For me its a result of Monsanto patenting food staples and suing world + dog.
They don't actually do that though. Yeah, they've sued a few farmers for knowingly and intentionally violating the law, but no one can seem to provide me a single well documented example of them suing someone without a good basis.
I don't agree with a few multinationals owning patents of the world's food staples so I will do everything I can to avoid GMO products for this reason and this reason only.
Which only hurts those of us in academia who cannot develop GE crops due in part to the consumer rejection of them. I swear, this anti-GMO nonsense is the best thing to happen to Monsanto. And of course, guess who sells the non-GE seeds? Yep, same companies. You are attacking a technology thinking you are hurting a company, but you are just hurting agricultural progress.
And I will continue to warn everyone I know against purchasing GMO products until they are no longer patented and the companies stop abusing the patents.
And I'm sure you don't eat any crops that have ever been patented, like pluots and HoneyCrsip apples? Otherwise, you are being completely irrational. And I hope you think about why companies like Monsanto and Zaiger Genetics patent plants and provide them a damned good alternative. And I'm sure you've written your local politician demanding better funding for your local university's breeding program, right? They're not exactly rolling in cash (at least not where I am anyway). Otherwise, you're just complaining without even attempting to provide a viable alternative, while enjoying the benefits of the thing you are complaining about, and mostly likely without even knowing that you are already getting those benefits too.
It's like how the entire Irish potato famine was very avoidable.
Assume you are alive during that period in Ireland. Would you rather have a GMO potato to eat, or someone simply telling you that you wouldn't need it if only the English would be more compassionate? Yes, the world does produce enough food for everyone, for now anyway, given current trends we are going to need more technology rather than less (and for some reason, everyone seems to think going backwards in agricultural progress is a good thing...no one seriously says that about computer, medical, or energy technologies). Nonetheless, unless those problems are fixed, it doesn't help those who could use genetically improved crops in the meantime, especially considering the arrangements against them ranger from weak to veritably false.
Oh okay, well we'll just fix all the social, economic, and political issues that need to be fixed before creating this perfect distribution system. How silly of those dumb agricultural scientists for not thinking of that simple solution sooner!
But seriously, what you are talking about is a lot harder than inserting a gene into a crop. You can insert a gene for pest resistance into a corn, but you can't fix a government or poverty so easily. In the meantime, people are starving. And even if it were so simple to fix all the world's problems, that still would not imply that genetic improvements cannot be sued to improve agriculture.
Maybe you don't, but you don't speak for the world, do you? I'm sure if the farmers agreed they would be planting things like Golden Bantam, but they aren't.
it's all about making seed banks all bound to Intellectual Property
Seed banks? Not sure the relevance to seed banks here.
making money for Monsanto
That someone profits does not imply the thing they profit from is bad.
Not sure what you mean by that, lots of varieties out there have been developed with mutation breeding, like the Pusa Nanha papaya, the Rio Red grapefruit, and lots of other things that don't get such easy to remember names. IIRC, about 80% of the world's wheat has such plant in its ancestor somewhere.
I think many people would have much less of a problem with GMO foods in general if Monsanto's business practices weren't so oppressively evil
While I am not a fan of finding myself defending some big multinational, here's the problem with that thought: it didn't start with Monsanto. The fear mongering surrounding GE crops started with the Flavr Savr tomato, developed by a small company called Calgene. Then Monsanto come along and people say 'GMO foods are bad because of Monsanto.' Well, that is clearly ignorant of the history of the matter, and furthermore, a lot of the 'evil' things Monsanto does, like suing farmers for being cross pollinated, are mostly myths spread by, you guessed it, the anti-GMO groups.
Fact is, if there were no Monsanto, it would be necessary for the anti-GMO moment to invent it. When your argument largely revolves around everyone disagreeing with you being paid shills, and most scientists disagree with you, you need a conspiracy. Doesn't matter if we're talking evolution, climate change, vaccines, or GMOs. Same thing. In this case, it is Monsanto who ties together the GMO conspiracy. Clearly, I am a paid shill, because the facts have a pro-Monsanto bias.
and the notion of routinely spraying Roundup on all our cereal grains (both for humans and livestock) weren't quite so heinous.
What gets me about that is it isn't! I'd much rather glyphosate be sprayed than one of the nastier herbicides out there. And what are your other options? Tillage and hand weeding mostly, and the first destroys the soil while the second is economically preposterous. The problem is that people are so damned disconnected from agriculture that what should be seen as a good thing is instead demonized. I'm not saying that it is an ideal situation, but realistically, you have to deal with weeds somehow. weed control is not optional, if it were farmers wouldn't bother spraying in the first place, but for not, herbicide tolerant systems are the best we've got.
Stating a fact does not make that fact meaningful. No one cooked with microwaves until recently; that doesn't mean that microwave cooked food and oven cooked food are substantially different.
Same could be said of the top dogs in the anti-GMO movement, to some degree. You could write a book on the things most people don't know about plants and agriculture. But only one issue gets singled out, genetic engineering. That makes it look undesirable. It is a weasley thing to do, to single out one thing and, in the name of 'consumer freedom' give absolutely no background information or necessary context, but that's the frustrating situation.
The existence of GMOs have NOT boosted production in the slightest.
Tell that to the papaya farmers in Hawaii. Virus resistant GMO papaya saved the industry. Without GMOs, there would be no papayas on the Big Island. How's that for a yield gain?
Second, you completely ignore the also prevalent Bt crops, which while they have not had much of a yield impact in developed countries (which is no surprise since insecticides are readily available there) but have had noticeable impacts in developing countries like India.
Third, why do you pretend this is all about yield? It's not. You criticize herbicide tolerant crops, yet I don't see you proposing a better idea for weed control. Would you like to go back to harsher herbicides? Or maybe tilling the hell out of the soil? Besides economic benefits, there is also the benefits of no-till and replacing harsher herbicides. It is a perfect system? Nope, but I don't hear the anti-GMO crowd volunteering to weed a few million acres by hand.
This herbicide immunity, by the way, is an immunity being acquired by other "pest" plants which were the original target of the herbicide.
The first example of an herbicide resistant weed was in the 70's, so your argument has more to do with over-reliance on a single mode of action herbicide than genetic engineering. Surprise, evolution in the weed population works the same regardless of whether or not a transgene is present. It is telling that one of the best arguments against genetic engineering is 'we might lose some of the benefits it has provided.'
GMOs do not represent a world-saving technology.
No one is saying they are, but to point that out is like saying that vaccines won't cure everything, therefore they are bad. That's an asinine argument. As the case of papaya in Hawai'i and Bt crops in Asia & South America, while they are no panacea they can indeed help.
What they represent is a danger to the world's food supply not only because it comes under control of a small collection of companies,
The consolidation of seed companies has been going on for a very long time. Just because you didn't start paying attention until GMOs showed up doesn't mean GMOs did it. Correlation, not causation.
but because it reduces the varieties of plants available. In the event a disease develops to wipe out these GMOs, there may be extreme starvation and human suffering due to the continual growth of GMO use.
Please explain how the presence of a transgene is reducing the varieties of crops out there. you are confusing the selection of genes, aka conventional breeding, with the insertion of a small number of genes. They are very different. Genetic monoculture is caused by having a lot of similar genetics, not from having a single gene inserted. Now, to be fair, over relying on a single inserted transgene can and has resulting in pests overcoming the resistance, but the same thing has happened in with conventional systems, from hessian fly overcoming the conventionally bred resistance in wheat to late blight overcoming tomato resistance, to the fall of the Gros Michael banana. You are taking a basic agricultural issue completely out of context.
Please shill for Monsanto elsewhere.
Ah, the big shill gambit. Not just for anti-vaxxers anymore!
One might assume that a good time traveler would be aware that someone was doing this to search for them. Well, that's what you'd hope anyway...you wouldn't want just anyone traveling through time. Who knows what damage some temporally displaced dumbass with a sports almanac could do.
Taxi and Le Dîner de Cons (called The Diner Game in the US) are two good French movies that got American remakes. I've never seem the remakes but they probably suck.
There's an old saying: 'The rich are eccentric, the poor are crazy.' This is just another variant of that trope. How oddity is perceived is dependent not on the attributes of the oddity, but on the attributes of the person displaying it.
The whole point of some of these changes is to make the food no longer attractive (or possibly even toxic) to pests. It seems reasonable that the changes required to do this may have some impact on people as well.
In this case, we know exactly how we are making it pest resistant. The Bt genes produce a protein that has no known affect on mammalians. It isn't 'possibly' toxic to the pests it targets, it kills them. It is, to them, toxic, but just like grapes and chocolate are toxic to dogs, that does not mean it is also toxic to humans. The Bt proteins have a very specific and well understood mode of action, and they simply have no impact on humans.
direct genetic modification is a lot less likely to cause problems than the radiation-based mutation where they just blast it and see what they end up with
You don't even need to go that far. People all over are breeding for pest and pathogen resistant crops. What is being increased in those? All plants produce toxic chemicals, like solanine in tomatoes, falcarinol in carrots, or psoralens in celery. It is how they evolved to defend themselves from herbivory since they obviously can't fight back. Maybe the conventional breeding of a new variety of a crop results in increased defensed by increasing one of those compounds. Maybe it results in an increase of pathogenesis related proteins, known allergens. Thing is though, this is a much more nuanced view of risk assessment of improved varieties, transgenic or conventionally bred or anything in between, and the various anti-GMO groups are not in the business of educating people.
If its approved by default, why do they spend millions testing it? Is it out of the goodness of their hearts? Why are they waiting for regulatory approval of their dicamba tolerant cotton & soy? Do they just care that much? You must have a lot more faith in them than I do.
when your government is in the pockets of large corporations
If that were in any way true, I think we'd have more than just seven species that are genetically engineered on the market sold by corporations. But keep on playing that conspiracy card & weasel words like 'frankenfood' in the absence of an actual point.
That's also part of the reason GE crops are so convenient for international issues. If you have a political issue with a shipment of a crop, there's not a lot you can do about it without outright making something up or being very obvious the issue is political. It would not be possible to do this with less regulated and less controversial methods of crop improvement (for example, if you don't want to eat peanuts with non-peanut genes for nematode resistance that were brought in without the direct use of genetic engineering, too bad for you), but with GE crops, you can just say you take issue with the genetic engineering, and then boom, you've got a plausible reason to reject whatever you want. Genetic engineering is a convenient pawn in international trade relations. As usual though, science takes the backseat.
Don't discount the very real possibility of this being done for some political purpose too. You think the Chinese government gives a damn about the virtually non-existent safety hazard here when they are letting the Chinese people be poisoned by very real things like pollution? Fat chance. Ah, but this is FOREIGN corn for people to focus on, those damn Americans are trying to sell something that might be dangerous. This, like a lot of things related to genetically engineered crops, is being driven by politics, not science.
Yes, indeed there is blood on that man's hands. I too remember the Great Internet Explorer Wars. Saw many good people lose their lives in that dark chapter of human history. What brutal, senseless suffering, and all because machines came pre-packaged with this one certain browser. Damn it Bill, why did you have to go and include a browser with every operating system, you heartless, greedy bastard! Were those ill gotten gains worth it?! And now you think you can just undo the sins of your past by eradicating malaria, hunger, and illiteracy? Well, it won't work! None of that can compare to the horrors of browser/operating system bundling. Truly, Micro$oft money is blood money.
I once got a laptop from FedEx (or maybe UPS, one or the other) that wasn't mine. Got a call from the person working there looking for it, so I told her I had it and she drove out and got it. I did that because it wasn't mine and I'm not an asshole. Maybe I could have kept it legally, but you know what? She made a mistake, and were I her, I certainty would have wanted the package to be returned so I don't lose my job or something. That's just being a decent person.
Some plants, like tomato, eggplant, okra, pepper, eggplant and the common bean, do just that. Others, like corn, are wind pollinated, and still others, like root/bulb crops (potato, sweet potato, onion, carrot, cassava, yam, taro, parsnip, ect.), cole crops (broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, cabbage, ect.), leafy greens (lettuce, celery, spinach, leek, ect.), and a good number of herbs/spices (basil, oregano, garlic, chives, dill, wasabi, cilantro, ginger, ect.), don't need pollination to produce a crop. In the long term there are a lot of crops pollinated by bees that humanity will want to take into space at some point, but there's enough crops that don't need them that I don't think bees are absolutely essential for short term space projects.
I'll buy your bullshit but until then GMOs are just that,bullshit.
So if somersetting isn't happening naturally its bullshit? Nice fallacy.
You have Monsanto (who seems to be in a race with Goldman Sachs on who can be the most like Wolfram & Hart)
Right, they freely liscense technology to charitable GMOs like rice that could prevent blindness and disease resistant cassava, then Greenpeace and others work hard to block it (because GMOs saving lives would make their anti-GMO donation pitch look really bad), and somehow Monsanto is the evil one in that picture.
not only creating plants that frankly shouldn't even be considered plants
What? They shouldn't be considered plants because they have a transgene? Do you have any idea what a plant even is? Really, if you are proposing adding new kingdom, you really need to re-evaluate your confidence in your level of biology knowledge.
God knows what else mixed in,
Today I learned APHIS is God. But you do have an unintentional point: we don't know how many things have transgenes. Probably everything seeing as how it happens in nature. Even humans have syncytin 2 transgenes.
So please don't try to feed us that "no different than crosbreeding" horseshit
Did I ever actually say that? No, I didn't. Of course they're different, that's why we have different terms to describe them, just like the mass selection breeding method is different from the pure line breeding method. You are stating a fact in a way that makes it look as if just stating something is a valid point. Well, I can do that too: everything has DNA, which is universal.
And that isn't even addressing the elephant rotting in the corner which is how this shit seems to be able to contaminate everything from neighboring crops to weeds
That's an ignorant statement. Ban a plant because it cross pollinates? You've just banned all outcrossing crops then. Oh, you want to hold GMOs to a double standard that no crop could possibly live up to? How convenient. It's almost like making an argument that cannot be falsified.
Just wait until Roundup Ready ends up in the Kudzu and we'll see how much you like that crap.
Yeah, right after God punishes the evil evolutionists. Highly unlikely.
I'm not sure why you're being modded flamebait, it's true. Look, for example, who was funding Prop 37. People out there know they can make money by creating and playing off fears, and that's exactly what the organic movement does. They want people to look at food and wonder if feeding it to their kids will make them sick, so that they'll pay extra for their 'better' and 'safe' foods. There's also organizations like Greenpeace who sell fear for donation money; why do you think Golden Rice, which could save thousands of lives, is such a high priority for them? Why do you think they, specifically, targeted and destroyed CSIRO's low GI wheat research field, which, if it works (and since Greenpeace destroyed the research we don't know that it does) could produce diabetic friendly bread with a direct benefit to consumers? Sure, some people might have to die, but Greenpeace & other professional activists and the organic industry have to keep that money rolling in...of course, Monsanto is the evil greedy one.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like patents that expire after 20 years?
For me its a result of Monsanto patenting food staples and suing world + dog.
They don't actually do that though. Yeah, they've sued a few farmers for knowingly and intentionally violating the law, but no one can seem to provide me a single well documented example of them suing someone without a good basis.
I don't agree with a few multinationals owning patents of the world's food staples so I will do everything I can to avoid GMO products for this reason and this reason only.
Which only hurts those of us in academia who cannot develop GE crops due in part to the consumer rejection of them. I swear, this anti-GMO nonsense is the best thing to happen to Monsanto. And of course, guess who sells the non-GE seeds? Yep, same companies. You are attacking a technology thinking you are hurting a company, but you are just hurting agricultural progress.
And I will continue to warn everyone I know against purchasing GMO products until they are no longer patented and the companies stop abusing the patents.
And I'm sure you don't eat any crops that have ever been patented, like pluots and HoneyCrsip apples? Otherwise, you are being completely irrational. And I hope you think about why companies like Monsanto and Zaiger Genetics patent plants and provide them a damned good alternative. And I'm sure you've written your local politician demanding better funding for your local university's breeding program, right? They're not exactly rolling in cash (at least not where I am anyway). Otherwise, you're just complaining without even attempting to provide a viable alternative, while enjoying the benefits of the thing you are complaining about, and mostly likely without even knowing that you are already getting those benefits too.
It's like how the entire Irish potato famine was very avoidable.
Assume you are alive during that period in Ireland. Would you rather have a GMO potato to eat, or someone simply telling you that you wouldn't need it if only the English would be more compassionate? Yes, the world does produce enough food for everyone, for now anyway, given current trends we are going to need more technology rather than less (and for some reason, everyone seems to think going backwards in agricultural progress is a good thing...no one seriously says that about computer, medical, or energy technologies). Nonetheless, unless those problems are fixed, it doesn't help those who could use genetically improved crops in the meantime, especially considering the arrangements against them ranger from weak to veritably false.
Oh okay, well we'll just fix all the social, economic, and political issues that need to be fixed before creating this perfect distribution system. How silly of those dumb agricultural scientists for not thinking of that simple solution sooner!
But seriously, what you are talking about is a lot harder than inserting a gene into a crop. You can insert a gene for pest resistance into a corn, but you can't fix a government or poverty so easily. In the meantime, people are starving. And even if it were so simple to fix all the world's problems, that still would not imply that genetic improvements cannot be sued to improve agriculture.
We don't need no stinkin' GMO food
Maybe you don't, but you don't speak for the world, do you? I'm sure if the farmers agreed they would be planting things like Golden Bantam, but they aren't.
it's all about making seed banks all bound to Intellectual Property
Seed banks? Not sure the relevance to seed banks here.
making money for Monsanto
That someone profits does not imply the thing they profit from is bad.
Radiation mutation in agriculture is a myth
Not sure what you mean by that, lots of varieties out there have been developed with mutation breeding, like the Pusa Nanha papaya, the Rio Red grapefruit, and lots of other things that don't get such easy to remember names. IIRC, about 80% of the world's wheat has such plant in its ancestor somewhere.
I think many people would have much less of a problem with GMO foods in general if Monsanto's business practices weren't so oppressively evil
While I am not a fan of finding myself defending some big multinational, here's the problem with that thought: it didn't start with Monsanto. The fear mongering surrounding GE crops started with the Flavr Savr tomato, developed by a small company called Calgene. Then Monsanto come along and people say 'GMO foods are bad because of Monsanto.' Well, that is clearly ignorant of the history of the matter, and furthermore, a lot of the 'evil' things Monsanto does, like suing farmers for being cross pollinated, are mostly myths spread by, you guessed it, the anti-GMO groups.
Fact is, if there were no Monsanto, it would be necessary for the anti-GMO moment to invent it. When your argument largely revolves around everyone disagreeing with you being paid shills, and most scientists disagree with you, you need a conspiracy. Doesn't matter if we're talking evolution, climate change, vaccines, or GMOs. Same thing. In this case, it is Monsanto who ties together the GMO conspiracy. Clearly, I am a paid shill, because the facts have a pro-Monsanto bias.
and the notion of routinely spraying Roundup on all our cereal grains (both for humans and livestock) weren't quite so heinous.
What gets me about that is it isn't! I'd much rather glyphosate be sprayed than one of the nastier herbicides out there. And what are your other options? Tillage and hand weeding mostly, and the first destroys the soil while the second is economically preposterous. The problem is that people are so damned disconnected from agriculture that what should be seen as a good thing is instead demonized. I'm not saying that it is an ideal situation, but realistically, you have to deal with weeds somehow. weed control is not optional, if it were farmers wouldn't bother spraying in the first place, but for not, herbicide tolerant systems are the best we've got.
Stating a fact does not make that fact meaningful. No one cooked with microwaves until recently; that doesn't mean that microwave cooked food and oven cooked food are substantially different.
They may be wrong, but they're not idiots.
Same could be said of the top dogs in the anti-GMO movement, to some degree. You could write a book on the things most people don't know about plants and agriculture. But only one issue gets singled out, genetic engineering. That makes it look undesirable. It is a weasley thing to do, to single out one thing and, in the name of 'consumer freedom' give absolutely no background information or necessary context, but that's the frustrating situation.
The existence of GMOs have NOT boosted production in the slightest.
Tell that to the papaya farmers in Hawaii. Virus resistant GMO papaya saved the industry. Without GMOs, there would be no papayas on the Big Island. How's that for a yield gain?
Second, you completely ignore the also prevalent Bt crops, which while they have not had much of a yield impact in developed countries (which is no surprise since insecticides are readily available there) but have had noticeable impacts in developing countries like India.
Third, why do you pretend this is all about yield? It's not. You criticize herbicide tolerant crops, yet I don't see you proposing a better idea for weed control. Would you like to go back to harsher herbicides? Or maybe tilling the hell out of the soil? Besides economic benefits, there is also the benefits of no-till and replacing harsher herbicides. It is a perfect system? Nope, but I don't hear the anti-GMO crowd volunteering to weed a few million acres by hand.
This herbicide immunity, by the way, is an immunity being acquired by other "pest" plants which were the original target of the herbicide.
The first example of an herbicide resistant weed was in the 70's, so your argument has more to do with over-reliance on a single mode of action herbicide than genetic engineering. Surprise, evolution in the weed population works the same regardless of whether or not a transgene is present. It is telling that one of the best arguments against genetic engineering is 'we might lose some of the benefits it has provided.'
GMOs do not represent a world-saving technology.
No one is saying they are, but to point that out is like saying that vaccines won't cure everything, therefore they are bad. That's an asinine argument. As the case of papaya in Hawai'i and Bt crops in Asia & South America, while they are no panacea they can indeed help.
What they represent is a danger to the world's food supply not only because it comes under control of a small collection of companies,
The consolidation of seed companies has been going on for a very long time. Just because you didn't start paying attention until GMOs showed up doesn't mean GMOs did it. Correlation, not causation.
but because it reduces the varieties of plants available. In the event a disease develops to wipe out these GMOs, there may be extreme starvation and human suffering due to the continual growth of GMO use.
Please explain how the presence of a transgene is reducing the varieties of crops out there. you are confusing the selection of genes, aka conventional breeding, with the insertion of a small number of genes. They are very different. Genetic monoculture is caused by having a lot of similar genetics, not from having a single gene inserted. Now, to be fair, over relying on a single inserted transgene can and has resulting in pests overcoming the resistance, but the same thing has happened in with conventional systems, from hessian fly overcoming the conventionally bred resistance in wheat to late blight overcoming tomato resistance, to the fall of the Gros Michael banana. You are taking a basic agricultural issue completely out of context.
Please shill for Monsanto elsewhere.
Ah, the big shill gambit. Not just for anti-vaxxers anymore!
One might assume that a good time traveler would be aware that someone was doing this to search for them. Well, that's what you'd hope anyway...you wouldn't want just anyone traveling through time. Who knows what damage some temporally displaced dumbass with a sports almanac could do.
Taxi and Le Dîner de Cons (called The Diner Game in the US) are two good French movies that got American remakes. I've never seem the remakes but they probably suck.
There's an old saying: 'The rich are eccentric, the poor are crazy.' This is just another variant of that trope. How oddity is perceived is dependent not on the attributes of the oddity, but on the attributes of the person displaying it.
The whole point of some of these changes is to make the food no longer attractive (or possibly even toxic) to pests. It seems reasonable that the changes required to do this may have some impact on people as well.
In this case, we know exactly how we are making it pest resistant. The Bt genes produce a protein that has no known affect on mammalians. It isn't 'possibly' toxic to the pests it targets, it kills them. It is, to them, toxic, but just like grapes and chocolate are toxic to dogs, that does not mean it is also toxic to humans. The Bt proteins have a very specific and well understood mode of action, and they simply have no impact on humans.
direct genetic modification is a lot less likely to cause problems than the radiation-based mutation where they just blast it and see what they end up with
You don't even need to go that far. People all over are breeding for pest and pathogen resistant crops. What is being increased in those? All plants produce toxic chemicals, like solanine in tomatoes, falcarinol in carrots, or psoralens in celery. It is how they evolved to defend themselves from herbivory since they obviously can't fight back. Maybe the conventional breeding of a new variety of a crop results in increased defensed by increasing one of those compounds. Maybe it results in an increase of pathogenesis related proteins, known allergens. Thing is though, this is a much more nuanced view of risk assessment of improved varieties, transgenic or conventionally bred or anything in between, and the various anti-GMO groups are not in the business of educating people.
If its approved by default, why do they spend millions testing it? Is it out of the goodness of their hearts? Why are they waiting for regulatory approval of their dicamba tolerant cotton & soy? Do they just care that much? You must have a lot more faith in them than I do.
when your government is in the pockets of large corporations
If that were in any way true, I think we'd have more than just seven species that are genetically engineered on the market sold by corporations. But keep on playing that conspiracy card & weasel words like 'frankenfood' in the absence of an actual point.
That's also part of the reason GE crops are so convenient for international issues. If you have a political issue with a shipment of a crop, there's not a lot you can do about it without outright making something up or being very obvious the issue is political. It would not be possible to do this with less regulated and less controversial methods of crop improvement (for example, if you don't want to eat peanuts with non-peanut genes for nematode resistance that were brought in without the direct use of genetic engineering, too bad for you), but with GE crops, you can just say you take issue with the genetic engineering, and then boom, you've got a plausible reason to reject whatever you want. Genetic engineering is a convenient pawn in international trade relations. As usual though, science takes the backseat.
Don't discount the very real possibility of this being done for some political purpose too. You think the Chinese government gives a damn about the virtually non-existent safety hazard here when they are letting the Chinese people be poisoned by very real things like pollution? Fat chance. Ah, but this is FOREIGN corn for people to focus on, those damn Americans are trying to sell something that might be dangerous. This, like a lot of things related to genetically engineered crops, is being driven by politics, not science.
Yes, indeed there is blood on that man's hands. I too remember the Great Internet Explorer Wars. Saw many good people lose their lives in that dark chapter of human history. What brutal, senseless suffering, and all because machines came pre-packaged with this one certain browser. Damn it Bill, why did you have to go and include a browser with every operating system, you heartless, greedy bastard! Were those ill gotten gains worth it?! And now you think you can just undo the sins of your past by eradicating malaria, hunger, and illiteracy? Well, it won't work! None of that can compare to the horrors of browser/operating system bundling. Truly, Micro$oft money is blood money.
I expected more from a Harvard student.
As opposed to what, some pleb who could only get into a public state school?
Kind of reminds me of the time PETA compared chickens slaughtered for KFC to Jews during the Holocaust, as if the two are even remotely similar.
Stay classy, animal rights activists.
I once got a laptop from FedEx (or maybe UPS, one or the other) that wasn't mine. Got a call from the person working there looking for it, so I told her I had it and she drove out and got it. I did that because it wasn't mine and I'm not an asshole. Maybe I could have kept it legally, but you know what? She made a mistake, and were I her, I certainty would have wanted the package to be returned so I don't lose my job or something. That's just being a decent person.
Plants don't pollinate themselves.
Some plants, like tomato, eggplant, okra, pepper, eggplant and the common bean, do just that. Others, like corn, are wind pollinated, and still others, like root/bulb crops (potato, sweet potato, onion, carrot, cassava, yam, taro, parsnip, ect.), cole crops (broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, cabbage, ect.), leafy greens (lettuce, celery, spinach, leek, ect.), and a good number of herbs/spices (basil, oregano, garlic, chives, dill, wasabi, cilantro, ginger, ect.), don't need pollination to produce a crop. In the long term there are a lot of crops pollinated by bees that humanity will want to take into space at some point, but there's enough crops that don't need them that I don't think bees are absolutely essential for short term space projects.
Can't recall its name
Arabidopsis thaliana is likely the plant you're thinking of. Fruit fly of the plant world it is.
I'll buy your bullshit but until then GMOs are just that,bullshit.
So if somersetting isn't happening naturally its bullshit? Nice fallacy.
You have Monsanto (who seems to be in a race with Goldman Sachs on who can be the most like Wolfram & Hart)
Right, they freely liscense technology to charitable GMOs like rice that could prevent blindness and disease resistant cassava, then Greenpeace and others work hard to block it (because GMOs saving lives would make their anti-GMO donation pitch look really bad), and somehow Monsanto is the evil one in that picture.
not only creating plants that frankly shouldn't even be considered plants
What? They shouldn't be considered plants because they have a transgene? Do you have any idea what a plant even is? Really, if you are proposing adding new kingdom, you really need to re-evaluate your confidence in your level of biology knowledge.
God knows what else mixed in,
Today I learned APHIS is God. But you do have an unintentional point: we don't know how many things have transgenes. Probably everything seeing as how it happens in nature. Even humans have syncytin 2 transgenes.
So please don't try to feed us that "no different than crosbreeding" horseshit
Did I ever actually say that? No, I didn't. Of course they're different, that's why we have different terms to describe them, just like the mass selection breeding method is different from the pure line breeding method. You are stating a fact in a way that makes it look as if just stating something is a valid point. Well, I can do that too: everything has DNA, which is universal.
And that isn't even addressing the elephant rotting in the corner which is how this shit seems to be able to contaminate everything from neighboring crops to weeds
That's an ignorant statement. Ban a plant because it cross pollinates? You've just banned all outcrossing crops then. Oh, you want to hold GMOs to a double standard that no crop could possibly live up to? How convenient. It's almost like making an argument that cannot be falsified.
Just wait until Roundup Ready ends up in the Kudzu and we'll see how much you like that crap.
Yeah, right after God punishes the evil evolutionists. Highly unlikely.
I'm not sure why you're being modded flamebait, it's true. Look, for example, who was funding Prop 37. People out there know they can make money by creating and playing off fears, and that's exactly what the organic movement does. They want people to look at food and wonder if feeding it to their kids will make them sick, so that they'll pay extra for their 'better' and 'safe' foods. There's also organizations like Greenpeace who sell fear for donation money; why do you think Golden Rice, which could save thousands of lives, is such a high priority for them? Why do you think they, specifically, targeted and destroyed CSIRO's low GI wheat research field, which, if it works (and since Greenpeace destroyed the research we don't know that it does) could produce diabetic friendly bread with a direct benefit to consumers? Sure, some people might have to die, but Greenpeace & other professional activists and the organic industry have to keep that money rolling in...of course, Monsanto is the evil greedy one.