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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
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.
Cleared rainforest land doesn't stay productive for very long due to the very thin layer of fertile soil underneath the rainforest. If you want to keep production up, you need to keep clearing rainforest (until you run out), and essentially leave behind an unproductive desert.
Essentially, you can play this game for maybe a handful of decades, then you're back at the starting point, minus all of the rainforest you started with. I wouldn't call that sustainable, exactly.
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+
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.
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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):
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.
Hypothetical timeline of inconvenient fact dissemination:
+0 days: greenpeace reports it
+5 days: fox news denies it
+6 days: daily show lambasts fox for denial
+10 days: CNN reports that inconvenient fact may or may not probably be verifiable, "scientists say," but "detractors detract"
+35 days: Science includes an article detailing the overwhelming, peer reviewed obvious correctness of evidence supporting the inconvenient fact
+37 days: WSJ publishes cleverly rehashed but thouroughly debunked fox news talking points; states but does not state that inconvenient fact is a convenient scam promelgated by liberals, homosexuals and communists
+38 days: my boss makes fun of me for supporting communist conspiracies & continues drinking only pure grain alcohol
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*.