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Overuse of Bioengineered Corn Gives Rise To Resistant Pests
An anonymous reader writes "Though warned by scientists that overuse of a variety of corn engineered to be toxic to corn rootworms would eventually breed rootworms with resistance to its engineered toxicity, the agricultural industry went ahead and overused the corn anyway with little EPA intervention. The corn was planted in 1996. The first reports of rootworm resistance were officially documented in 2011, though agricultural scientists weren't allowed by seed companies to study the engineered corn until 2010. Now, a recent study has clearly shown how the rootworms have successfully adapted to the engineered corn. The corn's continued over-use is predicted, given current trends, and as resistance eventually spreads to the whole rootworm population, farmers will be forced to start using pesticides once more, thus negating the economic benefits of the engineered corn. 'Rootworm resistance was expected from the outset, but the Bt seed industry, seeking to maximize short-term profits, ignored outside scientists.'"
That's how life works doesn't it? Pest attacks plant. Plant evolves defense. Pest finds a way bypass defense.
I wonder when will we learn that fighting the Nature is not the best path to survival.
""little EPA intervention""
There to busy going after everyone else.. The article itself isn't surprising, and the industry will be on the defensive with GM crops, and I'm waiting to see resistant weeds, and insects, as they are exposed to stronger, or more powerful insecticides/pesticides. Not that their more toxic, but I would expect to see the same resistance.
Are those bioengineers creationists who didn't think nature would adapt to those new genes? crazy.
1. Bug eats corn
2. Engineers update corn to 2.0 to withstand bug
3. Bugreports come in implying corn 2.0 still has bugs
4. Engineers should bugfix corn again, it's called 'progress'
YA RLY
And the corporations selling this stuff cannot care less about it, all they care about is that we transition to patented and sterile seeds so we perpetually depend on them. All the fuss surrounding GMO is about this.
Needless to say, the corporations should be prosecuted as fraudsters unless those buying the seeds sign a contract which clearly states they assume all responsibility for what the seeds do to their environment and the nearby fields. Because if something bad happens it's the fault of either one.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
O RLY
Yes, really. But that's OK, let's keep defending those who want to hide themselves behind patents and threaten litigation for even hinting to peek behind the curtain. Yes, I'm sure that we'll find in 5 years that all other GMOs are perfectly safe too, and that spike in cancer isn't related at all...
is this: agricultural scientists weren't allowed by seed companies to study the engineered corn until 2010.
surely with the help of our corrupt lawmakers.
How in the hell can scientists NOT be allowed to study IN DETAIL, and from the get-go, something as fundamentally groundbreaking and new as genetic engineering applied on a planet-wide scale for the first time ever in the history of life itself?
We need a revolution to overthrow the current government structures the world over, and sooner rather than later, if only because some day, Something Bad[tm] will happen that'll cause genuine harm to humanity.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
We need to start outsourcing our problems to Nature. How about we genetically engineer corn which can only be eaten by organisms which excrete efficient batteries, BitCoins and flying cars?
And this is what happens when decision are made by money greed capitalists. If scientist would lead the world, it would look quite a bit different.
Why doesn't slashdot stop its overuse of bioengineered corn?
And the worms shall inherit the earth...
Such counter-revolutionary feeling is only happening due to yours being a matter of breaking away from a foreign power that was very busy at the time and so didn't come in to wash the streets of New York with blood. You clearly cannot imagine the price. Take a look at revolutions against strong and established governments based where the revolution has happened and you'll get a good idea of the cost. Take a look at the outcomes of those and compare it to what George Washington's revolution gave you.
Do you really think you will get something better and what is wrong with George Washington's ideas in the first place that another revolution is required to replace them?
Why do you think it will turn out better than what Egypt is dealing with now?
unless those buying the seeds sign a contract which clearly states they assume all responsibility for what the seeds do to their environment
Well, I might not have the same perspective on "muh freedom", but you shouldn't be allowed to sign such a contract at all, because the scope obviously surpasses you. In an ideal world with an ideal justice system, such a contract should be void and both those who sold and those who used the seeds are responsible for the damage.
Sterile seeds have little to do with that, by the way, as they have been easy to produce and have been used for a long time already (sterility can be either desired or undesired depending on the crop, but usually it's just a side effect from hybridisation).
Okay, I can be pretty dense when it comes to reading between the lines, but even I notice a heavy dose of agenda in this summary. It's a good thing the anti-GMO folks have a crystal ball to see the future clearly.
I guess we need our daily dose of propaganda though.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
O RLY
Yes, really. But that's OK, let's keep defending those who want to hide themselves behind patents and threaten litigation for even hinting to peek behind the curtain. Yes, I'm sure that we'll find in 5 years that all other GMOs are perfectly safe too, and that spike in cancer isn't related at all...
The factors driving growth in cancer cases are pretty well understood and documented. http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02...
Including the fact that if you adjust for the aging of America, the cancer rate and cancer mortality in America is actually declining notably.
Years ago (10 years or more)? There was a study about the arms race in agricultural pest control. The subject of this study was a genetically engineered crop that made its own poison, but that was not really relevant to the outcome of the study. Traditional spraying would have the same effect.
It was discovered that poison did not only fight pests, it also helps pests. The non-resistant pest bugs were killed, but the resistant pest bugs were given a predator-free environment. This was important, because the poison resistance often comes with lower chances of survival in non-poisoned environments. For example, one poison had an impact on the nerve system, paralysing non-resistant bugs. Resistant bugs had a nerve system that worked much slower, so they would be a "sitting duck" in a natural environment.
the study showed that if a certain portion of the land (recommended was 15% to 20%, which sound like a lot, but is peanuts compared to the 60% loss often found due to resistant pests) was planted with non-poisoned crops, the whole arms race could actually be stopped. The bugs would move between plants, and if they came on a poisoned plant they would be attacked by the poison, and if they came on a natural plant, they would be attacked by their natural predators.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Phytophthora infestans A1 type created famine in 1845 in Ireland and Flanders.
Blight was largely under control in 20th century until the Oömycete got the chance to sexually reproduce with the A2 type imported from latin America to Europe around the 1980's.
Potatoes are largely from the "bintje" variety because consumer wants so. And potatoes are "cloned" by planting tubers from previous harvest.
I went to a seminar about a year ago at Clemson U. The presenter went over all of the protocols that farmers are supposed to follow, which included growing non-modified corn in a certain proportion of their acreage. This was to prevent this very thing happening. The idea is that pests thrive in the non-modified crop and spawn non-resistant offspring, and since their numbers are much larger than the bugs in the modified crop, they pollute the resistant DNA and they don't develop herd immunity to the modified corn.
He basically said that the pests are becoming resistant because farmers are not following the protocol, because the non-modified crops basically get obliterated as a honeypot for pests to thrive and multiply, and the farmers don't make any money off of that acreage.
So, don't blame the corn. Blame big agro for failing to follow the rules in the name of greed and profit.
It's their business model. Now, with the altered pests, they'll make another type of corn, and sell it for the next 5 years. And keep at it until the corn becomes too poisonous for humans or livestock to consume or the farmers/government wiseup.
...as long as it's only in the hands of greedy corps.
Because it's about furthering their interests, which most of the time don't align with mine.
The deeper problem, of which all this is a direct consequence, is allowing short term economic considerations of a tiny minority to outweigh the mid to long term environmental and health consequences (with associated dollar cost, of course) for society at large.
FTFS:
The corn was planted in 1996. The first reports of rootworm resistance were officially documented in 2011, though agricultural scientists weren't allowed by seed companies to study the engineered corn until 2010.
Same thing is happening around fracking, companies are disallowing scientists to scrutinize the many chemicals they're squirting down into the earth, because trade secrets.
In a democracy, everyone is responsible and accountable when, decade after decade, private profits are allowed to trump public well being, time and time again.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
YA RLY
And the corporations selling this stuff cannot care less about it, all they care about is that we transition to patented and sterile seeds so we perpetually depend on them.
my biggest concern is that they start creating what can only be described as "generation time-bomb crops", in a pathologically-insane effort to further save money. "time-bomb crops" would be those which you plant once, they grow, seed, plant twice, they grow, place a third time and they FAIL.
now imagine such insanely-dangerous crops pollenating and cross-pollenating world-wide and it's not so hard to imagine a scenario in which world famine occurs within a five to eight year period in which all food crops world-wide completely fail.
i was actually pretty shocked when i first heard of sterile seeds that even have a *single* generation planting. there's no guarantee that nature will not, through its own process of DNA evolution, *accidentally* come up with generation time-bomb crops.
i've said it once and i'll say it again: genetic modifications to crops are so insanely dangerous that i'm beyond understanding why people do not understand this. if there was even the *slightest* risk of killing 7 billion people *why would you even contemplate it*?
So there was a switch to rootworm resistant corn, which I'd assume came with a declining use of pesticide. If the rootworms overcame resistance to the resistant corn, does this mean they may have lost some of their resistance to the pesticide?
Or are these resistances somehow retained or overlapping so that we have rootworms with high resistance to both?
Other than the nasty concept of pesticide use generally, it sounds like maybe this would allow for a switch back to pesticides which the rootworms may have lost resistance to.
Or will my cynicism be correct, that farmers will use both the resistant seed AND pesticide and develop a super-rootworm with strong resistance to both?
All the fuss surrounding GMO is about this.
Not all of it, or even most of it. Most of the fuss is about how genetic modification is new and scary and GMO crops are going to be toxic. The justified component of the fuss, though - yes, that's about biotech companies establishing lock-in on the food industry.
My pets already resist! I dont need them to be any more resistant.
Its hard enough to get them to go out and pee this winter, and sure enough, theyll wait til Im in bed.
Now some Chemical company has to go and make it worse.
Ill dump bags of dogshit dropped in my house on Cargills front door.
But , I bet they only stomp out the fire,the first time.
Making resistant pets, indeed!
Corporations
Are any companies in the "Bt seed industry" other than Monsanto? I wonder why they hardly get a mention in the article.
evolution isn't real, right? adaptation to environmental stresses just a theory...
tell that to these farmers.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Fortunately, life finds a way, and time bombs are an evolutionary dead end. I'm not saying that GMOs shouldn't be scrutinized, but you don't seem to be looking at this properly, and also seem to be conflating what the GMO industry is doing right now with the underlying technology.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
But but but ... that might mean more government interference and then where would my Libertarian nonsense be? Shouldn't the free market sort this out? /sarcasm
News at 11.
Come on. really? nobody expected this?
This is why you are supposed to ROTATE pesticides not using the same thing over and over and over.
DDT has been out of use so long that I bet it is highly effective if they bring it back into use, but this time using it sparingly not dousing the entire countryside in thousands of gallons of it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yummy.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Because they are the biggest, and they invented it. Also everyone knows how big a bunch of cunts they are.
or two, it was well worth the experiment, at least to the CEO and shareholders. The CEO got his bonus and the shareholders got their bump in the price and that's all that matters.
When the CEO lays off all the genetic engineers because of this "problem" the shareholders will reward him with another bonus for being so proactive.
I don't know why you guys are getting so upset. It says right there in the Bible that God gave us all the plants and animals to do with as we see fit.
Which is why I tried pointing out to the above poster that a revolution has already been won for him - IMHO tweaking the current situation instead of throwing it all away to be a dictatorship or whatever is frankly somewhat more sane.
Right, my question is why isn't Monsanto mentioned by name? I think you may have misunderstood my comment.
as far as I know sterile seeds are not major part of the sold seeds if at all. Patented and controlled better than ever before - that is a problem that majority just overlooks.
"1996. The first reports of root worm resistance were officially documented in 2011"
So we got 15 years of pesticide-free corn? And the downside is we have to return to what we used to do, until we get another variety?
If it's 15 years for that one too, I suspect we can out engineer the bugs continually.
It is going to cost big business to retool factories to generate less CO2 emissions. They continue to do everything to maximize short term profits, without looking at the long term harm.
If they had their "no government intrusion" the way they want it, they'd still dumping waste in our waterways, and the major California cities would never have any smog-free days.
Welcome to the dystpoian oligarchy, where the only thing which matters is corporate profits, and where you assume it's safe until someone proves otherwise -- all the while making it impossible for people to study it enough to find out.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In your Libertarian nonsense, there are no public goods, or Commons. Everything is owned by somebody, including your grandmother. Every bit, byte, and nibble has a price. We have actuaries and accountants to keep track of it all, yep, even the data has a price, those actuaries and accountants do not work for free. In a Libertarian utopia, we'll all have Air Measures installed in our teeth and a monthly bill for how much air you breathe. And you'll have all the firearms and rocket launchers you need to prevent anyone from stealing from your pile of loot. And you'll need them too since not everyone will feel blessed in the Libertarian Paradise.
And when you die, don't forget to settle up or your heirs will be inheriting much more than your mold and spore collection.
You're right - I did miss-read. /tin foil hat Monsanto bought the paper?
Two thoughts.
1) Monsanto HAS already withstood antitrust scrutiny in regard with patented crop modifications. They won.
2) How long are patents protected, again? ISTR that some of Monsanto's expire in 2014.
It's in their own best interest, if those worms become resistant.
"and also seem to be conflating what the GMO industry is doing right now with the underlying technology."
There's a lot of that going around. Isn't that what pretty much every anti-GMO person does?
Seed with limited number of generation, simply kick themselves out of any gene pool which has no such limitation.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
So your point is what? Do not use the corn and the root worm thrives? So what is the point then when the root worm overcomes the
modified corn's resistance and starts a come back? We had 15 years of extra corn productivity that we would not have had.
And the down side of this? None. Other than some fool who believes that that a short-term victory is somehow worse than no victory
over pests.
Why don't you people at Slashdot use your brains before putting this crap out?
Crapdot. Where the undereducated, hormone-challenged wanker comes to ejaculate worthless words from their never closed mouths.
Just pour more and stronger pesticides on it. I mean why would it be dangerous somehow? It's just on the outside of the crops and in the soil, it's not like inside the parts you eat, right.
And if they can do that, then we can keep using fewer pesticides.
Everyone seems to forget that the reasoning for these types of crops it to minimize spraying poison on our food sources.
These "evil" corporations are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
There is noting weird and baleful about GM species that causes them to behave differently from non-GMOs in the environment, including how other species co-evolve in response to them. There was an early belief that transfer of genes between species was special manmade magic, until it was found that this happens in nature too: http://davesgarden.com/guides/...
Genetic engineering is nothing but a precisely targeted way of accomplishing changes that used to take generations of cross-breeding and culling.
If you try to hide from a life form or kill a life form using a biological pathway, you will eventually generate a better life form that gets around your efforts.
You forget Union Carbide.
Nothing says good food like Monsanto and Union Carbide. Yummy.
The whole terminator gene concept was designed to ALLAY fears that a GM species would get out into the environment and "take over" in some way, presumably evolving a mustache and a devilish laugh.
It's called OVERuse for a reason. If you use these technologies in reasonable ways, you can control pest populations while maintaining the effectiveness of the toxin. If you ONLY use this corn and it's this effective, you are basically breading the corn rootworms for resistance.
If you stupidly sprint at the start of a marathon you burn up your resources too quickly, and the same thing is happening here.
Someone explain to me again how GMO crops are the only possible way human beings are going to solve all our agriculture problems, and people opposed to them are Luddites? Did they not think that natural selection more or less negates any gains reached through GM within a few generations?
my biggest concern is that they start creating what can only be described as "generation time-bomb crops", in a pathologically-insane effort to further save money. "time-bomb crops" would be those which you plant once, they grow, seed, plant twice, they grow, place a third time and they FAIL.
now imagine such insanely-dangerous crops pollenating and cross-pollenating world-wide and it's not so hard to imagine a scenario in which world famine occurs within a five to eight year period in which all food crops world-wide completely fail.
Sorry but you don't understand even the complete basics of genetics. Time-bomb crops wouldn't be that dangerous in the wild even if they actually existed. It's extremely unlikely that a significant portion of normal crop population would become contaminated by time-bomb genes in just a few years. And two plants with both normal and time-bomb genes still have 25% chance of producing completely clean offspring.
Also, the chance of infertile hybrid turning into multigeneration time-bomb is practically zero. It's much easier to simply break the reproductive system completely than to build a generation countdown into it.
It doesn't exempt itself from evolution. So the question we need to be asking ourselves is, WHEN pests evolve to thwart GMO "innovations" what might those pests be able to DO how BAD will THAT be and how are we going to deal with it and how quickly can we react what happens to the food supply if we CAN'T?
We've got two types of seeds, and have for a long, long time: fertile seeds, that stay fertile from generation to generation, and sterile seeds (from e.g. hybridisation), that don't produce offspring. You're positing a third type of seed that would fall in between these two extremes. And then you invent a speculative doomsday scenario in which someone manages to make such crops, and the entire world converts to using them, and destroys their stocks of other seeds in the meantime.
Perhaps we should wait and see if step 1 is even possible first? As you said, there's no guarantee that nature won't do it on its own - and the fact that it *hasn't*, in the last few billion years, is a strong hint that genetics doesn't work that way. Then, if someone does manage to make them, we could always, y'know, decide not to plant them. Part of your doomsday scenario involves these crops cross-pollinating to override the genes of every competing crop, but genetics really doesn't work that way. If I drop a hundred blue-eyed babies in 5th-century China, I'm not going to come back in the present day to find that the entire population of China has blue eyes, because genes aren't "infectious" in that way: the cross-pollinated population still has all of its original genes, and also shares them back with the original population.
There are real concerns about intellectual property rights being asserted on genetically-modified crops, but your scenario is a wild flight of fancy that only detracts from serious debate.
This sounds like BS to me. Why would there be any more resistance issues with engineered corn than with pesticides?
Free Market COULD sort this out. This is a matter of courts. IF you can prove the harm, and you should be able to, then we can use the courts to sue the corporations and their boards and CxOs for liablity, toss them in to Pound me in the ass prison, and confiscate their wealth, and finally, after all is done, give the shareholders absolutely nothing by revoking the corporate charter (including subsidiaries). THIS would create a free market result that things that are harmful are not done, because it isn't profitable. As it is right now, there is no responsibility for malfeasance anywhere in the Corporate / Government complex.
We don't need more "laws" we need people willing to execute the existing laws effectively. But it is more profitable for government to allow for this crap, and that is why the government doesn't do its job. This is what running deficits year after year provide, a need for more and more taxes to cover up the fact that government isn't doing the one job it is supposed to do.
AND people like yourself think more laws will solve the problem. It won't solve anything, but rather creates more problems to solve. How convenient.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The deeper problem, of which all this is a direct consequence, is allowing short term economic considerations of a tiny minority to outweigh the mid to long term environmental and health consequences (with associated dollar cost, of course) for society at large.
Hey, hey! This is America!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
This is great news! Maybe my bees will develop a resistance to the crops and stop dying off when they come back from the corn and soy fields.
From the Abstract of TF Paper.
"These results illustrate that Bt crops producing less than a high dose of toxin against target pests may select for resistance rapidly; consequently, current approaches for managing Bt resistance should be reexamined."
Make of that what you will.
"Fortunately, life finds a way, and time bombs are an evolutionary dead end."
In nature? Yes. When some company keeps reproducing the SAME plant with the SAME "evolutionary dead end" it's no long a dead end. It doesn't just end and go away.. it keeps coming back. This repeated appearance increases the chance of something going wrong as, what should be dead in gone, is back again.
Sounds a bit like cancer, doesn't it? The "time bomb" or "evolutionary dead end" for that cell or cells isn't functioning as it should... and look what happens.
CAPTCHA: unborn
More on this unexpected development later.
Everyone seems to forget that the reasoning for these types of crops it to minimize spraying poison on our food sources.
And modifying the corn to produce poison is somehow better? Poison sprayed on the surface of corn can be washed off before consuming. How exactly do you remove the poison if it is internal to the kernel?
While on the opposite end, everything is peaceful, everything is a public good, there is no price tag for anything, and people are randomly executed for anything. A single entity other than yourself control your life and your destiny. You can find one such country (Hint: it is located on the Korean Peninsula.)
New Economic Perspectives
You are full of it. They make the plant resistant so they can use MORE pesticide without killing the plant.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Either in "Stand on Sansibar" or "Sheep looking up" I think the latter one. Well at his time it was considered SF. However it was plausible. And I'm not surprised that it indeed worked. Now lets wait for the worms to really mutate and become nasty :D
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Free Market COULD sort this out. This is a matter of courts. IF you can prove the harm, and you should be able to, then we can use the courts to sue the corporations and their boards and CxOs for liablity, toss them in to Pound me in the ass prison, and confiscate their wealth, and finally, after all is done, give the shareholders absolutely nothing by revoking the corporate charter (including subsidiaries).
Until ANY of those things happen at least once for corporate malfeasance, nothing will change. Much like gov employees documented lying under oath still walking free.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I think the plan is to kill only 5 or 6 billion people.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think you are confusing "resistant to pesticides" with "resistant to pests".
Of all the real issues with the GM industry, causing cancer isn't one of them. Screaming "cancer" is what separates the morons from the people who actually know what they're talking about in the debate.
There never will be a perfect government because governments are run & selected by humans, and humans have a lot of character flaws. If you want an AI government, then it could slip into a totalitarian government without humans noticing and we'd be imprisoned or discarded.
Better to suck 30% than suck 100%.
I smell unrealistic idealism: "because it's not perfect, bulldoze it down and start over."
Table-ized A.I.
Do you have a recipe? How big of frying pan am I going to need?
If I'm breading them, I'm pretty sure they're already dead and thus have infinite resistance to this corn.
I'm glad you made reference to the "Corporate / Government" complex since this is the problem. Our government is completely corrupt since corporations can buy whatever laws they need to keep their profits. Corporations buy politicians who make the laws which benefit corporations.
I don't really agree that "it is more profitable for government to allow for this crap" since government doesn't make a profit but the politicians who make our laws certainly can benefit from making laws to benefit corporations or from not enforcing existing laws.
In the US, there really is no difference between corporations and government. They act together to serve each others interests. We have reached the point of a fascist state.
There is no possibility of a "free market" in the US. It's all corporate control through their corrupt politicians.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
All the fuss surrounding GMO is about this.
YA, No. It's not. All the fuss surrounding GMO is about imagined illness and "unnatural" foods. I WISH it was about this because this is what the fuss should be about: Bad Farming Practices (tm). And Bad Farming Practices (tm) are not limited to GMOs, but also apply to the festering cesspool we call organics that poison hundreds of people every year.
Anyone who's arguing against GMOs because of where farmers get their seeds has no idea how modern agriculture works. Farmers have been buying seed from stores for nearly a century and that's not going to change any time soon. The economics of selecting, drying, and storing your own seed hasn't scaled in generations. This fantasy of the strapping farmer harvesting his crops and saving the seeds for next year's planting is just some Hakuna matata circle-of-life fantasy that doesn't exist in the real world business of agriculture.
YA RLY
And the corporations selling this stuff cannot care less about it, all they care about is that we transition to patented and sterile seeds so we perpetually depend on them.
... if there was even the *slightest* risk of killing 7 billion people *why would you even contemplate it*?
Profit of course.
Be seeing you...
No one wants your silly facts in this discussion. The only pertinent facts is that corporations are evil and care only about profits. GE crops are morally wrong.. for some reason. Anything or anyone promoting either is EVIL. Like shifty eyes evil.
Now take your facts elsewhere.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
If the farmers used more sustainable (organic, biodynamic, whatever) techniques it would never have become a problem in the first place!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This article is just plain stupid. Pests will eventually develop resistance to anything. You can't turn off evolution! To assume that GMO plants somehow avoid this inevitability is just a strawman that can then be used to 'prove' how awful GMO plants and their associated producers are. If there is a villain it is mono-culture. But mono-culture is just another risk/reward tradeoff. Mono-culture makes farming much more economical but gives evolution a much larger population of genetically similar individuals to operate on.
No. GMOs do not and would never exist in nature. Animal genes and plant genes don't mix in nature. Pigs and humans don't mix. A virus doesn't splice its way into your genetic code and become part of you and part of your children.
People are extremely ignorant about what GMOs actually are, even here. It's truly sad.
Are you getting confused between herbicides and insecticides? They engineer plants to be more resistant to herbicides such as round-up so they can go nuts spraying it to kill weeds which leads to a similar problem as in the article where weeds become round-up resistant but while similar and bad, is a different problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The way I read it, they came out with this new strain of corn that prevented the pest from infesting it. The pest adapted. So we are no worse than before, but no better than before. What is the horrible crime that has been committed? The vendors of the new strain off corn just put themselves out of business by overselling.
I can see why the scientists who came up with the 'fix' would have bruised egos, from thinking their 'breakthrough' hasn't saved humanity, but butthurt scientists are nothing new. Humanity often routes around the scientists' miraculous fixes, cuz human populations are not scientifically controllable. Scientists who want complete control should stick to populations of white mice.
Pest Resistance is a journey not a destination
The only thing that is sustainable is change
As far as I know, there are no seeds at all on the market using so-called "Terminator" technology, and never have been. So everyone crying over sterile seeds just doesn't really know what they're talking about. Now, if they're talking about hybrid vigor and how second generation seeds don't perform as well as first-generation hybrids, that's just genetics for you, not some grand conspiracy to make farmers buy seeds year after year rather than saving them.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
This is NOT a GMO issue, it's the same measure/counter-measure issue that's been plaguing agriculture since farming began.
It's an example of evolution in action as a species changes in response to a change in it's environment.
Stop trying to make it out to be more than it is.
Hey now, don't be bringing facts into the anti-GMO discussion! They hate that shit.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
As far as I'm aware, the seeds you buy with these traits come with a "best practices" information sheet that tells you exactly this kind of shit. That farmers still ignore that advice, even knowing what the outcome will be, can hardly be blamed on the biotech companies. After all, the farmers are the ones ultimately putting the seed in the ground. But hey, anything to bitch about Monsanto and the rest, right?
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
You are surprisingly ignorant...
Since, YES, Horizontal transfer does indeed happen, and is widely documented. In fact, it happens A WHOLE LOT.
Yes, porcine and human genes do mix, using viral vectors and other methods.
Yes, Viruses DO INDEED permanently integrate into human and animal genomes. (You DO know that the genes responsible for placental implantation in many placental mammals comes from precisely this source, right? You DO know about the porcine endemic retrovirus, and other such things?)
The argument shouldnt be that "Those things dont happen in nature", because that is straight up wrong. The argument should be that "Natural occurence of this is very narrow in scope, and only persists when there is a profound advantage boost, and then only takes root after a considerable incubation period, and that this behavior has no direct analog with the unnatural section processes used by humans in agricultural settings.
Not this one. Not any honest ones.
We're not quite fascist yet. The real problem is we aren't running a capitalist system, despite the frequent references.
We appear to be running some sort of managementist system. The wealth owners (stockholders) and wealth creators (employees) get bossed around by middle men who think they know what is best. They can be managers or bureaucrats. Even the voters get shafted by this system where someone put in place to work as part of the system, and do what citizens want, takes over the system.
Cheap storage VM.
Fortunately, life finds a way,
"Indeed it does!", say the maggots and microbes eating the decomposing bodies.
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
The problem with bt GMO corn is that the pesticide is present in the corn field 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Prudent use of a pesticide dictates that you use the pesticide as infrequently and as sparingly as possible. If you use it all the time, the insects you are trying to control will develop a resistance to it. But with a GMO plant which is producing the toxin continuously, you are providing the perfect environment for the insect to develop a resistance to it. Sadly, bt toxin is a pesticide that many organic farmers depend on. Since bt toxin is a naturally occurring toxin, it is allowed in organic farming. But, due to GMO crops like bt corn, organic farmers are going to lose a useful, natural pesticide as insects develop resistance to it because they are exposed to it all the time. But companies like Monsato will never be held liable for selling a product that is causing immense harm to organic farmers.
Greed and incompetence combined is just e vil.
The way I figure it, humanity has three potential futures:
Mad Max - We use up all the resources and plunge into Pure Freedom, although I like to call it Really Bad Shit.
Blade Runner - Corporations run the world, profit is everything, and the future is very very gritty for the folks at the bottom.
Star Trek - We invent ourselves into plenty, people can learn and grow as much as they desire or have the will to do.
I'd pick Star Trek. And let's face it, from where we're sitting, Star Treck looks pretty damn Commie. I'm OK with that, mostly because it's not commie at all and we're batshit insane. The point here is, you're restricting choices. Logical Fallacy: Black and White.
I'll take peaceful, everything is a public good, no price tag is stupid but lets call it a sane price tag, and no randomly killing people. It IS quite possible to do that. It is a viable option, and doesn't it sound pretty damn good? So stop inventing Scary Big Brother and help us build it.
P.S. Damnit, we're so CLOSE to Star Trek. Oh, not the spaceships, but universal education is a Khaaannnn! Academy away (I'm so sorry), We have a food distribution problem, not a food production problem, our tech is pretty impressive, our communications are practically free and instant, and damnit, the whole problem is one of culture and systems, not of possibility.
ST is communist.
Once you have the technology that provides pretty much whatever you need, then Communist is the only choice.
Free food and materials, so you really don't need any money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's nice to see that your history of posting dumb shit on /. continues.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You do realize that the VAST majority of thing Monsanto is accused of never happened, right?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What evidence is there that it's becoming poisonous at all to humans?
And please don't cite one of those long since debunked stories claiming that GMOs cause cancer, because not one of those studies has ever made it past peer review, and all of them have been since discredited as junk science, even by other anti-GMO advocates.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
"How exactly do you remove the poison if it is internal to the kernel?"
Recompile it from source?
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Yes, they should plant this on a rotation with different varieties and using sprays on some fields.
... the patent on this particular strain of corn has just run out.
Not reproducing is by definition an evolutionary dead end, no matter how many times you do it. There's no way for that trait to become dominant because it does not spread itself well. The trait is literally "NOT COMING BACK", which is something that does not keep coming back BY DEFINITION. Evolution favors reproduction. The inevitable failure related to terminator crops is not that the terminator genes will spread, but that the other genes will.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation where the operator, an individual or organization, pays returns to its investors from new capital paid to the operators by new investors, rather than from profit earned by the operator." --Wikipedia Or, in the case of engineered corn, the engineering generates its own demand. See also addiction. There is no sustainable value, only the false image of value, money, and only to one party, the engineer.
Nature finds a way.
"Uh, what's your point?"
See also: "we need to develop newer antibiotics for all the bacteria who have developed resistance to our old antibiotics, but they don't come cheap"
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
There are different versions of genetic modification. Taking a specific gene and transferring it into another organism is not a heck of a lot different from breeding for a trait. In some ways, more predictable since you know what protein you're going to produce, whereas breeding can have all sorts of odd pleiotropic effects, selection for major things like paedomorphism, etc.
The other kind of genetic modification is the "shotgun" method; chop the total DNA of these insecticidal bacteria into manageable pieces, mix it up with plant embryos, grow a zillion of them up and grab any which have incorporated the insecticides. And who knows what else.....
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
people too stupid to know when they've been PR'd into psudo-scientific corporate submission.
But no, we shouldn't have the ability in the US to know what foods contain what so that we can make our own choices, because, like, people will stop buying the shit...
Life doesn't find a way. Mass extinctions do occur on both macro and micro scales. Forests degrade into deserts. Even whole plants die. More species have gone existent than exist today. Or do you consider all plants dying, then other animals, and finally humans dying out with only bacteria left as fine since the bacteria is still considered life?
Stop believing in bullshit and look at how things actually play out. When the balance of an environment is tipped in one direction, it more often fails catastrophically than re-balances out. I'm not saying one breed of sterile crops is going to destroy all plants, but that "life finds a way" is complete bullshit. If life is so great, why are the rest of the planets seemingly dead? Life is lucky to exist at all.