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New Study Confirms Safety of GM Crops
New submitter ChromeAeonium writes "Much like vaccines and evolution, there exists a great disparity between the scientific consensus and the public perceptions of the safety of genetically engineered crops. A previous study from France, which was later dismissed by the EFSA, FSANZ, and the French High Council of Biotechnologies, claiming to have found abnormalities in the organs of animals fed GM diets by analyzing three previous studies was discussed on Slashdot. However, a new study, also out of France, claims the opposite is true, that GM crops are unlikely to pose health risks (translation of original in French). Looking at 24 long-term and multi-generational studies on insect resistant and herbicide tolerant plants, the study states, 'The studies reviewed present evidence to show that GM plants are nutritionally equivalent to their non-GM counterparts and can be safely used in food and feed.' Although it is impossible to prove a negative, and while every GM crop must be individually evaluated as genetic engineering is a process not a product, perhaps this study will help to ease the fears of genetically engineered food and foster a more scientific discussion on the role of agricultural biotechnology."
You cannot ease the fears of the crazy. If you could, they wouldn't be crazy.
But label the damn things so people can choose. Trying to sneak it under the radar - that's the true evil.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Personally I would never eat peas after Mendel had his hands on them.
<sarcasm/>
Your science does not confirm my preconceived notions! I will reject it out of hand and dismiss you as sheep. SHEEEEP!
That's a nice result and all, but it doesn't address the real concerns with GE crops:
1. patent wars on farmers
2. cross-contamination to non-GM crops / organic farms
3. against license agreements to save seed
4. crop monoculture
Like a previous poster mentioned, the study ''proving'' the safety of GM crops was financed, at least in part, by a consortium of large French companies with an interest (a large interest) in GM crops.
Make of that what you will, but it reminds me of these studies, sponsored by Microsoft, ''proving'' that Windows was more secure than Linux.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Why would anyone consider a crop "dangerous" simply because it may have had some gene spliced or DNA sequence slightly altered? After ingesting food doesn't the body break the food down anyway then build its own proteins as it sees fit?
The major problem with GM crops is their intellectual property implications, and another one is accidental cross-breeding with wild plants. If people are able and allowed to use the seeds of last year's GM crop to seed this year's crop, without paying a yearly fee to Monsanto or some such, and if there is a way to guarantee that the modified genes won't spill over into the wild plant gene pool (causing who knows what damage as wild plants become poisonous to bugs that feed off them), I wouldn't have a problem with GM - but what are the chances of either? Not very high.
http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articles/proveanegative.html
Health issues are not the damn point of this subject. Who really cares what your next carbohidrates source will be? The issues are about poluting the organic crops and then making people pay a seed license. Patents and ownership are yet again the real issues here
It is with the fact that companies like Monsanto now *own* the genetic code to the crop and can destroy anyone they think is "using" it without paying them a fee.
That is the real danger and threat to society. Add in the few strains of the crop being produced now and it becomes an even bigger threat to being totally wiped out with a single disease.
Monsanto and their unholy alliance with the US Government is the danger, people.
perhaps this study will help to ease the fears of genetically engineered food and foster a more scientific discussion on the role of agricultural biotechnology
Yeah, because people who reject vaccines and evolution despite overwhelming scientific evidence are going to suddenly embrace reason concerning genetically modified crops. If anything, this study will somehow reinforce their views. Already, I see others on /. -- people who really should know better -- cooking up conspiracy theories.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
I'm sure its sponsored by GM companies. The point is why even mess with it, we have food that we can grow now that isn't GM, in fact if anything we need to diversify our food supply and go the opposite direction, different breeds of corn, wheat, soybeans instead of the same 3 that are grown in every field. The other massive problem with GM is a company can control and patent a seed, once it dominates and is entrenched they slowly squeeze the profits and life out of small farms and into larger companies.
Claiming that GM is safe is about as stupid is claiming that GM is dangerous. Every individual alteration should be examined and go through safety trials.
But Mendel never cross bred a pea with a firefly.
Genetic engineering doesn't splice food with animals either. Try and find a reliable source for your idiotic hysteria.
I got here through a series of tubes
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I agree that the fear of *eating* GMO foods is science-phobia. But even if GMO foods are safe, GMO agriculture is bad for everybody.
Everything that you read on /. about intellectual property applies to the IP that Monsanto et al apply to their products and research. In fact, it's worse, because the wind doesn't blow proprietary software from nearby windows and OS X boxes onto your linux systems, causing you to owe the IP owners money and disabling your ability to build your own software.
GMO seeds are also highly optimized to solve certain problems, and can fail miserably in other climates where local strains have been bred to adapt to local conditions. The farmers in India who are committing suicide en masse because their crops have failed are not just phobic about science. They got fucked in the ass.
The GMO salmon that are safe to eat are so big because they never stop growing, so they never stop eating. Is that a species that you think would have no ecological impact if accidentally released into the wild?
Can't I just stick to buying local produce from my farmers market without having to wonder if good ol' Farmer Joe is using GM seeds?
I should have a choice to purchase non-GM produce at a price just as people should have the choice to purchase GM produce for another (perhaps the same) price.
To be fair to the grandparent, glowing peas would be pretty awesome and if someone is not trying to splice firefly and pea DNA to achieve this then I think we should be looking hard at the genetics community and asking 'why not?'
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The study goes on to say that failed attempts at a first post can harm your karma.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not successfully, as yet.... The theory was that the antifreeze proteins used by the arctic flounder to resist cold damage in its rather hostile environment would produce a tomato resistant to frosts and cold storage.
Splicing the gene in worked just fine. However, the product wasn't significantly better, as a tomato, and the PR was bad.
Good old Green Fluorescent Protein, a jellyfish derivative, has been spliced into just about anything and everything somebody in a lab coat has cared to hold still for 10 minutes; but largely as a proof-of-technique or imaging agent, it has no obvious value for food crops.
Our experience to the present suggests that attempting to grab useful animal traits and shove them into plants(I, for one, welcome the tomeato with enthusiasm!) is harder than naive speculation would suggest; but that there is no magic barrier to splicing animal genes into plants, other animals, bacterial, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis
Bacterium genes are spliced into vegetables as one of the most common forms of GMO crops. In general, it's not unusual for genes to be lifted from one genome and inserted into another that would be vanishingly improbable to happen in the wild.
I won't say "impossible" because some genes are thought to have been transferred between species through viruses, but it's a very very rare occurrence.
I'll also head this off and say that I'm not philosophically opposed to genetic manipulation of foodstuffs.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Compare most dog breeds today to their wolf ancestors from only a few thousand or tens of thousands of years ago and you can see that humans have been ransacking natural evolution since before historical times. These deformed creatures would never have arisen from natural evolution. Same argument applies to the (pre-GMO) corn raised as a crop compared to its grassy ancestor.
Did they test these plants before or after they dumped tons of extra pesticides on them?
That's one of the issues, we'll develop a Round-up resistant corn. Then the farmer will use 3x as much Woody's Round-up.
The end result is not that the particular GMO crop necessarily poses a health risk, but the greater use of pesticide related to that crop does.
Horizontal gene transfer actually is a fairly significant evolutionary force in nature.
The headline is egregiously wrong. But what else is new around here? If the article's abstract of the paper is anywhere close to accurate, this was just a toxicological study of the effects on animals of being fed certain genetically modified plants. It has NO predictive value with respect to the effects of other modifications.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
But Mendel never cross bred a pea with a firefly.
It's one thing to breed plants and mess with pollen and steer nature in a direction; it's another to start messing with genes and DNA and putting things in them that is impossible to happen in nature.
Viruses manage to inject DNA originally from one species into another all the time. It's thought that about 8% of human DNA has been injected into our systems from foreign by historical viral outbreaks, and then passed on to children. It's one of the ways our immune system passes on immunity.
Every single thing you eat has been genetically modified the good old fashioned way anyhow, through selective breeding.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There's also environmental damage. Herbicide-tolerant crops mean the farmer can spray more and push yields higher, but greater use of herbicides damages diversity in the surrounding countryside. I suppose this is related to your point 4.
Here's an anecdote for you. I'm actually home for the holidays (in farmland country) and was asking my parents what happened to a lot of specific insects I remembered as a kid but don't see these days (I realize it's winter but I've been home in the summer too). Specifically we used to have these massive garden spiders that had a golden abdomen like this one. When I was a kid, I used to flick grasshoppers and locusts into these massive webs they built between our pine trees. The webs are no longer there. My mom says it's the Roundup. She's worked her garden since 1977 and I mean like an acre of garden that we basically subsisted on. She's convinced that it's the farmers that drench their crops with Roundup now and that this Roundup is killing certain insects (directly or indirectly in the food chain). She also claims that due to Roundup we never see the number of toads and frogs that we used to (literally our backyard would be full of the young) but I can't say if this is true or not as my dad has since laid plastic lining around our pond to protect our lawn.
Anyway, is there anyone doing these studies? Who applies Roundup to frogs, toads, golden garden spiders or their food and studies the impact? I guess nobody really cares about spiders but there's the obvious recent example of pesticide harming the bee population and that could turn into be a very dreadful problem.
My work here is dung.
Government enforced, privately owned and limited food is anti-human and anti-life. Also the AC post directly above mine saying essentially what I wanted to say.
So is smoking -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycFrFx8MiVw
* Carthago Delenda Est *
You can readily prove the non-existence of something that satisfies a particular set of properties... for example, finding a real number that satisfies being equivalent to the square root of negative 1. The properties are "real" and "square root of -1". And it is fully provable that absolutely no number exists with both of those properties. While a complex number that is the square root of negative 1 exists, and one might want to argue that the ascribed property of being real was arbitrary and unncessary, one could equally argue the the property of being the square root of negative 1 was arbitrary as well... yet clearly real numbers exist, so what make one property distinctive and the other not?
It is even possible to prove the nonexistence of something with only a single property... such as the existence of a number that is equivalent to itself plus 1. There is absolutely no number, in any number system defined by mathematics, that satisfies this criteria. People who challenge even this would have to leave the domain of mathematics entirely, making the argument that it might still plausibly exist wholly meaningless... since, after all, outside of mathematics, what would it even mean to "add 1" to something?
Of course, one might then point out that this could work within a domain of mathematics because it is built on such rigidly defined principles, and those principles are well understood. In the real world, however, we do not necessarily know all the physical principles that govern the universe's operation... we may believe we understand them well enough to have demonstrated predictive power in the past, but that does not mean our understanding is anywhere near complete. Because of this ambiguity, some doubt can always remain about the existence of certain things. The only way you can remove this doubt is by ascribing properties to the thing you are intending to disprove, and then systematically showing that the satisfaction of those properties creates a logical contradiction, thereby disproving the existence of that thing with those properties.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
These days, you only have to whore yourself out once to be fixed for life. Reaching the desired conclusion for money has corrupted so many fields that there is a serious credibility problem with anyone getting funded by entities that have oxen and fear their being gored. It has gotten so bad with the unholy alliance between politics and drug companies that many people have begun giving up paying attention to it altogether.
The way these studies are conducted might be unimpeachable and the conclusions with these particular tests (wherein the changes are said to be "insignificant" (on what basis?)) might be statistically supportable. However, this is one conclusion and not a Fact. Similar studies show that coffee|Brussels sprouts|dietary fiber|control of sodium intake is good | bad for you (related summary here), and reaching opposite conclusions shows either that experiments are not being repeated, or that the effects are not clear.
But Mendel never cross bred a pea with a firefly.
Genetic engineering doesn't splice food with animals either. Try and find a reliable source for your idiotic hysteria.
"Idiotic"?
I saw it originally in Scientific American in the 1980s and that was what I was alluding to in the parent.
I expected Slashdotters to be a bit more educated and informed ....
Too bad most people having an opinion about micro organisms and bacteria wouldn't even know what horizontal gene transfer is. Some truths about life:
- Bacteria/ Archaea vastly outnumber any other living thing, there are much more of them than of anything else combined.
- We only know details about ~1% of them, because the rest can't be cultured.
- Horizontal gene transfer is the norm with bacteria/ archaea. Viruses are one type of vehicle used to transfer DNA portions.
- Pathogens among bacteria/ archaea are very uncommon. The successful evolutionary strategy for them is to NOT be pathogenic, otherwise there would be no multi cellular organisms.
- Only 10% of the human body is actually ours and derived from human DNA. The other 90% are micro organisms.
- At least one third (1/ 3) of the human DNA comes from horizontal gene transfer, it's mostly virus genes
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
There are studies which show that DNA and RNA can both survive digestion.
http://www.zivilcourage.ro/pdf/mazza.pdf
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/09/21/what-you-eat-affects-your-genes-rna-from-rice-can-survive-digestion-and-alter-gene-expression/
While that is no big reason to worry over GM food more than to worry over some strange food from the jungle that you don't know, it is still possible that GM foods can be dangerous.
This is especially true when the GM crops were altered such that lots of strange proteins are created, for example when the GM crops create their own poisons against crop diseases.
There are also other issues surrounding GM crops; One of the most worrying is the possibility that some GM crops contribute to honey bee colony collapse, and bees are vital to growing crops.
Another problem with GM crops is that they are often altered to produce seeds that do not grow into new crops, and even when that is not the case, farmers are forbidden by patents to grow and sow their own seeds.
While a rich country may don't care about this, it can be fatal for people in a poor country.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
If you take DNA from peanuts (safe) and mix it with wheat (safe) odds are you get a safe hybrid. Except if you are allergic to peanuts. Nobody expects to die from a peanut allergy when eating bread. Without labeling GM ingredients you can't know what you are eating.
Maybe people shouldn't give immune response suppressing medication like Advil = ibuprofen, especially if the fever is not critical. I know wifes who freak out if the fever is even 1 degree higher than the normal temperature.
See this paper here, it is from 1990.
"Adverse effects of aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen on immune function, viral shedding, and clinical status in rhinovirus-infected volunteers."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2172402
There is a reason that homeopathy sometimes works, and the reason is that sometimes no medication is the best medication.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
I'm not so worried about the ingestion part of GM crops but the troubling part for me is seeing Megacorp take down small time farmers for "copyright infringement"[0][1] due to crops cross-pollinating via the wind, bees, whatever. It's ridiculous. It's basically a legal argument to eradicate any form of alternative food source other than Monsanto's monopoly.
Thing is, GM crops are the foothold for food copyright. If you need any indication where that could end up have a look at RIAA proceedings for the past 10 years or even Microsoft's (et al) Seed Vault[2].
[0] - http://www.nelsonfarm.net/issue.htm
[1] - http://www.mnn.com/your-home/organic-farming-gardening/stories/monsanto-wins-lawsuit-against-indiana-soybean-farmer
[2] - http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23503
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It's not about preconceived notions: most scientific examinations of GM don't ask the right questions. Few people doubt that the current generation of GM foods are probably safe to eat and probably don't cause massive environmental harm. But some rather more relevant questions are:
- Can we rely on the integrity of the people who will test the next generation of crops and do we have sufficient controls in place to prevent biased testing
- Are the risks of GM food - however small they may be - borne by the people who profit from the technology? If not, how do we address this fundamental disconnect?
- What are the long term risks of reducing genetic diversity amongst our food crops? Does it make us more vulnerable to unexpected, intercontinental crop failures or reduce our ability to cope with climate change?
- What are the social, economic and geopolitical consequences of making third world farmers dependendend on multinational companies?
- What are the social, economic and geopolitical consequences of the planet's primary food sources being subject to patent controls?
I'm not comfortable that any of these questions have been properly addressed.
Yeah, something is happening. People who used to die at young ages of "unknown" cause (or even from known causes that are now treatable) are now living long enough for medical science to discover what is wrong with them.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
But some significant percentage of the world's population has food allegies, and here in the US, we seem to have allergies to foods that people elsewhere in the world don't. For instance, peanut allergies seem to be unusually prevalent to the US, and some scientists suspect that it may have something to do with how we cultivate them, how they've been selectively bred or genetically engineered, or perhaps due to contamination from other sources. It's not clear that this is due to genetic modifications, but it's a suspect. IIRC, it's only like 10% of the US population that have a food sensitivity (that they know about, anyhow), but anecdotally, GM crops are more likely to be allergenic.
Similar to peanuts, there is corn (maize), which is one of the most genetically modified crops we have. Even before scientists got their hands on it, it was selectively bred for thousands of years, from a barely edible grain to the high-glycemic food we have today. There are some people who have severe reactions to corn, which is basically impossible to avoid in the US, because most additives are derived from it, and the FDA doesn't regulate its use. These include dextrose (used to bind iodine in salt or elsewhere as a sweetener or preservative), citric acid (preservative), xanthan gum (thicker from a bacterium grown on corn), white vinegar (distilled but usually contaminated), microcrystalline cellulose, (high fructose) corn syrup, maltodextrin, any anonymous "starch", and countless other things. The refinement of these extracts is very poor. (Contrast soybean oil which, given that soy is listed as a major allergen, it is much better refined.) Some people with corn allergies even have trouble with milk from cows fed corn. Whether it's the genetic modifications, or whether it's allergies instead to the molds that typically grow on corn, some people with corn allergies report that they can safely eat "organic" corn. Corn allergies are relatively rare, but given that it's almost impossible to avoid, and those with corn allergies seem to have especially severe reactions to trace quantities, my guess is the primary reason the FDA doesn't regulate it is due to political pressure from the corn associations. Corn is huge business in the US.
It's interesting that the most cultivated foods we have seem to be the most allergenic. Soybeans, wheat, corn, peanuts, and milk (cows are highly domesticated). One hypothesis I have is that we're not cut out to eat certain kinds of foods, but desperate or clever people found ways to cultivate these barely-edible things into foods they could more readily consume. But we didn't evolve to eat them, for millions of years before we developed farming, so many people can't tolerate them. Wheat is an interesting hybrid plant, with a weird genetic structure. It's interesting because most people who can't have wheat aren't allergic -- they have celiac disease, which is an autoimmune condition. The body develops IgA antibodies to some of the gluten peptides, and those same antibodies attack other parts of the body, typically the gut lining. Those same antibodies can get into the blood and attack the thyroid gland, causing overproduction of thyroid hormone, which is any many celiac sufferers have panic attacks and other psychological symptoms.
A few concluding points:
- Genetic modification isn't inherently evil or anything.
- But there may be unintended consequences if you introduce genes without knowing their effects.
- And our ability to predict, up front, the effect of a given gene is poor, as is our ability to fully test the effects of the grown organism.
- Most people seem unaffected by this.
- But there is a notable portion of the population that MAY be impacted by these modifications.
- Keep in mind that the primary motivation for making these modifications is increased yield and increased profits, so the scientists and farmers are not especially motivated to scrutinize any unexpected effects. If it grows better, that's all that matters, even if a few m
The reason for the growing number of food allergies is quite clear. It comes from badly and wrongly trained immune systems, which is just a symptom for living in a sterile world. Studies en masse have shown that people living in rural areas are not affected by this growing numbers. As tough as it sounds, it's a small flux that nature will sort out, one way or the other.
And about cancer, it has yet to be proven that the increasing numbers are not a mere artifact of better detection methods. If that's not the case, I'm sure that pollution and a general unhealthy lifestyle contribute far more to it than "something in the water".
Also, selective perception plays a huge role when one is personally hit by this illness. I'm not saying the industry isn't at fault, it IS, because they produce sterile stuff with additions for years and keep telling you it's as healthy as a carrot picked from your grandfathers field. But GM is the least of our problems concerning allergies, if not the opposite. You know, peanuts that won't cause allergies and all that.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
effecting evolution by breeding dogs in between each other cannot be compared to directly poking at the genes of the dogs in an unrestricted fashion. not to mention how stuff like pitbulls worked out, even with breeding.
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BT *may* be safe however lots of stuff occurs naturally in the soil that is not safe. Anthrax comes to mind. I am not against Genetic engineering. I do however have a problem when companies like Monsanto hides internal research that shows negative results of GM crops. I think we need proper oversight in this area. I am also not for companies like Monsanto patenting strains of GM crops then suing people when their GM crops cross pollinate other crops. Also I recommend you watch the documentary The World According To Monsanto. I don't think these people should be the custodians of GM crops. When you go out of your way to hide what you are doing from consumers and lobbying so people don't know when a product they are purchasing is GM or not then you are corrupt and your products are more than likely unsafe and should be heavily scrutinized. You cannot trust Monsanto that their products are safe after the actions they have demonstrated in the marketplace.