Slashdot Mirror
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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'
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.
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.
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
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
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.