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Anti-GMO Activist Recants
Freddybear writes "Former anti-GMO activist Mark Lynas, who opposed genetically modified food in the 1990s, said recently, at the Oxford Farming Conference: 'I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologize for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment. As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely. So I guess you'll be wondering — what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.' To vilify GMOs is to be as anti-science as climate-change deniers, he says. To feed a growing world population (with an exploding middle class demanding more and better-quality food), we must take advantage of all the technology available to us, including GMOs. To insist on 'natural' agriculture and livestock is to doom people to starvation, and there’s no logical reason to prefer the old ways, either. Moreover, the reason why big companies dominate the industry is that anti-GMO activists and policymakers have made it too difficult for small startups to enter the field."
Kepler figured out he had it all wrong after a career spent trying to prove bad theories (Platonic model of the universe? Really?) ... and arguably launched the age of the scientific enlightenment.
I'm anxious read Mr. Lynas' coming works.
What exploding middle class? The one in China and maybe India? Everywhere else either middle class doesn't exist or is imploding like in the US and the rest of the western world.
I find this refreshing. If only everyone would take the time to reevaluate their beliefs from time to time we might be so much better off.
Cross contamination & subsequent loss of organic certification isn't an issue then?
How about Monsanto dragging innocent farmers into court?
Some are beneficial, some are horrifying. Such is life. However (due to the ridiculous patent system) most are economical devastating to small farmers. They are the wal-mart of the farming world, they are the inhibitors to sustainable farming practices.
Unfortunately, the other anti-GMO people are more likely to just start ripping this guy to shreds rather than accepting the truth. Just like the anti-vacine crowd who still claim the autism link despite the studies showing the link being completely fabricated.
Oh please! It's the lack of any scientific testing to verify these crops do not harm the environment unintentionally that is a problem.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/07/167230/colony-collapse-disorder-linked-to-pesticide-high-fructose-corn-syrup
Sounds like he has already found someone else to vilify.
The fact that meat consumption is so high is a much bigger problem than most people are willing to admit. Meat production is helping to starve people.
research has shown some GMO's are harmful.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Since when are terminator genes good for the environment? Since when have herbicide-resistant crops been good for us? Since when is it a good idea to have corn that has the BT built into every cell?
I have not read the article, but a couple of things in this summary ringed some bells: current GMOs use is not to feed the world population, for instance USA corn monopoly is empowered with Monsanto GMO corn to make farmers and countries even more dependent and them. There is a whole vicious circle involving subsidies, monoculture, corn industrial derivatives, corn feedstock, antibiotics that has nothing with "feeding the world population" but with empowering monopolies". Furthermore "'natural' agriculture", is he talking about traditional agriculture? I couldn't agree more that it's doomed. But the UN has studied Agro-ecology and found out that it could double agriculture production http://is.gd/oxtixy
I have nothing against GMOs. What I do have a problem with is patents on genetics.
I think that's what a lot of the more educated anti-GMO activists have a problem with as well. Nobody should be able to patent a life form or a DNA sequence.
Burgeoning bourgeoisie: For the first time in history more than half the world is middle-class—thanks to rapid growth in emerging countries. John Parker (interviewed here) reports. http://www.economist.com/node/13063298?story_id=13063298&source=hptextfeature
Would be interesting to know if Mr. Lynas has a new employer.
Seeing all the research showing absolutely 0% increase in food production per acre, this "i found science" line is bullshit.
In all cases, follow the money. While I'm not completely anti-GMO, the companies producing GMOs have not been honest, not been honest, and not been honest. As a long time hater and now a big advocate, I wonder who's payroll he made it on too in order to now back GMO foods. There is a tremendous amount of science showing how bad GMOs are, much worst than the anti-GMO crowd initially thought! So his "because of Science" answer is pure bullshit!
Studies have shown that GMO foods are not only unhealthy for humans, but often harm the environment. As a simple example, Poland found that a GMO corn was killing off whole colonies of bees. Poland outlawed GMO corn.
Studies showed that long term, GMO foods can cause some nasty cancers in lab rats. When mixed with a certain pesticide, the cancer was insanely fast growing and abnormally massive tumors would be found.
A very large GMO company ran smear campaigns trying to keep hiding what was GMO and what was not. Do you really trust eating foods that they don't want to tell you are genetically modified? Not only not tell you, but spend nearly a billion dollars to keep you from knowing?
That same very large GMO has been suing people left and right for having seed gone awry grow on their own farms. They have monopolized and killed off competition in many markets, many of which are overseas and impoverished areas. Interestingly, after the Mississippi river flooding, guess who bought most of the farm land? Of course it's only those Chinese and Russians that can influence the weather though, and hell an upstanding US company would never do such a thing would they?
Needless to say at this point, I don't trust anyone that changes sides based on a lie.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Really? Shouldn't the science have come first?
I bet he bought some GMO stock! Their income is going viral, literally! Who cares about social justice i.e. your right to have your crop of not infested with GMO dna and having to pony up $$$ to monsanto through blackmail. Your right to actually grow ENVIRONMENTALLY friendly crops without having to use poisons that are even illegal in warfare. Just as long as some big corporations can make some big money, who the fuck cares! Right?
This is great and all that he saw the light when it comes to science... but with technology and science comes responsibility as well. Two key issues come to mind:
(1) Cross pollination of farmers crops, and then demanding royalties from the seed owners,
(2) and engineering the crops to disable re-planting the same seeds for the purpose of profit.
One actual example would be allowing a patent to monsanto on basmati rice...
link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/jan/31/gm.food
> Moreover, the reason why big companies dominate the industry is that anti-GMO activists and policymakers have made it too difficult for small startups to enter the field.
Publicly funded research and breeding (i.e., USDA extension offices) did just fine, and still does just fine where they are still funded. The reason big companies dominate, and the reason they pursue GMOs, is because they can *own* the life, not because GMOs are inherently better for society than traditional breeding. I'm a little uncomfortable with big companies owning the DNA we rely on for sustenance.
GMO is inherently centralized, requiring large companies; "small startups" are never going to be significant in that field. It takes one farmer to make a new breed with traditional methods.
Look at the IP problems in music, films, mobile phones, software. Monsanto and others want to own IP on food. ou can live without th former, but try living without food.
Really good timing.
...Lynas jumped into his gold plated Ferrari and drove back to the country club for another round of golf with his new best friends from the Monsanto Board of Directors.
But sometimes the companies that use/sell them are.
Roundup used in commercial agriculture (food crops) only eliminated weeds for a few decades, now there are superweeds that have evolved its own immunity to Roundup.
what happens in the lab and used in the fields will find its way in to the wild (it is unavoidable)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Seriously, there is plenty of science that shows issues related to GMO crops. If not the crops themselves, the fact that a round up ready corn means several times more round up applied to the ground. This is scienfitically documented.
So I am of the opinion this guy is probably just some bought out loon.
Science, and advocate of real science, would concede there is far too much we just do not know at this point. And MANY fears that were pointed to, have been proved valid. Like infection of wild specieis.
That's SCIENCE...
The two options aren't unquestioning acceptance and total ban. GMO with strict regulations can be useful. Without it, it's a disaster waiting to happen. He is just a professional activist who can't accept that the world isn't black and white.
GMO crops aren't universally good, and they have a lack of oversight to the same degree drugs do. For something that can affect the human body just as much, this is irresponsible. Montsano recently created a variety of cucumber that results in genital baldness. We're not used to thinking of our food as drugs, or causing side effects, but given the sharp rise in the prevalence of food allergies and stuff like this, the obvious conclusion is that this is a technology we don't fully understand and has the potential to kill if misused.
More oversight is required, and blaming activists for the startup costs is stupid -- it's the patent law system that's broken, and the activists have a point regarding the safety of GMO products, even if they have been focusing on the wrong reasons.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Found this gem on wayback machine http://web.archive.org/web/20090422041121/http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto_today/2009/biotech_crop_safety.asp
"Millions of farm animals have consumed nutritious feed rations made with grain from biotech crops and people have consumed hundreds of millions of meals containing foods derived from biotech crops—all without a single substantiated instance of illness or harm due to the GM ingredient."
We all are lab rats
That's an Orwellian sounding retraction. It reads like he had a gun to his head while transcribing it.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
.. or is he just dumb?
The living standards have been getting better and still are, even in the western world. If you have some evidence to the contrary, I would like to see it. Oh you mean that the rich are getting richer so that makes you feel worse off in comparison even though you really are better off as well?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Some of us don't like the idea of corporations eventually holding patents on all our food. Sorry but if we can't sustain ourselves without giving up something so basic then we need fewer people on the planet.
Cross contamination & subsequent loss of organic certification isn't an issue then? How about Monsanto dragging innocent farmers into court?
I would personally advocate slicing GMO issues into separate bins. What you're referring to is the Intellectual Property bin which is a problem with (at least the US) most countries and the ownership (whether an instance of or the general use of) genetic material. Put all those lawsuits and patents and copyright crap in one bin.
Then you have another bin where we analyze the human element of consumption of GMO foods. What is the process to determine when something has undergone enough testing and is ready to push it forward? How many years of human trials must be held before it can be released? We do this with drugs but strangely, I haven't heard of much about this with GMO crops -- why is that?
Lastly we have a more open problem like environmental issues both surrounding the plant's effect on its environment and also the adjusted actions of the humans cultivating this crop. For example: with Roundup ready plants from Monsanto, have we really analyzed what the increased usage of chemicals like Roundup has on the immediate vicinity of the fields? Do we know that these genetic constructs that are taken from an insect and inserted into a plant do not adversely affect the pollen and have indirect affects on hay fever or honey bees? Again, how do we test this and how long should it be tested before it's pushed nationwide.
Lynas raises an interesting point I had not considered -- that my above desires for process and bureaucracy will prevent a small company from venturing into this field. On the other hand, we've been using selective breeding to move past a lot of the hurdles Lynas mentioned that GMO crops are supposed to move us even further past. It's unfortunate but this isn't a black and white issue and I'm against the unfettered proliferation of gene constructs that have been taken from other organisms and inserted into plants without sufficient testing.
The process of DNA -> Amino Acid -> Protein is still a very difficult puzzle for us as humans and I feel we should not openly experiment with inserting stuff at Point A when we don't know the full effects that yields in points B and C. I feel like there is still a lot to be achieved with selective breeding and until we have a better understanding of protein folding, we should shy away from smashing DNA into strands of plants unless it's absolutely critical to humanity. Go ahead and do that stuff in a lab to better understand it but leave it in a lab until there's a process that ensures it is safe.
My work here is dung.
Neither extreme is particularly credible, nor is going from one extreme to the other without at any point having a balanced perspective.
The technology to genetically modify food species is not bad, but misuses of the technology are, and the misuses are happening.
Amusing, lumping together global warming (is that even the name of the new scare anymore?) and GMO.
I don't think one can easily find a "Climate Change" denier. Everyone knows climates change over time.
What you will find are those that deny that climate change is more than minutely affected by man made causes.
I think the "former wrong-doer (or in this case, wrong-thinker) does right" think is cool and all, but I don't think anybody sane needed to hear this from him to form an opinion, and the anti-GMO nuts won't be swayed by it.
Prepare for him to be vilified as a 'shill' and accused of all sorts of nonsense by anti-GMO whackos.
Terminator genes have never been in a comercial product. EVER.
Congratulations, that doesn't mean GMO is always good.
It is a bad thing to breed pesticides into our food supply without absolute certainty of they are safe.
It is not a bad thing to have to label GMO foods for what they are.
....population reduction.
This can be in part accouplished with sterilizing GMO's
The real reason he changed his mind
for the science - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umFnrvcS6AQ
population reduction is as well in United Nations Agenda 21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21
Exactly. To here these Occupy types blather you'd think the middle class is sleeping under a bridge.
The standard of living for an American poor person is very high for most of the world, and mostly not so far behind socialist paradises in the EU. I'll give you that we need some sort of means-tested max-out-of-pocket universal single payer health care, but other than that it's a bunch of crybabying and class envy.
... the big corporations using them are. Software patents are debatable in the best of cases, but when the point of the software is to reproduce itself, you have serious problems if you think you can go and sue people when the pollen gets into their (otherwise non-patented) crops.
DRM as well. As bad as it is that we can't copy music files for backup, it's even worse when the main point of a crop is: you plant it, it reproduces, you sell some of it and plant some to have sustainable growth the next year.
Not, you enter into a legally-binding contract to get rid of them all and buy some new clones for the next year, because that goes against the entire theory of organisms adapting to their environment by surviving and reproducing.
GMOs aren't evil -- the big corporations that use them are.
Someone should make a GPL-licensed Potato.
A few years ago the closest grocery store to where I was living was a Coop. Which was great in the summer because it was stocked with a lot of fresh stuff from local farmers (it was a rural college town).
Well one of my biggest sources of income is the family farms I've inherited along with my Dad that we lease out. We're semi involved helping the farmer with trying new methods on our farms trying to boost yields (Rice & Soybeans are the primary crop, some years corn). This is mainly my father as he's retired and it gives him something to do, but as he's gotten up into his 70's I've started to take a more involved role in things.
One time I was at the Coop and commented about rice and lack of a particular brand that we sold our rice to which led to a conversation with one of the patrons who flipped out when I mentioned we had switched to a new hybrid seed. She went on this total anti-GMO rant at which point there were several people looking on and I said, "I said Hybrid. As in Rice A was bred with Rice B to produce the strain we plant. Farmers have been doing this for centuries now. Pretty much everything in your bag has been Genetically Modified using cross breeding."
Then I left and went on about my business leaving her red in the face not exactly sure how to respond to that.
And that's what I've never understood. To these people using cross breeding and classical Mendelian genetics to modify plants are fine. But go in scientifically and do the same thing in a sophisticated lab and suddenly it's evil.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Who cares what he has to say?
Any blanket assertion of GMOs being bad for you is just as idiotic and pointless as a blanket assertion GMOs are not bad for you.
Every case must be judged on the merits and it must not stop with the question of the qualities of the product. One must also consider the secondary effects playing god has on the environment and fucked up geopolitics of globalization meets Monsanto.
With Monsanto's deep pockets, I'm sure he was bought/bribed to retract his previous statements.
Publicly funded research and breeding (i.e., USDA extension offices) did just fine, and still does just fine where it is still funded. The reason big companies dominate, and the reason they pursue GMOs, is because they can *own* the life, not because GMOs are inherently better for society than traditional breeding. I'm a little uncomfortable with big companies owning the DNA we rely on for sustenance.
GMO is inherently centralized, requiring large companies; "small startups" are never going to be significant in that field. It takes one farmer to make a new breed.
The tawdry subject of coin comes immediately to mind. Was this person somehow encouraged to make these vast, overly general statements?
Since when are any of those things actually bad? Or at least, so bad that GM crops cannot ever be safely used to provide safe food? I understand the implications of creating plants that have what is effectively built-in DRM. I also understand that having an herbicide-resistant plant indirectly causes some issues by encouraging overuse of herbicides, but none of that actually makes the GM crops bad for us. All of those issues can easily be handled either through legislation, process changes, or through further alterations.
Get back to me when they GM crops are actually unsafe to eat, and then maybe I will see your point.
We need to go after the badness that surrounds the use of GM crops, not try and just pretend that non-GM crops are better when they definitely are not.
Oh you mean that the rich are getting richer so that makes you feel worse off in comparison even though you really are better off as well
Except that by the metric of household income the lower income tiers aren't particularly better off. The wealthy saw a significant increase in their incomes (inflation-adjusted) over the last several decades; the working poor saw almost none. See here, and especially this plot.
When they stop being the patented and wholly owned product of megacorperations simply trying to control the world's food supply.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
All food that is produced by humans through agriculture and farming has been genetically modified in some way, even though much of it happened in ancient times. Corn would cease to exist without humans. Almonds would all be poisonous. Cattle would not be docile. Wheat would scatter it's seeds before we could collect them. Man has been genetically modifying its food for thousands of years - even if we didn't always understand that's what we were doing. We actually understand the consequences of what we are doing far better than we ever did - because we are doing it consciously with science. This is what he discovered.
Income and standard of living are orthogonal metrics: standard of living can increase while income decreases, and vice-versa.
And in the western world, standard of living has increased more than income has decreased.
Since when are terminator genes good for the environment?
"Terminator genes" are a perfect example of the scaremongering on the anti-GMO side. They were never really deployed, and Monsanto has vowed not to do so.
And even if they were, you've got the idea wrong. They weren't an environmental threat - rather, terminator genes were scary because they'd make poor farmers reliant on big industry for their seeds (Terminator genes prevent the resultant plants from having viable seeds). They COULD actually be good for the environment, as they'd prevent GM plants from spreading uncontrolled (which is another scare story).
There's pluses and minuses to GM plants for food. But the debate is dominated by people with bizarre, uninformed emotional connections to one side or the other. Like yourself. Are you as brave and open minded as the guy in the OP? Having found out you're double-wrong on this, are you going to reconsider the issue and perhaps take a moment to learn about what's at stake?
I doubt it. I think it's much more likely that you'll lash out at me because I'm mean, or something equally productive.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I recall having a discussion with an anti-GMO campaigner in the late 90s in France. I was insisted that what was needed was extensive testing protocols, not unlike new drug approvals, rather than blanket opposition.
Sadly in Europe they got mostly blanket opposition while in USA we got mostly "rollover and hope that crops which produce their own DDT are not bad for you".
A total loss-loss situation.
Choose Science! Everything else is dumb.
The future of feeding a burgeoning population that's stressing the planet is Soylent Green.
...too often it's USED for profit at the expense of mankind and the environment and not for the betterment of mankind or the environment. This is a huge problem. Science is science and is great for advancement. Problem is, businessmen don't care about consequences or advancement. They simply think "how can we profit from this knowledge" and too often "environment/health/people be damned". GMO is not the problem. It's how it is USED that will/will not be the problem.
Sugapablo
Wheat and all other crops didn't spontaneously appear from nowhere. Man has been continuously modifying the genetic makeup of his environment since whenever, otherwise we wouldn't have enough food to eat. Whilst I disagree with the potential legal aspects (which is just another part of the 'intellectual property' argument), it does not mean I would think that the world should starve because we think that eating bananas will turn us into banana-people.
Strangely, his comments included in the summary are neither right nor wrong.
It gets tricky when foreign genes are introduced, no independent research is done to verify the safety claims of the company, and people are actually *forbidden* from disclosing whether or not their foods contain these foods. They may actually be just as safe as the 'natural' varieties. Or they may not.
If they are? Wonderful! It'll bear out in the studies, and people will know it's safe. In the meantime, those who are concerned have no way to do tests of their own because nobody is *allowed* to tell them whether the grain they just bought is GMO or not.
If not? We sure as *HELL* need to be able to know that so they can be pulled of the market and out of the supply chain!
It's not the GMO that scares (rational) people. It's the willful and *hostile* lack of full disclosure. Of course we *should* be able to trust that the GMO crop companies' claims of safety are correct. Just like we *should* have been able to trust the cigarette companies' claims of their own product safety. Unfortunately, history has proven, time and again, that sometimes people lie for their own self interest, even at the expense of their fellow human beings. As a result, the default position has to be *verify*. If we're not allowed to verify, we should at least be allowed to avoid. If we can't verify and we can't avoid, then they shouldn't be able to put it in our food.
Thanks only to an extremely broad definition of middle class that would include many that westerners would describe as working poor.
Anyone with merely the potential to escape poverty is considered middle class by this definition. That includes, e.g., the minimum wage fry cook because one day he could in theory become manager.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What exploding middle class? The one in China and maybe India?
In some places in Africa, too.
And? Are you saying that those people are somehow not middle class?
Nonsense.
People are earning less and working more. Meanwhile access to basic physical needs like health care are on the decline. We are headed for a next Guilded Age and many people seem to be all for it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The living standards are getting better but products keep using worse materials. Just try finding a piece of furniture made of actual solid wood.
Not everything is better off. The time it takes for a middle class person to pay for a house is now much longer. My grandparent for example managed to buy a house in 3 years while it would take me 10 years of work to buy one. He wasn't college educated and I am college educated in one of the top schools in this country. So you figure that math out.
stop modifying our food. thanks.
The main issue is that GMO has not gone through any reasonable testing.
Because of that, frankenfood companies can side step allegations that it is causing more allergies, heart issues, earlier menstruation in girls, etc, because all of those could have complex reason for increasing.
100 years from now, who the hell knows what the population will look like and have to deal with because we put profits over people today.
the easy solution is to label GMO and non-GMO
foods. let the people's dollars do the voting.
"an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment."
That's what GMOs are *supposed* to do.
But that isn't what GMOs are doing or will be doing in the forseeable future.
Lynas jumped the shark ages and ages ago.
One sad poster puts it like this:
"I'm anxious read Mr. Lynas' coming works."
I think he was missing the attention. He's looking for the love. Much like AGW denier Patrick Moore from Greenpeace. Or Yesteryear's kids entertainer David Bellamy.
Oh, and for the record: we don't need GMOs to feed the world. We need to be able to distribute the food we have. There's more than enough food for 7 billionn people being produced. USA gets enough for 1 billion and throws half of it away.
GMO or not, I want to know what I am buying. It should not matter if you are pro GMO or anti GMO, everyone does better with more information. I do not care if labelling it will cost business sales, guess what, if your product has a negative connotation because a bunch of hippies had better propaganda, you and your advert team should be fired and left to rot for doing such a bad job. Of course, I am not opposed to letting anyone that works in advertisement to be left outside to rot anyway. I digress, the point being GMO can be used for good or bad. You can setup a system where you drain the pockets of farmers and set them on a monthly schedule of what amounts to wage slavery... or you can increase the amount of antioxidants in tomatoes, and the drought resistance of staples. I want to insure that w/e it is, is safe by doing at least three generation studies on a mouse model... After that the product should be labelled as GMO and the intent code, Drought resistant - 0, antioxidants - 1, .... and so on.
>there is no empirical evidence for CO2 causing warming
go research the atmosphere of Venus and let us know what you find out.
The Guilded Age was an age of economic growth, great increase in prosperity of ordinary people and of technological advances. I don't see why something like that would be a bad thing? Inequality of income is a natural consequence of the same system that historically creates the greatest increase in prosperity, namely economic liberty combined with strong rule of law and protection of private property. You know, the system that formerly impoverished socialist economies are these days moving towards and, as a result, experiencing huge growth.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The Gini coefficient of the US is increasing. That's income inequality. It lends weight to phrases like "the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer". While it could be that the poor are getting richer while the rich are getting ludicrously richer, that's still seems, you know, kinda unfair. It's certainly class envy, if you want to be a dick about it. But when profits are privatized while losses are socialized, as they were in the 2007 econopocalypse, you get a little angry about the weight of the yoke we bear.
If you have not seen the movie Frankenweenie yet, do so now, for the sake of science!
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
GMOs can have profound effects on the body.
What does the F stand for again?
Or that it's not (going to be) a huge freaking problem.
Resources of all kinds are going to be stressed.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I'm actually going to challenge your assertion. I'd argue that the vast majority of the world's starvation problems are distribution-related, not yield related.
How much food goes to waste every year? (Quite a bit!) And how many people suffer because of a lack of food production in their immediate area, while other parts of the world produce more than enough to feed them?
"Every increase in crop yields due to the use of GM crops saves the lives of some people that would otherwise die from starvation. It's a direct and obvious relation - there's no need to do a scientific study here."
Personally, I believe we should be very careful with the use of genetically modified crops, especially considering historical evidence of what can go wrong with new discoveries, scientific consensus can change drastically, the impact of greed and backroom politics.
If one understands how the pesticide works, it's not so scary. Per WikiP: "When insects ingest [BT] toxin crystals, the alkaline pH of their digestive tract denatures the insoluble crystals, making them soluble and thus amenable to being cut with proteases found in the insect gut, which liberate the cry toxin from the crystal. The Cry toxin is then inserted into the insect gut cell membrane, forming a pore. The pore results in cell lysis and eventual death of the insect."
Humans, and I believe all vertebrates, have acidic digestive tracts, so BT is not active and cannot hurt you.
Not to say, in some remote universe, you couldn't be allergic to it, but that's true with any new molecule introduced into your person.
Have a look at Mr. Lynas' website, http://www.marklynas.org, and read about his views on other environmental issues:
Birds being killed by wind turbines: "But there is nothing to suggest currently that biodiversity is a reason to hold up deployment"
Paper on 'Worldwide health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident’: he calls "junk science" and downplays the dangers of nuclear energy
On GMO: "The idea that consumers have a ‘right to choose’ and therefore GMOs should all be labelled irritates me"
On every single issue he takes an industry-apologist / environmental-contrarian view, and on environmental topics where there is no possibility for such a position, he doesn't comment at all. If he sometimes took the contrary view, I could respect that as an independent scientific thinker, but when he always takes the contrary/apologist view, I start to get a little suspicious.
Appears to be more of a wolf-in-environmetalist's clothing to me. But go ahead a read his other writings and make up your own mind.
"Every increase in crop yields due to the use of GM"
Of which there is no evidence.
"saves the lives of some people that would otherwise die from starvation"
Except that they starve when food doesn't get to them. If GMO foods were getting there then non-GMO foods would too.
When you bring science into it, I have heard that at least in one case, the round-up corn which is GMO and resistant to round-up the weed killer, is easier to keep weed free, but the crop havested has higher concentrations of round-up in it which is not healthy. So GMO may not be all bad but not all GMO crops are good from a health standpoint.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TylvUGJIi_w
well done sir, well done.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The problem with GMO's has always been primarily with the idea that you can patent life. We need to fix that problem and FAST. All the old patents should be invalidated and no compensation should be made since it was immoral to do in the first place.
The other problem is with safety. I think many GMO foods have proven to be safe but new ones are made every day. For that very reason I still support labeling GMO and allowing informed people to make their own decisions.
If we waited for absolute certainty , we would still be single celled.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
SO FAR.
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What happens if terminator genes spread to non-GM plants, leading to most/all plants having no viable seeds? It's not so easy to get back from that one.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
How much of this GMO is just for pesticide tolerance? If it is anywhere a major percentage we are one slippery slope.
Monsanto uses the delta endotoxin from Bacillus thuringiensis. It's been used as a pesticide since 1901. It's the most widely used "natural" pest control agent in the context of organic farming (where the crystals are dissolved in water and sprayed on the plants).
The crystal structure of Bt endotoxin, when exposed to the alkaline environment of an insect's digestive tract, breaks down and becomes soluble where it is broken by proteases in the insect gut and the product forms pores in the gut -- terribly in convenient for organisms with open circulatory systems; the ensuing cell lysis through self-digestion kills the bug.
Humans have acidic digestive tracts and the toxin is very rapidly lysed into dozens of short polypeptides. The oral LD50 for mouse is 17300 mg/kg body mass (e.g. a mouse needs to eat 17x it's own body mass of the stuff before it has a 50% chance of dying from it) - it may be similar for humans, but there's no record of human illness from it.
When engineered into a plant, the primary concern would be whether or not the protein could be considered a potential antigen that provokes an allergic response. Since we know the primary sequence and structure of the molecule, we know that it contains none of the epitopes that are associated with human allergic responses. We also know that it's very rapidly degraded in the human digestive tract into effectively inert peptides.
In fact, it's safe to say that we know more about the genetics and composition of genetically modified grain plants than we do about naturally crossed plants. From a food safety point of view, GMO plants are let slide because the risk from them (despite widespread consumption) is too low to measure using current methods. In fact, crops such as celery and strawberries (non-GMO) have comparatively very high risk associated with them. The greatest risks are posed by: the soil composition, water used, manually applied chemical agents, and worker handling of the product.
There's an extremely large amount of scientific and agricultural literature on these subjects. It's not right to say that we don't know them to be safe. The scientific and agricultural communities have a very solid handle on the safety of these products, despite public perception to the contrary.
You would have a point if the 0.1% was doing all the innovating and increasing productivity. The fact is that nearly all improvements in wealth have been due to technology and those who are making disproportionate gains are typically those who play with money and screw the economy.
Fuck wall street. It's too bad Bin Laden hit the wrong targets. He would have done us a favor wiping out Goldman Sachs and their ilk. He'd probably be alive if that were the case and we wouldn't be trillion dollars in the hole.
You have those figures precisely backwards. Currently, the average cost of a home is $119,600. Average income, $46,326. The average house is 2,700 square feet. So a 2700 sq foot house costs 2 1/2 times income today.
In 19040, average income was $1,368, average home cost $3,920.00, or 3 times income. That average house was 1,100 square feet - less tan half the size of the average house today. Certainly it's possible that YOUR grandparents were more hardworking than you are personally, choosing to accomplish things rather than post excuses on slashdot, but in general people today can more easily afford a home than people 70 years ago, and their homes are twice as big.
To compare the same size house, an 1,100 sq ft house today is about 1.8 years of average income, compared to 3 years of average income in 1940.
So if you're not doing as well as your grandparents, it's not the country, it's YOU.
The fact that meat consumption is so high is a much bigger problem than most people are willing to admit. Meat production is helping to starve people.
Actually, the latest research appears to give red meat a somewhat cleaner bill of health than you might expect: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=meat-of-the-matter-modern-methods-preserving-cooking-meat-healthy It turns out that it's just processed meats that are bad for you, not meat itself. I've always wondered how such a "natural" part of the human diet could be so unhealthy, and now we know: it probably isn't, not in and of itself. It's the preservatives and all the other crap added to processed meat that's the real problem.
I bought in.
--SLC Punk
GMO's are dangerous. The introduction of man made proteins into a biosphere that has the goals of:
1) Destroying all natural varieties through cross pollination.
2) Destroy plants, animals or insects.
3) Destroy the third world who cannot pay for GMO food.
4) Destroy the freedom and economic independence of all nations so that only a few can produce food to exercise poorly veiled eugenics projects.
GMO's destroy, they do not enable, they do not feed people, they kill people, environment, animals, insects and the environment for worse than the oil industry does.
GMO is about destruction AND _control_, and it has nothing to do with producing food.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Are the two largest countries in the world too small for you?
I would also add that the mindless gasbag has presented a fallacy of false choice; use GMO or starve. We are told to believe that despite Monsanto's business plan of enslaving the world's farmers, that they are just doing this out of the kindness of their hearts to feed an overpopulated world. Here's a thought, reduce population growth instead. Statistics show that free access to education and contraception reduces population growth without imposing martial law. But no one gets rich off of giving something necessary away for free. So we are doomed.
Even then, it's not the cost of the materials for the home, it's the "value" placed on the financial worth of the land. If one CEO is earning $1.5 million and can afford a ten acre lot, that sets the price for everyone else earning $500,000 and $50,000.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
To feed a growing world population (with an exploding middle class demanding more and better-quality food), we must take advantage of all the technology available to us, including GMOs. To insist on 'natural' agriculture and livestock is to doom people to starvation, and there’s no logical reason to prefer the old ways, either.
This is a bunch of crap.
Modern industrial agriculture does NOT maximize food output per acre. It certainly does not maximize food output per input (fertilizers, fuel, etc). It maximizes food output per farmer. And it does so by disregarding good soil and water management practices, which means that it damages the systems it relies on over the long term.
Much higher yields can be obtained by intensive cultivation of smaller plots of land, with much more attention paid per acre. These techniques usually (though not always) also serve to preserve soil, nutrient, and water resources.
Plant have evolved to produce a tremendous amount of pesticide and herbicide, fungicide chemicals to compete and survive. They have also evolved to be tolerant of herbicides produced by other plants and viruses. Thus even organic produce has large numbers of completely untested chemicals that are naturally produced by the plants themselves. I think many people somehow form a cognative dissonance if they think about this too much, so they basically do doublethink.
Some of these natural defensive chemicals in plants that we know are quite deadly to us (say glycoalkaloids like solanine in greenish potato skins which are nerve toxins). Although most foods that we eat today have gone through many informal "trials", I doubt anyone can tell you what the process was, nor what the acceptably safe levels is of the various toxins are. We simply have "grandfathered" these foods into or diets. For example, the potato isn't even that old, although cultivated for ~7000 years, it only made worldwide since the 16th century and is now one of the top 5 food crops in the world. A similar food is Cassava root which is outside of south america/africa/asia is only consumed as Tapioca. Cassava is much more poisonous to humans than potatos (via cyanide poisoning), yet widely consumed as a food-security crop in much of Africa and some of Asia.
Certainly testing should be done on all things sold for food (I'm not advocating no testing), but I doubt that any level of testing would be sufficient to avoid all risk, nor even if it could, it would not satisfy many of the folks opposed to GM.
I imagine the real fear that most folks have about GM crops is not about the technology at all, it is simply the unrealized angry feeling of helplessness that as a society that we have evolved to be completely dependent on others for our own survival. We do not grow our own crops, we do not hunt, we do not forge our own tools, we do not build our own homes, basically we are at the mercy of greater society to provide us with the means of survival and we are angry about anything that might upset the current status quo. Simultaneously we discount/ignore all the massive changes and risks we have taken just to get us to our current point in history as a sunk cost.
Certainly there is much to fear, but I think much of our fear is just a reflection of our hidden anger about our evolution into helplessness. Typically fears are conquered by knowledge, experience and (when conditions warrant it) conditioning, but since in many folks these fears don't appear to be quelled by these factors, it's likely not fear at all, but emergent anger. People are just angry about having to be dependent for their sustinance from someone else, but supress that anger until some proposes a change and that event sets them off. Only when people get over their anger, they can tackle the fear and use it constructively to make sure that the proper risk/reward/testing tradeoffs are being made.
Whereas in 1940, one income.
"Exploding middle class"
Since when did THIS happen? We have next to NONE in the middle class, at least in America. Middle class is comfortable living with some money left over for saving/etc. That doesn't mean 30k a year for a household of 2.
Saying that GMO's are bad because you don't like Monsanto's business tactics is like saying computing technology is bad because you don't like Microsoft's (or Google's or Apple's, take your pick) business tactics, or that telecommunication is evil because you don't like AT&T's (etc.) business tactics.
Trying to increase yeilds to meet the demands of what is simply too many people for the world to support is just putting off the inevitable crash of the food supply. Genetically modified crops won't help when tornados rip the crops from the ground and hail damages what's left. Genetically modified crops won't help when there is drought one year and floods the next. We won't know what harm GM crops can do until it happens. It will probably be something no one thought of, but it will kill us anyway. There is far more science we don't know, than what we do.
I'd like Mr. Mark Lynas to go over to India where they use them for guinea pigs, and explain to the thousands upon thousands of farmers that trusted in GM crops! To the thousands of lives lost because all of their GM crops withered and died! The countless people that spent all their money of this suppose-ed miracle seed. Or how about all the Farmers in the rest of the world that are sued out of work and home by evil corporations like Monsanto simply because they are allow to copyright their GM seed?
I wonder who paid this guy off.
Nuclear weapons have never been in a commercial product. SO FAR.
The Guilded Age was the run-up to global war. The 20th-century totalitarian states arguably all existed in part due to huge inequality during this period.
I bet you were paid $50 by Greenpeace to post this! Haha all facts that exist are now invalid, SUCK IT
Until genetically engineered foods are proven to be safe I will continue to oppose them in our food supply and our ecosystems. We should be erring on the side of safety with these Frankenfoods and not simply assuming they are safe until proven unsafe. They should be banned until proven safe.
The most-recent attempt at labeling in California (which failed this past November even as the state re-elected Obama and Feinstein), for example, was political garbage: A natural foods guy funded a lot of the effort and it specifically required putting scary labels on foods that competed with his "natural" products.... rather than requiring honest labeling of ALL modified food. Sorry. FAIL.
When the anti-GM food people are that transparently corrupt and dishonest they destroy ANY credibility and anti-GM activist might have with the public
Popper-falsifiability is rarely possible for much of scientific research and Popper has said that it should not be a strict requirement for scientific claims. Just because the nature of the universe is such that not everything fits into the nice little boxes we've made up far doesn't mean that it's not possible to investigate and make determinations about.
The problem with genetic engineering crop is no different than the problem of the cheetah. You take away from a species it ability to environmentally adjust (minimize its genetic diversity) to climate change, disease and pathogens, and other forces of nature, you potentially destroy the species. Fundamentally we are playing at a level we don't understand. Whether we are endangering our health or our planets, it is just too early to tell, and as a result we need to be wary and cautious.
I find this interesting in Mr. Lynas's statement:
"As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing..."
I agree with his mission statement. In fact, it's best argument for the labeling of GMO foods there is. But until GMO foods are labeled as such, people won't know what diet they're choosing. Let GMOs be labeled and give people the real choices they have a right to.
The fact is that atheist conventions are filled with people who used to be (perhaps one might even say mostly are) die-hard Catholics or fiery Evangelicals. Then they had their little epiphany and now they understand "what's really right".
The most rabid faith-based organizations are likewise filled with people that at one time were certain of what they were doing, and then they "found God" and have some sort of monopoly on the Truth....this time, for sure!
Life isn't like that.
Life is never black and white, it's a whole slew of grays.
While I agree it takes some courage to make a 180 on your beliefs based on (what you assert) are 'new things you now understand', it may simply mean that you're one of those addictive 'follower' personalities.
"Believers" of all waters are just annoying.
-Styopa
Excellent and informative post, I do wish there was a reference however.
I'm not actually sure whether you're joking. In any case, gene contamination risk is (rightly, I think) seen as a benefit of terminator genes: if modified gene content does spread somehow, it would be less likely to continue to spread (over generations) further afield from the original contamination. There's a natural stop to the spreading of plants with limited ability to reproduce.
To the extent you're serious, I suppose that, yes, you've identified a potential concern. Also a potential concern is the possibility that consuming GM plants will turn us into zombies. Either of these scenarios would require mechanisms to exist that we have no evidence of, but there's no absolute reason either of those things couldn't happen.
However, there's a lot of risks that are much more likely and that should probably be higher up on the list of concerns. I certainly don't dispute there are legitimate risks to using GM technology, but there's also serious risks to closing off those avenues - and if demands a real, informed debate where pros, cons, risks and rewards are all weighed seriously.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I was raised as one of those old-soul, hippie, organic gardeners. In a perfect world, we'd all grow our own food in our own backyard and we'd probably all be healthier for it. Personally, I'm not a fan of most supermarket produce. If you've never eaten an heirloom tomato grown in your own soil, then you won't understand. Most supermarket produce is bland and devoid of nutrients in comparison to what you pick from your own backyard. However, I realize home gardening isn't terribly plausible for most people. As the human race spreads and populates more of the planet, we have more demand for food and less land to grow it on (it seems a reduction in population would be a better fix, but I'll argue that some other day). I can understand the want to genetically enhance crops. The concern is the motivation. Monsanto isn't fiddling with genetics because they're good folks and want to feed the starving masses; they want to turn a profit. As such, they're GMO is less about hearty, well adjusted plants, and more about terminator seeds and selling more pesticide. They couldn't care less about the health of the people eating their crops, so long as links to health problems aren't tangible enough to make a court case. The truth is, it'll be decades before we know for sure GMOs aren't slowly killing us. I realize most of the research says GMO is safe, and if that GMO was all about doing some good in the world, I'd be lots more likely to take those claims at face value. It might be worth taking a risk if the cause is noble. However, I'd rather not gamble with the health of the entire population for the sake of lining Monsanto's coffers. I, personally, don't want to eat their creations and I don't want to support those evil bastards. That leads to another major point: choice. In a few years, we may not have one. Pollen doesn't stop at fence lines or read signs. When you introduce this type of organism, it spreads. Once it's established, there's no good way to fight it. Once it's in the silo or your cereal box, there's no good way to discern mutant from natural. Just because I don't want to eat their demons seeds, doesn't mean I'll have a choice in the matter.
What an amazing sellout. I hope the money was worth it.
What's unfair in inequality? We're created inequal, just look at the body sizes. Shorter feedback that exists thanks to our minds amplifies those inequalities way faster than they would have happened among the animals, but this would have happened anyway.
Would you protest about some people being born pretty and others not? Would you protest about pretty girls getting 10x more attention than uglier ones? Would you impose a "tax" on pretty girls, making them sleep with ugly men so their children aren't born even more prettier?
Those with money better understand what life is about, what's your complain again? That you cannot adapt to living conditions on planet Earth?
GMO is just a bad idea. Genes don't stay put. Because of Round-Up resistant GMO crops, we already are seeing Round-Up resistant weeds.
Besides, some of us may not want food that makes its own pesticide.
My problem with GMO crops has got buggerall to do with gene manipulation itself. The current GMO foodcrops are being genetically manipulated not for higher yields, but for greater resistance to frighteningly strong pesticides. Quite predictably this particular regime of blasting weeds with weedkiller that left "most" of the weeds dead have also now bred "superweeds" which need multiple times the originally recommended dose of GMO-crop pesticides to keep them at bay. The worst-case scenario is that this arms-race against nature is probably going to end up with some version of Paolo Bacigalupi's "windup" universe. At best we can look forward to an increasingly toxic food supply.
Reference : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19594335
There is something very fishy about this guy's sudden "enlightenment".
In principle, there's nothing wrong with GMOs. Then there's practice. It's hard to predict the effects of some new gene introduced, and it's hard to measure the impact and l. For one thing (and I'm not a nutritionist), but I understand that some GMOs (but presumably not all) are more allergenic than their unmodified versions. And we're only now starting to really understand (as a culture) the impact of food allergies, short-term and long-term.
Sounds to me like Monsanto is holding this guy's family hostage.
The cheapest way to blacken a movement is to insert your people into that movement at the beginning. Usually, your agents then disrupt and destroy from within. Sometimes your agent rises to a high position in the movement, giving you the option to have the person publicly denounce the movement, as is the case here.
Mark Lynas simply reveals himself as yet another 'trojan horse' in a long history of the same. Do you really think giant international corporations and intelligence agencies, both of which have billions to spend on their agendas, ever hesitate for even one second in funding such tactics.
Monsanto is probably the most evil corporation to ever arise, and that is saying something. Pro-GMO articles on the web are ALWAYS a direct result of a large Monsanto pay-off. Monsanto, like so many international American corporations before it, is fully in bed with the United States intelligence agencies, and gets their full support as a consequence of the number of major politicians Monsanto has bought over the years.
Slashdot is a major 'pay-for-play' propaganda site, as can been seen from the number of stories highlighted that either bash Iran or praise Israel (laughable, when you think how little such stories have to do with the supposed remit of Slashdot in the first place). Selling the depraved 'brave new world' of Monsanto is riskier for the owners of Slashdot, since even the dumbest of nerds can figure out Monsanto's true agenda and vile business methods.
Slashdot tries the science 'uber alles' approach, that worked so wonderfully for the USA eugenics movement that gave Hitler and the Nazis every piece of their eugenic social engineering programs. Unfortunately, it is the memory of such pseudo-science activities that were pushed at the time by ALL the mainstream American scientific publications that makes people understand that science never equals giving supposed backers of scientific 'research' free reign.
Evolution is a random process, and cannot contradict activation energies that limit likely chemical reactions found in life. Man-made genetic engineering is 'semantic' and can create circumstances infinitely unlikely in nature. This means that the likelihood of creating a dreadful 'system bug' that would wreak havoc on life on Earth is statistically significant, even when the research is NOT trying to produce genetic weapons. When the research is military, the possibility of producing mass life terminating viruses, prions, etc approaches 100%.
We've already had one 'whoops' moment when the AIDS virus was entered into the Human population, because the cretin behind the oral polio vaccine in Africa broke all safety protocols, and used monkeys to produce the early vaccines. AIDS appeared simultaneously across Africa after mass vaccination programs with the contaminated OPV.
Later, kids across the planet were murdered by idiot medical scientists who produced the Human growth hormone they were treated with, by extracting the hormone from the corpses of adult Humans (again, breaking known safety protocols). Again with AIDS, AIDS had its small explosion in the West when blood checking protocols were disabled with blood donated by the dregs of society, as a result of pressure from American medical companies that made vast profits from cheap sources of Human blood.
When large amounts of money are involved, you can NEVER (I repeat NEVER) trust the so-called science, or the so-called scientific experts. You don't rise to the top of your field by questioning the motives of the people who pay massive grants for 'useful' corporate research.
I think Monsanto has his family gaged and bound with a death threat deadline.
The 20th-century totalitarian states arguably all existed in part due to huge inequality during this period.
I think it's much more complicated than that: Russia was arguably even worse before the Gilded Age, because the majority of the population were serfs. The country wasn't particularly industrialized by 1917 either, so most of the Gilded Age excess passed it by. (The excesses of existing aristocracy, of course, continued right up until the Bolsheviks took over, and the peasants were still in miserable condition.) Germany was the complete opposite: the country was one of the best-developed in Europe, and Bismarck had introduced what were then incredibly novel and progressive welfare programs when it unified (of course, the primary goal was to discourage communist revolution). Even after WWI, despite hyperinflation and depression, Germany had an enormous middle class and was in much better condition - or at least had much more potential - than the vast majority of the world and even Europe. That Hitler was able to take over had very little to do with lower-class discontent; in fact, the parties which actually advocated (or claimed to) for the working class, the Social Democrats and Communists, were the primary opponents of the Nazis. If they had cooperated (instead of the Communists denouncing the Social Democrats as "social fascists"), or if the German conservatives didn't foolishly ally themselves with Hitler, the result could have been much different.
If anything, I would argue that the countries which experienced some of the most spectacular benefits and disparities of the Gilded Age - the US and UK - managed to stay relatively stable.
And yet you didn't require one for the far less comprehensive and detailed OP?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
people are genetically modified organisms. But somehow human cloning is morally wrong and getting cooked in a backscatter x-ray at the airport for the sake of security theater isn't. What is it about GMO foods that scares us? Is there a difference between good GMO and bad GMO? Is it fair to lump GMO under one good/bad paradigm?
Good people sometimes do bad things but it doesn't necessarily make them bad people. Good people sometimes do bad things that do necessarily turn them into bad people. And sometimes bad people do good things and it can either turn their life around or not. In the same vein, GMO foods might actually harm us but it might actually be worth the trade off. Or it might not.
I don't feel any more enlightened by this revelation that the starter of the anti-GMO movement is remorseful about his stance, when he thought he was right then and he thinks he's right now. He sounds like he didn't know what he was talking about then, but he's drunk the GMO kool-aid now. How stupid is he going to feel if in 25 -50 years we discover that GMO food can harm us? Dumber than he'd feel if he kept on with his anti-GMO movement after he changed his mind about it? Somehow I think if we all just slowed down life enough that we could all just grow our own food this whole argument would be moot. I work as an engineer crunching time for deadlines and I can tell you most of them are arbitrary and pointless, much like this whole debacle. In summary, no one knows shit, so why are we acting like we do.
Not the same at all.
There's a difference between adaptations which can occur within the boundaries and rules of a functioning system, and changing the system itself.
Taming bovines for agriculture and selectively breeding apples and almonds is like winning a video game by being a smart player.
Directly altering the DNA of an apple or a nut or an animal is like hacking the code base of the same video game. It's very easy to crash the whole system.
When that system is our biosphere, it matters.
Not having read TFA, I hope that the summery given is a simplified version of what he meant.
The world is too complex and interdependent for something to be all good (with no drawbacks), or all good (with no benefits), and he seems to be insinuating that GMO foods have no drawbacks, which is just as wrong as saying the have no benefits.
But, other than that, I basically agree with his assessment that we NEED (or will need) it.
The world population is growing too fast for our current food production methods to keep pace with demand forever, and unless we are willing to sit passively by during mass starvation on scales never before seen, wars breaking out over farmland, crops, seeds and food animals, and extinction as local peoples turn to endangered species for food, we will REQUIRE GMO foodstuffs that can mature faster, grow larger, and sustain themselves on less, and/or in different environments.
Otherwise we will outstrip our planet's ability to support us.
We've already stripped the oceans of their most bountiful harvests, and are eating and passing off fish we once called "Junk Fish", as the high-demand fish become scarcer and scarcer.
But we must keep in mind and learn from our experiences with adding new substances and quantities to diets, such as plastics imitating estrogen, and causing population crashes and mutations in animals like frogs, and crocodiles. Also brain diseases like BSD / Scrapie / CJD / Kuru.
BSE (Mad Cow), first appears in 1984 and makes clear that there are dangers to radically changing the long-term diets of animals and humans by introducing substances and quantities of substances that have never before been seen in their diets. In this case, the introduction of massive amounts of proteins from meat (and brains) to replace vegetable sourced proteins in low quality animal feed, deniers point out that cattle have likely eaten meat proteins (via bugs) from time immemorial, though never in the quantities found in modern feed.
Mad Cow (and it's human variant vCJD [not CJD]) came from the well known, and well contained, disease called "Scrapie" (because it caused, among other things, the infected to rub up against things and scrape off their fur) in sheep and goats. The source of the disease was not known, but what WAS known was that it was common in some places, had been known of for at least 250 years, and that the meat AND brains of the Scrapie infected were human edible with no ill effects.
Scrapie remained a rare, species specific, disease that had no effect on predators UNTIL the introduction of industrial farming methods, specifically the use of low quality feed (farming byproducts, rather than valuable crops) that needed it's protean content supplemented by slaughterhouse waste. This introduced the Scrapie Prion into cattle feed, and eventually produced "Mad Cow Disease". But something changed in the transfer of disease from one species to another. It changed from a single species, predator resistant disease, to a food transmissible disease to which predators were not immune. (FSE, the feline version was first discovered in the 1970's, when domestic cats developed it after eating BSE infected cat-food. FSE is also found in captive big cats, thought to have been feed BSE infected meat. As far as we know FSE is unknown in the wild.)
My own theory is that all natural predators have a natural immunity / resistance to "Spongiform Diseases", the prion's of which are found almost exclusively in nerve tissue. This means that catching i
THINK! It's patriotic
Ah I stopped watching Fox news.
How is the parent post flamebait? What has happened to people's ability to comprehend a rephrasing the same question into a "cautionary tale"?
Pointing out the fact that even people have been unjustly demonized by a label is both informative and insightful. It does not equate anyone's view with that of the Nazi's, but (for anyone who knows their history) it is a vivid description of the power a label can have over human behavior. The Irish did it differently, when the English forced them to wear green, they turned it into a symbol of pride.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
GMO has become and was largely about the business of SELLING chemicals. But if Monsanto can OWN contaminated nature they'll be glad to migrate from chemicals to owning nature.
People seem to think plants are simple so lets hack them before we hack human DNA using our limited understanding of the code nature is programmed in. What could possibly go wrong?? Lets not ask Computer Scientists about their experience with man-made programming in completely artificial environments that are 100% verifiable...
FYI: Plants have more genes than humans. I say, let us learn on simple organisms like humans before moving to plants.
Too many people? Use Birth Control. At least humans starve and it is THEIR FAULT but to wreck all of life.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Ah, no. You simply don't understand. Monsanto is simply attempting, like others, to control the world's food supply, using a number of techniques, etc. Try this, for starters, you no nothing, GMO shrill:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/promise042403.cfm
or this:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/montreal060222.cfm
Etc., etc., etc. I have ZERO confidence in idiot, narcissitic 'scientists' playing god with DNA, as opposed to the very fine tuned, natural processes that have been developing over millions of years through evolution, etc., etc.
And I am a scientist. And I study genetics. We are, to put it politely, in the Stone Age of genetics and don't have a clue. We have discovered fire, but think we know how to make a fusion reactor. Don't get me started.
Terminator genes seem like a good idea to me - wouldn't they reduce the chance the GMO would successfully cross pollinate with other strains?
GMOs are as safe as driving without your hands on the wheel, in a car with good alignment, on a straight road.
The trouble doesn't come until nature throws us a curve.
It is a bad thing to breed pesticides into our food supply without absolute certainty of they are safe.
But it is ok to spray or add those very same pesticides to your food supply without absolute certainty that they are safe, as long as they are not GMed in?
How anti-science could you be?
While it is certainly possible that GMO COULD be useful, at the moment they are being horribly abused. The culture around GMO's is so big corporation friendly that no attention is being paid to the consequences. We already have massive crop failures, not to mention 1/3 of the world of the world's food supply is entirely dependant upon Monsanto, who in some countries gets paid by every farmer, under the assumption that everyone was using their seeds, (whether they wanted to or not, whether they even were or not).
Until we fix this, GMO's are more dangerous then the Nuclear Bomb.
I'd write a long post making fun of your poor grammar, inability to read, paranoia, and sad little grasp at authority, but it feels like a waste to argue with an AC.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
You are confusing production in developing countries with transport form developed countries. While it would be nice for the latter to be improved (while somehow avoiding the problem of cheap or free imported food destroying local farmers' business), improving the former will most certainly help, or do you deny that crop failures in developing countries have ever harmed anyone?
It's true that people take up space and use up resources. But they also create spaces worth being in and produce resources. Also, the more people we have, the more innovation we have. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource
Most of the USA's land and about half its water goes to livestock agriculture. The livestock runoff then pollutes most of the other half. See:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/
While a small amount of clean organic naturally-fed unprocessed meat (especially fish before mercury and dioxin polluted them) may be healthy in a diet, the quantities and types of animal product most US Americans are eating are part of why US health is so poor.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
On Earth, we could reduce water consumption by growing vegetables indoors. But in any case, we can always condense fresh water out of the air or distill it from the oceans if we have cheap energy, which we will get soon from cheap solar panels (and maybe cheap hot or cold fusion soon). The more people, the sooner we will get those innovation breakthroughs.
Since the Solar System could support quadrillions of people living in style in space habitats, even if one was to argue the Earth was overpopulated, even limited agricultural land is no reason to limit human population growth any time soon, even if one might suggest an aesthetic limit on the Earth perhaps, like putting an occupancy limit on a restaurant in a city.
The repentant anti-GMO activist is wrong on the need for GMOs, because GMOs (even if safe) are solving the wrong problem. To begin with, people starve or are malnourished for economic reasons that could be solved with a global "basic income". The market does not hear the needs of people without money, so the simplest solution to malnutrition is to give people money so the market will listen to their needs. Yes, this requires some level of social consensus leading to enforced redistribution of resources. Frances Moore Lappe and others explains why less people does not mean less starvation.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-it
http://windward.hawaii.edu/facstaff/dagrossa-p/articles/WhyCantPeopleFeedThemselves.pdf
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Although a semi-rebuttal to Lappe that ignores distribution issues:
http://www.hoodrivernews.com/news/2002/sep/18/lappe-response-think-locally-starve-globally/
Agricultural robotics (including for the home gardener) and solar panels are going to change the face of agriculture over the next twenty years to produce lots of food for all, if we want that future:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
We do not need GMO crops to feed the planet. What we need is to do things like grind up rocks to make cheap organic fertilizer:
http://remineralize.org/
And then we need a space program. And we need to be better stewards of the oceans (rather than overfish because our economic systems are broken in that sense).
The current focus on plant breeding, whether GMO or conventional, has produced monocultures of crops that are dependent on s
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What's the more feasible solution?
Solving distribution problems ... or growing more so there's still enough left after waste.
My own opinion, the 1st requires changing human nature which is pretty hard to do.
This planet is overpopulated with people. Until there is a viable way to control population growth we are on a path to eventually destroy the planet we live on. Producing more food through genetic modification is a panacea as is fracking. Both have serious ethical issues attached to them. The Earth cannot sustain a population of 6 billion people and it can't begin to sustain 9 billion. Argue all you want to about whether a person has achieved "scientific enlightenment," but for fucks sake let's sometime take a look at the real issues.
What happens if terminator genes spread to non-GM plants, leading to most/all plants having no viable seeds?
It's only a problem if all of the plants gain the terminator genes at once, which is vanishingly unlikely. Otherwise, what happens is that the plants that get the terminator gene get immediately selected out of the gene pool.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
FYI I have compared a same sized house (similar number of sq meters) in a similar neighborhood. Yes my grandfather was a hard working person however I could not buy a same sized house in the same time frame he did even if I worked overtime. I have crunched the numbers more than once. I am a software engineer with a graduate degree so its not like I am earning minimum wage here. My grandfather was a stone mason in case you were wondering.
You can downmod me all you want. I know what I am talking about. I have the documents of the transaction and I know the regular wages in that era. I talked with my grandmother while she was still alive. I have seen similar studies of people both in the US and elsewhere in Europe claiming the same thing. If you read this article you can clearly see even back in the 1980s houses in the UK were a lot more affordable than they are now.
What did not exist back then was the ease of credit people have now so house prices were not inflated nearly to the same degree. But you can keep drinking the kool aid as much as you want.
Another chart this time house prices vs income in Melbourne Australia 1965-2010.
Bingo. Most of the extra cost has been on land. Easier credit compared to back then also means people accept these highly inflated prices when they wouldn't do it otherwise.
1. Restricting access to information has risks. Usually the greater risk is incurred by the party who has less access to information.
1 a. as noted above by many, currently food that is not genetically modified cannot in the USA be labeled as such, and food that is genetically modified either is rarely or never labeled as such. One may say the first instance is a de jure or legal prohibition, while the second instance is a de facto prohibition.
1 b. One argument to continue this situation is that the use of such information will have bad results, or is illogical or based on unscientific.
1. c. extend 1 b. to other consumer items. Is there a scientific basis to prefer disc brakes over drum brakes? You can make an argument that since they both stop you in time, there isn't. Or a recording made with a Stradavarius violin vs. a modern, or this wine vs. that wine, and so on. The rationale to say a consumer should not have access to the information is that someone else knows better, someone else makes the decision for some other people.
1. d. Who chooses who is the people deciding things for other people? Who chooses who does not get to decide.
1. e. Quo bono? Entities with power and influence are more likely to take on the powers to do the deciding. This favors entities of larger scale, big companies over individuals or small companies, entities with greater wealth, and excludes others.
1. f. Entities with influence, wealth, power are more likely to conduct or pay for scientific research that supports their continued position in society. The result is that 'science' may be quite accurate in the research it does, but skewed in the big picture not looking in other areas. Like the story of the drunk looking for his lost wallet under a streetlight. When someone helps him and they can't find it, he says, "well, I lost it over there in that dark alley. " "What?!? Why have we been wasting time looking under the streetlight?" ""Because it's too dark in alley to see anything." A more concrete example: scientific research into drugs and medication is chasing chemicals that are created in a lab, as opposed to something naturally occurring. Naturally occurring chemicals can't be patented. As time goes on naturally occurring drug are being overshadowed by invented drugs.
1. g. Do individuals have the right to make wrong decisions? This is one of the arguments against labeling GMO--that there is not 'real' reason to object to GMO food. Back to someone making decisions for someone else. Who watches the watchers.
1. h. Conclusion. This whole issue can be thought of as a contest between individual liberty, vs. someone else deciding what is possible for someone else. One of the major rationales is that the people deciding for someone else, have also decided that there is wrong thinking that people should not be allowed to affect their actions. Since we don't have effective thought detectors or thought police, we will have to settle for not allowing wrong or incorrect thinking to be effective.
1. i. This assumes that the people doing the deciding for other people are correct that all the thinking that would make one want to take a certain action they are blocking is due to the incorrect thinking they think it is. With millions of people involved, that probably isn't true. Someone may not want to eat GMO for all sorts of reasons, ranging from the simple fear it may be bad for you or the environment, to a desire to eat the same food that the great chefs of France did 100 years ago. Or a religious objection. Or they want to boycott Monsanto, or simply big companies. Or just on a whim. Under the current situation there is a response to the 'non-scientifically' based objections, and silence on other objections. Let's pretend there are no other objections, seems to be the plan.
2. The world has a food shortage. Maybe. A lot of food never makes it to some of the people of the planet. To flip the issue around, instead of a food shortage think of an eating people 'longage.'
Let certain merchants label their food "Made without carefully controlled genetic modification. Only random genetic modifications of completely unknown nature and with unknowable consequences were used". Put it next to the "No carefully tested nutrients were used on this crop. Only untested, randomly varying nutrient mixes containing many infectious substances known by the state of Wholala to cause death were used."
Roundup, the plant growth hormone that messes up the plants growth regulation to the point that they die, and is then quickly destroyed by soil bacteria.
It is hard to find a completely natural substance more benign, unless you happen to be the plant sprayed with it. ( I will refrain from making statements involving the word "vegetable".)
If you are going to complain about chemicals, find something that is worth complaining about.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Why are so many of these responses being modded 0? I find the careless dismissal of GMO fears to be more ludicrous than the "superstition" that the pro-GMO techies are lampooning. Burden of proof surely belongs on the GMO side, seeing as GMOs are only a recent development and have been adopted on a huge scale without anything approaching real testing.
... are more the result of the introduction of hybrid vs. the native varieties.
The fact that the big agricultural corporations preferred to introduce GMO hybrids, more than non-GMO hybrids, and push them relentlessly through bribery, does not make the increased production a result of GMO 'an sich'.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
... and what exactly does this have to do with GMO?
And how many lives did his technology cost in terms of diseases through the soil exhaustion, hence reduced nutrient content in food?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Mosquitoes carry G Fever (in 1 of 4 strains), &
a great way to reduce their numbers is to GM
some males so they'll mate but no life comes
from the eggs from their unions.
Populations have dropped by 85% after 3 mon's
of introducing the GM'd males.
(This was reported in a very recent TED-talk.)
This example might persuade anti-GMO folks
to reconsider, at least for such obvious cases
of advantage from GM of animal that we -don't-
eat.
...he could well be saying the same about global warming.
I wonder how much was paid for such good PR for companies like Monsanto pushing these untested and unsafe foods onto people. Did this Lynas see the recent long-term Russian study on rats? Now that's actual science, not mere assurances.
Just read TFA, I suspect he's been drawn into the orbit of the "skeptics" movement (deliberate quotation marks) who have blind faith that the government is only there to help people, that no corruption of regulatory agencies takes place, that there is no fraud in science etc...
On a side note perhaps what he really meant to say is that with the growing population we need GMO food to kill everyone off who is unable to access a strictly non-GMO diet. And the more crops that become GMO the harder that becomes. We could be only a few generations away (60 years?) from the unwashed masses disappearing into extinction. Then that seed vault in Svalbard that was created by private financiers for absolutely no reason whatsoever will be put to use.
That's one of the stupidest things I've ever read. Read your own comment again, slowly, go sit and think about it for a while, and when it comes to you, I promise you'll kick yourself.
My other UID is three digits.
GMO crops neither grow in a way that is better for the environment nor do they increase yield. I smell a payoff here, especially in light of the fact that states all over the United States are now calling on their administrations to force food producers to clearly state whether foods are genetically-modified or not. There is no positive at all to genetically-modified crops. They cause the formation of tumors and therefore cancers, they produce food that has a mere fraction of the nutritional value of their organic counterparts, they create weeds and insects that have a resistance to pesticides and the chemicals used in their creation actually destroy the environment more and not less than organic crops. I can guarantee you that this guy was paid off by the corporations he initially attacked and thus 'changed his mind' because of the large amount of money coming into his bank account.
Google Images: Rats + GMO + Cancer. Nuff Said.
GMO is a depopulation tool of the elites. Complete infertility in test animals by third generation.
The studies are out there folks, the once that Monsanto didn't pay for. Unlike Global Warming, the debate really is over on this one. Don't mess with the genetic heritage of the planet. You're not smart enough.
Yes, today. Distribution is a problem. But that's because GMO have helped yields so significantly. Scroll up and read the article on Norman. Countries with low yields have had dramatic turnarounds because of the green revolution.
People can grow and eat all the GMO food they want. It just should be posted on products so I/anyone can decide. Also Monsanto needs to protect organic and non GMO farmers from contamination. Very simple. Let me live my life.
And it has nothing to do with the obscene amounts of money Monsanto may or may not have deposited into your bank account?
What does it break down into?
Structurally, Glyphosate is a remarkably simple-looking compound, as far as organic structures go. You have a carboxyl group on one end, a secondary amine in the middle, and a phosphate on the other end. There are no halogen groups, heavy metals, or other exotic hetero-atoms. It can be degraded to common biological substrates, by common microorganisms, in a remarkably short sequence of steps: http://umbbd.ethz.ch/gly/gly_map.html
Obtaining "magic bullet" selectivity with a structure this simple is only possible thanks to engineering the crop itself. You can be sure that pesticides intended for non-engineered targets (like the weed killers people put on their lawns) are more complex-looking beasts.
Without some form of working population controls--we're either going to be eating GMO foods--or Soylent Green.
The old journalists adage applies anytime you see a turnabout like this. Lets see who funds his speaking tours, book deals etc. I'm betting he has sold his soul for 30 pieces of silver. He changed his mind because he "discovered science"? Anyone who opposes it is "anti-science" just like the "climate deniers"?
First off anyone who call scientists who are sceptical of the human role in climate "deniers" really needs to discover the scientific method. For someone to have claimed they "discovered science" and not be aware that being sceptical and trying to poke holes in theories IS being a good scientist shows how little they know.
Second the whole "denier" term is a pathetic attempt to paint legitimate scientists with legitimate concerns and questions into the same camp as the WWII death camp deniers is just being completely asinine.
Third the whole genetic engineering of foods is a typical scientific double edged sword. Great potential and great danger. If we should have learned anything from history it is that companies should NOT be in charge of testing their own products for safety. The list of items considered "perfectly safe and proven so by science" that have since been stopped, removed and recalled is huge. If the products are safe why do they limit the tests to 3 months in rats? That is like testing in humans up to the age of 20 and saying "no problem".
Lastly there are a whole lot of scientists who disagree with the GMO foods being safe. Here is a list of just some of them:
Patricia Hunt, PhD
Washington State University
Bruce Blumberg, PhD
University of California, Irvine
Carl-Gustaf Bornehag, PhD
Karlstad University, Sweden
Richard Clapp, PhD
University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Terrence J. Collins, PhD
Carnegie Mellon University
Peter L. DeFur, PhD
Virginia Commonwealth University
Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT
Institute of Neurotoxicology & Neurological Disorders
Louis J. Guillette, Jr. PhD
Medical School of South Carolina
Tyrone B. Hayes, PhD
University of California, Berkeley
Steve Heilig, MPH
San Francisco Medical Society
Shuk-mei Ho, PhD
University of Cincinnati Medical Center
Richard Jackson, MD
Former Director, National Center for Environmental Health, CDC
Harvey Karp, MD, FAAP
USC School of Medicine
Bruce Lanphear, MD, MPH
Simon Fraser University
John Peterson Myers, PhD
Environmental Health Sciences*
Gail S. Prins, PhD
University of Illinois at Chicago
Shanna Swan, PhD
Mt. Sinai School of Medicine
Bernard Weiss, PhD
University of Rochester
Laura Vandenberg, PhD
Tufts University
Frederick S. vom Saal, PhD
University of Missouri
R. Thomas Zoeller
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Surface contaminants are possible to wash off, GMO infused contaminants can not.
You're not challenging it, you're being pedantic.
"And how many people suffer because of a lack of food production in their immediate area, while other parts of the world produce more than enough to feed them?"
Great, so if GMO crops produce more immediate food, those lives are saved. Even if a 13% increase in crops worldwide only increases the global food supply by 5% than every increase still saved lives at a ratio less than one but more than zero. If those crop yields are local maybe 13% produces 11% increase in food supply. The point is you're splitting hairs, and even if 1000% increase in food only supplied 1% more food to the starving the statement would still be true.
Which statement seems more likely? I'm going to cite the Green Revolution and you can cite... something or other?
The most common gene inserted into pesticide crops is for the production of Bt toxin, a pesticide used on organic farms for generations.
why should i start now?
Perhaps Mark has forgotten the lawsuits bought by Monsanto and crew against farmers who were farming nearby GMO crops and have had their farms contaminated by GM pollen and then sued for theft. Or that once a GMO crop is out in the wild, it can NEVER be brought back. I am not saying that there isn't a place for it, I am just saying that there needs to be a lot of care taken and that engineering a crop so that it can take more pesticide isn't a move forward.
I don't so much have a problem with GM of foods. What I do have a problem with is the Patents. I am also a bit leary of corporate short sight of next quarters profits, over long term food security.
Basically making better food, in the natual order of things, means it will be more successful. Which is fine if it is better in everyway including nutrition. However the slipperly part is when your neighbor isn't using a particular GM strain. To which your GM strain basically kills off and takes over. Is the neighbor who is now forced to use your GM strain forced to pay licencing fees for a product that killed off its compatition? Would (inconcievible!) GM strains be purposfully built to this end with this buisness model in mind?
Anyway like a lot of things, if done the right way is a good thing, or if done the wrong way very bad. So long as this is a highly regulated endevor with built in safe guards and some checks and balances it is probably fine.
Look at your own chart. Home values in Australia more than doubled immediately when a huge change was made to the way they are taxed, in 1999. Other than that one jump from the tax change, home prices vs. incomes have been pretty flat. The fact that the best you can do, looking at all the countries in world, is to find one country with a single spike in prices due to huge tax change proves one thing - in any but the most unusual situations, you're simply wrong. Smart people become smart by learning - by opening their eyes to when they are wrong and learning what the correct facts are. Stupid people continue to defend their mistaken ideas no matter how clear it is that those ideas are wrong.
No, that seems like a fairly petty thing to do. How about a more progressive tax system to account for runaway executive compensation instead?
And maybe tighten up those tax loopholes and deductions. Yes, even if that means getting rid of the ones I partake in. And if they funnel all their money off-shores and pay zero taxes or do a little dance with stock options and only pay capital gains, then the IRS needs to go in with guns blazing and send them to JAIL.
LD50 does not account for long term damage caused by persistent exposure.
"For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research
17300 mg/kg body mass (e.g. a mouse needs to eat 17x it's own body mass of the stuff before it has a 50% chance of dying from it)
17300 mg/kg = 17.3 g/kg = 0.0173 kg/kg. So your sentences should read "a mouse needs to eat 0.0173x (or roughly 1/64th) it's own body mass....". For a 80kg "mouse", that would mean roughly 1.4kg of the stuff. That is assuming that your LD50 figure is accurate.