and biotech companies beaten down by the consumer backlash
against the rapid and largely covert introduction of genetically modified
organisms into global food supplies. The advertisement for golden rice,
widely broadcast, is that it avoids all the pitfalls associated with the
ill-fated "Frankenfoods" that so unsettled the buying public.
What lends this new, experimental rice its golden color is the presence of
beta-carotene within the part of the kernel -- the endosperm -- that
remains behind (normally as "white rice") after milling and polishing (Ye
et al. 2000). Beta-carotene is a precursor of vitamin A; the human body
can use it to form the vitamin. This is important because millions of
children, especially in Asia, suffer from vitamin A deficiency, which can
lead to blindness.
By most accounts the virtues of golden rice are many:
** It is not the product of profit-seeking biotech companies. The
research, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Swiss government, and
the European Union, was performed at Swiss and German universities.
** The researchers stressed that, once the rice proves viable in field
plantings, it will be freely distributed. No patents will block access to
the rice by third-world farmers. (Just recently a slightly revised
version of this promise has emerged: the scientists announced that they
had reached a licensing agreement with the giant pharmaceutical company
AstraZeneca and a smaller German company, Greenovation. The companies
will donate seeds to developing countries and sell seeds to developed
countries. Donated seeds will be distributed to government-run centers
that will pass the seeds on to farmers. As long as the farmers do not
earn more than $10,000 annually from the sale of golden rice, they need
not pay any royalties. See *Financial Times*, May 16, 20000; *Associated
Press*, May 16, 2000)
** Rice naturally makes beta-carotene and other carotenoids, which are
present throughout the plant -- except in the endosperm. The genetic
manipulation producing golden rice is simply designed to extend this
natural production of beta-carotene into an additional part of the plant.
In her commentary on this research in *Science*, Dartmouth biologist Mary
Lou Guerinot suggests that the fears of most opponents of genetically
modified foods will be allayed by the new rice (Guerinot 2000). After
all, it's a far cry from transferring fish genes into plants.
** Unlike with many of the current genetically modified organisms, golden
rice poses no risk of increased pest resistance to herbicides or
insecticides.
** And, of course, the primary virtue of golden rice is its announced
potential for solving problems of hunger and malnutrition in developing
nations. Such a purpose hardly seems gratuitous or grasping. Who could
possibly object?
So golden rice, as we now hear the story, looks rather like a "silver
bullet" -- a one-shot, almost magical solution to a major problem. It
turns out, however, that the situation is much more complex than the usual
story allows.
The immediate challenge for researchers is to develop hardy strains of the
transgenic rice, and then to convince Asian growers to plant the new
strains. But this is barely to touch upon the conversational complexities
the researchers must negotiate if they wish to enter constructively into
the modern contexts of hunger and malnutrition. Here, briefly, are a few
of the themes that need taking up.
If You Grow the Rice, Can You Deliver It to Those Who Need It?
-----------------------------------------------
The sobering fact is that "nearly eighty percent of all malnourished
children in the developing world in the early 1990s lived in coutries that
boasted food surpluses" (Gardner and Halweil 2000, p. 17). The Green
Revolution in Asia brought about a shift toward intensive cultivation of
fewer crops like wheat and rice, which are often grown for export.
Traditional diverse polycultures have yielded to large monocultures.
At the same time -- and at least in part due to the Green Revolution and
other technology-driven change -- hundreds of millions of people have
migrated from rural to urban areas in Asia during the past few decades.
Mostly poverty-stricken, these transplants take up residence in the ever-
expanding slums around cities. Their problem is that they can't buy the
food they need. Golden rice will do them no good if they can't afford it
-- and if they can afford it, then it is not clear what the new rice
offers that would not be offered better by a more traditional and diverse
diet.
Every green part of a plant contains beta-carotene. When Indian scientist
and activist Vandana Shiva was asked what alternative she saw to golden
rice, she cited "the 200 kinds of greens we grow on our farms". (See also
Shiva 2000.) Traditional cultures never subsist on rice alone. In
addition to the many different types of greens grown in India, wheat,
millet, and various legumes are cultivated, not to mention the wild greens
gathered from the countryside. Such polycultures develop differently in
each region, but all allow, as long as there is enough food, for a
balanced, life-sustaining diet.
It needs recognizing that what we in the western world embrace as export-
driven economic growth has contributed to the problem of hunger in
developing nations (Lappe et al. 1998). Golden rice can be seen in part
as a one-dimensional attempt to "fix" a problem created by the Green
Revolution -- namely the problem of diminished crop and dietary diversity.
But the fix offers no direct help to those who have been displaced by the
revolution and who cannot buy the food they need.
There are alternative approaches that do more justice to the complex
geographical, historical, social, political, and economic issues. In 1993
the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, collaborating with
nongovernmental organizations such as Helen Keller International, began a
program to help poor people in Bangladesh grow a diverse array of plants
to combat vitamin A deficiency (reported in Koechlin 2000). In areas
where people have at least small plots of land, families -- usually
mothers become the driving force of such projects -- were introduced to
different carotene-rich varieties of fruits and vegetables and they
learned cultivation methods. Landless families were shown how they could
plant vines in pots on outside walls. They then planted beans and
squashes that can grow up the vines.
When women noticed the positive health effects of their new diet, news
spread by word of mouth, and now approximately 600,000 households (about
three million people) participate in this project. This is, relatively
speaking, a small number, but the project is promising because it can
become part of cultural tradition. It empowers people instead of making
them dependent on western aid.
Scientists evaluating the project found that the general health of the
participants improved and that even small plots can provide sufficient
vitamin A in the diet. Moreover, the more different kinds of fruits and
vegetables people ate, the better the uptake of carotene -- an
illustration of the inherent value of natural variety in the diet.
After assessing a number of such projects, John Lupien of the Food and
Agriculture Organization concludes: "A single-nutrient approach toward a
nutrition-related public health problem is usually, with the exception of
perhaps iodine or selenium deficiencies, neither feasible nor desirable"
(quoted in Koechlin 2000).
If You Deliver the Rice, Will They Eat It?
------------------------------------------
"We must not think", writes Jacques Ellul, "that people who are the
victims of famine will eat anything. Western people might, since they no
longer have any beliefs or traditions or sense of the sacred. But not
others. We have thus to destroy the whole social structure, for food is
one of the structures of society" (Ellul 1990, p. 53).
Billions of Asians subsist on rice, which they mostly consume as white
rice. To obtain white rice you must first remove the husks from rough or
paddy rice, leaving the brown rice kernel. Then you must remove the
embryo and bran layers by milling and polishing. These discarded,
nutrient-rich layers happen to contain carotene. What is left after
polishing is the shiny white endosperm -- mainly starch.
This raises the obvious question: why not solve the problem of
nutritionally inadequate rice by getting people to eat brown rice,
containing protein, carotene, and various micronutrients?
The issues, again, are complex. Brown rice does not keep well in the
humid South Asian climates, which is the reason scientists usually cite
for Asians eating white rice. But while most rice is milled and sold as
white rice, the rough rice kernel -- still enveloped by its husk -- can in
fact be stored for long periods. The agronomist Heinz Bruecher observed
that "the small farmer in Asia proceeds differently and avoids polishing
by husking only as much rice as he needs at a time. In this way he always
has a nutritious grain in storage" (Bruecher 1982, p. 58). Perhaps this
practice could be encouraged.
But we must also reckon with the cultural traditions related to white
rice. In Asia rice is not just something that is ingested like we eat
french fries. It is steeped in thousands of years of culture and
tradition. Different shapes, sizes, and cooking consistencies are
preferred, depending on the context: everyday rice, rice for special
occasions, rice for flour, rice to accompany other specific foods, and
rice for ceremonies.
The whiteness of rice also has spiritual connotations:
There is more to eating than merely ingesting nourishment to survive,
more to living than merely surviving. Confucius in 500 BC knew this
well as he preached the gospel of a virtuous, yet graceful life. He
was a stickler for excellence and ceremony at the table and insisted on
the pure whiteness of rice in sheer, elegant porcelain bowls as a
background for light emerald-green vegetables picked at their succulent
zenith, golden brown stir-fried morsel of duck, pork or fish, and deep
red jujube dates.
"Come eat rice with me" is the most gracious greeting in Chinese
hospitality. In old China, families kept two crocks of rice, a large
one of gleaming, white polished rice for the family, a smaller one of
coarse brown rice for seeking one more day of existence. (Gin 1975)
The sensory symbolism of "pure whiteness", or "emerald-green" shows how a
religious culture judges food as a spiritual-physical reality. The diet
Confucius recommends is, in more prosaic terms, nutritionally balanced.
People who use white rice experience it as being lighter and easier to
digest, and find that it allows the taste of other foods to come to the
fore. It is prepared in many different ways. In the context of a varied
diet, white rice is an integral part of Asian cuisine.
Only the beggar receives the more nutritious brown rice -- but without
anything else -- allowing him to eke out one more day. So it is that
white rice can become a symbol for high social and economic status in
Asian cultures. When the poor emulate the rich by consuming white rice,
they are actually putting their already precarious health in greater
danger. In this way social inequality accentuates nutritional problems.
It would be reasonable to encourage the use of brown rice throughout Asia,
but any such program must reckon with deeply rooted cultural traditions.
Certainly the new golden rice will bump up against these traditions, and
it is not at all clear how the resulting conversation will play itself
out. If we wish to engage in the conversation at all, the question is
whether it makes more sense to push the one-dimensional "solution" offered
by golden rice, or instead to cultivate the potentials of a traditional,
diverse diet, possibly in conjunction with greater use of brown rice.
If They Eat the Rice, Will It Do Them Any Good?
-----------------------------------------------
If golden rice replaces white rice in the Asian diet, can we be sure this
will solve the vitamin A deficiency problem? That is, leaving the social
issues aside, will the silver bullet at least strike its immediate, narrow
target?
Not necessarily. It is a naive understanding of nutrition -- encouraged
by a habit of input-output thinking -- that says you can add a substance
to food and the body will automatically use it. Beta-carotene is fat-
soluble and its uptake by the intestines depends upon fat or oil in the
diet (Erdman et al. 1993). White rice itself does not provide the
necessary fats and oils, and poor, malnourished people usually do not have
ample supplies of fat-rich or oil-rich foods. If they were to eat golden
rice without fats or oils, much of the beta-carotene would pass undigested
through the intestinal tract.
Moreover, fats and also enzymes (which are proteins) enable carotene and
vitamin A to move from the intestines to the liver, where they are stored.
Proteins are bound to the vitamin in the liver, and enzymes are again
required for transport to the different body tissues where the vitamin is
utilized. A person who suffers protein-related malnutrition and lacks
dietary fats and oils will have a disturbed vitamin A metabolism.
In sum, carotene uptake, vitamin A synthesis, and the distribution and
utilization of vitamin A in the body all depend on what else a person
eats, together with his physiological state. You can't just give people
more carotene and expect results. There is no substitute for a healthily
diverse diet.
Who Will Grow the Golden Rice?
------------------------------
Of the many thousands of rice varieties grown in Asia, most are local land
races. Despite the introduction of high-yielding varieties in the Green
Revolution, Indian farmers still use traditional varieties in over 58
percent of the rice acreage (Kshirsagar and Pandey 1997). These varieties
serve their desire for different types of rice, while also providing the
diversity needed within local ecological settings. The number of
varieties a farmer grows tends to increase with the variability of
conditions on the farm.
For example, when they don't irrigate, farmers in Cambodia plant varieties
with regard to early, medium, and late flowering and harvesting dates;
eating qualities (such as aroma, softness, expansion, and shape);
potential yield; and cultural practices (Jackson 1995). In India a farmer
might have high, medium, and low terraces for planting. The low terraces
are wetter and prone to flooding; they are planted with local, long-
growing varieties. In contrast, the upper terraces dry out more rapidly
after the rains, so farmers plant them with drought-resistant, rapidly
maturing varieties. Altogether a farmer may plant up to ten different
rice varieties -- a picture of diversity and dynamic relations within a
local setting (Kshirsagar and Pandey 1997).
This multiformity has evolved locally and regionally over long periods.
Since the Green Revolution, more and more farmers plant, in addition to
land races, high-yielding varieties. The price they pay for this progress
is dependence on irrigation, fertilizers, and herbicides. The use of
insecticides has become widespread, although they have been shown to be
ineffective (Pingali et al. 1997, chapter 11). (Sometimes the highest, if
also most mindless, recommendation for western, industrial-style
agricultural practices in the third world is that they're "modern".) The
locally evolved land varieties, in contrast, tend to be more drought- and
pest-resistant.
Imagine transgenic golden rice in this context. Currently this rice
exists only in a laboratory variety. The next step is to make transgenic
varieties that can do well under field conditions. Then large-scale seed
production could begin and also interbreeding with other varieties. If
bred into high-yielding varieties, golden rice would be grown primarily on
large, export-oriented farms. In this case the rice would do little to
alleviate Asia's food problems -- and, who knows, it might even end up
being exported to America and Europe.
If, on the other hand, the golden rice DNA is introduced into varieties
that small farmers use, then these new, transgenic varieties will be
subject to local practices and conditions. What started out as an
isolated laboratory variety would gradually intermix and change, probably
looking very different in different places. Whether the genetic
alteration would prove stable in the midst of this flux is a real
question. Although no one can say what will happen, one *can* say:
things will change. It is unrealistic to think you can simply introduce a
new plant and that it will then produce carotene on demand. Genetically
engineered plants are not immune to context.
What Will Rice Make of Its Golden Genes?
----------------------------------------
The fundamental problem with genetic engineering from the very beginning
has been the absence of anything like an ecological approach. Genes are
not the unilateral "controllers" of the cell's "mechanisms". Rather,
genes enter into a vast and as yet scarcely monitored conversation with
each other and with all the other parts of the cell. Who it is that
speaks through the whole of this conversation -- what unity expresses
itself through the entire organism -- is a question the genetic engineers
have not yet even raised, let alone begun to answer.
But without an awareness of the organism as a whole, we can hardly guess
the consequences of the most "innocent" genetic modification. The analogy
with ecological studies is a close one. Change one element of the complex
balance -- in an ecological setting or within an organism -- and you
change *everything*. It is a notorious truth that our initial
expectations of an altered ecological setting often prove horribly off-
target. And the possibility of improving our discernment depends directly
upon our intimate familiarity with the setting as a whole in all its
minutia and unity.
Certain herbicides kill plants by bleaching them -- that is, by disrupting
carotene metabolism and blocking photosynthesis. When scientists
genetically altered tobacco plants to give them herbicide resistance, some
of the plants indeed proved resistant to an array of herbicides (Misawa et
al. 1994). Unexpectedly, however, leaves of the transgenic plants
produced greater amounts of one group of carotenes and smaller amounts of
another group, while the *overall* carotene production remained about
normal. In some unknown way the genetic manipulation affected the balance
of carotene metabolism, but the plant as a whole asserted its integrity by
keeping the overall production of carotene constant.
Such unexpected effects are typical, expressing the active, adaptive
nature of organisms. An organism is not a passive container we can fill
up with biotech contrivances. Even when scientists try to change the
narrowest trait of an organism, the organism itself responds and adapts as
a whole.
When tomatoes were engineered for increased carotene production, some
plants did make more carotene, but often in places where they wouldn't
normally produce much of the substance -- for instance, in the seeds, the
seed leaves, and the area where the tomato breaks off the stem (Fray et
al. 1995). In addition, the plants produced more and different kinds of
carotene than expected. More surprisingly still, the plants were dwarfed.
The more carotene a plant produced, the smaller it was. Because a
substance that normally stimulates growth in plants (giberillin A) was
reduced thirty-fold, the scientists assume that the carotene increase
interfered with giberillin production.
This is not an isolated example of how genetic manipulations can affect
the vitality of a plant. In the first successful alterations of rice to
produce precursors of vitamin A, half the transgenic plants were infertile
(Burkhardt et al. 1997). Of course, infertile or markedly dwarfed plants
are left by the wayside, while the researchers select the most desirable
specimens for their breeding stock. But unexpected effects are not always
as apparent as dwarfed tomato plants.
The transgenic golden rice plants were reported to be "phenotypically
normal" (Ye et al. 2000). This statement needs to be read: "no visible
modifications were noted". The researchers evidently didn't undertake a
biochemical analysis of the kernels to see how their overall content might
have changed. What *doesn't* a golden rice kernel produce as a result of
the plant's breaking down excessive amounts of carotene? What new
substances does it produce? And what are the changed balances among
substances normally present? The more one learns about the flexible and
dynamic nature of organisms -- demonstrated so clearly by genetic
engineering experiments themselves -- the more one comes to expect the
unexpected and to realize that we cannot know what subtle effects a
manipulation may have.
How many genetic engineers have pondered the remarkable fact that rice,
despite the myriad varieties that have arisen over thousands of years,
never produces carotene in the endosperm of the kernel? The rest of the
above-ground plant makes carotene, and the endosperm should (according to
prevailing conceptions) have the genes that would allow it to produce
carotene. But it never does so. Certainly that should give us pause to
consider what we're doing. Might the excess carotene in the seed affect
in some way the nourishment and growth of a germinating rice plant? What
does it mean to force upon the plant a characteristic it consistently
avoids? Can we claim to be acting responsibly when we overpower the
plant, coercing a performance from it before we understand the reasons for
its natural reticence?
Organisms are not mechanisms that can be altered in a clear-cut,
determinate manner. The fact is that we simply don't know what we're
doing when we manipulate them as if they were such mechanisms. The golden
kernels of rice almost certainly herald much more than a novel supply of
beta-carotene.
A Disproportionate Interest in Silver Bullets
---------------------------------------------
We often hear that biotechnology is merely doing what high-yield breeding,
industrial agriculture, and nutritional science have done all along -- but
now much more efficiently. In one sense that's exactly right and also
exactly the problem: we don't need more of the same. What we need is to
overcome an epidemic of abstract, technological thought that conceives
solutions in the absence of organic contexts. We need a refined ability
to enhance life's variety rather than destroy it. And we need to realize
that the problems of life and society are not malfunctions to be fixed;
they are conversations to be entered into more or less deeply. The more
deeply we participate in the conversation, the more thickly textured and
revelatory it becomes, reacting upon all the meanings we brought to the
exchange.
The engineering mindset that tries to insert individual traits into rice
by manipulating particular genes is closely allied to the long-standing
agricultural mindset that tries to improve crop yields in a purely
quantitative sense by injecting the right amounts of NPK (nitrogen,
phosphate, and potash) into the soil. On this view the soil offers little
more than a structural support for the roots. At the same time, it is a
kind of hydroponic medium into which we place the various "inputs" that we
can identify as requirements for plant growth.
What this approach overlooks is
upon inputs, outputs, and uptake mechanisms, it loses sight of the
unsurveyed, nearly infinite complexity of life in a healthy, compost-
enriched soil. The truth of the matter is that whatever we can do to
enhance the diverse, living processes of the soil will likely improve the
quality of the crop, and yet an input-output mentality proceeds to destroy
the life of the soil through simple-minded chemical applications. Our
silver bullets, much too narrowly targeted, rip through the fabric of the
life-sustaining context.
Sponsors of the green and genetic revolutions are not inclined to ask what
is lost when input-intensive, high-yield monocultures replace the kind of
local diversity that results in thousands of local rice varieties
throughout Asia. We have never heard a biotechnologist venture the
thought that local varieties may actually -- through their long history of
co-evolution with the people who bred them -- be uniquely adapted to the
nutritional needs and dietary complexities of the local population.
The adaptation is not hard to imagine when you consider beta-carotene.
Plants make many different types of carotene; beta-carotene is only one
member of a large family of substances. Each species of green, squash, or
brown rice produces its own unique array of carotenes, with different
types and amounts arising in different tissues depending on changing
conditions. Numerous species-specific carotenes have scarcely been
investigated.
Similarly, human beings need different kinds of carotenes, and, as long as
a reasonably diversity of crops is available, each individual will draw
out of his food what he needs. But what if, in the name of this or that
specific "input" abstracted from the complex, nutritional matrix of life,
we proceed to destroy the matrix? The disproportionate hope placed in
golden rice, together with its salesmen's casual disregard of biological
and social context, suggests the likelihood of precisely such destructive
consequences.
There are no silver bullets in any profound conversation. There is only a
progressive deepening of meaning. Or, if we prefer the satisfaction of
unambiguous bits of information, then -- whether we conceive those bits as
genes or NPK or the dietary inputs of Asian children -- we abandon the
wholeness and coherence of the conversation altogether. We can, in this
case, certainly proceed with our narrow programs of manipulation and
control, which are what we have left when we give up on conversation. But
the results will be no more satisfying than a diet of rice alone.
(Craig Holdrege, the primary author of this paper, is director and Steve
Talbott is senior researcher at The Nature Institute in Ghent, New York.
The Nature Institute is dedicated to pursuing a science of nature rather
than of mechanisms assumed to lie behind nature. This is a qualitative
science, contextual and holistic in spirit, and ethically informed in
immediate practice rather than in afterthought. The Nature Institute also
promotes humane uses of technology rather than mechanical uses of humans.
Email: nature@taconic.net.)
"You can catch flies till the cows come home, but wasps are a totally different kettle of fish."
- zebra muscles in the Great Lakes, introduced to prey upon some 'bad guy' or other, and now taking over the niche of native clams and muscles
- kudzu introduced into the south to control roadside erosion, now famous for growing rampantly out of control.
- pompas grass, introduced into CA from S America to control erosion, now grows everywhere, out competing endangered native grasses.
The list goes on and on...Now, I know, nutritionally enhanced rice sounds innocuous at worst, and life-saving at best, but ... it is so difficult to predict the effects of tweaking any of the variables in the complex dynamic systems of our ecosphere. Too often the result is unexpected and irreversable damage.
Given that the problem of malnutrition is not the result of a lack of resources in the world, but of a flawed distrobution system for those resources, wouldn't we be wiser to spend our energies and money solving the distrobution problem, rather than inventing one more expensive, monopoly-controlled food source and peddling it to the world's poorest countries?
Just my $.02
Joe's -- No GMO's!
its nice to want to feed the hungry, but this is only a temporary solution to the symptom.
if you feed the starving without educating them you are just posponing the inevitable. they will continue to reproduce until thier ability to feed themselves becomes a problem once again. then we will have to find more nutritious food once again.
the solution to starvation is education! we need to teach them the value of birth control. until this point is realized and we can control our population, disease, starvation and violence will result. this is one of the greatest threats facing humanity currently, and it gets worse each year.
john
-- john
The riots in Seattle were't neo-Luddite. They were neo-Anarchist and anti-corporate. They'd blow up your office whether you were high tech or low tech. I mean, they targetted Starbucks - not exactly a mecca of technology research.
It's clear that there is enuf food being produced to feed everyone (dont worry: you probably wouldnt even have to give up MuckShit). So why do we continue to destroy it in order to keep the prices up? The important issue is not genetically mod food, it's addressing the cannonical problem of wealth redistribution.
Isn't it just about time that humans decided to live within the ecosystem in a sustainable fashion rather than trying to destroy it?
We live beyond our means in terms of energy consumption and localised areas of the world produce populations that cannot be sustained in those areas. (The UK for example couldn't exist in isolation due to over population)
I wonder if we'll ever decide that it's time to stop f'ing the planet and control ourselves?
Forget human rights, what about the rigths of humanity to live within a sustainable none ecology destroying ecosystem? rant mode=off
You have to separate the Genetic thing from the saving children thing.
Once again, media is doing a great job for all those GM producing companies !
All we are doing right now is linking together more deeply in the mind of people positives emotional issues concerning GMO (ex: "It could save millions of childrens...").
Hey ! There is enough food produced right now on this planet for everyone. And there could be more then plenty of food for everyone if we people were concerned about it GM OR NOT.
So if you want to talk about child poverty/malnutrition, talk about the social/political issue. If you want to talk about GM, talk about GM.
The only money issue here is for people who are already rich.
dArkee
Instead of shipping new GMOs to various poor countries, why doesn't the US government stop paying farmers not to produce food, and ship the resulting excess to those self same countries?
I realize that's probably going too far. After all, those farmers have a right not to grow food and subsidies help maintain prices of crops. But it seems to me, that starving countries can't afford to buy these crops anyway (they wouldn't be starving if they could). So why not just ship any excess to them?
Of course, the old arguement that they wouldn't be self-sufficient if other countries just gave them food but maybe it could give them the the food (and therefore strength and time) they need to start themselves on the road to self-sufficiency. I don't think a new GMO (with beta carotene and 75,000 essential nutrients) is the answer, enough food is the answer and most of the western world produces more than it needs and many (like those in North America) actively pay people not to grow crops. That's just dumb.
Like I said, it's a radical idea.
Genetic changes are happening all the time in nature, all by itself, also sometimes across species. The reason why human changes are considered powerfull are because they are directed.
Now, a scientist can introduce a gene into an organism, fx by using a bacteria or virus to deliver it. This happens in nature too. When it happens in nature, there is no control with it. In the case of golden rice it is carefully analyzed, and the gene has a harmless effect.
Caution is good, but what is on display here is paranoia. Scientists cannot with absolute certain say golden rice is harmless, certainty is the realm of religion, but use your common sense!
Thank god this was about Genetic Engineering rice and not something far more sinister.
I don't think there is any beta carotene in that anyways...
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
That if this guy wanted to save 3,500 children each day then he simply would.
If he really gave a flying fuck about the poor third world children then he would simply ignore the laws and the protesters and the patent lawyers and mail some seeds over to them.
Am I the only person that sees this?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
One of the oldest Genetic experiments Man has conducted is called Dog. Scientists have traced the genetic lineage of all dogs back to wolves. A Lhaso Apso surely doesn't look like a wolf, but genetically it is a wolf. It would be technically possible to crossbreed a Lhaso Apso with a wolf. The point is that we have been conducting Genetic Experiments for years. Up till now we were limited to the slow method of breeding as opposed to faster methods like Recombinant DNA, but we were still doing the same thing. Do you really believe that the corn we eat now (and I don't mean the stuff in Taco Bell) is not Genetically Engineered? Natural corn looks much more like "Indian" corn with multicolored kernels, than it looks like yellow or white corn. How long has Aspartame been on the market? Are there any bad effects with this? (Outside the possble deleterious effects to those that suffer from Phenylketonuria, but those that do suffer from a disease that does not let them process an amino acid properly.) Test the golden rice, is there any chemicals that don't appear naturally in Rice or Carrots? If not, then let's get the rice out to people that really need it.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Just what the world needs: another million children.
People who don't know much about genetics are always very sure that we don't know enough about genetics to know if it is safe. Very convinced that the people who do know enough about genetics to know what is safe and what is not, really don't know enough.
Of the many people who have tried to explain to me that genetic engineering is dangerous, none even seemed to know what a 'gene' is. Nor will they listen if you try to explain. They only know it is dangerous, not what it is. Apparently the knowledge itself is considered dangerous.
Too much vitamin A is bad for you. In high levels it is a known teratogen (can deform a foetus)
Arguments like this are so far off base and it's scary how easily they are believed. No one is starving because there is some scarcity of food. We've had the technology to feed the world for decades. The problem is one of distribution. Who is going to buy land, buy seeds, grow food, and then pay to have it shipped to those who can't afford it? Even when people are "benevolent" and would like to do this, it's just not financially possible because of the way the market works. Being able to grow food more efficiently is /not/ going to benefit the hungry. Who it /will/ benefit is agribusiness, which is why they're pushing so hard for it and arguing "how can you be against this when it will solve world hunger?"
What also usually ends up happening is that through the increased use of monocultures, pesticides, etc. it is a major blow to the environment. So let's tally that all up:
hungry people: lose.
the environment: loses.
(already)rich agribusiness CEO's: win!
this looks like it has about the same result as anything else large corporations are pushing for.
Yeah, this "troll" is the only one that got the problem:
WTF is another child to parents with no food?
Drop free Baby-pills and that'll solve the problem!
What happens there IS Birth-Control, if there's not enough food, babies die, hence more food'll be available soon! Just a normal process.
Yes, it's hard, oooh, we're all just animals.
We can discuss about genetically optimizing a plant, but this is just CRAP!
But the article also describes great resistance to everything GMO, even something as harmless and beneficial as this.
As most of the worlds scientists seem to be unable to definitively agree on just how harmless GMO is, how is it that you seem to be so convinced.
Diving in and distributing something that may potentially have devastating effects on posibly the worlds greatest staple diet (especially one that does reproduce) could be one of Man's greatest blunders - and that is really fucking saying something!
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
... he wold be able to accomplish nothing else.
his career would be over, and he would loose creditably. you may think this is selfish also, but consider what else he may be able to accomplish. if he were to simply mail the rice to sombody and lost his job as a result, he could effectivly be forfiting his ability to do anymore good.
this is a very touchy subject, and once you cross the line it's very hard to get back. perhaps he wants to exhaust all other possibilities befor taking this path.
john
-- john
Most criticism of genetically engineered foods I've seen focuses too much on what it will do to humans -- cause cancer, etc. But the real danger is how it will react with the local ecology. If this new rice provides an unrivaled, bountiful food source for local pests, you could set off FE a misquito plague. The misquitos could carry a blood-born virus, and thousands, maybe millions could die. Or the vitamin-rich new rice crops could provide better habitat for fungus or disease, which could devestate the crop or, worse yet, spread it to adjacent "normal" rice plants or other crops in the neighboring field or in storage. The anti-starvation crop could set off a famine. Or the crops DNA could be too homogenous (the same), and the first disease/infection it gets could erradicate it 100% (opposed to say every other or every third plant, which will happen in a diverse population. Some members will be immune/resistant). Or the genetics of the rice could alter the adjacent soil chemistry and set off wildfire growth in a local weed, again providing new food/habitat for undesirable insects or diseases, or choking the waterways where rice is grown with overgrowth, which can cause flooding, and so on.
Sure these are propped up examples, but this is the kind of stuff that has happened in the past when humans have translocated other plants and animals. Just recently they figured out that if a brown bear doesn't eat its annual dose of riverside salmon, the local forest suffers because the salmon saturates the bear's stool with nitrogen and other nutrients that aren't as abundant in the food the bear usually eats (unless the tourist in question eats a lot of bacon). So they add this to the pros and cons of removing the dams from our state, which would deprive us of 25% of electricity, our least polluting source of it. It would cause a lot of air pollution to replace that electricity (and no one's going to use less of it). Is it because of what a bear buries behind a tree when no one's around to hear it? (Except for some hunters: Didja hear that?! Ewwwee!) Naw. But it will add to the "pile" of evidence the government will consider in deciding whether dams stay or go.
Anyway, I think the dietary danger to humans implied by these crop is exaggerated, founded on pure cowardice. Smoking is probably more dangerous. Or eating at fast food restaurants where the employees don't wash their hands. It's just a sequence of DNA that gets read by the ribosome and generates a protein. If you pick a well-understood protein, you have a decent chance to predict what it will do in the body. It's the ecological side effects of these crops that are harder to predict (and to fix after the fact). Meanwhile, the hysteria about GE crops focuses on what it will do to humans because it's a scare tactic that ignorant bystanders can visualize while they smoke, eat bacon, drink their coffee with BGH milk, booze, or processed sugar in it, and brush their teeth with floride from fertilizer and mining waste. Wash it all down with a glass of cool tap water. Mmm. You mean it might be bad for me? Those godless scientists...
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
One of the reason the US pays farmer to not farm fields is the agribusiness in the US has pushed prices so low that to make up the overhead, over farming and a return to the dust-bowl is a real threat. A second is from two-birds-one-stone-dept. The fedral government also uses this to encourage farmers to allow formerly native species, particularly birds, to return to the habitat. But mostly it's to reduce the over farming. If you're looking for extra food (doesn't really solve the problem, see below) then don't eat meat. Go Vegan, lots of extra food.
And ship the resulting excess to those self same countries?
For the sake of argument, we've got all the food to feed the whole world x 10. We fly the food to Starvania for free, bulk UPS discount. Ok, now we're giving away all this free food right? What happens to the local farmers? How do they compete with a better product that's free? (There is a reason "dumping" is frowned on by the FTC.) Where agriculture is pretty much the industry, wouldn't such action on our part pretty well annhilate what little local economy there is? I would consider that pretty sadistic, it's not small pox infected blankets, but it's not neighborly either. Maybe we if we got all the dragon balls together we could wish the economy OK, we still have the distribution issue. How do you get the food to the people. It's an obviously valueable commodity. The power to starve is pretty commpelling is it not? So you've got a poor region, and poor regions have desperate people, and they usually have guns. How do you distribute the food? Florida elections officials? Mormons? Marines? Well now the situation is really sticky.... What if we choose marines and push comes to shove? Do we slaughter desperate people wholesale? We could, and an argument could be made that this would be helpfull. Do we bluff? Early in Clinton's presidency we had a problem exactly like this. Not a kodak moment in spite of all the good intentions. There's a lesson to be learned.
At the end of the day, these people need someone to throw them a line, not jump in the quagmire with them.
All opinions expressed are humble and not necessarily those of the Columbia Broadcasting System.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Couldn't have said it better myself. We artificially genetically modify not only plants, but animals too - and we've been doing it for as long as animals have been domesticated, same as food, and many species characteristics that we take for granted are the result.
More GM food, cheaper food, less people starving, less PESTICIDES, which should scare the shit out of you (ever work on a farm? You'd be shocked to see some of the precautions you need to take.. "DANGER: NERVE TOXIN" etc.. Genetically modified foods have major advantages over spraying "natural" crops with chemicals that you can't even pronounce. Betcha didn't know that people for decades used lead to turn oranges a nice color.. ahhh, the ignorant masses.
..don't panic