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Publicly Funded GMO Research Facing Destruction In Italy
ChromeAeonium writes "Shortly after the events in Rothamsted Research in the UK, where a publicly funded trial of wheat genetically engineered to repel aphids was threatened by activists with destruction and required police protection, another publicly funded experiment involving genetically engineered crops faces possible destruction (original in Italian). The trial, which is being conducted by researchers at the University of Tuscia in Italy on cherries, olives, and kiwis genetically engineered to have traits such as fungal disease resistance, started three decades ago. When field research of GE plants was banned in Italy in 2002, the trial received an extension to avoid being declared illegal, but was denied another in 2008, and following a complaint from the Genetic Rights Foundation, now faces destruction on June 12th, despite appeals from scientists. The researchers claim that the destruction is scientifically unjustifiable (only the male kiwis produce transgenic pollen and their flowers are removed) and wish to gather more information from the long running experiment."
If you are genitically modifying crops they MUST be kept isoated from nature and ensure that they cannot contaminate conventional or organic farms with patented gene. Sealed greenhouse whatever. IF you can accomplish that then carry on and label your product as such.
(only the male kiwis produce transgenic pollen and their flowers are removed)
Until a single seed gets away, then the cat is out of the box.
Then there's the human factor. If anthrax can get out of controlled labs, I'm quite sure that pollen or seeds can get out that way too.
male kiwis produce transgenic pollen
In NZ, "kiwis" are only either the people (New Zealanders) or the birds, but never the kiwifruit plants! Very confusing...
/MC
i bet the people angling to have these crops destroyed also count amongst their concerns fighting hunger, alternative fuel sources, better nutrition, fighting pollution, water conservation, etc.
all of which can be achieved through genetic engineering
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In this case, the issue is only that Italy has a law requiring that GE/GMO plants be kept in a roofed and floored structure to prevent pollen from escaping. The scientists here didn't do that, couldn't afford it, and then left the plants to grow without any safeguards. So, the scientists were basically pulling a Monsanto here and are now claiming that the plants shouldn't be destroyed because they want to gather more information (that they've been gathering since 1998 and were supposed to have stopped doing in 2008).
GMO just does what human controlled breeding would take longer to accomplish. Yes, there are dangers, but the vast majority of it is no more dangerous than you would expect from a new version of a cell phone. Crop growers that produce non-GMO foods will often use interesting pesticides, interesting soil, chill fruits to ensure they come to the consumer more fresh, and use grafting on trees so that the combination of 2 trees produces better yield. We are far past natural foods, pretty much every variety of an apple you buy in the store is genetically identical to all the others, they just use clonal propagation to ensure the optimal fruit tree keeps producing optimal fruit. They have stopped evolution, which is making these plants more vulnerable to diseases and pests.
Before you go off on why GMO is bad, make sure you understand what is already being done in today's world.
BTW, this has nothing to do with animal testing.
The anti GMO lobby needs to get with the program. GMO is a reality. You can't oppose it. You can moderate it. But it's happening.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The West rejects some research, so find a welcoming alternative.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
It's cool activists... Monsanto will continue doing their research, with armed guards protecting their facilities, then they'll patent it and spend the next 100 years getting a nickle every time you eat.
Good work with that.
My kingdom for a donkey!
"GMO just does what human controlled breeding would take longer to accomplish."
Not really, the change is approached from a very different angle and creates a inherently different result.
You might get a similar effect if you used both approaches to get a specific desired effect but it would be a very different plant internally and the side effects of the change would be very different.
Also there are inherent problems with it being so fast. When you can create a new different plant and then have it on consumers plates in a handful of years their is far more risk than a crop strain which was developed over decades/centuries.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The frustrating thing about this controversy is that the reason there's such a strong backlash against GMO plants is the widespread use of a *particular sort* of GMO plant: roundup-ready plants. Here, genetic manipulation has been used to make the plant resistant to Roundup, which is a fairly scary pesticide. And then there are the plants that have had insect toxins engineered into them. These toxins have in some cases been found to be toxic to humans as well.
OTOH, GMO products that have high yields, or are more resistant to fungus and mold, are not such a bad idea. But we treat all GMO products as the same, and so we wind up seeing stories like this one.
(Someone will probably point out that insect resistance and roundup resistance can improve yields, and this is true, but it's the side effects that people worry about.)
the 'green revolution' of pesticides and fertilizer did not end hunger. hunger is not caused by a lack of supply , but by the distribution methods. many countries that experience starvation are also experiencing brutal wars, dictatorships, lack of civil society, property rights, etc etc etc. afghanistan, for example, from 1979 to the present. they had to set aside things like crops and farming so that they could grow opium and fight a proxy war on behalf of the two the superpowers.
then there is the fact that most costs of food nowdays in places like the US go to marketing, and 'value added' stuff like freezing, dehydrating, processing, and otherwise repackaging basic wheat, corn, soy, etc, into pizza rolls, snack chips, etc etc.
for speaking their mind about issues of the day, the use of their land + water, etc etc etc.
"fairly scary pesticide"...isn't it actually widely used because roundup is a relatively NON-scary pesticide?
"The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers glyphosate to be relatively low in toxicity, and without carcinogenic or teratagenic effects.[18] The EPA considered a "worst case" dietary risk model of an individual eating a lifetime of food entirely from glyphosate-sprayed fields, and with residue levels remaining at their maximum levels, and concluded no adverse effects would exist under these conditions.[18]" -- wikipedia
If the activists had real knowledge of what these fruits needed protection from, they might give this a second thought. There are a lot of things happening that concerns the welfare of vegetation worldwide. They (activists) may need to do their own research before they destroy this. If certain factors are amped up which affect the weather and components of the chemical makeup of rainfall, they may regret this action. Its very secretive, still there is more than ample knowledge available concerning this.
"GMO just does what human controlled breeding would take longer to accomplish."
I love how this argument is always wheeled out.
I've never seen or heard of human controlled breeding successfully crossing a plant with a fish, yet monsanto have genetically modified some plants with fish genes.
We rigorously test new medicines to make sure there are no side effects, but a new species of plant ?, the test is to put it out into the market and hide its origins so that people dont have a choice.
I'm not saying all GM food is bad, but some may have deleterious effects upon the human metabolism, and Monsanto will let us know ?
Yeah, right......
Also there are inherent problems with it being so fast. When you can create a new different plant and then have it on consumers plates in a handful of years their is far more risk than a crop strain which was developed over decades/centuries.
No. Everyone eats the same, genetically identical plant, one one of the millions of farmers finds a mutation that seems interesting they might decide to put that on the market. Maybe they don't realize its a mutation (or does anyone else) since all it did was increase crop yield. Most times with GMO, a single nuclitide base pair is altered, exactly what you would expect with evolution. At least with GMO, the change is more officially reported and it doesn't simply "sneak" into the consumer food supply.
Who knew aphids had such rabid fans?
You should read the rest of the wikipedia article, not just the first paragraph of the toxicity section. Also, it turns out that the excessive use of roundup-ready GMO crops has, shockingly, caused evolution to occur in the midwest, where it was thought to be impossible. Consequently, the next generation of pesticide-ready GMO crops will be much more exciting. Another point I neglected to mention earlier is that if you are a farmer who does not use roundup-ready seeds, but does save seeds for planting next year, then when your neighbor's GMO crops contaminate your seeds, Monsanto will sue you for violating their patents.
I logged in to say just about exactly what you did and then caught your comment. I'll rephrase it so it will show up at a higher mod rating -- this shows that the Europeans have absolutely no standing on which to make statements about science illiteracy in the USA!
When you can create a new different plant and then have it on consumers plates in a handful of years their is far more risk than a crop strain which was developed over decades/centuries.
AHahahahahaha...
Yeah but people have no problem introducing invasive species like Japanese Lilacs. Ah the irony.
Om, nomnomnom...
Italians have voted to not do this. They're tired of US corporations like Monsanto pushing them around. Actually, the US with the push of its power elite was heavily involved in fixing elections and installing a puppet government in Italy, and then making sure that government couldn't be tossed out once it was in. Now Italian workers are told they have to suffer under "austerity" (for them) and be ruled by foreign banks and foreign corporations.
Good for Mario Capanna and company. The Italians democratically voted this in, I have no desire for the Monsantos of the world to find some way to weasel around this. What does Monsanto do anyhow? Create plants with sterile seeds, so Monsanto can then grab all of the farmer's money? Sue farmer's whose fields are next to Monsanto seed fields, alongside the blowing winds, and get the courts and government's to side with them against small farmers?
The antiquated, anti-enlightenment ideas are not the working people and small farmers trying to protect themselves against a small handful of parasites trying to take ownership of everything. The backwards, antiquated ideas are the corporate newspapers and websites who attack anyone against against handing the whole world on a plate to the parasite heir Monsanto majority shareholders. In Italy, in Greece, in Spain, at Occupy Wall Street and Occupy everywhere, people are fed up with the high unemployment, and the expropriation of surplus value from the majority of working people to a handful of parasitic 1% heirs. This Monsanto GM IP deal is no different than the big companies in IT who own all the patents and are parasitically suing everyone around, and harming economic growth.
A major problem that isn't generally discussed is the pests and diseases don't just cry uncle and move on to non commercial food sources. The problem is evolution kicks in and they get resistant. They are already finding it in some GMO crops. Ultimately the pest and diseases get tougher so they potentially are even more damaging to traditional crops while GMO crops go back to the drawing board. It's very similar to what is happening with antibiotic resistant diseases. It's very much like the old cold war where each side builds bigger weapons. Eventually one side looses and I doubt it'll be nature. The problem is if we loose this war billions potentially starve. Basically all staple crops are being genetically modified so the entire food supply is at risk. I know the belief is science always solves every problem but the antibiotic analogy proves that isn't the case. There are now many incurable strains of diseases with no solution on the horizon. Do we really want to go through the same nightmare with food? It'll take 20 pr 30 years for us to be in the same position with food production but by then it will be far too late. If you don't believe it's happening in GMO crops do some web searches.
Most times with GMO, a single nuclitide base pair is altered, exactly what you would expect with evolution.
I don't think you know what you're talking about. Can you give me even one example where this is so? All the genetic engineering I'm aware of involves inserting one or more entire genes from another (usually very distantly related) organism. (And they do stuff with the promoter regions for the genes, but I'm not so certain about what the story is there.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
the reason there's such a strong backlash against GMO plants is the widespread use of a *particular sort* of GMO plant.
While there is some truth to that, I really can't say I agree with that for a couple of reasons. A few considerations in no particular order of importance: glyphosate is actually one of the better herbicides out there in terms of both human and environmental safety, and while no agrochemical input is desirable input, it is one of the least damaging ones (also, not many in the opposition to herbicide tolerant crops will mention the environmental benefits they have provided by facilitating the conversion to no till and conservation tillage systems). You mention the crops with a toxin to insects in them. This is true, but it is hardly new, in fact, this same toxin has been used in organic farming for decades. There is no evidence it is harmful to humans aside from a handful of widely criticized studies. You're partially right in that those are listed as reasons for opposition to GE crops, and contribute to some of the opposition (whether or not they make scientific sense), but realistically, people would oppose them regardless. Remember that there was opposition to the first GE crop used in the US, the Flavr Savr, and all it had was an antisense polygalacturonase gene and the NPTII gene, and that you see the same opposition to things like the virus resistant Rainbow papaya, the Arctic Apple (a non-browning apple awaiting approval), and even Golden Rice. So, to say that people oppose GE for the herbicide tolerant and Bt crops is like saying people oppose evolution based on lack of transition fossils. It may be the case in the minds of some people (again, rational or not), but make no mistake, there is a deeper reason.
No, that is not how GMOs are produced. Genetic engineers insert whole genes from completely different organisms. The inserted gene doesn't even have to come from the same phylum as the original organism. Heck, maybe not even the same kingdom.
HMM?
You are comparing what some crazy, negligent to the apocalyptic consequences, farmers have done to GMOs.
And how exactly does one of a multitude of genetically identically plants be different? If they use this method are they not cut evolution out of the equation?
An actual reasonable non-GMO based agriculture business would mitigate the risks of evolution created dangerous foods to an extreme minimum.
But I cannot comment on the likelihood of evolution randomly generating a poisonous/otherwise dangerous plant from an edible one (particularly one that in a single generation is dangerous at all). I have never heard of this happening and I will admit that you cannot be in-depth testing of every single generation of the evolution of a plant being grown for consumption.
But while you say, "Most times with GMO, a single nuclitide base pair is altered, exactly what you would expect with evolution", I cannot stop thinking that a new GMO produces a useful and quite big change while a single step in evolution does not. It does not seem conceivable to go from a non-poison to a poison in one step in evolution (particularly while also improving a good quality of itself), while a lot more complex things are done in most new GMOs.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
This was what killed all those honey bees. They were fed corn syrup made from GMO corn, which was engineered to produce toxins to protect itself from insects. Although I suppose with any luck evolution will sort that out and we'll eventually have pesticide resitant honey bees.
So, in conclusion, there is more than just humans we ought to be concerned about when we're doing our food safety testing.
So what? Protien is protien, carbs are carbs, it does not matter.
Anti Science precautionary principle ecofreaks are a REAL threat to human prosperity and possibly to hman survival. If there wre ever an arguement for imposing the eath panalty, it would be against those dangerous idiots. Perhaps the crops could have a gene added that releases cynanide gas if anyone attempts to harm the crops? Love to see it.
So, you think an entire field of research shouldn't exist, and you don't care about any arguments? That's pretty much the epitome of anti-intellectualism. Also, there are hungry people in places other than Africa.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
If that's true then why couldn't they prove it in court? Stupid lack of evidence of Monsanto suing farmers in that case.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/28/us-monsanto-lawsuit-idUSTRE81Q1PN20120228
The stories you've read have been lies. The farmers who have been sued by Monsanto knew the seed had become roundup-ready and saved that seed specifically to plant. One farmer even bought his seed each year(did not save) for _decades_ and then suddenly started saving his seed. That's intent there.
Evolution occurs anyways, with or without GMO, and they knew about it. Who thought it was impossible? You?
has, shockingly, caused evolution to occur in the midwest, where it was thought to be impossible
:D
Yes. Many of us here are quite aware that evolution is thought to not be possible in the Midwest.
Its not a big step. Scientists don't really know how genes operate, they can only guess on what they do based on what they've seen happen in other organisms. Many times the change in an organism is a small genetic mutation, which turns off a functionality or enables one that previous did not happen. Even when entire genes are inserted into an organism with GMO, the same thing can happen in nature with gene transfer.
Evolution is messy, current genetic makeups of organisms are far from ideal. I fail to understand why everyone is so scared of genetic engineering. Do you fear we are interfering with "gods works"? Are you afraid of the implications of what GMO will do to the human race, that you consider so sacred? Much of what GMO can do, so can nature. Why then limit all of GMO instead of just those parts that cannot be as easily changed by nature?
Corn is wind pollinated.
Also, who is going around giving corn syrup to bees? They mostly eat nectar from flowers. Are they shopping at the store?
I kind of think this is an example of a first world problem...
In the not too distant future the earth will reach its carrying capacity with regard to non-GMO food production, and then we'll have an entirely different ethical problem on our hands -- shall we allow dark skinned babies die of starvation even though we'll have the ability to produce more than enough food if we use GMO? Will we be so high minded then as to mix GMO and non-GMO food together so that we're all playing Russian roulette together? I doubt it. We'll ship millions of tons of GMO to poor countries, and we'll keep "the good stuff" for North America and Europe no doubt. We are a disgustingly short-sighted and greedy species... barely evolved beyond cannibalism frankly.
I'm sorry, but do you have any hard data whatsoever? Everything you've said is at best somewhat believable conjecture otherwise. I can do the same thing and reach the opposite conclusion:
"There are inherent problems with traditional selective breeding. Compared to genetic modification, it creates a very different plant internally and has many side effects, not all of them good. To take just one example, over time plants adapt to insects in their environment and create specific natural pesticides for themselves. Breeding together several strains of a certain plant increases the offspring's insect resistance by overproducing each of the parent strains' natural pesticides. It can take many years for subtle developmental problems caused by the consumption of so-called 'supercharged' insecticides to appear in humans. Genetic modification, on the other hand, produces carefully controlled, surgical changes that can be calibrated for safety. Only well-tested non-harmful natural insecticides are added to the genome by genetic modification, making the process much safer than traditional selective breeding."
Honestly, it's ridiculously easy to make this shit up. It's hard to get scientifically valid evidence to back up your positions. I understand the GMO issue is large and contentious, and it's easy to make up good-sounding scientifically invalid arguments, but still, we don't need more people just spouting whatever crap pops into their heads. The same is true for a huge number of today's arguments by the way: autism and vaccines, (anti-)gay marriage, climate change.... And if you ask for evidence, I can provide some :).
If I've misread you and you do have good evidence, I apologize in advance.
Cheers to you for calling it how you see it!.
Luddites have taken over Slashdot.
GMO crops reduce fuel dependence, and help conserve water. He stated that what used to be a good yield for him in a is now considered to be a really low yield. Before GMO crops every time it rained, he had to go out and turn the soil to prevent weeds from growing. The turning of the soil caused the water to be lost in compared with GMO crops, now when it rains the soil is not turned and the soil retains the water causing the larger crops and more crops. Fuel costs go down too because there is drive the tractor as much.
So you Luddites can stick with your non GMO crops and deal with the smaller crop size, water shortages, and fuel shortages that will most likely be caused when 8 billion people need to be fed food.
Enjoy!
Actually, not true... a protein is not always protein... every heard of mad cow disease? It's caused by a class of proteins called "prions" -- a malformed protein.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
Personally I think that GMOs either are, or soon will be, a necessary evil, but we do probably need at a minimum some very good ways of tracking GMOs from field to plate so that at the very least we have an outside chance of containing a food born apocalypse if we unleash one.
I'm so not scared of eating genetically modified food, the chances that corn for instance can be modified to suddenly be toxic to me is very slim. That's dumb. What's not dumb is people getting sued because they're growing genetically modified corn that's taken over their field. What's disturbing is genetically identical crops all lacking immunity to some sort of disease and a large percentage of the food supply gets knocked out.
We need to do this stuff so we can feed our massive population without destroying the planet, let's be careful but not reject it for being icky. Something to think about, It took us a very long time to figure out which things in our environment were toxic and we probably still eat some natural things that aren't so good for us but we still haven't learned they're bad for us. The idea that we're going to put our food supply through the same sort of testing as pharmaceuticals is really stupid, all that testing makes our drugs super expensive, and lots of the most popular ones are still of questionable use and safety.
If you want testing maybe we should demand Monsanto breed their genetically modified genes into a normal diverse gene pool and then conduct all trials places where folks are starving for free.
You obviously cannot cross a plant with a fish through selective breeding. But you're arguing the method not the result. (CS analogy, "I've never heard of a merge sort successfully sorting an array by repeatedly swapping adjacent items like bubble sort"). Just because you can't breed a fish and a plant doesn't mean you cannot get the same resultant organism through breeding. You can, but it takes a whole lot longer.
Best read up on ERVs. Horizontal gene transfer through viruses or directly between bacteria has been going on for billions of years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I think you're vastly overestimating people. I think the controversy controversy comes primarily from the fact that most people don't understand genetics at all; it sounds scary to them, so they fear anything that deals with it. Natural is good, and unnatural is bad. It's a similar deal with nuclear power, really, where the thing I can't see and don't understand is inherently too scary to permit.
and "crossing" plants with fish is bad how? (apart from appealing to some quasi underbelly feeling about morality).
btw, it is not crossing, the genes are quite carefully selected and as such the process is even more predictable than crossing (which brings in loads of unknown material).
In addition, you may not have heard about plant/fish breeding, but bacteria/virus/plant breeding (and even virus/human) is quite common in nature (a common transgenic technique in plants actually uses a bacteria that has been splicing its genes into plants for probably millions of years). Bacteria are more genetically diverse from plants than fish, so I see little problems with it. Recently we know that horizontal gene transfer among lineages (the plant fish thing) is much more common than what was once thought.
Now, even if it was not, something that does not happen in nature is not necessarily bad (according to any sane philosophy imho). But I agree with you on the need for proper testing of food, and I also lament the fact that many "GMO companies" play dirty games (but be aware that I heard at least one scientist in my field convincingly argue that society had caused this monopoly of 2-3 big GMO corps by creating such a mess or regulations and costs that only mammoths like monsanto can still put GMOs on the table, any smaller company does not have sufficient resources to make it happen).
There is something with genes that makes many laypeople somehow forget their otherwise sound reasoning ability, in a way, it is even worse than AGW and evolution.
O noees, different kingdom you says.
And yesterday, a bacteria landed in my salad which was actually part of another EMPIRE. And I actually ate its whole genome! What will happen to me now?
I have no idea how this gets modded insightful. I know people who work in this field. They work in countries where GMO crops aren't marketable. They analyse the genetics of varieties with desirable properties to work out the cause of the property. If they could use GM then they'd just combined it with another variety. Because they can't, they breed together different varieties until they get the combination they need (and 1000s of other genetic changes that they don't know the effect of).
I'm not advocating open season on GM research but our current position of blocking everything is driven by nothing more than ignorance and FUD. We can afford it at the moment in wealthy western economies but we'll see how principled we really are when food prices are higher and the devolping world is happily eating affordable GM food.
That is, of course, true. The only thing that will end hunger is if everyone lives in a free open democratic country with a decent market economy and a government that actually cares about its people, with decent education, healthcare, infrastructure, ect. Obviously, hunger is a complex social issue and a scientific solution isn't going to change the root cause of the problem. However, it is not a binary choice between GMOs will save the world vs GMOs are no help. Improved genotypes, be they transgenic drought tolerant traits or viral resistance traits, or conventionally bred traits (I follow some very fascinating research that seeks to alter the internal structure of roots and the overall architecture of the roots to improve nutrient uptake), can help people. They won't solve every problem, but look at it this way: assume you are a poor sustenance farmer in Africa where your soils are poor (phosphorus is a problem). Would you want the improved root genotype? Or maybe BXW is going to wipe out the banana crop you rely on, even if it doesn't fix all your problems, would you rather have a GE banana resistant to BXW or lose your crop? Improved crops, GE or otherwise , are no silver bullet (and I'd add biodiverse underutilized crops to the list of things of great importance...the amount of research in that field is so stupidly low it is quite frankly dangerous), but lets not forget that does not imply they are without a role, and most likely a significant one, to play in ending hunger and improving agriculture in general.
frankly we have ZERO idea what those extra strands of alien DNA are gonna do long term.
First, these sequences, they're not alien DNA, they just come from different species. Alien is a technically correct but way-over-the-top term. Please don't use it. If you must, use "foreign" DNA or some such.
Second, we know exactly what these strands are going to do : they're going to evolve and adapt to their environment, just like any other gene. They're no more scary that any other piece of DNA that's loose in nature, in other words, they're no more scary than any other part of nature. Which is to say, they're somewhere between terrifyingly dangerous, like h1n1, and a puppy. But they're no different from any other piece of DNA.
Third, and this one really makes your argument fall apart, humans are not the only ones doing cross-species DNA recombination. And we're not all that good at it compared to our competition at all. Meet the dangerous GMO experimenters that having been pulling a Monsanto for about 3 billion years, maybe more. They're, as the article shows, not doing this randomly, but with the express purpose of preventing the treatment of lethal diseases (which is what nature is trying to do to us). They're also very good at it.
In other words, it's not monsanto that's dangerous, nor their competition, nor is the spreading of a infinitesimal amount of genes in any way dangerous, nor the spreading of large amounts of DNA. It's world-travel, the fact that the world is connected, without millions of totally uncrossable natural obstacles. Tolerance and travel is what's destroying the varieties present in the human species, and import/export is doing the exact same thing to every other species. If you aren't prepared to live your life as a scared medieval peasant, self-sufficient, never even to see products made further away than the next city, and extremely unlikely to ever cross the nearest mountain he/she can see from his home, the only hope we have to survive in the long term as a global group of humans, is to keep outsmarting evolution. The only hope we have, is GMO.
Mind you, I'm not denying that patents on GMO genes are a horribly bad idea, as nature will simply not obey the law, no matter how self-important humans feel. Frankly, this is something I appreciate about "extremists" : they accept that they will bend to the will of the "nature" of the universe. Even if I don't agree with their views of the universe, it is refreshing to see people capable of appreciating that their world is not what they want it to be. In this way, of course, someone like Richard Feynman is far more extremist than most extremist Christians, and he too would have had very little tolerance for this whole attitude of "science is bad", propagated by people the vast majority of which cannot solve a simple equation, and who, of course, do not see the problem in defending ideas without data or theory behind them.
Frankly, you're little better than the original "gaia" worshippers who locked people into huge wooden puppets and set them on fire to appease nature. Except of course, that if you ever get listened to, far greater numbers of people will die.
It somehow fails to amaze me that, like every other party, the greens are the very opposite of what they claim to be, just like there's nothing republican about the republicans, just like there is hardly a trace of democracy in the democrats.
I am for scientific research and GMO, but please stop spreading the lie / misinformation that adding gene from a totally different genera, is like hybridization. Yes plant hybridize readily, it is know and what game us for example the limequat. But there is no way to hybridize a fish with a plant, a feat which can be done with general genetic modification. And even between plant some of gene transfer discussed would not ever happen because they can't cross polinize even with human help. There is enough idiot making stuff up against GMO without having people adding more lie in an attempt to defend them.
Would it be possible maybe to "save" some of the research by de-planting the tree and replanting them in a more friendly country ? Maybe crowd source it ? I would not mind to pass a few day in italy doing hard work for science, with a shovel.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
well if it's anything like the one I consumed ,a 10 day course of a targeted antibiotic and a testicle the size of a tennis ball and painkillers to target said inflamed nut.
not all bacteria is bad but some are worse than others, and left untreated it could cause renal failure and my death.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
All it will do for aphids is breed hyper-resistant variants. Nature works around obstructions.
on dumpster diving.
There is your data.
Remember: every single piece of data is anecdote, and therefore data IS a collection of multuple anecdotes.
Weird. You fluffers go on about transgenic hybridisation (which isn't pollination and fertilisation) having happened for tens of thousands of years, yet here you are saying that because they don't produce fertilisable pollen, there's no way for the modification to get spliced into the normal population.
Really weird disconnect going on here.
During winter. When they don't have any honey left because it was harvested.
None of that has any relavance to roundup being a "fairly scary pesticide". If you are going to make things up at least have them be arguments for your claim.
My main objection to GMO is that we're not yet wise enough to foresee all the future outcomes.
We are already seeing such things as Roundup-resistant weeds, some from the overuse of Roundup and some from genes escaping from plants genetically modified to be Roundup-resistant. Scotts is planning on selling Roundup-resistant lawn seeds, surely a monster if there ever was one. Get off my lawn, for real.
When we become as wise as God, then we can play God. Until then we're like children playing with a loaded gun.
Everyone is so scared, mostly, because of all the really scary things they have already done with it. because GMOs are pretty much inherently a monoculture, inherently patentable, and are responsible for stuff such as the terminator varieties.
To separate the potential for good from the known bad is both impossible and illogical. It is like saying dictatorships are so much more efficient and all together a better model for government, lets just ignore Hitler.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Well I would not say that I do have evidence, but it might not be of the kind you would be satisfied with (and I would not blame you, I very well might argue against myself in the same situation).
I would argue that "the change is approached from a very different angle" is self evident, the processes are simply very different.
That these different methods yield different types of results, I don't have any data on this. But I THINK just using statistical models you could prove that it is extremely unlikely for the guided randomness of evolution to produce similar results to the surgical methods of GMO production.
On the topic of which one is inherently safer, you are right neither really seems theoretically inherently absolutely better than the other. But we have millions of years of data/evidence that would seem to suggest that evolution does not produce harmful things like this (tens fo thousands for agriculture) and in particular when you have a good interdependency going on that one of them does not just evolve and kill the other (and by extension itself). Evolution seems to work quite well, and if it screws up and unbalances entire ecosystems at times then I am surprised I have never heard of it.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
My point is that this is on par with what breeding projects have already produced (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7569064.stm where dogs have been bred to look cute, and as they grow older, their skull can't contain their brain).
Your examples are not what people are afraid of. I haven't heard "because its patentable" as a GMO fear before. If this was the only fear, then a simple change to the law would fix it.
because GMOs are pretty much inherently a monoculture
What? There are many private companies and public institutions performing genetic engineering around the world.
lets just ignore Hitler.
And Stalin,and Mao, who managed to be even worse than Hitler.
I meant promoting a agricultural monoculture. Like having three strains of wheat instead of 3 thousand, each with huge genetic variability inside of them.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
But there is also the fact that after only 5 to 10 years those crops designed to produce higher yields are now dropping in yield production. so the whole increased yield argument falls short because the non GMO crops are producing at a constant yield year after year.
I meant promoting a agricultural monoculture. Like having three strains of wheat instead of 3 thousand, each with huge genetic variability inside of them.
I don't think your fear makes sense. As I said, there are many private companies and public institutions performing genetic engineering around the world. Each of then will probably have many strains of wheat, designed for different climatic/economic conditions.
Add to that, the fact that organic food is growing fast [1]. Multiple strains of organic wheat will be grown for the organic market.
And if all that wasn't enough... the solution would be to lobby governments to keep a small reserve backup for each important
strain of wheat.
Therefore, using "monoculture" as an argument against GMO is absurd.
1 : http://www.ota.com/organic/mt/business.html
I have to disagree with your conclusion.
Yes having an organic industry mitigates the danger as not everything is GMO (assuming that GMOs stay as unacceptable to organics).
And preserving grains and other genetics in seedbanks and similar is important and provides a big safety net.
But you cannot just say that since we have a parachute it does not matter how you fly the plane, to use an analogy.
Also it does not matter how many private companies are performing genetic engineering, they will never produce the same variety of genetic diversity as nature where every single individual grain seed is unique. They will not even have something approaching that, and they would never try because it is not economical. Could I conceive of genetic engineering being used in the future such that you have a few varieties that each have many many sub-varieties suited to specific climates, yes. Would the system as a whole still likely be too genetically similar to be safe, yes. Am I making assumptions and judgements based on my feelings, it is possible, but I still think that GMOs are inherently monoculture oriented.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
Do we have any better feasible option than to require the use of greenhouses to reduce unlicensed pollination? I don't think that "you can be sued by a big corporation because of something perfectly legal your neighbor did" is a state we should put farmers in.
I believe we should switch to completely indoors farming with artificial lighting, thus saving the land area, saving energy otherwise spent on agricultural mechanization, saving nutrients and water (excess captured and reused) and making all environmental variables, such as temperatures, light spectrum, O2 and CO2 atmospheric content completely controlled, and turning the whole year into a continuous harvest time. GM could then be applied on the factory floor and develop breeds optimized for growing in factories, e.g. small stalks and resistance to infective diseases that could hit closely packed plants.
I would argue that "the change is approached from a very different angle" is self evident
Agreed. I also agree that one would expect selective breeding and GM to differ in the ways you suggest, though at the risk of sounding like a broken record what one expects is not always what one gets, and different people can expect different things. Still, I consider it likely enough not to seriously argue the point.
But we have millions of years of data/evidence that would seem to suggest that evolution does not produce harmful things like this (tens fo thousands for agriculture) and in particular when you have a good interdependency going on that one of them does not just evolve and kill the other (and by extension itself). Evolution seems to work quite well, and if it screws up and unbalances entire ecosystems at times then I am surprised I have never heard of it.
I don't agree; evolution can be wildly unsafe. The black plague comes to mind as an example. In Europe, it proved too deadly--it killed off its population too much and essentially wiped itself out. Presumably a particularly deadly strain happened to evolve. Bacteria and viruses with long-term success are typically either extremely prevalent but not very deadly (chicken pox, common cold) or not very prevalent but very deadly (HIV, ebola). It's at least conceivable that some of the mysterious civilization disappearances in history were caused by pathogens that accidentally became too deadly or prevalent and burned themselves out.
Still, evolution and selective breeding are not the same. Even in dogs, selective breeding is far from unharmful--for instance, American Staffordshire Terriers have a wide range of inherited disorders. I imagine selective breeding of plants can encourage more uniformly good traits since we don't care morally about the "bad" experiments, and I suspect plant evolution is not even remotely as dangerous as pathogen evolution, but I'm not at all an expert.
In the case at hand, I'm far, far more inclined to believe scientists who have studied GMO for years calling for the experiment to continue than to believe whatever special interest groups decide it's bad, especially if that decision is based purely on plausible but non-scientific arguments.
P.S. I reread my first post and found the tone more hostile than it should have been. Thanks for ignoring that.
Or cut down on population. Which is doable without resorting to war or murder (but, I repeat myself). Put the money into sex ed uncontaminated by religion, free prophylactics, and rewards for not having children. Positive reinforcements, not negative like China did.
There is no global overpopulation. Some places (such as Japan) are already experiencing population aging and decline, which is bad in many ways. Other places (such as the USA and specially Europe) already have sub-replacement fertility rates, and their population only grows because of demographic lag and immigration. It is predicted the the European Union population (now at 503M) will reach zero natural population increase by 2015 and zero total population increase in 2035 (at 520M), then start declining.
The USA will grow from 310M in 2010 to 403M in 2050. [1]
Asia will increase from 4.2B in 2010 to 5.1B in 2050, then start declining. [2]
The only region that is really growing is Africa. It will increase from 1B in 2010 to 2.2B in 2050. [2] Then its population density will be 67/km2. [3] Compare that to the current population density in Portugal (115/km2), in South Korea (487/km2) and in Taiwan (641/km2). [4]
Global population is predicted to grow from 7B in 2011 to 9B in 2050 and 10B in 2100 [5] and start falling soon after [6].
And according to [7], 40-50% of America-produced food is thrown away. According to [8], 1/3 of the world food is thrown away.
And this does not take into account that people eat, just for pleasure, excessive quantities of resource-intensive food (such as meat). If Americans/Europeans want to help the poor, an easy way would be to decrease (say, by 30%) their diet of meat. This will immediately reduce food demand and, for double bonus, the saved money can be donated to charity. And much arable land is wasted on subsidized inefficient corn-based ethanol. You can lobby your government to stop that.
Plus, there does not seem to be a negative correlation between population density and GDP per capita. [9]
African hunger is not caused by overpopulation. It is caused by corrupt and authoritarian governments, and by guerrillas/terrorists motivated by Marxism, Islamism, ethnic hate or simply greed.
Overpopulation fear-mongering is very old - at least as old as Malthus. One of its more recent incarnations was the 1968 book "The Population Bomb", which predicted mass starvation to occur in the 1970s.
Anyway, for better or for worse, there is already strong action taken by individuals, foundations, and Western governments, to restrict fertility in Africa.
1 : esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_11.htm
2 : esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_2.htm
3 : According to [2], Africa will have 2.2B people in 2050, and according to Google[10] and Wikipedia [11], the area of Africa is 30,221,532 km2
4 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_population_density
5 : esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_1.htm
6 : esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_6.htm
7 : http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/news/ng.asp?id=56376-us-wastes-half
8 : http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/74192/icode/
9 : http://sanamagan.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/population-population-density-gdp-per-capita-ppp/
10 : https://www.google.com.br/search?q=africa+area
11 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa
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