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Scotland To Ban GM Crops
An anonymous reader writes: Scotland's rural affairs minister has announced the country will ban the growing of genetically modified crops. He said, "I am concerned that allowing GM crops to be grown in Scotland would damage our clean and green brand, thereby gambling with the future of our £14 billion food and drink sector." Many Scottish farmers disapprove of the ban, pointing out that competing farms in nearby England face no such restriction. "The hope was to have open discussion and allow science to show the pros and cons for all of us to understand either the potential benefits or potential downsides. What we have now is that our competitors will get any benefits and we have to try and compete. It is rather naïve."
in case you missed the last twenty years, they're specifically talking about the Monsanto crops which are a: terminal (they do not produce viable seed), b: specifically resistant to insect and disease strains that have already adapted to the resistant strain crops such as triticale (a hybrid of wheat and rye), and most importantly c: as synthetic strains, are patented, hence with marker genes can be traced into the wild and used to shut down farmers who refuse to buy Monsanto strains by litigating them to death when those marked strains are found sprouting in their hedgerows.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I guess Scotch made from organic wheat will be better for my liver?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
I don't think the world is quite ready for genetically modified haggis.
#DeleteChrome
Aren't all crops genetically modified?
No, not by humans. By natural selection, yes, but that rarely would produce Antarctic teleost genes in vascular plants or other extreme HGT effects now "readily" possible.
TFA:
"The Scottish Government will shortly submit a request that Scotland is excluded from any European consents for the cultivation of GM crops, including the variety of genetically modified maize already approved and six other GM crops that are awaiting authorisation."
The rest of the world calls that corn. We've been genetically modifying it for all of recorded history.
Really? You mean they're not talking about the stuff that Norman Borlaug made as well. It sure seems like it, and many of the things he invented fall into those categories as well.
Om, nomnomnom...
Scottish Nationalists want to go back to pre-1707, apparently everything was a paradise back then.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Lots of people like to say things like 'there is no evidence that GMOs are dangerous.' But that is mirroring the hippy-dippy types who say that anything 'natural' is healthy.
Just because no one's found a problem with the corn that most of us have been unknowingly eating for decades, that doesn't mean the latest and greatest GMO won't have its own unique risks. The more GMOs that are engineered, the more chances there are to screw something up.
Do these people want us to go back to the Stone Age? Because that's what's going to happen.
These people are opposed to any progress that might actually solve the problems we face, which only leaves us with the option of going backwards.
From http://www.savethepinebush.org...
Who Owns Life?
Canadian Farmer Sued by Monsanto
by Lynne Jackson
ALBANY, NY — The First Lutheran Church was the setting for the talk by Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian farmer being sued by Monsanto for patent infringement. [...] Around 1995, Percy told his wife he was thinking of retirement. Louise expressed concerns about what he would do with himself, so Percy decided to keep farming for a while longer. What to do with his spare time was decided in 1998, when Monsanto sued Percy for patent infringement. Monsanto said that it had found GMO (genetically modified organism) canola seed in Percy’s field, and that Percy had to pay a $15 an acre fee for using its patented GMO seed. Percy never had anything to do with Monsanto. He never purchased seed from Monsanto. He was concerned that Monsanto seed had contaminated his farm. The GMO canola plants got into his fields by the wind blowing pollen or seed onto his land. It took two years for the pre-trail motions and paper-work to be completed. During this time, Monsanto dropped their charge that Percy had illegally obtained the GMO seed. Because this was a patent case, the case would not be heard by a jury but by one federal judge. The trial took two and one-half weeks. The federal judge decided that it did not matter how the GMO crops got into his field, he must pay Monsanto their fee of $15/acre. In addition, the judge ordered that Percy pay Monsanto all of the profits from his 1998 crop, and that he must turn over all of the plants and seeds to Monsanto. Two of Percy’s fields were not contaminated with Monsanto GMOs and 60% of the GMOs Monsanto found were in the ditch by the road. Percy appealed his case to the federal Court of Appeals, which upheld the ruling against Percy by the first judge.
There is nothing Luddite refusing GMO.
Scottish Nationalists want to go back to pre-1707, apparently everything was a paradise back then.
If you had to eat English food, you would think so too.
Scotland's rural affairs minister has announced the country will ban the growing of genetically modified crops. He said, "I am concerned that allowing GM crops to be grown in Scotland would damage our clean and green brand, thereby gambling with the future of our £14 billion food and drink sector."
Oh he's gambling with their food and drink sector but not in the way he thinks he is. Simply banning these crops in the absence of actual evidence of their harm will definitely cause an impact but probably not a positive one. I understand taking reasonable steps to evaluate the effects of new(ish) technologies but slapping a blanket ban on something without any actual evidence of harm seems rather short sighted. This is exactly the sort of thing that you need to have a rational and evidence based debate over. Not a fear motivated ban.
Of course, you realise that the Terminator Seeds thing is effectively a myth - right:
http://www.monsanto.com/newsvi...
Of course, we're quite happy to eat effectively some of these kinds of plants (seedless grapes and seedless watermelon).
And of course if you were worried about some of the GM gene's getting into the "wild", this would be a good thing. Then again, you'd expect one to be more concerned about our traditionally GM'd crops (i.e., bred) inter breading with their "wild" relatives.
forcing terminal
Nobody is 'forcing' anybody to do anything, and there are no 'terminal' crops. Two words, two lies. Seems about right for the anti-GMO bunch.
Selective breeding is humans directing natural selection. We have been doing it for millennium. Wheat and maize only exist because humans have influenced them.
Though I would expect that this kind of GM would not be banned, unless the hippies that are running things have really gone off the hook. But even still, this "science = BAD!" generalization is not helping things. What happened to having some government organization look at each proposed GM change and authorize them on a case-by-case basis?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Must you keep repeating this bullshit? Read the actual case, not some anti-GMO spin on it.
He was not 'concerned that Monsanto seed contaminated his farm'. He suspected that some GMO seed from his neighbors property got on his field, so he intentionally killed (with glyphosphate) all of the crop that HE planted, kept the seed from the 'contaminated' plants, and replanted them. There was nothing 'accidental' about it.
in case you missed the last twenty years, they're specifically talking about the Monsanto crops which are a: terminal (they do not produce viable seed), b: specifically resistant to insect and disease strains that have already adapted to the resistant strain crops such as triticale (a hybrid of wheat and rye), and most importantly c: as synthetic strains, are patented, hence with marker genes can be traced into the wild and used to shut down farmers who refuse to buy Monsanto strains by litigating them to death when those marked strains are found sprouting in their hedgerows.
Aren't a and c mutually exclusive? I am not a farmer, so if I have a gross conceptual error here please correct me, but if the crops are terminal, how are the farmers "illegally" getting seeds to plant without paying royalties? Someone has to buy the seeds from Monsanto if they are not viable on their own, right?
they're specifically talking about the Monsanto crops which are a: terminal (they do not produce viable seed)
If they are, they're not blocking anything, as Monsanto has never sold terminator seeds.
specifically resistant to insect and disease strains that have already adapted to the resistant strain crops such as triticale (a hybrid of wheat and rye)
If they are, they're not blocking everything, because all crops are being constantly bred for disease resistance
as synthetic strains, are patented, hence with marker genes can be traced into the wild and used to shut down farmers who refuse to buy Monsanto strains by litigating them to death when those marked strains are found sprouting in their hedgerows.
There has never been a lawsuit for accidental wind sprouting. The closest case was Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser, in which Schmeiser bred roundup-ready seed, pretending to have had it been part of a wind-blow, but actually having purchased the seed before, and simply bred a new crop without paying for it:
Lots of luddites on slashdot right now. I thought I ought to correct the record.
anytime a company holds a patent on our craps
It's the end of the world when you can eat your food and get sued when it comes out the other end.
Well, now I need the rest of the story. I know seedless oranges were luck of normal, natural genetic chaos, and they propagated the seedless trees through grafting. Are you saying seedless grapes and watermelon (which have been around for more than 20 years) are not the same?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Jeffrey M. Smith (born 1958) is an American consumer activist, self-published author, and former politician.
He attended Maharishi University of Management, and participated in a TM-Sidhi program yogic flying demonstration
Wow
He probably wanted something actually based on science, and not anecdotal claims and innuendo.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There's been a slight increase in the human population since the Neolithic.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
How the fuck did he 'saved the seed and planted is next season' if your claim that they do not produce viable seed is correct? You need to keep your lies straight.
The book is wrong. There have been hundreds of studies that show animals turn out the same. Also the seed/pesticide price for a farmer isn't that big of a difference between the two types of corn. The farmer would not grow it if there was a difference.
I find it really funny how non farmers think farmers are stupid. They spend all day thinking about these things, the same as you think about computers/tech, etc.
What, humans aren't natural? Where did we come from then?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
> and simply bred a new crop without paying for it:
Paying to grow plant seeds, simply because he "ought to have known" that those seeds have artificial restrictions placed on them by government on behalf of some company? That's luddism right there.
Seedless watermelon involves crossing two lines (diploid and tetraploid) annually to generate a sterile fruit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I understand it seedless grapes are typically grafted from plant to plant and are perennial but I expect the "first" generation of them are produced in a similarity. That's how you could get multiple seedless varieties (green, red, black, etc.)
Why would you think that this could happen? There are tons of companies that produce seed. The only reason a farmer would pay a ton of money for their particular seed was if it was a really profitable seed that they couldn't get anywhere else. And farmers have been buying seeds anually forever for lots of crops. Agreements not to replant specialty varietals long predate the modern transgenic era. A lot of the time, they're just buying a particularly useful hybrid that doesn't breed true (or doesn't produce seeds at all), so it makes sense to buy seeds year after year anyway.
This doesn't actually seem to be happening, though. Glyphosate use is way up, but that seems to be primarly because it's replacing other (much nastier) herbicides. And insect resistant crops actually reduce insecticide use.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The "accidental contamination gets you sued" argument that they made is also a myth. The most famous case usually cited is that of Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser, where they sued a Canadian canola farmer for growing crops from seeds wind-pollinated from a neighbor using their plants. But Schmeiser always admitted to deliberately trying to get the glyphosphate resistance. He roundup'ed his own crops that were grown next to his neighbor who was using roundup-ready canola, saved only those seeds from the survivors for the next year and planted his whole crop with the resistant seeds, achieving a 95-98% concentration of the gene. He was deliberately attempting to acquire the gene without paying for it - it was in no way, shape or form "accidental contamination". Monsanto confronted him about what he was doing and insisted he pay a license fee since he was using their crop. He refused saying that because he grew it from seeds on his land, it was his own property.
Despite the fact that it was deliberate contamination, not accidental, Monsanto still barely won the patent infringement case, 5-4.
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
Corn with fisheyes is generally considered to be GM. Corn in tune with Mother Nature (when she's not trying to kill us) and grown under the benevolent gaze of a wholistic crystal is not.
Take a close look at those cases. The lawsuits have only been people who were obviously intentionally selecting for the trait to grow their own roundup ready seeds. People who get cross-pollinated by accident have never been sued. The lawsuits generated a lot of press, so there's a pretty good amount of information in the public record about what actually happened, and it's nothing like what the anti-GMO activists have claimed.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Interesting perspective. Almost entirely wrong, but still interesting.
TL;DR:
1) Monsanto does not produce "sterile" seeds. They do hold a patent on that technology, but have promised not to create seeds using that technology. Yes, they could go back on that promise...but how about we wait until they actually do that before vilifying them?
2) They have never "litigated a farmer to death" over "marked strains are found sprouting in their hedgerows". The one lawsuit that occurred was a result of a farmer who intentionally replanted Monsanto seeds from crops adjoining his neighbors farm (who was using Monsanto seeds), after spraying those same crops with RoundUp, so he knew that was was left was pesticide resistant.
In this case, the amount the farmer (after appeal) had to pay Monsanto was: $0.
> What pray tell is a terminal crop?
Genetic use restriction technology
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
It might be some comfort then that such products have never, ever been sold commercially. Monsanto didn't even invent it, they happened to acquire it as part of Delta Pine and Land, which they bought because they wanted to get into the cotton business.
Name one such case other than Schmeiser. Schmeiser doesn't count because there was nothing 'natural' or 'accidental' about it. He intentionally killed everything that was not GMO and replanted the GMO seed. Nobody forced him to do that, although he was forced to pay once it was found he infringed on the patent. The willful ignorance is all yours.
Simple answer:
The plants do produce viable seed. The sterile seed BS is just FUD by the anti-GMO group.
Your view of property rights is pretty messed up. If monsanto doesn't want their seeds being blown by the wind, carried by birds etc, they need to build fences. If their seed lands on my land I can do whatever I want with it. Period. Only massive legal spending on a scale never before seen, and that could not be matched by Schmeiser enabled them to squeak out a victory. If they don't like the way nature work s- those pesky bees spreading pollen everywhere - they are welcome to leave the seed industry.
Really? You mean the book by this guy, who has literally no educational background in genetics (or for that matter, any kind of science).
And before you accuse me of ad-hominem (which is not always fallacious), a pretty good trouncing of every "fact" in that book can be found here
In general, there are several concerns about GMO foods (presented in no particular order):
1. GMO foods cause cancer, infertility, etc. (health concerns in general)
2. GMO foods will disrupt the environment, either by spreading too far due to their increased fitness or by spreading their genes and causing unforeseen changes in the surrounding wildlife
3. Issues with the concept of patenting life
4. Concerns about letting one (or several) large company control most of the seed stock
5. Concerns about allowing crops to get too similar, thus potentially raising the chance of crop collapse like the Potato Famine
6. It's "unnatural" and scary
Of these, 1. has no real evidence behind it, and plenty of evidence against it. It's still a potential concern in some cases, but in general these fears are overblown (especially when people are afraid they will pick up those genes - if gene therapy was that easy, hemophilia or muscular dystrophy wouldn't be an issue), as the proteins made from the inserted genes are already generally considered safe. 2. is possible, in that they could disrupt the insect/pest population, but their genes are unlikely to significantly improve the fitness of surrounding plants, and crops aren't good enough to grow outside of fields, for the most part. I understand both sides of the issue on #3. 4 and 5 are (in my opinion) legitimate concerns in general, but that isn't limited to GMO crops. 6 is just stupid.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Strawberries too. 100% of strawberries are from grafted hybrids.
Corporations do some crazy things in the name of profit, but GM food is not particularly crazy or malevolent. It's pretty awesome, actually. Unfortunately, the ill-defined "natural foods" trend -- really just another form of superstition -- is all the rage among a well-meaning but (sometimes willfully) uninformed population of mommies, hipsters, and, by extension, their households.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
That's because it's already happened. If you notice a bunch of crops growing on your land with special properties, and you dare replant those next year, you could inadvertently be running afoul of a license agreement you never saw, never agreed to and be sued for patent infringement.
So it doesn't matter that you can buy seed from a competitor - if some of the "viral" seed ends up on your land, your only option is to burn it. Or be sued.
Terminator seeds don't work, period. And unless the legal system changes to the point where if your patented seeds end up on someone else's farmland, then it's SOL for you - it's your responsibility to prevent that, then it's a serious problem.
Hell, the problem's compounded if your neighbour starts using the seeds and you want to go for organic certification.
All Scotland really needs to do is change the laws a little bit and say legal agreements are not conveyed by living things. So you can impose license agreements on farmers that agree to buy your product, but if they spill your product elsewhere, then not only is all legal protection void on the spilled product, any other IP protection carried on that product cannot be enforced. So your neighbour's seed ending up on your crop is yours free and clear.
It's IP law, not property law. If you photograph the book that I've written from your house, that doesn't give you the right to publish it and sell it.
And you could make a great argument against IP laws -- there are many to be made -- but this has nothing to do with property rights.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Greenpeace has a quarter of a billion dollar annual budget. If they spent a tiny fraction of a percent of it on that research instead of trying to get people to trample research plots, they'd have it. The Center for Food Safety has a several million a year budget and appears to have a few million left over after expenses. A $500K grant for some good research would go pretty far. If they can prove that 90+% of American corn is poison, GMOs will die off pretty much immediately and they can all go home after collecting all of their science accolades. But they don't, because propaganada is cheaper and they don't havae the science on their side.
People act like Monsanto is an unstoppably huge juggernaut and the anti-GMO movement is a plucky little team, but Whole Foods has almost the same annual revenue, so there's clearly money in the anti-GMO world. In fact, the anti-GMO industry is big business and if they're not funding halfway decent research, it's their own fault. The reality is that propaganda is a better bet for them because it always makes them look good. Real research is unlikely to produce unambiguously terrifying results, so they don't bother.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
And yet, with all of the farmers out there, there are no examples whatsoever of inadvertent use resulting in a lawsuit. The only ones who have gotten sued are the ones who obviously intentionally selected the Roundup Ready seed and planted that. Monsanto's position on this is pretty clear, and they've acted on it exactly how they said they would. In fact, Monsanto used to have (and probably still does) a policy that they'll pay to have hybrids removed from your fields if you contact them.
Terminator seeds would completely solve this problem, but there was so much outcry and shit flinging when they were proposed that Monsanto has pledged not to produce them. This is 100% not Monsanto's fault. They'd love to sell terminator seeds and have 0% cross pollination and never have to worry about enforcing their contracts.
That's a tougher nut to crack. USDA rules allow some cross pollination without losing certification. I haven't seen a lot of data that indicates hybrids are taking over, and depending on the crop, there are techniques to mitigate the problem (adjusting planting times, etc.). But cross pollination happens and people need to learn to live with it. If I grew strawberries and claimed that my deity was angered by corn pollen touching them, how much of a right would I have to dictate what my neighbors planted? At some point, the public's demand for religious accommodation on this issue is going to start trampling on other practical goods and we're going to need to draw a line.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Well, that and the fact that it's 100% obvious to any judge that Schmeiser intentionally killed off his non Roundup-Ready crops to select for the trait. His fields were 95% Roundup Ready. That's not "Ow! Monsanto is pollinating my crops with its big, bad pollen!" That's, "Yay, I'm going to get this stuff without paying for it!"
And Monsanto had a solution to this a while back. Terminator seeds that produce sterile plants. But everybody had a heart attack over the idea, so they've agreed not to use them. Now they're stuck chasing pollen around and getting blamed for "contamination" by farmers who clearly just want to steal their IP.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
We don't need most things. A nutritious, flavorless paste, some water, and shelter from the elements is all we really need. Making crops faster, better, cheaper, more nutritious and with less waste is just a nice option we like to have. Just like fuel efficient cars and nice smartphones. We could do without them, but why?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
If at some point in a discussion about GMO and the company Monsanto gets brought up as a point pro/con GMO, just remember this. Bringing up a company that is built around a product does not mean that the product in question inherits the attitude that the company that uses has.
Good example, if I'm talking about chicken and McDonald's and their woeful employee wage gets brought up, more than likely you have less a problem with chicken and more a problem with McDonald's.
I get that Monsanto has some serious legal ethics issues and that apparently the CEO goes to bed at night after his late night snack of kittens. However, GMOs didn't make their CEO some monopolistic asshat, he was already that before hand. GMOs are just his weapon of choice. It could have been self-microwaving hotdogs for all we know but we were destined to have this kind of caliber of a person grace the planet and this person choose GMOs.
You have a great point in that the whole problem isn't a scientific one, the problem is a political one. Much like climate change, a lot of people when the topic gets brought up start naming off political parties. Which that typically means whoever it is doing the talking has a lot more beef with the other political party (parties) than they actually do with the science behind the whole issue. It would be great to not hold people accountable if they didn't plant the seed and it came over by the wind instead. However, I will say, that a fair amount (I wouldn't say majority, but a lot more often than would like to be admitted) of farmers are on purpose planting seed knowing all about the agreements and what not. That comes from my experience with living not too far away from where a lot of growing goes on and having a few buddies that work on those farms. Again, though, we have a serious problem because the vast majority of those that aren't seriously trying to game the system are finding it difficult to mount a serious defense. However, again, that's not a problem with GMOs so much as a political problem.
So it is important and yet very difficult, because after all we are humans, for us to understand that there is a separation between the actual thing being debated and those who want to be complete dickheads with or about those things. Scotland banning GMOs is less an attack on the validity and safety of GMOs, and more along the lines of a big middle finger to companies like Monsanto. Knowing the context of why Scotland took the actions it did, helps us to cut through the "how do we make GMOs safe / how do we eradicate GMOs from the Earth" debate and get to the real heart of the matter, "How do we stop kitten eating CEO corporate greed? Or at the very least wean them off of kittens and reduce the full throttle amount of greed that engage in?" Because it is not unheard of for a business owner to actually take interest in their employees' lives and care about their impact on the local and national levels. That era may have passed us or may be only something in the domain of small businesses. However, I believe that this is truly the topic we should on a more broader sense be discussing.
When I did a search, Schmeiser did not come up, but this did: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/monsanto-wins-lawsuit_n_3417081.html and to quote in part, "Monsanto filed 144 patent-infringement lawsuits against farmers between 1997 and April 2010, and won judgments against farmers it said made use of its seed without paying required royalties."
The assertion on slashdot is that everyone they won against stole the Monsanto seed, but cross-contamination is well documented which places the burden of proof on Monsanto's many and loud defenders. Monsanto does not claim cross-contamination doesn't occur, though they claim to not sue for it (that PR statement being the subject of a lawsuit that was the subject of the linked article). Yes, in the linked article it appears that being a public statement it is binding -- but Monsanto has refused to sign anything that would clearly be legally binding -- despite: "In its ruling Monday, the court noted that records indicate a large majority of conventional seed samples have become contaminated by Monsanto's Roundup resistance trait."
And, again, *Monsanto* admits to cross-contamination so any claim that they have not wrongfully sued needs to be examined on a case by case basis. Just offering one case (there are 144 mentioned in the article) does nothing to support Monsanto's claims to not wrongfully sue.
I know, Monsanto's astroturfing wants the discussion to be about "GMO is so good farmers steal it and then lie about it" but that isn't what is happening. That isn't why the lawsuit in the linked article happened. Free market proponents want the market to settle things and... the free market has said there is a market from selling non-GMO products. And companies that wish to cater to this are being harmed by cross-contamination as their product is no longer non-GMO.
You made that up. Or somebody did. What GMOs need more pesticides? And what pesticides are they, specifically?
Bt crops that produce their own pesticides are amazing. They took a natural bacteria-based pesticide that has no known effect on humans (and is used by the truckload on "organic" crops for this reason) and engineered the gene straight into the plant. The result is a pest resistant plant that massively reduces the amount of Bt pesticide used per acre and increases its effectiveness at pest control.
Of course, the anti-GMO crowd has a million complaints about it. It produces too much Bt to be safe. It also produces too little Bt to be effective. It's OK to spray it but it's super toxic when the plant produces it. 100% bullshit, but it's cheap to make a web site and hard to do real research.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I realize the Monsanto narrative is about dishonest farmers who steal Monsanto's imaginary property, but Monsanto's GMO is a *liability* for farmers. They don't *want* it no matter what Monsanto lies are spread around. Why don't they want it? Because it costs them money. Not from paying Monsanto, but from not being able to see their product. http://www.rt.com/usa/monsanto-lawsuits-gmo-wheat-603/
I'm inclined to agree with you in a lot of industries, but plants? What progress is being held back? It seems to me that the people doing the real heavy lifting in producing transgenics and novel hybrids are companies that benefit from patent protection. I mean, Bt and Roundup Ready crops are amazing and there's even more interesting work being done, but if all of your investment is gone within two planting seasons, it seems unlikely that they'll do much more expensive biotech research.
It's also worth remembering that this isn't purely analogous to other types of patents. If I get rid of a patent on a machine, you at least still need to design a copy of my machine and build it. Seeds are more like software. You can copy them at will without much effort. So getting rid of that patent protection is a lot more like doing away with software copyright. There may be philosophical reasons for doing it, but I don't think Adobe is going to be putting out a new release of Photoshop if it's 100% free to copy.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I'm totally onboard with it. The problem is that you haven't done so. At all.
You're asking me like you know the answer and that's a rhretorical question, but it's pretty clear that you don't and it's not. I personally know scientists who are paid by the university (with taxpayer dollars) and whose research is funded by a mix of the university and the USDA. The Land Grant universities pour a lot of public money into crop research. Do you have some specific examples of money as a corrupting influence that we can go into, or are you just going to hand wave the entire field of public scientists doing crop research into the "corrupt" bin based on your thought experiment concluding that they all work for Monsanto?
And even if you don't know where the money comes from, the research is not useless. Science doesn't work that way. Reproducible experiments and data win in the long run. If they're putting out false data, they'll get caught. And if anybody, no matter how small, has a good reproducible experiment that shows that most of America's corn and soybeans are dangerous, they'll be on the fast track to fame and fortune as a scientist with breakthrough research.
Once again, science doesn't work that way. Scientists don't get together and decide that the winner is the one with the biggest pile of cash. They bring their data to the table and look at it. Good research will win over bad research in the long run. If corn really is poison, it doesn't take much money to test that. And if the results are interesting and they can be reproduced, they'll win. But I don't see examples of them funding good research. I see them using all of that money on propaganda instead. Seriously, nowhere in that budget is there room for a $500K grant to a professor to test one of their wild theories about GMOs?
As for Monsanto's legal department, do you have any examples at all of researchers doing real research and receiving any sort of threat? The only legal abuse I'm aware of is harassment against GMO friendly researchers at public universities using FOIA requests.
Are you kidding me? Are you claiming, with a straight face, that Coca Cola funds most of the world's nutrition research and that you can't find data anywhere in the literature that sugar is linked to obesity? That researchers who have data showing the link are shouted down, squelched from the journals, kept from the public eye, defunded, and threatened with lawsuits? If that's your best analogy, I think you've made my case for me.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Unfortunately, the ill-defined "natural foods" trend -- really just another form of superstition -- is all the rage among a well-meaning but (sometimes willfully) uninformed population of mommies, hipsters, and, by extension, their households.
You nailed it: GM fear and vaccinations are the 2 top superstitions of the 21st century. Plus, the two are related: "stick a pin in a map in the center of an anti-vax hotspot, and you've found a Whole Foods.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, eliminate IP for all things would be better of course, but eliminating it for lifeforms would be a nice start.
Well, that and the fact that it's 100% obvious to any judge that Schmeiser intentionally killed off his non Roundup-Ready crops to select for the trait. His fields were 95% Roundup Ready. That's not "Ow! Monsanto is pollinating my crops with its big, bad pollen!" That's, "Yay, I'm going to get this stuff without paying for it!"
So farmers cannot select for beneficial traits anymore. What are they to do -- keep databases of traits so they can determine which ones might be "property" of a genetic engineering firms?
And please don't try to tell me this ban on millennia-old behavior will stop at 'Roundup-readiness'.
It's fairly simple. Generically modified crops will appear fine at first. People will happily eat them, unaware that anything is wrong.
Then, wham! One day, we all wake up. Zombies everywhere.
Same dealio with irradiated foods. Except Mutants everywhere.
Also Monsanto is evil. If they can genetically engineer food, they're probably grafting other things to create X5s and Nexus 6es. BMW has already released an "X5", but where did they get the design from? Likewise, where did Google get its Nexus 6 from? Monsanto, that's where.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
No spin: Before GMOs farmers could select for interesting traits without restriction.
Now they must assume that new traits they come across are someone else's "property" until proven otherwise. To say this is burdensome would be an understatement.
No, they absolutely can. Just not ones that are specifically genetically engineered and patented. Other than that, knock yourself out. Although farmers aren't really in the "producing new and better varietals" business these days. If they want to get in to R&D, they can jump right in, but most of them are going to keep buying seeds and seedlings from the companies that actually produce the varietals.
Are you seriously implying that that knowing about Roundup Ready crops was just an undue burden that nobody in the industry could ever be expected to keep up with? This case is so completely over the top that it's a wonder anybody is defending him.
Actually, it's not really a wonder, because he's the only example they really have. The other borderline cases that everybody is thought experimenting on never seem to materialize in the real world. Ending up with 95% of a neighbor's traits in your seed "by accident" is just impossible.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
My baseball falling onto your property does not give you the right to mass produce that exact style/design of ball.
Just because something fell onto your property, it doesn't give you the right to break copyright on that item, no matter how much you twist the law.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
There has been no case where the farmer accidentally grew the GMO. Every case that has been pursued in court was over a farmer intentionally concentrating the seed and planting it. Not accidental anything.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Except he plainly admitted that he knew about it and did it intentionally and that his motive was to not pay for the seed by claiming it was justified because he grew the crops that he harvested for seed. We can argue the merits of IP, but let's be honest about it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Well, we don't have a time machine, so in this particular hypothetical situation, we'd still have Bt corn and Roundup-ready soybeans. I bet that Monsanto would even still be the one to produce them, at least until their competitors manage to economically produce generic alternatives, which conceivably might take a while.
But I guess what you mean is, if we abolished plant patents today, no one will be willing and/or able to develop whatever the future, "new-and-improved" versions of these crops are. Or, if these hypothetical laws had been in place 20 years ago, we wouldn't have these crops today.
I think a large fraction of Slashdot users reject this premise. It's basically the biotech equivalent of the open-source-versus-closed-source debate, or the idea that bands would stop making music if people refused to pay money for their recordings. Granted, a genetics lab is a much bigger investment than a few guitars and drums, or a laptop running a software development environment. But I personally believe that, if there were no plant patents, eventually all the farm co-ops around America and the world would pool their resources to develop their own GM crop lines. The yield increases still provide adequate incentive, plus the farmers' collective wouldn't have to compete with Monsanto on cost while developing their own alternatives, and best of all, they wouldn't be sued into oblivion by Monsanto's fleets of lawyers.
It's not a question of "no one" doing it. It's simply a question of how many. There will always be public research and non-profit funds for doing this type of work. Just not as much. Doing away with patent protection won't halt biotech. It will just slow it down. If that's a price we're willing to pay, then so be it. But in this particular industry, the cost/benefit analysis seems to me to go the other way.
Software development requires investment, but not nearly as much investment as biotech. Add in regulations and what it takes to get those GM lines into production (you'll note that there are lots of interesting new GM plants on the drawing board or in the lab, but very very few actually in the market for regulatory reasons) and you have huge startup costs when compared to most software or music projects. You note this, but I think it's important to really take in the scale. It's also worth noting that musicians generally make more money performing than they do on album sales, and that open source software companies still make money selling support and services. I don't think biotech companies really have much in the way of alternative ways to monetize GM crops beyond selling them.
On the other side of it, there's a difference in what the IP rules cost us in different industries. Software lifecycles are ridiculously fast. A 20 year patent might as well be 100 years. The costs to the industry of a 20 year patent are substantial. On the biotech side, planting cycles are annual and development timelines are generally measured in years, so a 20 year patent isn't all that long when compared to the time it takes for new ideas to become widely adopted products. Second, there's the bullshit factor. In software at least, the bullshit factor is high. I'd guess that most patents these days are given for bullshit rather than real innovation. On the GM crop side, the signal to noise ratio is still high. That could change, but I don't think we're there yet.
I'm really sympathetic to the problems people have with the patent system. In a lot of fields, it seems like it has outlived its usefulness. But in this one, it seems to me like we still have some mileage left.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
First off, the evidence for including them as "probably carcinogenic to humans" (category 2A) is fairly weak. Some glyphosates were only classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" (category 2B), which means there's no good evidence one way or the other - coffee falls in this category, FYI. Second, do you really think farmers are stupid enough to pay extra money for Monsanto seeds if they were getting much less out of them? That's just dumb.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
He was deliberately attempting to acquire the gene without paying for it
This, in a nutshell, is my problem with GMOs. Nobody should have to pay for genes, period. Exclusive ownership of lifeforms and genes (which after all are just information) is wrong. It's that simple. If we allow this, and we do, we venture out on a very dark and extremely slippery-sloped road. Not buying GM-ed products is a way of protesting the "life can be IP" meme, which is why I support labeling laws despite the fact that I don't believe GMO food is harmful. It's about ethics and the future, not public health.
This is one of those sentences that doesn't inspire confidence in the technical accuracy of what's to follow. Kind of like talking about sending your kid "an internet."
You mean they've classified it in a class of carcinogens that includes "emissions from high temperature frying" and not quite in the class that includes "sawdust." Lots of things are probably carcinogenic. The question is how seriously carcinogenic they are and whether they're toxic in other ways. And all of that is assuming that you want to take this one agency's conclusions over the conclusions of a bunch of other agencies that reached a different one.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Bullshit. The RoundUp-Ready trait is useful only because you douse your whole plot with RoundUp and every plant not resistant to it dies in 2-3 days.
Schmeiser did not "find" the useful trait. To find it, he would have had to use RoundUp before *knowing* that some plants are resistant to it. However, RoundUp has no practical use except as a herbicide together with RoundUp-Ready plants, so he had no reason to have some around.
I have no love for Monsanto and their horrible legal practices, but that Schmeiser guy was clearly a smartass trying to rig the system.
"If I recall, the stone age stuff was pretty tasty."
Yes, that's why we continually bred different foods; to get stuff that was worse for us. Huh?
"Not messing with mother nature is not neo-luddite-ism."
Yes, it is.
"Messing with it is hubris"
So, you don't eat oranges? Corn? Potatoes? THOSE DON'T EXIST IN NATURE!
Shouting "shill alert!" doesn't make anything he said less true.