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Fraud Detected In Science Research That Suggested GMO Crops Were Harmful (nature.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Three science papers that had suggested that genetically modified crops were harmful to animals and have been used by activist groups to argue for their ban have been found to contain manipulated and possibly falsified data. Nature reports: "Papers that describe harmful effects to animals fed genetically modified (GM) crops are under scrutiny for alleged data manipulation. The leaked findings of an ongoing investigation at the University of Naples in Italy suggest that images in the papers may have been intentionally altered. The leader of the lab that carried out the work there says that there is no substance to this claim. The papers' findings run counter to those of numerous safety tests carried out by food and drug agencies around the world, which indicate that there are no dangers associated with eating GM food. But the work has been widely cited on anti-GM websites — and results of the experiments that the papers describe were referenced in an Italian Senate hearing last July on whether the country should allow cultivation of safety-approved GM crops. 'The case is very important also because these papers have been used politically in the debate on GM crops,' says Italian senator Elena Cattaneo, a neuroscientist at the University of Milan whose concerns about the work triggered the investigation.
The bigger issue is the Intellectual Property issues associated with the GMO crops. As part of the license agreements that come with the GMO seeds, Farmers are no longer permitted to keep behind a portion of their crop to plant the following year, should they wish, and are thus forced to buy new seed every year. Yeah, it may be profitable in the good times, but it dramatically reduces their self-sufficiency.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
That's nothing new, though. Seed license agreements long predate modern transgenics and farmers go along with them for a lot of reasons. Keeping seeds is not as common as most people think. Very often, the traits that they want don't breed true anyway, so your next generation is a total mess. Just buying seeds every year gives you a consistent product with consistent yields without a lot of headache. Obviously, whether you can save seeds depends on the type of crop you're growing, but if seed saving was really a big thing across the board, seed companies would have been out of business a long time ago.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Yeah, that's not actually anywhere near any case that has ever happened.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
As part of the license agreements that come with the GMO seeds, Farmers are no longer permitted to keep behind a portion of their crop to plant the following year, should they wish, and are thus forced to buy new seed every year.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Another myth spread by the organic foods industry. Top Five Myths Of Genetically Modified Seeds, Busted
Myth 1: Seeds from GMOs are sterile.
Myth 2: Monsanto will sue you for growing their patented GMOs if traces of those GMOs entered your fields through wind-blown pollen.
Myth 3: Any contamination with GMOs makes organic food non-organic.
Myth 4: Before Monsanto got in the way, farmers typically saved their seeds and re-used them. By the time Monsanto got into the seed business, most farmers in the U.S. and Europe were already relying on seed that they bought every year from older seed companies. This is especially true of corn farmers, who've been growing almost exclusively commercial hybrids for more than half a century. (If you re-plant seeds from hybrids, you get a mixture of inferior varieties.) But even soybean and cotton farmers who don't grow hybrids were moving in that direction. This shift started with the rise of commercial seed companies, not the advent of genetic engineering. But Monsanto and GMOs certainly accelerated the trend drastically.
Myth 5: Most seeds these days are genetically modified.
Not only that, but he's trying to use FUD to fight the technology. Monsanto's patents on roundup ready seeds expired last year:
http://www.technologyreview.co...
Does it make sense to ask "are electrical circuits safe?" Circuits are designed, and some designs are safe and others are dangerous.
Likewise there is no such category of things "genetically modified crops" that you can treat as one thing from the point of safety, because each genetically modified organism is an unique artificial construct. You could genetically engineer potatoes to contain ricin for example, and that thing would be unsafe by design. Heretofore nobody has found harmful GMO foods because they are the product of safe design process which protects the investment needed to bring a GMO product to market.
Some day in the future it may be possible to do something like desktop genetic engineering. If the cost of creating a genetically modified crop drops enough, and enough people try their hand at it, then eventually someone's going to make something dangerous. This might even be intentional. But at present when you look for GMOs you're looking for screwups.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Labeling serves the purpose of choice, the consumer has the right to choose to buy or not to buy something based on whatever the hell they want.
That's fine, and manufacturers who want to be GMO free can label their products as such so they can cater to the food religion. They already do this, and there's nothing stopping them from continuing it. The same is also true of Kosher and Halal foods, which are labeled for equally useless reasons.
So you already have it your way, you just aren't aware of it yet, thus you can stop your lobbying for it already.
Caterpillars that eat BT crops sure do. But the story that's usually told is that BT crops are wiping out the Monarch butterfly, which does not seem to be true. Roundup is a problem for monarchs because they eat milkweed and milkweed is... a weed. Modern farming techniques are making weeds less and less common, so they are reducing monarch habitats. But that's not a problem of chemical toxicity. Just that we need milkweed patches to keep monarch populations up.
Bee populations have been hit with various problems, but none appear to be traceable to GMOs as far as I'm aware. Did you have some data for that?
I don't know what this claim maps back to, but the answer is almost certainly that no, they are not.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Ok I'll play with your red herrings (yes, two of them you just used.)
First of all, there is no "frankenfood". When you hear about gene splicing from plants to animals, that's done for research purposes to understand how genes work, and doesn't end up on your plate. There are only two commercially used cases of gene splicing, and one is from one flora to another (that is, for Bt) and the other is to splice human genes into e. coli to produce Humulin, an insulin that is chemically identical to human insulin, which has been used by diabetics almost exclusively since 1982 (prior to that cow insulin was used, and a lot of people were allergic to it and died from it.) So there you have it, a "frankenfood" that has been proven to be saving lives for 33 years now.
Second of all, the effects of lead were well documented prior to it being regulated out of most products we use. However there are no documented negative effects of GMO, except in cases of scientific misconduct, as seen in TFA.
Go ahead, bring more anti-science at me, I'll be happy to debunk your Food Religion.
With an LD50 more than half that of table salt, we should all be very careful.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
You want credible evidence GMO is bad? Go to home depot and buy a bottle of roundup. Read the warning label.
I'm just going to be brutally honest here: You're an uneducated idiot if you think GMO is all about roundup.
Patiently await evidence all possible strains of GMO ever produced are forever guaranteed to never prove harmful.
And now you've just invoked a massive logical fallacy. Seriously go to school before you come here and try to argue this.
The rest of your post is equally uneducated, and not worth a response.
No Way!!!!!
No, Science found out that fraud was fraud. Science was just doing it's job.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So butteflys didn't actually die fro BT crops?
No
Bees are not sick?
Yes they are. But most likely from nicotinoids, not glycophosphate GM crops.
The roundup resistant crops are not causing other crops to die in Argentina?
No, the herbicides used on the crops are.
You've got your cause and effect all mixed up. Roundup ready crops are indeed a bad idea, but because they have the problem of resistance more than anything else. So the concept of using a food product engineered to resist one herbicide, just means you are buying time.
But if you like the idea of falsifying data to suit your viewpoint, it says more about you than it does about whatever the fraudulent data is trying to condemn.
It's like I always say to the Anti-Vaxxers - wouldn't you like to know what the real reasons for the problem are, not decide something was the problem and declare the job finished?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This is a common misconception. That a thing is nutritionally substantially equivalent does not imply it is cannot be patented. The Gale Gala apple, to give one example of many, is patented. It is a bud sport (a somatic spontaneous mutant arising from a bud growth) of the standard Gala apple which is commercially propagated and cultivated. It can be patented because it is a unique thing, however, it does not fall outside the range of any standard apple nutrition variation, nor I might add does it anyone require it be so labeled. In fact, there are lots of patented conventionally bred crops; plant patents are nothing new. The last peach you ate might have been one of the patented Flamin Fury peaches, or maybe the last time you consumed sunflower it came from a patented Clearfield sunflower, or perhaps your last. Neither the apple, peach, nor sunflowers I mentioned are genetically engineered.