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Activists Destroy Scientific GMO Experiment
Freggy writes "In Belgium, a group of activists calling themselves the Field Liberation Movement has destroyed a field which was being used for a scientific experiment with genetically modified potatoes. In spite of the presence of 60 police officers protecting the field, activists succeeded pulling out the plants and sprayed insecticides over them, ruining the experiment. The goal of the experiment was to test potato plants which are genetically modified to be resistant to potato blight. It's a sad day for the freedom of scientific research."
That sounds like terrorism to me. "Stop making GM plants, or we'll fuck your shit up."
Don't treat it as a religion, especially when dealing with stuff that can contaminate things unrelated to your "scientific experiment". Or with "safely modified, strengthened, disease resistant food".
I don't want your GMO "food" to mix with my food. I don't want my food to even have a chance to be contaminated with your food, even if you think it isn't dangerous.
You're free to do things as long as you don't infringe on my freedom. And at this time in my life, I want freedom to eat non-GMO food.
They sprayed herbicide, not insecticide.
Open-field testing of GM plants is an inconceivably bad idea. Fifty cops can't stop cross-pollination with unmodified crops.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
A sympathetic farmer was quoted as saying, “They [the GM lobby] talk a lot about farmers, but we are never heard. This type of action strengthens us and seems like the only way forward for consumers and small producers who are independent of powerful interest groups like big agribusiness. “
Which amounts to small indie software studios saying: "The developers of that new hot 3D engine keep saying that they are doing it for the developers, but they never come around to my studio asking if I even want competition from better looking 3D accelerated games, or if I want to buy their engine. which I don't!. So we are going to raid there server-farm in a peaceful way, delete all their code an replace it with more developer friendly opensource code."
Farmers are a dying breed, and thank god for that, they all seem to be ignorant idiots who believe that it's the duty of politicians and pretty much the whole rest of society to make it profitable for them to make a living by inefficiently harvesting each of their individual little plots of lands. We are already throwing money at them like crazy to keep them happy, now they also want to stop all progress because some farmers are scaling up, and taking new measures to allow bigger better farms with lower overheads. So the small farmers collect to tear appart their fields.... Nice. I'm looking forward to the day when the lone farmer is just a bad memory.
You can QQ about the moral implications of scientific progress all you like, but you won't be stopping it. Don't like stem cell research because it is an affront to God? Don't like genetics research because it isn't natural? Tough tiddly winks. It takes one researcher spending time on a subject, doing it right, and publishing their results. There is no stopping science.
If you are so terrified of a universe humans understand, shed the hypocrisy. Shut off your computer and all your lights. Refuse antibiotics next time you have a major infection. Reject models like the heliocentric solar system, gravity, electromagnetism, and all the rest.
Having a powerful model for genetics has the potential to outshine all the theories mentioned above in practical use for human life. It will doubtless be necessary if ever we get off our asses and go to the stars.
No :-)
In my defence, painting protests as terrorism is all too common nowadays:
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Gene splicing is not the same thing as evolution.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
These GMO 'experiments' are like kidnapping the whole world because they are ransoming our future food supply for short term profits. They are worse than nuclear explosions because the effect of nuclear explosions are localized, say the massive radiation of the Bikini Atoll, because the effects are much more widespread and may not get better in relatively short periods of time unlike nuclear explosions. We have no idea what the new genes in plants will do, but we do know that they genes will be spead because that's the whole purpose of nature, to spread mutations. Bad mutations will be breed out over time, but it could cause ecosystem to collapse.
In a larger context GMO exists to reinforce the non-sustainable agricultural methods developed over the past century. One of these is artificial fertilizer and insecticides. The negative effects of this is real. In the recent debate of blowing the levees so the missispii could flood farm land instead of cities, one argument against it is that the rivier is so full of these chemicals that the farm land would be destroyed. We live in a world where we can't even use annual flooding the reinvigorate our land.
Everyone says GMO is all about increasing food security, but it is really about increasing short term profits. In the Americas and Europe we grow way more food than we need. The issues in Africa is about using unsustainable framing practices and int he process creating desert. In the US where we have way more food than we need, we process it into empty calorie snacks na brainwash out kids into buying it as food. Just look at what happened when FLOTUS said it might be nice for kids to have healthy food. All the lobby dollars of the junk food industry came out and said that if parents though that chips and soft drinks were what parents wanted to feed the kids then they should have that choice. Which I don't disagree with, just let's be honest about what we are doing and why we are doing it.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
No it doesn't. This issue is very simple here.
Physically attacking a scientific experiment in the guise of a protest against commercialization of a technology that you may have political issues with is nothing than a form of terrorism and should be treated extremely harshly.
I do not think many slashdotters would understand, that world over, resistance to bio engineered and gene modified plants is mostly due to business reasons.
Or the "Monsato" model.
Most GM food is owned by corporations.
They sell you seed, and you grow the plants.
Then you need to buy seed again the next year.... and so on.
So as local less hardy varieties vanish, the corporation can set its own prices.
Traditionally, farmers buy seed just once, and then keep reusing in normal circumstances.
GM model is trying to alter whats being done for many millenia.
Its more difficult than making old world studios embrace the internet.
So around all this, you have a whole slew of conspiracy theorists and wack jobs who basically add fuel to the fire.
So here is the opposition.
In countries where farmers are a powerful vote bank(eg India), govt mostly does the GM corp kicking here and there.
In the west, I guess, its the activists.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Bad day for scientific research? No. It's set back of limited duration.
Is GM food "bad"? Dunno, jury's still out on that and it really depends which camp you want to listen to.
Is the licensing and patenting of GM crops bad? Oh hell yes. The goal of "crop lock-in" is real, demonstrated and rather scary IMO.
Would this be a good time to discuss licensing or policies to halt this type of corporate behavior? Definitely. In fact it's so long overdue we may have passed the tipping point five years ago.
For your consideration:
Haitian rice
Monsanto Lawsuit / canola
Monsanto Lawsuit / soybeans
Patented disease
University gene patents
I think that this imbroglio underscores the need to limit or do away with gene patents, as there is little chance that the men in white coats (or the ones in black suits that pay them) will stop their tinkering, and I'm not sure that it needs to stop.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Other than, "it's new and people don't fully understand it" ? Or, ?
If people had that same mindset/fear of the unknown that they did when penicillin and vaccines came out, I think we'd be seriously fucked as a human race.
I seem to remember the potato blight being a terrible thing that killed millions of people in the Irish/Scottish/European famines. And I personally know a family in Newfoundland who were farmers - several years back their potato crop contracted late blight, antifungals didn't help, they lost the crop and ended up bankrupt at the end of it. A blight resistant strain of potatoes seems like a pretty fantastic idea to me.
Besides, the more food that we grow that doesn't need antifungals, pesticides and other "of course they're toxic, they wouldn't work otherwise" chemicals sprayed on it for it to grow, the better. I'd eat a GM vegetable any day over that.
(Mind you, I'm personally against engineering salmon to be 10 times bigger and growing them in offshore fish farms. Grow that shit in an inland fish farm where it's guaranteed that they won't take over and fuck up an ecosystem.)
after seeing what the genetically modified crap monsanto propagates around (curiously after a while the crap propagates itself without help from anyone), this is a win for my stomach.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/01/13/0328221/Organ-Damage-In-Rats-From-Monsanto-GMO-Corn?art_pos=1
https://www.facebook.com/notes/wood-prairie-farm/the-complete-text-of-dr-don-m-hubers-letter-to-usda-secretary-vilsak/197340006962367
http://vimeo.com/22997532
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The absence of control over the cross fertilization from GM plants is a legitimate issue that is thus far not adequately addressed.
People breeding pure strains that are inadvertently contaminated from adjacent GM plants may see their business destroyed with no recourse. This has happened in the case of some orange growers. It also is a concern for those seeking to market GM free vegetables that command market premiums.
Thus far, the proponents of GM plants have essentially had a free ride on this issue and no consequential damages have been paid. This is unjust, as it puts the burden of adjustment on the injured party, rather than on the originator of the damage. When the law acts thus unjustly, people will respond similarly.
I would not be happy either if someone moved a contamination source into my neighborhood and told me that adjusting to it was my problem.