Slashdot Mirror
California Bans Genegineered Fish
Cheeko writes "California regulators have announced that they are blocking the sale of genetically engineered fish. The arguments of the regulators seem to echo some of those discussed earlier here."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Is there anything stopping California residents from taking a quick trip out of state, buying the little fishys, and then bringing them back home? I can't see how this ban will do much good with today's interstate commerce...
I am a little bit bothered about the general responce to genetically modifying anything. I mean, people just need to get off the possible negative side effects and realise the potential we are holding in our hands.
I mean, lets talk about better living through chemistry breaking to a whole new level.
I thought the only non-engineered corn on the planet existed in Mayan tombs. I know we do a ton of genetic engineering to make most of our modern day veggies so what's the big deal? Technophobia, running amok...
I'm no PETA member, far from it -- I love a good steak -- but this could open up into a serious mess. What's going to happen when genetically modified cats, dogs, birds, fruit bats, orangutans, ad naseum, become the new trend?
Not really--it just replaces one problem with another.
You know how they control Mediterranean Fruit Flies in California? They capture and breed some of the flies, breed them until they've got a nice big population, then they sterilize and release them into the wild. Since reproduction requires a fertile male AND female, they've just reduced the probability or reproduction by introducing a large number of neutered flies.
That's really not a lot different than making neutered GM lifeforms. They are by their very nature produced in large numbers (how else would it be profitable?), and all it takes is a large "break" to get them into the general population.
"Breaks" are easier than you would think. GM plants escape all the time right now, and they don't even have legs. Some farmed animal populations (salmon) have to be released into the wild as part of their natural lifecycle. And if this happens, the reproductive capacity of that species is reduced due to the increase in neutered members.
And all that's assuming the neutering is always 100% effective with no errors. That's not exactly something I'd want to count on either.
"Indians" were cross breeding corn with corn. Transgenic canola cross-breeds canola with fish. The transgenic canola is patented. Canola, whether transgenic or not has airborne pollen. So neighbours of farmers with transgenic crops have been sued for patent violation for planting their own seed.
Sure, the geneticists can claim that they could "turn on" sterility in the target animal/plant genome. But that begs the conundrum:
If one modification can have unintended consequences than all of them can. If neither can have unintended consequences, why bother with the safeguard?
Okay, it's an oversimplification of a vastly complex subject, but I think the proposition is oversimplified as well. It is all well and good to cite genetic sterility as a safeguard when making other genetic modifications, but what are the unintended consequneces of genetically inducing sterility? More importantly, the unintended consequnces of the two in combination. After all, at one point, adding an extra Y chromosome might have looked like a viable way to block breeding, but now we know that would have resulted in billions of sociopathic fish (but sterile).
Power corupts, but absolute power is kinda neat... at least until your three hundred pound, opposable thumbed, parthenogenic guppies decide that they are entitled to the six pack of Weinhards in the fridge...
We simply don't know enough to know what we have to do to minimize the impact of mistakes, malice and general human stupidity.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Look at the quotes in that article.
... At the end of the day, I just don't think it's right to produce a new organism just to be a pet. To me, this seems like an abuse of the power we have over life, and I'm not prepared to go there today."
"For me it's a question of values, it's not a question of science. I think selling genetically modified fish as pets is wrong.
Well, good for you. So you're not prepared to go there.
So why are you using a law to prevent anybody *else* from going there? What about the folks who *do* think it's okay to have a genetically-modified animal as a pet?
I think smoking is wrong. I think doing drugs is wrong. I think driving an SUV is wrong. But is "I think X is wrong" ever in itself a good enough reason to ban X? Should things be banned until there's a good reason to believe they're okay, or allowed until there's a good reason to believe they're not?
California is also the only state on the continental US that still bans domestic ferrets. This ban has more to do with opinion and misinformation than fact. And it ignores an estimated 500K pet ferrets already within California's borders.
I'm not suprised the same attitude is applied to fish.
> There is nothing innately wrong with genetic modification, though, like all technologies, it can be misused.
> To condemn a technology on the claim it is tampering with life is a flimsy stance
They are not stopping, banning or condemning the technology. They're stopping the results from using the technology, which is quite common if you think about it.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Each year, the president pardons the Thanksgiving turkeys and they're sent off to some farm to live out their lives.
Unfortunately, since they're bred to be meat animals, they don't survive very long. Some last a week. The lucky ones last a year.
Virtually all of the food we eat has been genetically engineered, just using very primitive methods over long periods of time. I bet we could even breed glowing goldfish using traditional methods . . . given a few hundred million years.
Actually, if I'm allowed to do gene sequencing of each generation of dog, I'll bet it could be done in less than 10 generations. The protein motifs for GFP (green fluorescent protein) are very well-understood now. I know you said selective breeding *alone*, but gene sequencing the puppies is only monitoring, not making direct changes...
expressing a fluorescent protein in zebrafish may sound harmless, but I think restricting such things for now is prudent.
I have to disagree. I think few people would disagree that biotech is a phenomenally influential tool.
However, I don't think that it's all that efficient to put a hold on biotech work and try to do research out of the hands of the public.
If a zebrafish escapes, it has a gene that is potentially very damaging -- it's easy for predators to see. It's unlikely to do very well. Glowing zebrafish will probably die out in the wild quickly, leaving only regular zebrafish. Nature is pretty robust.
On the other hand, there are a few things that we might want to avoid. One is introducing poisonous variants of nondomesticated edible fish. As long as it isn't too expensive to be poisonous, there's a pretty clear evolutionary advantage to an animal in being poisonous. A poisonous, say, tuna could take over and beat out the nonpoisonous tuna -- and then we wouldn't be able to just catch and eat tuna any more.
As long as we do our best to avoid things that clearly could have very negative side effects (such as the poisonous tuna above), I think we'll be okay. Dragging feet on technology has never worked. We're better off working with biotechnology and understanding it, and learning to deal with it. And enjoying its fruits.
Think of fire. Fire is can have *phenomenal* destructive value. You can literally wipe out thousands of acres of life with a flick of your fingers and the aid of fire. Many people have died from and been hurt by fire (and still are). However, we adopted fire, and learned to work with it, and would never dream of going back.
I agree that we will probably muck up some of the existing state of things. We'll probably wipe out some species and muck up some ecosystems. We've been doing that for a long, long time, though.
Good comment, though I disagree with some of it.
May we never see th
And guess what --- this happens all the time.
Ignoring simple mutation, which can add new encodings to a species' gene pool that weren't there before, there's a well-established and uncontroversial mechanism that allows gene sequences to be passed from one species to another, entirely different species.
It works like this: viruses reproduce by injecting their genetic material into a host cell. The new material hijacks the host cell, which starts producing more viruses.
Sometimes this doesn't work properly, and you end up with fragmented viral genetic material in the host cell, which doesn't work. What does the host do? What it always did, largely. Except that when it reproduces, it will now reproduce the viral genetic material as well. (If the viral genetic material isn't completely disabled, this can cause really odd effects, like cancer.)
What happens if the host cell happens to be a sex cell, like in the testes? Well, the sperm produced will contain the viral genetic material, as well, which will get reproduced into every cell in the offspring, etc. So you've now transferred viral genetic material into the gene pool.
It works the other way, too --- the host cell can start producing viruses containing fragments of host genetic material. So if one of these contaminated viruses infects a sex cell in another species of creature, you've now transferred genetic material from one species to another completely different species.
Does this sound far fetched? Yes, it is. But it happens. There are sections of human DNA that have been positively identified as coming from viruses, and there are sections that show clear signs as having come from other species --- although it's a bit hard to tell.
(Embarassingly, I can't remember the technical name for this process.)
It gets even more complicated with plants, because plants don't have the single-cell-zygote bottleneck between generations. It's entirely possible for several pollen cells to fertilise a plant, and the resulting offspring will be a chimera. (This happens surprisingly frequently with humans, too.) There are also some specialised processes for incorporating foreign genetic material that I don't really understand or remember enough of to describe.
DNA's not as sacred as you think it is.
Okay I'll bite, their is a big difference between selective breeding and actively mucking around at the genetic level. Try as much as you like but you can't get fish genes into plants through selective breeding but you can with GE.
Organic shit sucks? Well without the amount of preservatives people eat, I would say only about sixty to seventy percent of shit is organic anymore. Anyhoo, your advisor is talking out of his arse. If he did any research he would find that it is quite possible to produce enough food to feed the globe using organic methods, hell before the industrial revolution and the introduction of pesticides it is how the world operated.
Until you can prove to me that introducing foreign (read from another species or genus) DNA into an organism isn't going to cause problems I'll keep eating food that hasn't been spliced thanks.
Nature kinda has a delicate balance that we tend to screw up for an immediate solution to minor annorances. See cane toads vs cane beetles for an example.
Genetic engineering allows introduction into a species of genes that express proteins (and other molecules) not available within the host species' existing gene pool.
Where do these people get the idea that genes can't cross species? They can. Look up horizontal gene transfer in any molecular evolution text. Like Creationists, the anti-GE crowd simply ignores science when it doesn't serve their purposes.
This reminds me of nuclear power. Done right, you can make a nuclear power plant that is incapable of having a melt down, yet people are so afraid of the nightmares of science fiction that they refuse to look at the facts. France has 59 nuclear reactors that supply 77% of the total energy to them, and you don't see a bunch of glowing frenchies now do you? Yet this stupid knee jerk reaction people have to technology has caused us to remain dependent on fossil fuels for our power, and no doubt contributed to the energy crisis in California. I'm not saying that there aren't ANY problems with nuclear power. Obviously there are, but the point is that the positive easily outweighs the negative when viewed in a rational light, and the decision not to use the technology comes from people's emotions/fears and not reason. Genetic engineering is a lot like nuclear power, with the exception of the bar to entry being a lot lower. Unlike nuclear power, all you need to do genetic research is the scientists, the money, and a few cute helpless animals. People trying to block genetic manipulation (either the sale of it or the research) are just going to force it to go underground, or to another country that lacks regulation where there is a much higher probability that something WILL go wrong. The solution is not to outlaw it, but to regulate it closely.
Do you think that the multiply resistant strains of bacteria are just spontaniously appearing out of nowhere? Or could it be that the genes for AB resistance are suddenly very much more common in the wild as a result of genetically modified organisms?
Can you actually prove that, or are you just theorizing?
I would tend to believe that there are so many AB resistant bacteria out there due to the rediculous amounts of AB stuff that people use in their lives. They demand antibiotics every time they get the sniffles, use antibiotic hand soap, AB kitchen wipes, etc... In that kind of environment the only bacteria that will survive will be the multiply AB resistant ones, which were mutants with no real survival advantage to begin with.
So they aren't appearing out of nowhere. They have always been there but now they have the advantage and they are filling the niches left by the non-resistant ones. Then all it *may* take is another mutation to turn it into something really nasty.
... I have a unique prespective. I have resently found refuge from unemployment by leveraging my decades of knowledge and experience as a Tropical Fish hobbiest, to obtain a position at a Aquatics Store. What bothers me are all of the tattooed, stained, dyed ( via feeding), and obnoxiously hybridised fish. The last thing I want is to be selling GM fish. Though, the Glofish is probably a lot better then a tattooed fish ( i.e. painted glass fish). And certainly better then the Jellybean Parrot Cichlid ( the Mopyfish fish), which is first of all a most obnoxious hybrid, but is also stained. On a side note; It is realy a good idea to have other skills besides programming in these weired times.