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Genetically Modified Maize Is Toxic — Greenpeace
gandracu writes "It appears that a variety of genetically modified maize produced by Monsanto is toxic for the liver and kidneys. What's worse, Monsanto knew about it and tried to conceal the facts in its own publications. Greenpeace fought in court to obtain the data and had it analyzed by a team of experts. MON863, the variety of GM maze in question, has been authorized for markets in the US, EU, Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Mexico, and the Philippines. Here are Greenpeace's brief on the study and their account of how the story was unearthed (both PDFs)."
Summary?
Monsanto says "cases of liver and kedney damage not statistically significant."
greenpeace says "liver and kidney damage cases are statistically significant." Rats not fat.
No data is given.
Maybe judgement should be reserved until someone has seen this data. I believe both sides here would have no problem with manipulating data for thier own interests.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Nobody eats corn as it was created by nature: All the variaties of corn in use today are the result of a centuries-long selective-breeding program.
Genetic engenerring just speeds up the process a lot. Not that we shouldn't be careful: There are dangers in modifying foods, and the amount of change has a direct bearing on the amount of danger.
Just don't claim that 'non-GM' corn is 'as nature intended'. It just took humans longer to modify it.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
However, it is also apparent that no experiments have been carried out to investigate this product's effect on human subjects. The toxicity symptoms found in rats should have been a springboard for further investigation, but it seems it was not (unless this has been covered up).
Unfortunately these days corporate dishonesty is not seen as unusual or unacceptable in any way, so what we need is smoking gun evidence of toxicity in human beings, exceeding such toxicity as may be found naturally in other foodstuffs.
The sad part is that "genetic modification" is going to take the majority of the blame, not the individuals at Monsanto that actually caused the problem.
I wouldn't call whaling "technological progress". Also, I haven't seen Greenpeace protest against technological progress in the field of, say, solar power.
This may or may not be true (I'm skeptical when it's just one single study that had some ambiguous questions), but Greenpeace is not the one that ought to report it. Yes, the messenger does matter. If this is really true, give it to a mainstream organization and let them figure it out.
Of course, we know Greenpeace won't do that, since they're all about the publicity.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Aspartame has some of the "smoking gun" evidence you mention, yet it is still on the market. The number of people actually poisoned by Aspartame are very low, and treated as "statistically insignificant", so the product continues to be used.
Even if the GMO corn is used by humans and someone is killed by it (not just poisoned), there would just be a number of studies and some finger pointing to show that it was actually something else that may have been responsible for the poisoning. As long as something else may be responsible, there is reasonable doubt and the GMO food would remain on the market.
You need a lot of "smoking guns" to get a product off the market after it's been established. It's much easier to keep such products off the market in the first place.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
And thus people grew accustomed to eating the variations over the centuries. When you modify something and it's vastly different than what the body can handle it can cause serious issues.
Corn and tomatoes are indigenous to the Americas. When the settlers from Europe or wherever arrived, they ate corn and tomatoes, that had been selectively grown for centuries. They were not accustomed to eating the variations over the centuries and yet they suffered no ill effects.
Have you ever eaten anything for the first time?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Genetic engenerring just speeds up the process a lot.
If that's the case, if it's nothing new, how can it be patented?
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Certainly it cannot be the modification process itself, since it uses natural enzymes.
Just because it's natural does not mean that its non-toxic. There are a lot of poisonous enzymes that occur naturally in the environment. For example, naturally occurring almonds have a poisonous enzyme. A quote from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almond):
I am a biogeneticist, and while I have not read the technical article (as it has not been published yet), I do have a few points. 1) According to TFA, this corn has been in use for a while. Remember the callifornia spinach ecoli thing? It took what, a couple dozen people getting sick for the authorities to track back to the source of the problem. Conspiricy theories aside, you will note that there have been no outbreaks of illness associated with this corn. On an acute level, it seems to be as safe as eating spinach (note that this is anecdotal rather than rigerous scientific work). 2) Most of the stuff that we eat can be shown to be toxic to the liver in rat studies under some conditions. I will be interested to see what their control groups are once the study is published. 3) Statistical significance is a useless word in these sort of situations. What we need to look at is the confidence interval, which is a hard number. Monsanto probably asserts that they aren't 95% certain that the effects were caused by corn toxicity, and Greenpeace probably asserts that they aren't 95% certain that the effects were not caused by corn toxicity. This dispute will eventually be resolved by the scientific community, which will promptly be ignored by the rest of the world at large. 4) "Natural" and "Nature" are nonsense words from a scientific perspective, used by people who would really like to use the word "God", but are too saphisticated or ashamed to actually use it. Nature is not an entity, does not intend, and encompasses humans and human creations as much as it encompasses beavers and beaver creations.
This is why, IMHO, these studies should be independent and any oversight at arms length. The FDA should ask the NIH to award the research to a qualified lab based on competence and independence, and the award should be funded through the NIH using the funds of the firm that needs the research. A second lab would in charge of reviewing the result. Though this would be add an unfortunate level of bureaucracy, it would also help improve the reputation of these firms, a reputation that has been tarnished over the past decade by an effort to put goods on the market that do not provide a net benefit, as defined by the FDA.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Ok. If I may gripe for a second: This is where the engineering mindset, which occupies probably around 99% of the /. community (IT guys, coders, physicists, engineers of all types), has trouble coming to grips with biological issues.
Assume for a second that Greenpeace is correct, and that rates of liver damage are statistically significant. That means that, all things being equal, eating this corn is harmful to the rats' livers. Case closed. Aside from figuring out what that reason is in order to fix it, there's no reason to go through all of that--it is a simple application of Occam's Razor.
It looks like you're going through troubleshooting steps..."It can't possibly be this...and it can't possibly be that either!" DO NOT make the mistake of discounting the study because you cannot come up with a root cause right away. First off, in biology it's typically a bad idea to conclude, a priori, that certain variables are not an issue: it's simply a more complex and less well-understood discipline than something as clean-cut as, say, orbital mechanics. Second, you have a much greater potential for interaction effects and emergent properties--stuff you can never predict, but which becomes blatantly obvious once you see it and characterize it...for example, ant colony behavior: if you get some huge number of ants together, the coordination and patterned behavior is fascinating, but it's not obvious from the random behavior of a single ant that such behavior would ever emerge. Once you see it, however, you can easily experiment and track it back to things like pheremones.
The mindset issue comes down to the difference between bottom-up and top-down analysis. Bottom-up analysis will tell you facts, but is poor for integrating those facts. That's what I think you're looking to do. At some point you have to look at the big picture--a view that doesn't tell you much aside from how the facts fit together, and where you should look next. Good analysts do both. Bad analysts either never research facts (this is in fact what you are accusing "religions" of doing) or they fall into the trap of extreme reductionism, wherein you discount observations if your radically simplistic understanding of the universe cannot explain them.
This last is what a friend of mine, who is an aero engineer, does all the time. He knows that physics informs chemistry informs biology informs psychology informs political science--but since he cannot explain election results in terms of the Newtonian motion of atoms, he dismisses any such study as bullshit, as well as the conclusions draw from that bullshit. But you don't have to explain things at the lowest level possible in order to draw meaningful conclusions, such as in this case: Better hold off on eating that Monsanto corn for the time being.
That doesn't seem too alarmist, nor am I trying to vilify genetic engineering. The fact that Monsanto apparently should have made that announcement and instead decided to gloss over it, and thereby profit from others' loss (what you accuse Greenpeace of doing), does tend to make them somewhat vile in my eyes, however.
I would go one step further and note that, when the West sells seed to starving African nations, it's "Terminator" seed.
:)
We don't give those nations a hand up, we put them on life support.
Just another example of how free enterprise and secular science benefit the poor by the innate goodness of their natures...
Ok, maybe that was a poor troll. But only for being obvious, not for being false
The real issue with genetic modification is the increases scope and speed of such changes. A person breeding corn might be able to breed to different strains to produce a new one and it could conceivable result in higher levels of some dangerous toxin corn naturally produces. But, given both strains of corn have existed for some time and have presumably been safe to eat, it is a lot less likely than if someone actually targets the genetic code that controls toxicity levels. GM opens up whole new avenues of change that selective breeding and random mutation are highly unlikely to ever touch and as such more caution is required.
Arguably there is no such thing as "natural corn" these days.When people go to the store and buy a corn, they have expectations. Those expectations include that the corn is from one of the many strains that have been being consumed for a long time, or a combination of those strains. They don't expect that corn to have significant changes to its genetic code, and unless it has been exposed to a significant mutagen they are right. I'd argue that passing of corn that has been genetically modified or heavily exposed to mutagens as "normal" corn is not in their best interests and is deceitful. There is a real difference in the risk posed between "natural" corn and GM corn, although to most people educated on the subject that delta is pretty small. By being honest, however, companies investing in such products are motivated both to produce benefits end users care about and to make sure the testing process is thorough so that GM foods earn/develop a reputation for safety.
Even worse, the Terminator genes are dominant. Which has a very devastating effect if introduced by a single farmer in places where farmers still use some of their harvest as seeds for the next year.
And even worse than that is when the seeds from a farm growing the monsanto crops gets carried (by wind/birds/whatever) over to a neighboring farmer's fields, who is NOT using Monsanto seeds to grow crops... The farmer is now violating the seed patent as his plants are partly from this other seed, and he cant get rid of them with the normal herbicide since they are resistant. Add to that, that if he is trying to re-use his seed for next year's crops, and happens to mix in some of the monsanto seeds, his whole seed crop is now violating the patent, and when Monsanto finds out, they will demand their fees for this "use" of their technology. Luckily with the terminator gene, the crops just wont grow. But then again, since pollen is spread in the wind as well, and carries the genetic info, and the pollen from the monsanto field blows across the other farmers, which then starts producing seeds with either the roundup resistance or terminator gene or both... well you see where Im going. Not that its happened or anything.
Tm
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And _you_ did your research then? From what I understand, the _whole_ mutation in this particular strain of corn is to make it produce a sort of a natural pesticide. I.e., yes, a toxin.
Now Monsanto basically says, "yeah, but it's not toxic to mammals." Greenpeace says, "whoa, actually that data says that it's somewhat toxic to rats."
Now both positions _could_ be true. It _is_ possible for something to be toxic to insects without being lethal to humans. (See coffeine. It really evolved as a paralyzing poison against insects. See why Robusta is a hardier crop than Arabica: the Robusta plant simply produces more of it. Yet a human can drink lots of it for decades without being too harmed in the process.) On the other hand, the opposite _can_ be true too. And without proper testing how would you know?
So, pray tell, without even seeing the research, how _do_ you know which side is right and which is wrong? Or are you just motivated enough to rant against Greenpeace even when you have no fucking clue what is it about? At least, even as motivated studies go, they did at least do and publish one. You did... what? to get your info on which to base such a swift judgment.
Hand-waving about mutations happening randomly in nature is at best brain-damaged too. Equally random mutations in plants include atropine (nightshade), ricin (deadly in 0.2mg doses and no antidote), solanine, cyanide (wild almonds), etc. And that's just the short list of the most known ones. We could go into a couple hundred other fun natural stuff, including such exotic effects as immuno-suppressors in some moulds. Just because something _could_ have occured naturally doesn't make it automatically safe. All the poisons in this paragraph occured naturally, yet _aren't_ safe at all.
Plus, it often is false as such anyway. Just because something was created via genetic engineering does _not_ automatically mean it could have occured as a natural mutation any day now. There's plenty of GM stuff, like renet-producing moulds or goats whose milk contains spider silk, which would _never_ evolve on their own, not even in another billion years. There's simply no natural advantage in producing those (wake me up when any plant needs to digest fresh milk, which is what it would take to make renet an advantage), and in fact it's a serious disadvantage to waste your energy and aminoacids on producing them.
So, you know, if you're going to go into a whole rant about who's ignorant or worse, it would be nice if you at least took the time to read a bit and have at least some minimal clue what you're talking about.
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