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Interview With Professor Potrykus, Inventor of Golden Rice
crabel writes "According to WHO, 127 millions of pre-school children worldwide suffer from vitamin A deficiency, causing some 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness every year. This deficiency is responsible for 600,000 deaths among children under the age of 5. Golden Rice might be a solution to this problem. The only problem? It's GMO. In an interview inventor Potrykus, now close to 80 years old, answers questions about the current state of approval, which might happen in the next couple of months."
It being a GMO isn't a problem, unless you're a Luddite.
Ignorance and fear are the problem.
Idiots who shop at Whole Foods would rather a child go blind due to vitamin deficiency rather than allow an evil GMO food to be used. Their suggestion of "they should eat more vegetables" ignores the simple fact that they need the special rice because they don't have access to the fucking vegetables.
Tons of food have been destroyed in Africa because of this ignorance. It's better that people starve rather than risk ingesting a GMO food. What. The. Fuck?
-- Will program for bandwidth
600k more children living... I bet they're some place that is already suffering a child shortage right? Great, so you fix their death by problem 1 and lead them right into death by problems 2 through 100.
Monsanto cannot sue for golden rice either, as there are free licences available, see access for those who need it
By allowing HIV to spread, the Africans will evolve HIV resistance. In the mean time, the high mortality rates will prevent oversupply of labor, resulting in better wages and working conditions for African laborers.
For the body to take advantage of the vitamin A it needs to be consumed with fat.
So the poor people should make sure to have a good kebab with their portion of rice...
Instead of adding genes to rice that make it contain more vitamin A, people should simply eat more carrots.
Good luck finding an 'unmodified carrot'.
Oh, wait. If it was modified more then 100 years ago it doesn't count as evil.
No sig today...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_A and check "Sources" section.
So... why ? I mean if there's a country in Africa that doesn't have access to anything containing vitamin a, then ok sell this rice to them. 99 % of us are ingesting it daily already.
GMO per se are at least sometime OK, sometime probably not. For instance I don't think glyphosate (aka RoundUp (tm)) resistance is a good idea, as it will inevitably lead to glyphosate overuse and will make its way into our food with undocumented side effects. However in this case adding beta-carotene to rice is probably a good idea.
The problem is licensing. It costs more money to plant golden rice. License holders have given out free licenses to subsistence farmers, and seed reuse is OK. However I think this is a foot in the door. Make no mistake, golden rice is not a humanitarian endeavour, it is 100% commercial.
Its not profitable, therefore it was only developed as a PR mechanism.
I guess so many people knew about that that they decided they had to ask for permission.
We have seen how non-gmo invasive species fuck everything up and you think that because of that we should fuck it up ourselves with GMO product?
Logic was never your bedfellow, was it.
If "GMO" were the same thing as cross breeding, it would not be possible to patent it.
They are not the same.
> Oh, wait. If it was modified more then 100 years ago it doesn't count as evil.
That's not it. If it was modified by human experimentation then it counts.. as a potential problem. ... like Monsanto.
By "human experimentation" I don't mean taking two species and leaving stuff for _nature_ to either do it's thing or not do, understand ?
Especially if that "human" is a corporation
Programmers should understand this better. Occasionally I'm amazed that so many tech people are pro-gmo-as-we-know-it. It's a cool thing, but some of us aren't playing games when it comes to our health.
Usually people that said what you said also say something like "gmo is cool because we're running out of food" which is the stupidest thing a smart person can say. We can feed a lot more people. The bigger problem is distribution and allocation, but for this we don't need GMO we need politics and governments that are actually working for the people, and not for themselves and upper 1 % whoever they might be and corporations that are only interested in profit.
Damn you've got a cool name!
You can artificially put vitamin A in (expensive, copyrighted) rice, but you won't fix the poverty that is the cause of all this. Once these people will (maybe, if they can afford it) have access to rice with vitamin A in it, the next deficiency will kill the "new" survivors. Fix their poverty, not their lack of vitamin A in their food. They will take care of the vitamin A without having to resort to GMO rice. Spending money on this sort of food modification won't pay for anyone but the copyright holders. It's not even about the "risks" of GMO, it's about the futility of trying to solve poverty with it.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
And you can live longer blind than you can with cardio problems.
Way not to read the flaming article.
What about all those poor farmers who can't save their own seeds unless they go back to Monsanto for a license?
"Excessive vitamin A consumption can lead to nausea, irritability, anorexia (reduced appetite), vomiting, blurry vision, headaches, hair loss, muscle and abdominal pain and weakness, drowsiness, and altered mental status" - Wikipedia
Hey watch where you're putting that stuff, it's like salt, you need a certain amount but too much is equally harmful. And the difference between too little and too much is a lot closer than with other vitamins like Vitamin C.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
there are other sources of vitamin A, like pumpkins and carrots!
Posting anon to avoid removing mods
Syngenta != Monstano;
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology != Monsanto;
University of Freiburg != Monsanto;
In this case, even Monsanto (Potrykus has spearheaded an effort to have golden rice distributed for free to subsistence farmers. Free licenses for developing countries were granted quickly due to the positive publicity that golden rice received, particularly in Time magazine in July 2000. Golden rice was said to be the first recombinant DNA tech crop that was unarguably beneficial. Monsanto Company was one of the first companies to grant free licences.
The cutoff between humanitarian and commercial use was set at US$10,000. Therefore, as long as a farmer or subsequent user of golden rice genetics does not make more than $10,000 per year, no royalties need to be paid. In addition, farmers are permitted to keep and replant seed. [ Courtesy of Wikipedia]) != Monsanto;
STFU with your (and every other persons) rant about Monsanto in this thread. Not everyone is the devil incarnate Monsanto, not even Monsanto all the time.
Idiots who shop at Whole Foods would rather a child go blind due to vitamin deficiency rather than allow an evil GMO food to be used.
That simply is not true, most of those people would be unaware that vitamin A deficiency causes blindness and how widespread the problem is, so how they can possibly "prefer" it? If both sides go around accusing the other of being "evil" then nobody will be enlightened. Sure there's some unethical marketing involved in pushing "health foods" and it should be highlighted on sites such as this one by knowledgeable people, but really it's no worse than the industry standard since the same claim of "unethical marketing" can (and has) be made about fast food and soft-drink companies.
;).
"Let them eat veggies" is no different to "let them eat cake" or "let them eat string cheese", the reason people say such idiotic things is due to plain ignorance, it's not stupidity, and it certainly does not imply they "prefer to see kids go blind". At most it implies the person has lead a "sheltered" life and have done a poor job of self-education on that particular subject.
At the end of the day I firmly believe the government has as much right to tell me what I put in my body as it does telling me what to put in my mind, ie: none. Having said that the government does have a strong role to play in ensuring public health, checking advertising claims and labelling, and promoting the most accurate health information science can provide. The reason I think we need those regulations (aside from preventing fraud) is because I recognise no single person is an expert on everything they eat, drink, inhale, or inject, they do not (and cannot) know the chemical makeup of everything they consume. In my experience most people consume what they do for two reasons, taste and/or inducing a state of altered consciousness.
Starvation, as seen in Africa and parts of Asia, is a completely different state of mind and is all about nutrition. Once you starve yourself beyond a few days, taste no longer matters and the hallucinations are free. In fact you can get the hallucinations in (normally) less than two days by simply not drinking and staying awake. Not that I recommend doing those things, it's just that when you get to my age (50+) it's almost a given that you will have experienced at least one (non drug induced) auditory or visual hallucination of some kind, in my experience the majority of those are induced by lack of sleep. Often combined with the dehydration of a hang over
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's a cool thing, but some of us aren't playing games when it comes to our health.
Why would GMO affect your health? Do you have any idea what percentage of 'natural' plants are nasty, poisonous, cancer-inducing, etc.?
eg. Potatoes. When they turn green in sunlight it's because they're making a deadly poison to protect themselves. It can cause illness, birth defects and even death. There's no way a potato would get FDA approval if it was introduced in our diets today.
Tomatoes have it, too. You know potatoes and tomatoes are members of the nightshade family, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanine
I hope you're totally paranoid about potatoes and ask to inspect them before cooking if you're in a restaurant. Peeling away the green skin doesn't remove it (the green is only chlorophyll, not the Solanine) and it's not affected by heat. You do, ask, right?
Oh, wait...people have been eating them for more than 100 years so it doesn't count.
No sig today...
Let's reduce the problem of dietary diversification to one problem of shortage of a precursor to vitamin A and the industry is winning the GMO debate already.
Moreover this debate takes monoculture for granted.
A good example of problems with monocultures is a crossover of Phytophtora infestans (blight) with Mexican Phytophtora since the 80's, wreaking havoc on (cloned) monocultures of potatoes.
If the idea is to help people, then forgo the patent entirely. cede it to the public. retract the patent.
If the idea is to make money from people's hunger, then keep the patents.
Because the Monstato paper on how it was safe used the same strain of rat. Indeed, that strain of rat is ALWAYS used *precisely because* they're sensitive to the consequences. Means quicker response with fewer rats used.
Moreover, the number of rats used in the french trial was higher and the trial lasted longer than the Monstato trial "proving" it was safe.
You DO know that cancer takes time to become visible, right?
Articles are being removed because Monstato will remove any and all funding for a journal carrying something that damages the GMO jihad. And other biotech and agribusiness companies are doing the same.
There's trillions to be made here.
That article has been debunked before.
Try reading it and following up, rather than stopping at the first google hit and selecting the headline.
Quote: One of the most hotly-contested areas where that is happening is software patents, which are not granted in Europe "as such" (you can imagine what fun the lawyers have with those two words).
This is about a patent office wanting more power and saying "we should let this be patented too!".
If it were already patentable, do you think that they'd have to ask?
Fucking moron AC.
Surely it's at least as easy to help folks without vitamin A grow spinach, kale, carrots, sweet potatoes, etc as it is to have them grow a different variety of rice. I understand the instinct to find a technical fix, but hunger is not really a technical problem, it's a political and distribution problem with a few major causes:
- Feeding poor people is not typically profitable. If there's no money in it, it doesn't happen on its own.
- Government programs in poor countries designed to feed people are typically quite corrupt, so the people may or may not get fed depending on the whims of the bureaucrats.
- US-based farm equipment and seed companies want to turn farmers in poor countries into a revenue stream.
- It's damn near impossible to get food into a war zone for anyone but soldiers.
There's enough healthy food in the world. That's not the problem.
I am officially gone from
Rice contains - as usual for plants - only the provitamin A, which will be converted into retinol (VitA) depending on demand.
So it is perfectly safe. The threat of overdosing only occurs when you eat animal-based food (i.e. liver).
How did it work out when the Irish tried that? The key word is "survived". The Irish died relying on the potato.
The fact that GM is created out of almost complete ignorance of the consequences does not make it safe.
Here's something you morons will never understand: GMO's are Uber Invasives.
If, for example, a new type of fish were to be moved to a location by natural random cause, it would have to compete from a minority position. But when it's brought in by the truckload "for a reason" by humans, they no longer have to compete from a minority position.
So a transspecies gene transfer in plants that gives it insect genes from natural processes via viral transfer will have ONE of that species and competes against an entire continent of other species competing in the same sphere.
A GMO organism will be sowed on hundreds of square miles of land in a job lot. No competing needed.
To someone whose brain does not automatically turn off when "green" is said, the consequence of this difference is obvious.
If you fry them in margarine and cover them with cinnamon they are disgusting. If you mash them with white sugar, butter, and vanilla, stir in beaten eggs and bake, they are extremely delicious.
Malnutrition isn't starving and neither is heart disease.
Your point? A galaxy beyond your grasp.
thank him!
I just want the companies to be honest about what's in the food. I may well ~choose~ to eat it given the option.
Someone said that having a tomato plant with some tuna fish genes injected into it would be no worse than just eating a tomato with some tuna fish. Fine. Great. How does that work for a vegetarian? There's a moral issue. What happens if the person is horribly allergic to tuna fish? Now there's a health issue too.
I don't a company has a right to just make that decision for someone. I'm not so happy about forced water fluoridation or iodized salt either, but at least those things are usually labeled.
500,000 a year. Each year's delay is 500,000 more blind children.
I've been saying this for years -- organizations like the FDA cause a lot more harm than good because delaying good drugs hurts a lot more than forbidding bad drugs helps.
Bad drugs that make it to market get found out bad soon enough and are pulled. But one good drug that saves, say, 10% of heart or cancer patient, boom, a million, boom, a million right there. No bad drug will ever harm that many before it is stopped. Almost certainly one incident like that, and we have had many, outweighs all the FDA's decades put together.
Nobody runs these numbers. They point to bad cases. They never point to millions who die needlessly because most drugs are delayed 5-10 years. With AIDS drugs they had to shame government into inventing "fast track", with the supposedly obvious logic that these people were going to die anyway.
I will say it straight out: far from improving the situation, FDA-type organizations kill mmagnitudes more than they save. It's just not obvious since someone who dies from a bad drug (a few) are good news fodder, but millions each year from disease are normal, un-newsworthy wretches.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Instead of more money in Monsanto's pocket for no reason, let's take a trip to Walgreen. Oh look! Pounds of vitamin A. How about we ship that over to these countries instead of experimental, patented, money-making machines. Monsanto might as well be selling them cocaine.
Start pounding their fists and say "no! no! no!" to anything GMO related.
Not because of any real scientific evidence but because "social news" has told them that GMO is bad, period. The Idiot Elite cannot form their own opinion on anything only regurgitate and corrupt a single myopic one.
In the meantime GMO has saved billions of lives by provided food to areas of the world that could not otherwise sustain crops or increasing the yield of crops to make food affordable and to allow farmers to make some kind of profit rather than always relying on government subsidies to produce a crop where half of it goes to rot.
I am not saying that some care and concern should be made over how GMO is used, certainly I have no respect for Monsanto trying to monopolize food crops by adding suicide genes so that farmers are forced to buy seed every season, but this is not the reason to dismiss GMO as a whole. Finding one negative and then striving to shut down an industry is what the Idiot Elite excels at.
Humans have been manipulating crop genes for thousands of years. While we do it in the lab these days, taking two plants and cross pollinating them to produce another species has been going on for thousands of years, all in an effort to make food more efficient and effective and produce a better product. The Idiot Elite can easily understand the idea of shaking pollen from one plant on another, they can't understand the concept of taking individual genes out of one plant and combining them with another under a microscope to achieve the same results. Therefore this must be protested simply out of ignorance. There is no such thing as a non-GMO organic food item that has not resulted from thousands of years of human intervention.
I mean those fluffy passive stuffed animals that people call their pet 'doodles these days is a result of thousands of years of human fuckery, there is nothing natural about a Schnickerdoodle or whatever. But you don't have the Idiot Elite rising up and calling them Hellhounds (except maybe pitbulls).
One day soon, the Idiot Elite will grab their pitchforks and burn down the institutions of science claiming they are using witchery when in reality they are trying to cure disease, solve world hunger, and find a solution to the energy and environmental crises.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
There may be plenty of reasons why they are not already growing sweet potatoes but instead something that grows well at their farm. Since sweet potatoes die if they don't have good drainage it's pretty well the opposite of a rice paddy - but of course many rice paddies are artificially flooded so may be able to be converted so that argument is not universal.
It's reminding me of the "let's just give everyone ten acres" anecdote, where the new barbarian overlord that only knows about fighting manages to arbitrarily reward or screw over people because he has no clue that not all bits of farmland are equal or good for every purpose.
Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to radical environmentalism, and nice green uniforms.
I wonder if humans would evolve further, maybe producing their own beta carotene or Vitamin A? I do not condone the suffering of millions of people, but I wonder if giving our bodies everything in plenty is good in the long run (like generations).
Also, can't this deficiency be solved with existing crops and/or vegetables? The rice looks nice, though...
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
I know there is a stigma attached to the human engine that there is nothing more important than making as many humans as possible and keeping them all alive for as long as possible. This is great for the economic engine of the 1%ers...not so much for anyone else.
IMHO Natural Selection is a "natural" process that yes even us humans ( yep were mammalian animals after all, deal with it ) should be more comfortable with. We're fighting the DNA modification of food, but not letting nature take it's course to improve the DNA future of the human population as a whole.
Epic Fail human race, Epic Fail..my sig says it all...
When most of your post is setting up a strawman, just mash the 'Cancel' link rather then posting.
What do you think of the posts that misrepresent your position then shoot that down? Waste of time? There you go.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In parts of the USA there used to be a problem with Pellagra. AFAIK the solution to problems like this is to fortify common staples with vitamins. That's what the "enriched" in packaged rice sold here is. Instead of modifying the very source of the food, why not fortify? As an added bonus, you can probably process all varieties with added vitamins. That means you can experiment with diverse crops and still get proper nutrition.
Fortification works so well we don't even think about it. When was the last time you met anybody with a goiter? All our salt is iodized. That's why. It prevents goiter.
Fortification can also be controversial (see, flouridated water), but as long as it's labeled I don't have a problem with it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The exceptions being cannabis, opium, coca, peyote, shrooms, ergot, and a bunch of other things that American propaganda calls "eeevul drugz".
Yep. The ignorance created by the fair labeling exemptions that GMOs enjoy in the USA and the entirely reasonable and understandable fear people have when they realize that GMO producers who oppose labeling are known bad actors.
If an organization people trusted (like they trusted the old Diamond Match company) created a GMO, it'd be proudly labeled, and nobody sensible would fear it. But because current GMO producers are well known to be vicious bastards willing to do anything for a nickel, and they insist that we can't possibly be allowed to know if we're consuming their products, everyone with two brain cells in their head fears them.
And it doesn't help that Dan Quayle was the guy who got them their labeling exemptions. Even if you don't fear Monsanto's perfidy, you have to fear Quayle's egregious ignorance.
I got no problem with GMOs, but I only trust GMO advocates who don't oppose labeling. The others are obviously haven't the sense or morality that deserves trust. They want to sell you a pig in a poke, literally.
Mod parent up. That's a really interesting fact I never knew.
so can you overdose on "golden rice"?
say i'm a rice lover and it eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner (and maybe even desert)
will i get too much vitamin A? as i understand it is fat soluble and unlike vitamin C,
you cannot just piss the excess out?
-
i checked wikipedia for "vitamin A" and they list some foods that have "vitamin A",
but it's lacking food stuff that could live in (near) a rice field, like frogs, or eels, or some maggot
living in bamboo (bamboo can live near a rice field, right?)
i mean i intellectually respect the feet of genetic manipulation in a laboratory, but
has anyone checked the actual biosphere ("the rice field") to see if introducing
some non-genetic modified, edible vitamin A carrying organism would suffice as a
"low-tech" solution?
Everyone's ignoring the fact that vitamin A, like D, are fat-soluble, not water soluble, and so if a large portion of the food intake was this vitamin A rice, there are medical consequences of too *much* of the vitamin.
http://www.niams.nih.gov/Health_Info/Bone/Bone_Health/Nutrition/vitamin_a.asp
mark
Give your kid a goddamn carrot. Problem solved. Nooo, let's instead genetically modify rice to contain a vitamin already present in over a dozen common foods. What could possibly go wrong when we manipulate the genetic code of our food and stuff our kids with it?
No one is telling these people they can't save their seeds from these crops. GMO does not necessarily mean that it is "closed source" and owned by the company that made it. That is just how big agriculture businesses like Monsanto operate. There is nothing indicating that will occur in this case.
GMO just has a stigma in that some people believe that they have hidden health side effects. The Monsanto lawsuits against farmers is another thing entirely. There are plenty of GMO crops out there besides the "Roundup Ready" seeds you are referring to.
'Maybe because Golden Rice has nothing to do with Monsanto?`
...
"Monsanto have now agreed to provide royalty-free licenses for its technologies to help fast-track the further development and distribution of the rice." ref
And these farmers can never go into the seed selling business - into perpetuity
The risks from green potatoes are no more significant than the risks associated with basically any meat product. The vast majority of the toxin is kept in the skin, so peeling does in fact eliminate most of the toxin. Boiling and deep frying, while not destroying the toxin, cause it to leach out into the cooking fluid, again greatly reducing content. And finally, the toxins are extremely bitter, it's unlikely you're going to keep eating food that tastes disgusting, which is why almost all cases of real poisoning happen when there's simply no other food to eat.
The Incan Empire got most of their energy from the potato, which has a very impressive nutritional profile. The Irish failure was due to monoculture—before the blight, the potato drove a massive population expansion. Check out Charles Mann's books 1491 and 1493 for many more interesting tidbits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato#South_America
(Or perhaps you're trolling; it's sometimes hard to tell around here...)
...it's what you do with that tool that decides if the result is a positive or negative thing. The knee-jerk fear of (and efforts to eliminate/label/vilify) all GMO is generally part of a sad, and often justified, anti-government, anti-big-business, and lately, (unjustified) anti-science, social psychology. GMO is typically not distinguishable from all the cross-breeding done by dog-breeders, rose fanciers, and agriculture for hundreds of years. It's only when combined with other nasty procedures, for instance being coupled with the use of herbicides ("RoundUp"), that it becomes the screw-driver in the hand of a villain.
By allowing HIV to spread, the Africans will evolve HIV resistance. In the mean time, the high mortality rates will prevent oversupply of labor, resulting in better wages and working conditions for African laborers.
It's actually the caucasians that have the HIV resistance. 1 out of 10 have one gene mutation making it more difficult to contract HIV and 1 out of 100 have both genes mutated making them immune to HIV.
That would be the famous CCR5-Delta32 mutation, which is present at a frequency of about 4-16% in populations of European decent. Assuming Wikipedia is correct, the frequency of CCR5-Delta32 homozygous individuals would thus be 0.16% to 2.56% assuming Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium.
However, there are also other non-CCR5 traits which confer varying degrees of HIV resistance.
Here is an example of how the anti-technology religion has duplicating the Holocaust over 10 years in the name of organic virtue.
I recycle like everybody, but adherence to fanatical ideology at the expense of many human lives is unconscionable. The people who need it insist on rice and always will. Every fanatical movement justifies deaths of innocents as the price to pay for their glorious vision of perfection. Pol Pot, the Taliban and Stalin agree. Joseph Stalin famously said, “you need to break some eggs to bake a cake.” Environmental fanatics brake 600,000 human eggs a year to support their ideology.
"Fix poverty". Which immediately leads to the question, *how* do you fix poverty?
Good question and history (as it so often does) provides us with some instructive examples; the war on Hookworm which took place (as related in books such as The Germ of Laziness).
In the early 20th century, Hookworm eradication was seen as a key part of anti-poverty initiatives aimed at the South and the Appalachians, due to the anemia and energy-sapping effects of heavy infestation that left its victims too fatigued to do much work. Combined with the public-health initiatives were large-scale development projects such as those part of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
While poverty still remains with us today, the combined development and public-health push was largely successful in eliminating the the most desperately impoverished pockets of 3rd-world-tier poverty that existed at that time, and has left a legacy of infrastructure which we still benefit from today.
This miracle plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moringa_oleifera grows in parts of world where people suffer from malnutrition http://www.treesforlife.org/our-work/our-initiatives/moringa. From Wikipedia" The leaves are the most nutritious part of the plant, being a significant source of B vitamins, vitamin C, provitamin A as beta-carotene, vitamin K, manganese and protein, among other essential nutrients." How much 7 times compared to orange, 4 times calcium compared to milk, 4 times vitamin A to carrot, 2 times protein to yogurt and 3 times potassium compared to banana". Natural has the solution it just needs awareness and adoption.
Eat it and be happy there is food to eat. Without GMO we most likely would be hungry today.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Peas can be easily dried and stored. They have a slightly higher vitamin A value than golden rice. Why reinvent a slightly crappier wheel? Golden rice will not change anything... it'll just be yet another product we aren't sending to poor countries. Only reason why this is even in the media is because Monsanto wants to promote GMO so they can sell their other food products and pesticides to markets that currently refuse to accept GMO.
If I google this, I get a lot of noise. Are there any documented cases where a GMO food has caused identifiable harm? I see lots of claims about what MIGHT happen, complaints about people playing God, introduction of harmful allergens, etc. But I haven't heard of any verified cases.
I often ask food producers about corn products in their food. The real reason is that my wife has a corn allergy, and you just can't get away from the stuff. The FDA has no legal definition of corn as an allergen (in contrast to gluten, for instance). So in addition to asking the question, I point out that a lot of people avoid corn to avoid GMOs. I honestly don't care about them being GMOs, but food companies that make specialty products (like gluten free foods) are sensitive to customer perceptions, sensible or not. For instance, while it's great for celiac patients that there are certified gluten-free products, the fact is, many people eating gluten-free are doing it because they think it'll help them lose weight.
Fun fact about that: through good old fashioned, non-controversial conventional breeding, a potato with toxic levels of solanine was produced. If genetic engineering did that, you'd never hear the end of it, yet strangely none of the anti-GMO organizations will put things in context by bringing up that topic (either that or they are simply ignorant of the both the science and the history of crop improvement, which is commonly the case).
I was under the impression that most of the fear of GM crops was the possible unintentional release of GM into the environment when trial results and results of cross breeding with other variants are still unknown. I haven't heard a single fear squeek about the health effects of the purposely GM foods, maybe I just dont care enough.
The risks from green potatoes are no more significant than the risks associated with basically any meat product.
Nobody's saying they are, but they're probably far greater than the risks from Golden Rice.
No sig today...
This guy's using blindness as a cover to get laws against transgenic genetic modification of our food supply off the books.
So what is the testing protocol for new GMO foods? Is there a standard or just every company do their own and trust us? It would make sense to have a standard one that could be done by anyone with the resources. Having blatant conflicts of interest with the companies doing the research the way they want is the fox guarding the henhouse.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/
Dr Seneff has published some very interesting work on the effects of glyphosate (RoundUp) on your gut bacteria. 80% of your immune system is determined in your gut and we are now eating lots of glyphosate. I know this product doesn't include that but it shows how company research misses a lot, perhaps intentionally.
Monsanto has given the whole field a bad name. They do 3 month rat studies, feed them as little as possible and feed them isolated proteins instead of the whole food. Lots of tricks to say "see, no problems, let us on the market". To quote a famous GMO opponent "they have bad science down to a science".
Genetically Engineered foods are the classic double edged sword of science and so far it has been wielded very poorly.
Here in the U.S. we are eating cloned beef (very tasty cloned beef I might add!), and the wack jobs are criticizing a product like golden rice and it's potential benefits. Get a life people! Nobody is going to force golden rice down your throats, but for those who need it, it could be a Godsend!!!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!