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Genetically-Modified Everything
BreadMan writes "The Economist has an interesting article about how the use of GM (genetically modified) plants extends well beyond the food industry. Altered trees that make better paper, insect-resistant cotton, potatoes that contain the right kinds of starches. An interesting read to see where the industry is going in light of problems with having GM foods on the dinner table. There's more industrial uses for agricultural products than you'd think of right away, so this may be a lucrative use for GM technology."
I've always thought the ultimate use of genetic engineering would be to make puberty-free, Permacute puppies and kittens. Not only is it a lucrative market, there wouldn't be worries about the altered genes entering the natural ecosystem because of the sterility.
Back when I was a genetists (early 80's), I worked at Coors Biotech for a summer. The project was kind of interesting. Chickens that are sold in US stores had colorizers to turn the flesh pink. They were feed dafodils just prior to slaughter. We took the genes from the dafidils and splice it into algae. Worked great and I think that it was a fraction of the price of the flowers. I do not know if it is used today, but I do know that FDA did not regulate it. If it was not directly consumed by humans, it was off limits (per the reagan admin).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The Agricultural Revolution. How dare man stop picking whatever he found and get proactive. Now its all GM this and farming that and billions breathing.
Some GM stuff in labs can perhaps be controlled, but once modified geness are released into the RealWorld they are very difficult to control. The risk of doing bad things is great. We already see the effects of cross contamination of crops etc.
If this goes more widespread (eg. GM trees for paper production) we can expect weird things happening (eg. say we remove some substance from trees to make them easier to process but that gene provides disease resistance etc. If that crosses into wild populations then we end up with sick forests etc).
Agriculture and food production are regulated and controlled (well to a degree anyway), industrial stuff less so. It concerns me that all the GM bads we see in agriculture will be far worse in the industrial sector.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Monsanto's GM canola has also crossbred with Canadian canola strains, making it impossible for Canadian farmers to guarentee that their canola crops are GM free, thus locking them out of the EU markets. Now, they want to do the same thing with wheat.
Leaving aside the fears and marketability problems surrounding GM plants, we still have the problem that patented plants are a huge threat to farmers. You can get in big, expensive trouble if you didn't license the genes that are growing in your field, even if you didn't plant them. If you save your own seed, and that seed gets contaminated by someone's patented, GM genes, you could loose a lifetime of work.
See what I've been reading.
Corn was originally a grass, with each kernel being very small. Through very careful breeding, the Aztecs managed to increase kernel size to its present state.
Dog breeds have been around for a long time as well.
The only difference between what the Aztecs did and what scientists do is whether or not you access the genes directly or through the natural "API" (aka breeding, Java programmers no doubt hate GM food).
(Waits for jokes about kernel size.)
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
http://www.louisville.edu/org/sun/sustain/articles /hemp/paper.html
good educated paper on the good and bad of hemp paper. Basically yes its more expensive, but prices will fall. And it can be recycled many more times than tree paper.
Maybe if we made bacteria that was better at making methane.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Do not expect Canada or the Nordic countries to be shortly covered with GM pines; commercial use of GM trees in Europe is at least ten years off. But it is on its way.
How is it on its way? Because some guys are researching it?
Now the I can't speak for the entire world, but I live in Sweden, I know a lot of people in the paper industry, and I've personally spoken with people belonging to senior management of several scandinavian paper companies.
And they all said the same thing: They currently have no interest whatsoever in GMO trees. They're not researching for it, they don't want it. The are interested in biotech, but only to the extent that it can give them insight into how to do traditional forestry better.
Why trust them? Well, the reasoning behind this is that this industry has been harshly critizied by environmentalists for a long time. Today, they've pretty much 'cleaned up their act' (in scandinavia), aiming for FSC acreditation and so on.
They are not about to throw all that work away.
That said.. I'm personally positive to biotech, and I think that we might very well see GMO trees out there. But not in ten years time. Not in the nordic countries anyway.
Actually hemp makes great paper. It's cheaper and uses less chemicals than paper made from wood. Don't think our friends at Dow Chemical didn't know this when they lobbied to make marijuana illegal.
Help also makes great fabric for clothes, sails, even parachutes. (Of course, it was a hemp parachute that made sure George Bush would be around long enough to sell arms to Iran, funnel the profits to the contras, and have sons that would costs us billions in S & L bail outs, disenfranchise minority voters, and generally suspend the bill of right (except for the 2nd amendment of course), so I guess there is a pretty good argument that marijuana does support terrorism.)
The reason why marijuana is illegal is because the best use for the crop is to produce drugs.
Oh, man, that is so wrong on many levels. First, smoking is not the best use of marijuana. Second, if that was the case, why is tobacco legal? Or coffee? What else are people doing with hops other than make beer?
50% of the pesticides used in the USA are used on cotton. Hemp can grow with little to no pesticide use, produce stronger fibers (measured in feet compared to the inches of cotton), and has a higher yield. It also has a higher yield than trees when used for paper, doesn't require chemicals when making the paper, and it doesn't turn yellow with age.
Other organisms alter their genes purposefully, and share this with their neighbors (bacteria), also others purposefully manipulate their own DNA (ants) just on this planet. As humanity delivers the seed of DNA to other stars and the cosmos it will be to the advantage of all of the creatures we take with us to be able to adapt rapidly to many different environments. Genetic Modification is necessary not only for the advancement of the human species, but for all life in the solar system as strive to expand our reach ever outward. Anyone who is opposed to Genetic Engineering does not see the entire picture.
How do they keep the new bioengineered products from cross pollenating with the standard food varieties.
GM "products" should be engineered to be sterile . . . it's not that hard to craft a triploid strain, or knock out a fertility factor. The crops are still clonable by traditional agriculture methods . . . but don't breed to make hybrids.
That, or we should be able to sue a company into oblivion for contaminating a nations agricultural products. Contaminating a nations food source, is bio-terrorism, and should be handled as such.
luckilly $$$ will keep broski off the backs of these corporations, and in the library watching what I read.
I concur.
Furthermore, humans must eventually bring safe, effective GM to bear on the problems that we have inherited and inflicted on ourselves. Evolution has shaped humans into tool-using social creatures for protection and the societies spawned have radically changed the way our genes are selected for and against. No longer is it as imperative for humans to be in the height of physical fitness, nor have excellent genetic health in terms of hereditary afflictions and cancer defenses. Indeed, I believe the prominence of cancer today to be influenced by the tempering of natural selection in our collective gene pool. This is the threat we will continue to face and it will not go away.
I express these concerns with my consumer dollars. I do not buy organic because of the possibility that proceeds will go to political efforts fighting the progress of GM in any sphere. These political efforts are regressive and threaten the progress and (perhaps, if I am not being too dramatic) the continued well being of the human race.
By stifling this emerging GM market, such political efforts will retard the growth of more advanced, human oriented technologies and economies. Researchers will not be able to learn the necessary lessons to use this technology safely, now or in the future or it will not come to fruition until it is too late. I don't see how we have any choice but to develop these technologies before our own genes betray us. We must become what we are, users of tools, and move forward. For these reasons and more: Please don't buy organic.
Trees are not only easier, but probably cheaper, too. To produce paper in a lab, you need a way of controlling the cellulose chain growth so you get reasonably uniform fibers, something that happens naturally in trees. You need energy to drive and and regulate the process, which trees acquire at a pretty good price per KW thanks to chloroplasts. You also need the complex equipment that handles the materials in bulk, mixes it, and handles the product, which the tree provides, as well. The tree even handles the acquisition of the raw material from the environment. Additionally, trees are reasonably environmentally friendly, having few side-effects other than a small contribution to the heat death of the universe, which is unavoidable for any use of energy.
On the downside, trees require a significant amount of land and time. The hybrid cottonwood-poplars that the James River Co farms here in Washington are remarkably fast growing, but still take about 15 years to reach harvest size. I'm afraid I have no idea how difficult it is to acquire a large amount of "feedstock" for making your cellulose and other ingredients.
Regarding hemp, I'm not at all surprised that it makes good paper, so then I am surprised it's not more widely used. I've been told there is a hemp farm somewhere around my area that grows it for rope and thread and there's a big paper mill in Camas, WA. I guess they just haven't gotten together.
...and that will cost someone money in coping with the resulting ecological changes.
There is one certainty in all of this: the genes spliced into GMOs will get loose in the world due to inter-breeding with non-GM organisms of the same species. This is as certain as losing in Vegas.
So how does this sound: I propose to release novel self-replicating entities into your environment, and I don't know what the consequences will be. I can be almost certain they won't lead to the end of the world as we know it, but on the other hand it isn't a great strech to imagine that my self-replicating entities are going to have a significant effect on the ecosystem you live in and depend upon.
Personally, I'd be very unhappy with someone making this proposal, and the comparisions that come to mind with existing activities, such as selective breeding for domestication, don't really hold water because a) the whole point of GMOs is that they contain genetic combinations that would not occur in nature and b) selective breeding for domestication has already been responsible for major environmental changes.
Domestic species both force out non-domestic ones (as happened with prairie grasses) and due to increased genetic homogeneity may also be more susceptible to disease. So comparing the GMO process to domestication is not entirely reassuring.
"Industrial biology" has been extremely good for us humans in the past hundred-odd years. We can feed ourselves, worldwide, better than at any time in history. But there have been costs, and I'd like to see a really compelling case made for adding to those costs with GMOs.
So far, that case has not been made, and many GMO proponents simply deny that there are going to be costs. Only when they admit to that will there be a meaningful debate. Of course, for that to happen, the "GMOs are the work of Satan" mantra from the other side would have to fall silent as well.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The funny thing is that if hemp were legal and encouraged, the pollen would ruin all the pot grown for drug use.
love is just extroverted narcissism
GM may be targetting specific amino acids in encoded in the DNA but is can be much more than that. Just a note: amino acids make up protein and that information is encoded in the DNA. DNA is made up of nucleotides. There are no amino acids in DNA.f orschungsprojekte/vag_hen_syn_rhar/vag_hen_syn_rha ren.html). There is potential with these virus infections to shuffle different proteins between species (new virus infects, excises old virus with some human genes and infects some other species).
You can take an existing protein in your organism of interest and modify it using molecular biology techniques. This is similar to selective breeding, only with selective breeding you had to wait a long time for that mutation you wanted to come up, or it was a phenotype that you just couldn't select for. But all the raw materials are present in the original organism.
Another form of GM and one that I believe is more contraversial is to take genes from other organisms and put it into the one you want to improve. i.e. Bt corn which takes a bacterial toxin and expresses it in parts of a plant to make it more bug resistant.
This kind of gene jumping does also occur in the 'wild' but not on the scale that people are doing. The human genome has many virus proteins encoded in from ancient infects where the virus inserted itself into the genome but failed to excise properly (8% of human genome: http://www.med-rz.uni-sb.de/med_fak/humangenetik/
Sorry for the unfinished post - darn enter key submits form badness.
I understand that it is easy to just write off these concerns as just more wacko technophobe hysteria, but look at how many problems we have created just by introducing non-native species into other habitats. These aren't genetically modified, or in many cases even bred by humans for specific traits. They are perfectly natural organisms that simply evolved in different places. And yet they have reeked havoc in their new habitat because the life forms in that habitat are not evolved to deal with them.
Nothing is evolved to deal with these new crops that we are introducing, and the primary motivation for the crops is that we want them make them more resilient against natural (and in some case human made - aka RoundUp) predators, so we can get better yields cheaper.
I am not opposed to GM in principle - I think it can and will have a wonderful positive impact on us and even the environment as a whole, as it will allow for more efficient and balanced use of the resources available to us. However, I think we need to be careful, and I think that it would be a good idea if the work was more driven by scientific curiosity then profit. In my opinion the best way to do achieve this is to declare GM work to be unpatentable. This will remove much of the profitability of GM research, while creating a more open scientific environment. Not to mention the philosophical questions of whether genes and biological processes should even be patentable. And if it also slows down progress some, that might even be a good thing in this case.
If these GM-cats see the light someday, I would expect some kind of similar business model. And the DMCA being called to protect the producer from "counterfeit supercat food"
We have stockpiles of cases where new tech had unexpected side-effects causing irreversible damage.
What I am calling for is better controls over the damage, forseeable and unforseeable alike. Further, if there is more responsibility and liability placed on the shoulders of the decision-makers, then controls and responsible application are more likely to occur. As things stand now, we have a corporate culture that lacks morality and conscience. Those values need to be reconnected into our culture before these things can be considered safe for public consumption.
I have no doubt that any and all of these things can be made safe and profitable. But the problem is there is presently little incentive to make these companies act responsibly. Hell, it takes several acts of congress, continuous oversight and enormous treats to get even the most basic of environmental concerns addressed. And as can be shown even now, if the fines aren't big enough, they are simply factored in as the cost of doing business and they keep right on damaging the planet.
I'm far from advocating returning to the caves. But I see that advancement and profit should not cost us our habitable planet in the process.
Energy density is only important if you need to store/transport. Thus, hydrogen might not be ideal for cars, but if you can generate it onsite, its great for powerplants.
Onsite hydrogen generation could conceivably allow for extremely clean/efficient power plants, running directly on hydrogen and producing water as a byproduct, either at a large scale or even at the individual scale, depending on the amount of support structure necessary.
For that matter, depending on how much bacteria it takes to generate a given volume of hydrogen, you could maybe even fit a bactank on to the back of your car and run it directly, no storage. Just take the hydrogen stream and burn it as it comes out of the bugs. When the car is parked, turn the turbine or IC engine into a generator, plug into the grid, and help the rest of the world (assuming there's no way to tell the bacteria to knock off for lunch).
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
These techniques allow improving species with lower cost than gene modification methods. And because it avoids those methods, which are patented, they have less restrictive IP issues; and it has been developed in a collaborative environment. As a result, the Wired Article calls this "the agriculture version of open source"
Put some hops in a little pillow and sleep on it for a solid night's sleep. Hops is useful for insomnia. But don't handle it excessively, as it can cause contact dermatitus.
Its analogous to proprietary software: you can't just buy the algorithm: you have to buy the whole package (and support and perhaps hardware too). In much of current GM technology you can't just buy the nifty new gene, you have to buy the whole potato (w/a limited selection of potato types if any choice at all) *and* you're just leasing the potato *and* you have to keep buying the upgrades each year.
Problems with the closed-source methods of GM tech include:
One problem with genetically modifying everything is that the modifications are done to solve a specific problem, or a relatively narrow set of problems. But do the modifiers thoroughly consider the far ranging consequences of their modifications? Eg, if a genetically modified butterfly flaps its wings in New York, does a typhoon still occur in Hong Kong, or is it a flood in Bangladesh? Is it even possible to discern what the unintended consequences may be five, ten, fifty years in the future? Nature spent thousands, millions of years evolving itself to a state of balance, and then we come along and start altering that balance willy-nilly to solve a few immediately pressing problems. I worry that we're taking an approach to GM similar to a very bad software development project - no overall plan, build features and modifications in response to isolated needs, and spend the rest of the project lifetime putting out fire after fire after fire. It's just that fires in software development are not quite as consequential as fires that affect the natural state of the world ecology.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Perhaps with large capital investment in new plants, economy of scale in mass production, and refinement in the process, hemp fiber will be only slightly more expensive than wood fiber. I do work in the paper industry and know first hand the fear of possible plant closures due to the tight margins industry wide. If hemp looked promising as a low cost fiber source we, and every other manufacturer, would be raising a stink heard nationwide to get access.
uses less chemicals than paper made from wood
Hemp could save some chemical usage when it comes to wet strength additives, but that is a fairly small percentage of the whole system. The majority of chemical additives required for wood fiber paper would still be required for paper with hemp fiber.
If hemp is going to use a mechanical fiber preparation system instead of a closed loop liquor system, prepare to bite the bullet for some major energy costs.
Don't think our friends at Dow Chemical didn't know this when they lobbied to make marijuana illegal.
Dow chemical does manufacture some chemicals used in the papermaking industry (coating polymers, defoamers, biocides primarily), but is far from being one of the major players in that market. I reckon using Eka as the conspiracy name does not carry the same demonizing weight.
One acre of annually grown hemp may spare up to four acres of forest from the current practice of clear-cutting
The only clear cutting that is used to supply fiber to the paper industry comes from stands of ten year old poplars on tree farms getting the whack. The other primary wood fiber sources are waste chips and sawdust from lumber mills and post consumer (recycled) fiber. The percent of virgin, natural forest fiber used in paper manufacturing is in the low single digits.
Compared to wood, fewer chemicals are required to convert low-lignin tree-free fibers to pulp
Actually we are kinda fond of the lignin in the wood fiber. That lignin is the energy source recovered in the boilers that recycle the pulping chemicals, produce steam used throughout the plant, and generate enough electricity that we actually sell back to the market.
Less bleaching results in less dioxin
Dioxin is a ghost from the past in the paper industry. Very few mills still use elemental chlorine in the bleaching process. Quite a few still use chlorine-dioxide, but even these are giving way to newer bleaching plants based on newer technologies with zero dioxin byproducts.
This is a reply to this post, and the one a bit further down stating the same thing.
It works both ways. If some enterprising individual were to leave a SINGLE mature male marijuana plant in a field of hemp, every single seed resulting from that pollen would be a marijuana seed, not hemp.
In fact, trends on the overgrow forums, etc already show some people are doing this. Among stoners, naturally growing hemp (what Jefferson called Indian Hemp plant) has been nicknamed "ditchweed" because you often find it growing in ditches on the side of US highways.
Now, male plants need to be removed from a marijuana grow so they don't pollenate the buds and you get "sinsemilla" (seedless) buds full of THC and CBN. Which means they need to be destroyed, which can be difficult sometimes, so people are leaving their male plants in ditchweed patches, just for fun basically. Law enforcement doesnt bother because it looks exactly the same, but all the new plants that sprout in a years time from the seeds are marijuana plants, not hemp.
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The last digit of pi is four.
Just for starters, GM techniques: - often place plant DNA in animals and vice-versa. Dangerous? Who knows?
DNA is DNA. The difference between a human and a cabbage is minimal. You may not like the idea of a fish gene in your strawberries, but that doesnt make it dangerous. It does however give the opportunity to move a specific and well characterised trait from one organism to another. No amount of breeding will make a frost tolerent strawberry because there is no natural trait *in strawberries*, but fish do... personally i think thats kind of cool
- involve the insertion of promoter sequences, which stimulate the expression of the desired sequence. What else do they stimulate? Again, no one really knows.
If it did something bad in the plant, then that plant wouldnt be desirable, and so it wouldnt be grown, sold, eaten etc. This is just FUD.
- also involve the insertion of a gene for antibiotic resistance, to help isolate those cells in which the gene transfer "takes". Dangerous? Hell yes! Horizontal gene transfer (between macro-organism and bacteria) is documented fact.
Oh boy, FUD, FUD, FUD, F U D, FUD. Not to mention just plain wrong and a popular mistruth recited by anti-GM bodies. Yes antibiotic resistance genes (and herbicide) are used, but has anyone bothered to check what those are used for? NOTHING. And in case you didnt stop to think, where did the resistance genes come from? From the environment. They are already out there. Pick up a handfull of soil and see how much antibiotic resistance genes there are out there *naturally* (i did this as a 1st year prac).
And why oh why would a bacterium even have any selective pressure to pick up a resistance gene from a plant (very difficult) when it can pop down to the local hospital and procreate with a nice slutty staph or E coli that is *actively* trying to spread its "geans of mass destruction".
Now for seconds, organic farming:
Uses the same bacterial toxin (Bt) on the surface of plants as the GM plants do. And did you know that Bt is closly related to anthrax! (just like a human is to a monkey)
Uses heavy metals in large quantities to control pests that do not bio-degrade and are toxic. (Mercury, copper, etc)
Dont test *any* new variety, breed, wild plant etc for health effects. A lot of the fashionable new plants have very high alkaloids and other toxins (cyanide-like etc), yet they are 'natural' and therefore outside the regulatory system. Peanuts would never be certified for consumption because too many people are allergic
Will *irraditate*/poision/mutate plants to produce desirable traits that are not characterised and completely unknown!
And (traditional, if not also organic) is in many cases quite inefficient, using more resources, spraying more toxic chemicals, with less yields than what can be achieved with a disease resistant/herbicide resistant/enhanced GM crop.
OK, long post, but take this message away, GM isnt bad because it is GM, and organic and natural doesnt mean it is 100% safe. No you shouldnt *have* to eat GM if you dont want too, but dont stop anyone from benefiting just because you read something on the internet saying it is wrong.
And if horizontal gene transfer is so natural and well documented, wouldnt that make GM crops practically organic? think about it.