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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.
And we're surprised at this?
There are two sides to this:
(1) GM is bad, and this corn is a good example - see the potential damage
(2) GM is new, some food are bad for you, this is an example where some people are sensitive to...(blah blah blah)
GM peanuts would be pretty toxic to a small percentage of the population, and might even have a (small but barely significant) increase in reaction from those sensitive.
TFA is light on detail, and I'm not a biogeneticist. I think I'll pass on judgement here right now. I don't trust Monsanto to tell the truth, but I also don't trust GreenPeace to not have an agenda.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
It appears that a variety of genetically modified maze produced by Monsanto is toxic for the liver and kidneys
Keep calm, mazes are not that hard. There is no reason to get that stressed out. Just follow one of the walls at the entrance and you'll eventually get out.
Well good thing this didnt happen with a huge crop like corn. Why if that happened and it mixed with our natural corn we could be in a lot of trouble. Thank god no one eats maize anymore.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
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.
This just in: Virtually all food is toxic.
It has been discovered recently that virtually all food products known to mankind contain either fat-soluble vitamins or other compounds shown to build up and eventually damage the organs that process them when consumed to extreme excess. Even water-soluble vitamins and yet other compounds have been shown to dilute blood, deplete salts, and otherwise wear down the various organs they come in contact with in extreme amounts.
Moreover, it has been shown that virtually all physical objects are toxic in these same regards. Air in too high or low concentrations is extremely toxic. Even completely filtered air has been shown to be linked to negative effects on the immune system, and thus even the cleanest living ideals can be considered toxic!
Furthermore, even non-physical things can be considered toxic - most ideas taken to extreme have been shown to have negative physical consequences for the holders of these ideas. From peace extremists, to defense extremists, to health extremists, to even low-stress extremists, virtually all philosophies and ideas can be shown to be completely toxic in large doses.
Ryan Fenton
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?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
"NutraIngredients USA isn't exactly a reputable journal..."
n ger/00244/index.asp
RTFA. The peer reviewed journal noted is "Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology" published by Springer. http://www.environmental-expert.com/magazine/spri
Looks a proper journal to me.
"Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology is a repository of significant, full-length articles describing original experimental or theoretical research work pertaining to the scientific aspects of contaminants in the environment. It provides a place for the publication of detailed, definitive, complete, credible reports concerning advances and discoveries in the fields of air, water, and soil contamination and pollution, human health aspects, and in disciplines concerned with the introduction, presence, and effects of deleterious substances in the total environment. Acceptable manuscripts for the Archives are the ones that deal with some aspects of environmental contaminants, including those that lie in the domains of analytical chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, toxicology, agricultural, air, water, and soil chemistry.
All manuscripts are subject to review by workers in the field for significance, credibility and accuracy, as well as for proper arrangement (format, style, language, etc.) Review articles, abstracts, short communications or notes will not be accepted for publication. Where appropriate, these will be referred to Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, or Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. "
Changing the genetic code modifies the protiens that the corn produces. Changing genetic code can turn proteins into poison (not all proteins are digestible). Now, such a thing is unlikely- what is more probable is that the corn now produces more of a specific protein than it used to, and the higher dose of this new protein is toxic. Remember, anything is toxic at high enough dosages, even Water.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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):
If I remember correctly, Monsanto modified soybeans and corn to be "RoundUp Ready" as they called it. Basically they GE'd the plants so that they would not be affected by Monsanto's RoundUp pesticide, allowing farmers to spray their whole field with the pesticide and leave their crops untouched. So I would venture to say that in order to make these plants resistant, there is probably something being produced by them that is not entirely natural.
But even if this corn does NOT produce anything un-natural, you still have the issue of farmers being able to indiscriminately spray pesticides on their fields without affecting the corn. Undoubtedly this means that more RoundUp is getting on the corn, in the ground, etc., than would otherwise be possible, so I wouldn't doubt that some of the pesticide is moving up through the food chain to us. Either way, you have non-natural chemicals entering the human food supply, which could easily have adverse health effects.
While we're on it, I want to say that Monsanto is about as virulently evil as Greenpeace when it comes to protecting their interests. They have actually made patents on seeds, and have gone after farmers for "patent infringement" if they find evidence of seed on their fields with similar genetic code. Farmers have been jailed over this; Monsanto's kind of like the MPAA of grain. They are even pushing "Terminator" seeds, which are sterile, forcing farmers into purchasing seed from suppliers every year instead of keeping their seed for the next crop. Monsanto tried to cover up reports of the adverse health effects of BGH (bovine growth hormone), the list goes on and on. The wikipedia has decent, somewhat unbiased (IMO) coverage of the issue and I'm sure you can google up some more.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
Umm, most plants produce natural toxins they use for biological warfare against other plants and animals. Most genetic modification is an attempt to either increase a toxin to kill a pest (rootworm) or increase a resistance to a toxin to fight another plant or a artificially introduced toxin. In this case the corn was designed to create a toxin (Bt-toxin (Cry3Bb1)) and as a byproduct also is said to create (Cry1Ab).
So the most probable indication is that one of those two toxins has more of a negative affect upon rats and thus possibly other mammals like humans than was previously believed. Greenpeace responsibly refrained from making specific claims about the intermediate causation as that is still not yet determined. There is, however, a reasonable amount of evidence that this strain of GM corn could be dangerous to humans and animals and should be investigated and possibly pulled from the market or at least labeled until the topic is fully investigated.
It just seems to me that Greenpeace is following the formula of the religions - find something that is mysterious and unsettling to the average person, vilify it, then profit.Greenpeace is a bunch of marketing people for the most part. It is possible every tuesday night they gather beneath an abandoned monastery and eat human babies.That doesn't however, speak to the accuracy or implications of this research.
Genetic engineering is not a panacea, but nor is it a boogieman.Genetic engineering is a science where people mess about with code without understanding the full implications of what that will result in. It's like modifying software while only having read and understood a small portion of the code and not the other code dependent upon it. As such, I think that while it is promising, extra caution and care needs to be exercised and I don't think the FDA or the commercial enterprises involved give a damn about anything but money and are uninterested in taking appropriate precautions.
Genetically modified foods still contain the same amino acids in their proteins as all the other foods, so unless you modify their biochemistry to an extent where they'll produce real toxins, they will be digested just the same.Genetically modified foods almost all produce toxins. The question is did some change to the genetic structure cause it to create different ones or toxins in different levels and what does that mean for normal people? Another part of the problem is the food almost always appears to be the same as non-modified food and is often not labeled. Would you eat some random plant when you did not know if it was edible and no one had ever seen it before? Every GM food is one of those. Most are probably fine, just like most plants are. Some might be developing toxins that are harmful or concentrating something from their environment which is harmful. If we made it to other planets and found them with ecosystems very much like the earth, but separated by millions of years of evolution, would you trust that something that looks like corn has not adapted in such a way that it is poisonous? That's sort of what GM food is, a common food, modified not by evolution but by man in a way we don't fully understand the consequences of. Often the results are beneficial, but caution should be the byword and thorough testing and serious consideration of possible problems. The fact that this corn might be at the grocery store near you with no indication that it is not the natural corn most people expect it to be is a deception and needs to be considered.
One possible basis of toxicity is discussed in one of the PDFs that the article links to:
April 8, 2003: The German competent authorities publish their assessment of the MON863 application. In their report they state that the amino acid sequence of the Cry3B1 toxin produced by the MON863 maize has similarities to some other toxins. Most notably, the German authority found some "homologies to sequences from Clostridium bifermentans, Caenorhabditis elegans, Vibrio cholerae and Bacillus popilliae." These homologies are of high relevance in respect to human and animal health.
It seems warranted to at least be concerned about the unknown effects of introducing a protein which is classified as a toxin into one's diet. Particularly where the "science" backing it up is not analyzed independently, and cannot be reviewed, as the underlying data submitted to the regulatory agencies is held to be confidential.
Alternatively, you seem to suggest that data or experience suggesting the safe use of substances independently of each other somehow implies they are safely used together. It's fairly easy to come up with counterexamples in everyday life (ammonia and chlorine as cleaning supplies, for example), let alone in the more complex and unpredictable field of biochemistry.
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.
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.
You need to educate thyself. I am in ag (and you aren't so pay attention please), and I'll tell you right now Monsanto is NO friend of health, farmers or consumers. Not even close. There is *so* much evidence out there it is astounding. Spend an evening doing some research on their past history. Any place they can be complete jerks, as long as they can squeeze a buck out of it, they do it. And they are really trying to come up with some way to get a global monopoly on food, try their scam with the terminator gene for starters. Look into how they have screwed over farmers with their disgusting canola/rapeseed weed that is spreading all over and infecting other's fields, so they get to *own* those new fields then and sue farmers for "IP" theft.. Look into how they are trying to patent strains of crops that farmers have been using for thousands of years in India. And so on. They make Enron and Haliburton look like upstanding corporate citizens. They've been caught bribing off foreign ag bureaucrats n numerous foreign nations, they are getting away with running OPEN AIR hidden secret test fields where the pollen from their patented crap will escape and keep infecting other fields. And so on.
They need to have their incorporation charters pulled at a minimum, IMO. Just a bad news company all in all. Buying up outside seed companies then stopping production on various strains, to further eliminate competition. I mean, this list goes on and on and on. It is NOT a good idea to reduce biodiversity, that's REAL science. Trying to impose monopolies on food is just pure damn evil, stupid and retarded, no two ways about it. In fact, just from a strictly scientific viewpoint, it is *insane*.
Greenpeace is not driven by a fear of technology. Some new technologies are actively supported by Greenpeace, others are not. Greenpeace is motivated by conservation of our natural habitat, and that sometimes leads them to speak out against certain technologies they see as damaging. I tend to believe that if Greenpeace had existed when Tesla wanted to broadcast electricity instead of running it through a wired grid, they would have opposed that too. That's what they do.
This is a method I agree with wholeheartedly, and I think any sane and rational person with a modicum of intelligence would also agree with. They have a well publicized political position, and they assess technologies from that position and advocate or oppose accordingly.
Whether or not you agree with their political position, it's not wise to endorse or discount what they say on the basis of who they are and your prejudice about their support base; rather read their argument and make an assesment based on and limited to the case at hand.
In some cases I have disagreed with them, in particular their opposition to high temperature incineration of toxic waste, but as in this case I think it is best to keep an open mind, listen to their point of view and wait until I have read the studies and can make an informed decision. They have alerted me to a potential danger here and I need to find out more. I am thankful that someone with a vested interest is taking an opposing view to Monsanto, which also has a vested interest, because I feel it makes for a more balanced debate.
Knee jerk reactionaries have no useful place in public debate, except of course in tabloids, mainstream biased media and trolling on /.
;-P
I don't therefore I'm not.