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Suppressed Report Shows Cancer Link to GM Potatoes
Doc Ruby writes "After an 8-year-long court battle, Welsh activists have finally been allowed to released a Russian study showing an increased cancer risk linked to eating genetically modified potatoes. While the victory of the Welsh Greenpeace members in the courtroom would seem to vindicate the work of the Russian scientists that did the original research, there are still serious questions to be answered. The trials involved rats being fed several types of potatoes as feed. The rats who were fed GM potatoes suffered much more extensive damage to their organs than with any other type; just the same, serious questions remain about the validity of the findings. The Welsh group wants to use this information to stop the testing of GM crops in the UK, tests currently slated for the spring of this year."
"Those in the "control groups" that were fed non-GM potatoes suffered ill-effects"
Maybe pototoes are bad for rats. Doesn't mean they will be harmfull to humans.
It showed that the potatoes did considerable damage to the rats' organs. Those in the "control groups" that were fed non-GM potatoes suffered ill-effects, but those fed GM potatoes suffered more serious organ and tissue damage.
Hold on... the non-GM potatoes still caused ill-effects? How much potato were they feeding these rats? Did they even cook them first?
It seems like the only conclusion one can draw from this study is that "if you're eating so much potato that you get sick, GM potatoes will get you even sicker!"
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/a.pusztai/ is the site of the paper's author.
Given the suggestion that GM foods might be more harmful than old-school foods, wouldn't the sane thing be to *increase* testing? What's wrong with these idiots?
Software patents delenda est.
that research causes cancer in rats.
From the article - "Greenpeace said the Russian trials were also badly flawed. Half of the rats in the trial died, and results were taken from those that survived, in breach of normal scientific practice."
Go sensationalism. These "findings" were probably "suppressed" because they weren't very valid and obtained under shifty premises.
You need a good case study for GM crops? GM crops have been in American markets for years now starting with the Flavr-savr tomato. It's not like the FDA hadn't done independent testing on their own before approving them. But a sample size like the entire US, a pattern would probably emerge.
But until the science of genetic manipulation is (close to)perfected, all they are doing is 'fooling' with it. Coupled with todays climate of unbridled corporate power, this stuff is very dangerous IMO. Please bear in mind, it's not the scientists who get to push 'products' to market. And, corporations will *always* be able to buy a scientist who supports claims of safety.
I file GM under "not worth the risks". (And _do not_ give me that old "it'll help starving people" crap. No. What will help starving people are governments that aren't run by evil shits).
The paper being described in TFA can be found Here. Also, there are almost a dozen different citations of the paper on Google Scholar
Potatoes Modify YOU!
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Hopefully never, because "don't fuck with nature" is a self-defeating position for a human being to hold. We have flourished as a species because of our ability and motivation to manipulate nature to improve our conditions. Vaccines and antibiotics come to mind. Hell, we'll probably be extinct within the next 1000 years unless we learn more about how to better "fuck with nature".
http://outcampaign.org/
Genetic modification is the artificial changing of DNA... you can say that a specific DNA change is harmful, so that a specific type of engineered potato is bad... but that doesn't say anything about GM foods. The safety or danger of the foods would have to be evaluated on the specific genetic changes made. Even then, the GM products don't carry any more risk than plants created by mutation breeding (in fact, GM was concieved as a less risky version of mutation breeding).
That, of course, is totally ignoring the fact that the guy conducting the research was a hardcore anti-GM activist before the research. It is like asking activist creationists to do an impartial study on evolution.
The reason for GM crops is only one: profit. Profit may come from improved appearance, from increased shelf-life, or from increased yields due to lower pest numbers. The agrochemical companies make two birds with one stone. They sell the GM seeds which usually are modified as to be pesticide-tolerant, and then they sell the pesticide to be used in excessive amounts to kill off everything else. Using vast amounts of chemicals is bad for the foodstuff as it leaves toxic residue inside, as well as for the environment that the toxic waste is released into. There is also increased risk of cross-pollination with other non-GM crops, which is the main reason of banning GM agriculture in Europe.
America is probably not a good example to use. Estimates of autism have shot up in recent years, it is now classed as the second-worst contry in the Western world for children, education standards have fallen, creationists have become a major political force, obesity is sky-high and rising, something caused Britney Spears' hair to fall out, and 90% of all recent US news stories on legal and/or political issues can be best explained by some form of brain damage.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That's the right question, left neglected and alone by the story.
Poking around a bit, it turns out that the genetic engineers and the researchers were both looking at one particular lectin, introduced to make the potatoes resist insects and nematodes better. Which is important because "lectin" is a whole family of chemicals with different biological effects.
Now, the natural chemical defenses in plants are bad enough. Wild potatoes may need elaborate preparation to be safe to eat. Farmed ones are screened for solanine. Potatoes, in case you didn't know, are in the nightshade family.
So the real question here is what other research was done and what results it had. Does other work confirm or contradict the Russian study?
Then there's the systems question, which is whether we're better off with the risks of the engineered potatoes or the risks of the pesticides needed to keep "natural" ones alive. The word "natural" is in quotes because they're quite different from their wild relatives.
There's a 98% chance you're an eleven year old dork in a ninja costume.
Take off every 'sig' !!
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the particlar version of GM potato studied was more damaging than a certain type of unmodified potato. Your generalization of "GM potato" is just too broad. For example, would you say that all condensed tree sap is dangerous after watching mice die from ingesting concentrated hemlock sap? Obviously, that would be quite erroneous and our pancakes would be rather plain fare.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Just because someone put words in a paper doesn't necessarily mean they're true. Even if there's no outright falsification, it's entirely possible that their statistical analyses could be off (for a silly example: they had a sample of only two rats, and one of them suffered more free radical damage than the other). There's the potential for them to have misinterpreted their results, or to have accidentally exposed the rats to a different--
Wait, wait. Wait. I just went to look in the article for where these folks had been published (i.e. what quality of peer review they had). Right at the bottom of the page, it says that Greenpeace _admits_ that the Russian studies had errors. So, they're admitting that they're using a poorly-designed study in order to try and scare the government into banning trials on GM foods? What is going on here?
78% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Actually, more recent studies have shown that cigarettes are the leading cause of statistics.
There's two sides to the terminator gene, as I understand it, one of which you're overlooking. Suppose you engineer a crop which grows extremely well, much better than in its original form. This crop might spread wildly, and become a form of a weed, overcoming native plants and even other useful crops. The terminator gene is useful here because it prevents the crop from spreading into the wild. In this way it's a safeguard.
Suppose there is some series of studies confirming that a particular crop is statistically more correlated with the occurrence of some medical problem in humans who eat it. If that crop has already spread in the wild, and perhaps merged with non GM crops, then we'll still be eating it whether we like it or not. We need safeguards like the terminator gene.
Also, using it doesn't mean choosing the new business models it allows. They could sell seed to the same farmers at close to cost price for repeat customers, making it closer to the existing business models.
A few juicy points from the book (not in the order as they appear in the book, just the order it came out from my memory), though I knows too little to judge if their validity:
Oliver.
It's rare to find so much misinformation at Slashdot, and that's saying something.
Humans and chimpanzee DNA are very similar, there are apparently about 40 million differences (out of about 3 billion positions) between chimp and human DNA; in protein coding regions, the number of differences is much smaller.
Humans and mice, on the other hand are far more evolutionarily distant (80 million years since the last common ancestor, compared with 5 million, or less for chimps). In protein coding regions, mouse and human DNA sequences are about 80% identical, on average, but outside protein coding regions, the level of sequence similarity is no higher than would be expected by chance. (This large difference was one of the reasons the mouse genome was sequenced after the human genome - sequences that were more similar than chance were expected to have a function.)
While plants and animals (and bacteria) share a large number of proteins that do similar things, their DNA sequences do not share any significant similarity except in protein coding regions for very highly conserved proteins.
What all of this has to do with unpublished Russian studies on genetically modified plants, I cannot imagine.