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Terminator Gene Ban Suggested in Canada
innocent_white_lamb writes "A member of the Canadian Parliament has proposed legislation to outlaw the development and deployment of 'terminator genes' that would prevent seeds from germinating after a set span of time. This practice would require farmers to re-purchase seed every year instead of saving the seeds from last year's crop. The legislation is not expected to pass due to opposition from the Agriculture Minister. 'There is also an issue with the technology, which is based on a complicated five-gene construct. It is "inevitable" it will fail and could harm biodiversity, said Lucy Sharratt, co-ordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, which backs the ban. CFIA argues exactly the opposite, saying "the terminator approach provides an excellent method to protect against transference of novel traits to other crops and plant species."'"
Hmmm. Genetically modifying plant DNA so that they stop producing seeds after a generation. Why does that sound like a really really bad idea.
The industry of growing crops has been around for thousands of years... of course farmers shouldn't have to re-buy seeds. Using last year's seeds/etc is how the small farmer can even bear to get a living against a corporate farm.
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It seems like with the insanity the US government promotes with corporations gone wild and the destruction of human rights, it will be up to the rest of the world to preserve civilization. Maybe once the whole house of cards collapses the rest of the world can then help us fund our rebuilding, a reverse Marshall Plan.
And I avoided making any reference to man-eating venus flytraps looking for Sarah Connor! Yay--er, crap.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Jurassic Park anyone?
The terminator gene prevents germination, but not pollination. So it can still trade genes with other plants, then those plants are unable to germinate.
Because the plants are also engineered to be resistant to chemical herbicides, so they (1) end up being grown instead of multiple, other species of the same plant, and (2) encourage a lot more herbicide use, which kills off other species of plants by `accident'.
I agree.
Imagine a world disaster happens and Monsanto goes under, and all of humanity needs to rely on the existing crop seeds for nutrition... if everyone is using a crop with the terminator gene, then we would be doomed.
These corporate folks are putting greed ahead of public responsibility.
Food shouldn't be intellectual property. Period.
- or -
Patent everything and enslave us all.
Choose your own future.
It might cross breed with normal seed and terminate it. What you would be left with is nothing but what the friendly multinational has to offer each year. That might not be good for you.
The whole "rape seed" Monsanto insanity is a good primer on these matters. An normal farmer in Canada was forced to destroy his crops because they were contaminated by neighbors using Monsanto seed. The US has pushed these practices onto the Iraqi puppet government, so you can see where they would really like things to go.
There are fundamental problems with seed patents that need to be corrected. The contamination issue is one that makes the whole idea look foolish and economically harmful.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That makes me wonder where humans went wrong.
Seriously, passing a law that requires farmers to re-purchase natural seeds every year??? When did people get so obsessed with money that they stopped caring about the people that they live with on this planet?
This kind of shit is what sends me into a spiral of depression.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
There are some things that should never be left up to the free market and this is one of them. It should not be acceptable to use genetic manipulation to hinder farming practices. It's fine to use it to promote farming practices (such as to increase yield, drought resistance, etc), but it should be absolutely illegal to sell genetic material designed to prevent people from farming. Yes I realize this lowers the incentive to "innovate", but as we have seen in the health care industry, higher profit though selling new products from research and development does not automatically mean better outcomes. In fact, far more people die each year thanks to lack of access to health care than are saved by the billions of dollars put into research and development.It would be a horrible shame if the same kind of philosophy made its way into agriculture, a field of endeavor fundamental to our very existence as a species.
People starve when you do. The free market is concerned with short term profit (the 10 to 30 years it takes to get filthy, stinkin' rich), not with the long term viability of our food supply. This doesn't mean socialism, but it sure has hell means regulation.
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It should not be banned only, it should be declared as crime against humanity.
Imagine a sudden, global catastrophe that would shut down global transportation, resources or access to harvest and distribute the "designer" seed...
Corporations want to send people for downloading music or copying a movie, but they are free to put in danger the food supply, that can potentially affect the survival of millions, so that the shareholders of one or a few companies can make more money?
I challenge any politician to explain the voters how is it more harmful to society to copy illegally a cultural product than putting in danger the food supply.
That's their job.
It's the government's job to watch out for the public and slap down such reckless and exploitative practices.
Don't blame Monsanto, blame the legislators and bureaucrats who have so shamelessly violated the public trust.
Honestly, an Agriculture Minister standing up for t-genes... it's so transparently corrupt you'd swear it was American politics.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I'll caveat my response with "I have no love for genetic engineering as it's being pursued today". I truly believe that genetically modifying foods is a bad idea and we shouldn't stop at terminator genes. Taking one gene from one organism to get a trait in another has HUGE consequences; my favorite being splicing fish DNA into tomatos to make them frost resistant, yum fishmato. How can they actually sell us this food when we don't fully understand the end result? Really, is it nutritionally the same? I never understood why we take our food so lightly but we regulate drugs so heavily.
Further, the whole Monsanto thing unfortunately gave Canola a bad name. Too many folks attribute Canola to being some kind of Frankenfood when it's a cultivar - it was bred not spliced or at least it wasn't spliced originally before Monsanto thought to improve on it. A friend of our family is an organic farmer and some of the things that he and other farmers are trying to do were really amazing to us and the techniques didn't require labs or millions to accomplish, just patience and breeding. Anyways, I don't think we need to be producing genetically modified foods and at a minimum our food should be clearly labelled if it is a GMO.
Oops, how did this get here?
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Genetically modified plants should not be able to pass their genes on PERIOD! This is very dangerous. We shouldn't ban the terminator gene. But whole polination and germination thing comes into play. (See story about Monsanto).
What we should be doing is forcing these large companies to use the terminator gene AND another gene which stops pollination as well. That way farmers can still use their seeds, but genetically modified ones will never reproduce.
If there is a more advanced alien race out there, I'm sure their moto is "Don't Fuck With Mother Nature".
all plants that pollinate with these plants run the risk of dying off because they cannot reproduce. Who thought of this? There is a serious flaw here.
encourage a lot more herbicide use, which kills off other species of plants by `accident'
This also breeds more resistant weeds, so eventually everyone is forced to use pesticide resistant seed ... owned by a single company!
There is also disturbing evidence of the resistance genes being passed directly into weeds from the crop. The mechanism is not understood.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If there is pollination on some plants then those plants are unable to germinate on the other generation so... they won't propagate anymore.
Actually you are both wrong. He did win in that he did not have to pay Monsanto fees for having their crop in his fields. (they wanted him to pay $15/acre for having their product in his fields even though he had no contract.) But he only won because he did not benefit from the modified stock. he did not take advantage of the Monsanto spraying regimen and he did not make more than before he had the contaminated plot. That really limits the "victory".
Monsanto's canola seed completely is immune to Roundup so a farmer can spray the herbicide over a planted field to kill all the plants growing there, but not the crop -- as long as it comes from Monsanto's seed. Schmeiser's fields were almost 80% Monsanto seeds (according to Monsanto funded studies, Schmeiser showed his own evidence that the fields ranged from 0 to 68% Roundup Ready)
Also the court judged that Monsanto owned the plants and DNA of their crop that had seeded in Schmeiser's field and thus Schmeiser can not use seed from his own field or he would be infringing on the Monsanto Intellectual property. That basically destroyed 40 years worth of Schmeiser's intellectual property and requires that he buys all new seed for his field which may be contaminated again in a couple years.
That is why Schmeiser was quoted saying "In my case, I never had anything to do with Monsanto, outside of buying chemicals. I never signed a contract. If I would go to St. Louis and contaminate their plots--destroy what they have worked on for 40 years--I think I would be put in jail and the key thrown away,"
The gene is found in hybrid crops that have a pretty poor yield anyway in a second generation plant. In practice, few industrialized farmers can afford to not buy new seed each year. Sacrificing a portion of their crop for seed that will generate an inferior hybrid-hybrid cross will cost more than just buying the new seed. The people for whom this is a problem are organic farmers (who use much different lines and who do recycle seed). But they don't buy this kind of seed, so they are only worried about cross-polination.
I had worked for Monsanto a long ways back, and so this product was something they were developing at the time. Cross-pollination was a serious concern for them. IIRC, their solution was an insertion of 3 cis genes that all had to be present in order to work: a repressor, a recombinase, and an embryonic toxin. To active the system, the seeds must be treated with and inducer that inhibits the binding of the repressor to recombinase so that the recombinase is produced. In the absense of the chemical inducer, the terminator system doesn't work and the seeds are normal (which is how the producer makes more seeds, by not chemically treating them). If the repressor is blocked, the recmobinase excises a promoter blocker and leaves a late-promoter for the embryonic toxin which causes the embryo (seed) to arrest once it's reached maturity.
It's a pretty fragile system and if there was cross-pollination, the cassette would either transfer intact but uninduced or be destroyed through recombination or genetic silencing (the terminator genes themselves separately occur naturally in maize).
So, the danger of the technology is somewhat misstated. It's not as simple as pollen being carried to another crop -- that alone is insufficient to cause harm. The question is whether or not the traits will be transferred and then subsequently mutated through generations of natural genetic variation to develop a new system that doesn't require an exogenous inducer to activate. And, that such a system will be virulent (since sterile strains of plants occur with a certain frequency already in nature and have no ill effect on the environment -- seedless oranges, for example). No known mechanism for that exists, nor has such a thing been observed. I'm thinking that millions of these plants have been planted so far and there might be some documented evidence of this occurring (it would be fascinating if it did), but in the absence, one can only conclude it would be rare event, and it's also self-limiting (one generation only), soe the risk (probability of event x cost of event) would have to be very low.
There's risk in any agricultural operation. Out in CA there was an organic vendor of celery that had developed a crop that was so toxic, it caused welts on the exposed skin of the pickers (luckily the reaction was quick, if people had eaten it, it would have been deadly) -- and that's through organic crosses.
This is nothing new.. and yes it's bad.. I've been mad about it for years.
It's hard to believe people are 'worried' this 'might' come to the US or other countries.
it's been going on for ages.
you buy seeds at a large store.. like walmart, lowes, southern states.. etc etc..
that seed is hybrid.. and sterile.. it will make a plant.. but that plant will not be able to reproduce from the seed that it's fruit bears. and yes it's bad for you.
it's all about recurring revenue of course.. nothing else.
some stand up and say.. 'but the seeds are made to resist rot, or mildew, or insects etc etc..
no they are not.. the chemical coating that is on them does that.. (the red and blue and green stuff)
the seed is simply made to be a hearty plant that can't reproduce.. they put it on steroids per se'
and we've been allowing this to go on for decades.. people have squeeked a little about it. but not enough..
this is about the only kind of seed that is available on the market.. it's very very difficult to find heirloom seeds..
this needs to be stopped.. has needed to be stopped for many years..
but people just don't seem to care.. they go to the store and buy their food.. in boxes, cans and bags.. as long as it tastes good they don't complain..
there are too few farmers to make a difference.. and the general store-shelf consumer is oblivious to what is going on in the seed world.. and many don't care.. or just don't know..
and when they do find out.. just say 'thats awefull' and turn the page.. to move on to hear about the next article of consideration.. without ever doing anything about it.
what is going to happen if a war breaks out and the hybrid seed plants get squashed in some way or other.. by either infection or destruction. mass starvation..
because the only source for the seeds is gone..
think about that or wind up your own scenarios..
but this has to stop.. and it takes MANY VOICES to make it so.
do it.
> These corporate folks are putting greed ahead of public responsibility.
That's their job.
Bullshit bullshit bullshit.
Sorry for swearing, but i see this so much here. It's not their job to rape and pillage the world for profit. Being a corporation does not give you a free pass to put money ahead of morals. That is not their job. Their job is to offer a product to a market.
It's the government's job to watch out for the public and slap down such reckless and exploitative practices.
Don't blame Monsanto, blame the legislators and bureaucrats who have so shamelessly violated the public trust.
No, blame Monsanto. Blame the government too. They are both doing the wrong thing.
While I agree that the government should watch out for such abuses, this does not, by extension absolve corporations like Monsanto from responsibility for such an apparantly reckless action.
For example, if I make a decision to drive home drunk one night, that's a bad decision regardless of whether or not someone is there to enforce the law (i.e. I get caught), or even if there was an accident as a result.
no...it is not the corporate world's job to put greed above corporate responsibility
A goal is a dream with a deadline
The ultimate goal is to dominate and rule the whole world of seeds. While this may sound like a conspiracy theory, it is the only explanation that makes sense without thinking the Monsanto management has their head stuck up their arse.
The new Canadian law is exactly this - a lobby effort targeting at domination, against our environment.
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The creation and endorsement of terminator seeds is a crime against humanity. I cannot believe money and time were spent to develop this. These should be made illegal everywhere on this planet. We already have enough problems with dictators starving their populations for their political ends. Let's not give them anymore tools to do so.
If there is pollination on some plants then those plants are unable to germinate on the other generation so... they won't propagate anymore.
Right. In other words, it effectively kills any plant strains it cross pollinates with. If terminator crops continue to be planted, then they will pollinate and kill more crops, until eventually there are no non-terminator crops left.
Obviously as the terminators cannot reproduce on their own, this is only a problem if farmers continue buying terminator seeds from Monsanto and plant them.
Which is why they should stop immediately.
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Unless, as has been pointed out elsewhere, your neighbor uses the modified seed. Then, due to natural processes, your crop gets cross contaminated. Then you're fsck'd.
When wind and bees take away your choice to use or not use a crop, and you end up losing a court judgement saying you're illegally using someone's patented crop, then the whole system is messed up. If it kills off all of the natural stuff by getting the t-gene into other crops, then we're left with no biodiversity since it'll all be owned by the chemical companies.
If someone wants to have plants like this, then they should be required to have their entire field hermetically sealed so that it doesn't have a chance to cross-pollinate with others who don't want it. Otherwise, everyone else in the vicinity loses their right to choose.
Similarly, a few years ago the US wanted to send food aid to Africa. It was GM corn. The normal practice would be to keep some seed for next years crop. Then, they would be planting GM crops, and their export markets to the EU would have dried up due to bans -- leaving the poor starving people with noplace to sell their corn. The request to mill the corn to prevent the problem was not readily accepted by the Americans who couldn't understand why people wouldn't want GM corn, leaving food aid to moulder -- all because they couldn't risk importing GM seeds for fear of losing next year's export market.
This stuff tends to affect loads more people than just the first farmer to do it. It's not like the people designing this stuff have figured out how to restrict it to only the approved plots of land -- it's pretty indiscriminate once it's out in the wild.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Option A: I buy the traditional option, I lose X% to various natural hardships, I replant the seed I keep back next year.
Option B: I buy the new version, I lose a smaller Y% to various natural hardships, I have to buy the seed again next year.
If my profit increases due to decreased loss by more than the cost of annual purchases, I buy the annual purchase option. If my profit increases less than the cost of annual purchases, I keep doing it the old way.
This is the reasoning that arises if your fundamental assumption is that cost == money. This is the assumption many -- especially business -- make, and it makes sense for them because first you can count money, and second anything that you can avoid paying for ceases to be a cost. For example, pollution is a common "cost" that a business doesn't have to see because unless they get fined it never turns into a dollar amount.
It's the same thing with engineers, who say "who cares about the license, use the best tool for the job". So they pick some piece of software with a per-seat license model because it has some nice feature or whatever in preference to some free software tool... Then the license server goes down, the software won't run, and where's the 'best tool for the job' now? The license -- what you are allowed to do with the product -- necessarily impacts which tool is "best".
Same here. You can't just look at the price of buying seeds from Monsanto compared to the benefit of increased yields. You also have to consider what happens down the road, when over-use of Monsanto seeds has made the natural option even less viable (e.g. increasingly resistant weeds), and then you don't -have- Option A. What will happen to the prices of Monsanto seeds then? What happens when the majority of farmers are using one of only a couple strains of crop and a disease wipes them all out? These are the costs -- that cannot be marked in red or black ink on a quarterly balance sheet -- that are truly important.
Still, in terms of the "poor farmers" - unless there's some kind of monopoly I'm missing, why can't they just not buy the product if they don't like the terms?
Economic incentive, mostly. Most farmers that aren't huge corporations are struggling already, and the short-term gains are very attractive -- especially when one is concerned with survival in the short term. Right now they may have the choice to not buy the product if they don't like the terms, but the more farmers that buy in the less viable that choice becomes.
I'll note that many African countries have flat out rejected US offers of agricultural aid, because it came in the form of Monsanto-engineered crops complete with all the legal restrictions. They are able to see the cost, even if accountants can't.
The enemies of Democracy are
It's like DRM, except for living things.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
In the first year, the financial losses would be covered by a crop insurance company, which would then turn around and sue Monsanto into the stone ages. Think "big agriculture" is scary? See what a scorned insurance company can do. Those guys make IBM law division look like preschool teachers.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Although plants who take on the gene will not produce offspring they can infect other plants through pollination. So if you're a farmer using unaltered seed and your neighbor is using the t-gene strain the chances are likely that some of his pollen will make some of your next year's crop seed worthless. You'll have a smaller crop because some of your last year plants produced seeds infected with the t-gene and those seeds won't germinate. More farmer's will be forced to buy seed and if they choose the t-gene type the problem grows. Personally I think farmers need a class action suit for damages. If their product infects my product in a negitve way why would I not be able to recover my losses?
It's a living organism not a bunch of lego's. Molecular biology is still very young and our knowledge of the interactions at that level is still limited. Sure one strand of DNA is a piece but the consequence that piece can have is profound and has considerable risk when introduced in the food chain. We need to fully understand those consequences and risks be for we look at the commercial application and that day and understanding is years away, so best to ban GMO's until we do.
Oops, how did this get here?
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Great post, which adds to the discussion. However, you miss one key point: why make the seeds terminate? You say that the yield from second generation seeds is poor enough that most farmers buy new seed. That's fair enough, but it doesn't address the central question: why have them terminate at all? Is there any benefit to the farmer in this? They can choose to buy new seed next year if they want to. Monsanto seem to be forcing it upon them.
Friendly companies "do things" we find useful and make a profit when we buy many. Evil companies decide what they 'can do' based on possible profit, and to hell with usefulness.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
...glad you saw it or I would have chimed in. The reason for terminator gene seeds is to establish food monopolies/cartels eventually, seeds are the first step and they really want to get this going in the developing world, lock in millions or billions *forever*. They are well on the way there already, this is obvious, along with trying to patent every possible conceivable living thing (and people think software patents are a bad idea), along with the ongoing scam and ripoff of privatization of drinking water supplies for the masses. Control the food and water and that's a *lot* of economic and political power. Add in control of energy, and you got most of the bases covered and can dictate directly or sub rosa from a few steps away from the public facing political puppets how you want society to act.
Remember, this is the same company that tried to corner old traditional Indian wheat with a "patent", never mind THOUSANDS of years of "prior art", and almost got away with it-this is how they think and act, these are their "corporate values". They are the MS, Enron and Haliburton of "food". If they are "for" something, you can bet the farm it isn't good for you, and only goes to insure vendor lockin and maximum profits. I farm and won't give them turkeys a single penny for anything.
Now, I think there's a place for some extremely regulated genetic engineering and I think it can be of some good benefit long term-but not that company, not what they do and with their track record, nope, as far as I am concerned they are just *creepy* weird. I mean bad news weird. Can't put it any better than that.
I wonder. I suspect that most companies start out "friendly", (I do believe that people are basically good), but become more "evil" as they begin to make larger profits. I think we're witnessing this in Google right now. The pressure is there (especially since they went public) to make as much money as possible, in any way possible.
There is no morality in a big/successful company. I think it's because of the whole "groupthink" mentality that's built-in to the human psyche - even though any given member of the board of directors may know that what the company is doing is against ordinary individual morals, it's the group that's doing it, and so it isn't their individual fault. This links back to the famous Stanley Milgram experiment, where people are shown to be willing to do horrific things, provided somebody lifts the burden of responsibility. Furthermore, a vote against something that will make profit (morality aside) may be perceived as a sign of weakness, possibly jeopardising the individual's career. For these reasons, the ethics which you and I live by simply do not apply to corporations, no matter how well-intentioned their founders were.
This may not sit comfortably with many on Slashdot who love to hate the "bad guys", (Microsoft, Sony), whilst pouring adoration on the "good guys" (Google, Apple), but I'm afraid it's the truth. In the world of business there is no good and bad - just money and the best way of acquiring it.
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It seems entirely sensible to me to insert fail-safe control mechanisms into genetically engineered products: we want a way to limit the damage they can cause in the event that something bad happens. We do NOT want the uncontrolled spread of something that turns out to have been an environmental disaster. For for trains, the equivalent is the dead-man's-switch.
If this means that farmers can't grow plants from seeds then I for one am happy with this. And actually, I'd like multiple off switches so that we can be as certain as we can that we will be able to contain the inevitable failures.
Farmers do not have to use the genetic engineered varietals, they do so in the belief that they'll be getting a better return on investment than with a normal plant.
I say all this as a GM believer. I don't see any way through to feeding the world, except through the use of GM, so I'm pro GM.
Sidenote: Ooh, I feel a software patent coming on! I started with an analogy to using Break/Ctrl+Alt+Delete/Ctrl+C to stop run-away programs, but these take a positive action to stop the program, whereas failsafe mechanisms require an action to continue. In multithreaded or multiprocess software designed for multi-core processors, if some program goes awry, you want the parts of the program to stop: they should be designed so that without positive input from the controlling process they cease funtioning. For instance one embodiment of the present invention is a computing device programmed such that if the child computation of a parent computation fails to receive a heartbeat signal from the parent computation, or any computation acting in its stead, then said computation should end. Remember you read it here first, and prepare yourself to pay me billionz!!! Oops, forgot to file it, and now it's in the public domain.
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The point should be that genetic modification of our food isn't worth the risk. It isn't enough to try to prove that they are safe. It needs to be shown why we can't go on without them. They can't do that because we've got along just fine for what a hundred thousand years or so now without them.
Get rid of this crap, and get rid of aspartame. That would be a good start.