Anti-science protesters come just as much from the left as the right. The only difference is the flavor of anti-science. The right protests evolutionary and climate science, and the left protests medical and agricultural science. Lest we forget, it is typically the hippie dippy moonbats who are protesting, say, vaccines.
Sometimes that can be useful to have a huge mass of data to fall back on. When some study comes out that says something unexpected, then you have a bunch of data to act as a buffer so that people have some context, because most people think the truth is the whatever study the media misrepresented last, not the body of evidence as a whole. The more info you've got, the harder it is to deny something when its convenient. It might be a waste of time if people were rational creatures, but if something is being done to add to a body of evidence that people are still questioning, then maybe it isn't such a waste after all. And I suppose having some study to back your case if you want to make a policy change or legal claim too, rather than just rely on what should be common sense, for example, saying that studies show tired people preform poorly is better than just saying that you're tired and have a hard time working when you're tired.
You mean like Ug99, the wheat fungus that could kill millions if it gets even worse? I guarantee you, these anti-GMO morons in rich developed countries would be the first to start screaming for this technology if THEY were the ones who had to go to bed hungry. But when some poor schmuck in Africa or Asia starves to death or gets some nasty medical condition like blindness because of malnutrition, well, that's ok, as long as we aren't tainting the nature goddess's purity with evil technology, or some asinine bullshit like that. Out of sight out of mind.
That's the point! This was government funded research, NOT a giant corporation. How often does that need to be said? Why do people think a single corporation owns biology itself? Destroying this research to get at Monsanto would be like burning down your local burger joint then standing back and saying 'I sure taught McDonalds a lesson.' No, you've lessened the competition, that's what you've done. These anti-GMO fucktards are always going on and on ad nauseum about how corporations are so bad and can't be trusted with this stuff, then they trash publicly funded research too, which basically means that the anti-corporate thing is just a mask for their science hating nature worship.
You are the same kind of person that brought back preventable diseases like measles because some vacuous fear based argument is all it takes to make you stop thinking rationally. These people did nothing noble. They're just science hating thugs who complain about corporations while destroying completely unrelated research and ignoring the mountains of evidence proving them wrong.
will be honest that I don't know enough about how they genetically manipulated specifically these potatoes but I find the whole idea of directly genetically engineering food is bloody scary when you consider _all_ the risks and potential disadvantages. I know that hybridising and cross breeding for selective traits has been going on for millenia and the food crops we have today wouldn't ever have evolved naturally, however direct modification of the core organic mechanisms of our food is a whole other level. Doing it while at the same time admitting we don't know everything is plain crazy.
Like what? I mean, it really isn't that big of a deal, it's just inserting a few genes. It isn't like this is going to cause some sort of crazy chain reaction or something. If that were possible, we'd all be dead already - 30% of the human genome is inserted leftover viral genes. No, you can't know anything with omnipotence, but also keep in mind that you can't live in perpetual fear of unknown unknowns that probably don't exist. I mean, you could have made that exact same argument against the smallpox vaccine, and no one could prove it wrong, but without evidence, there would be no reason to think so. I'm studying plants and plant biotech, and I have never seen a convincing peice of evidence to suggest GMOs are dangerous. I've seen some pretty crappy studies claiming it, hears some guys lying their assess off to sell their new books, but nothing convincing. It is true that we don't know everything, but we don't know everything about normal breeding either. And I simply don't understand how moving around one gene is inherently more unpredictable than moving around thousands of genes. Yes, genetic engineering is new and different, but it isn't that far removed, and it can cross species barriers, I do not see how that is relevant outside an appeal to nature fallacy. Plants don't care where they got their genes from, they really don't, and once a trasngene has integrated into the genome, it's just the same as any other gene basically. All the concern about companies and stuff is fine, but about the science itself, it is hugely misplaced.
Apart from the whole safety of our food issues, do we really want our whole food ecosystem to be under tight patent control by megacorps like Monsanto?
History shows us over and over that with any decision made by a megacorp, maximising profit is the ONLY factor. Morality, safety, common sense and whats actually the best for the people/planet NEVER affect corporate decisions.
These are the same people who destroyed a French government GMO grape test too a while back. Considering that the anti-GMO folks destroy government funded research, and also oppose university developed GMOs like the Rainbow papaya (a virus resistant papaya developed by the University of Hawaii), and charity NGO ones like Golden Rice and BioCassava, the whole anti-corporation thing looks an awful lot like just an excuse to justify their unscientific beliefs.
This was Dutch government funded research, no Monsanto involved. Why do people keep saying that? It makes no sense. Saying that everyone who does genetic engineering is Monsanto is like saying that everyone who cooks hamburgers is a McDonalds.
Is GM food "bad"? Dunno, jury's still out on that and it really depends which camp you want to listen to.
You could just as easily replace 'Are GMOs bad' with 'Do vaccines cause autism' or 'Is evolution real' and get the same conclusion for the same reasons. Just because there are two conflicting sides does not mean the jury is still out on an issue, as one side may be entirely wrong. If you ask any scientist in a relevant field, odds are they've pro-GMO. I'm at a major university in plant biology/agriculture, and of all the plant biology and agriculture and biochemistry and molecular biology and genetics experts I've met, not one has been even remotely anti-GMO; in fact, many strongly support it, some very much so. On the other hand, if you ask some uneducated activist, odds are they will be anti-GMO. But you need to realize that the opinions of those two groups, quite frankly, are not equal. People don't like being told that not everyone's take on something is equal, but it's true, ignorance isn't a point of view.
That's not true. Go look at, say, Naked Juice. You can label something as non-GMO. You just don't have to label things as containing GMO products if they do. Just like you can label something as kosher or halal if you choose, but no one makes you label them as non-kosher or haram if you don't want to. You want to make an informed decision? Learn about it. Study the topic, and not from bullshit scare stories, but from an actual science text. You want everyone to label things so that you don't have to learn about it to support your magical thinking based superstitions about GMOs. Nope, not happening.
So, what part of government funded trials aren't you understanding? No corporation owns an entire branch of science. That's like saying that any restaurant that cooks burgers is a McDonalds. By your logic, and I'm using the term logic very loosely, because I don't like Wal-Mart I should burn down the local mom & pop grocery.
3) They can't cross breed, but I'm also guessing you'd complain if they're sterile. (i.e. seeds need to be bought each year.)
They actually developed transgenic lines that are sterile to avoid the cross-pollination issues, but they underestimated just how crazy and ignorant the anti-GMO lot really is. They completely flipped out at the thought of farmers needing to buy their seed every year...you know, like farmers have been doing with hybrid seed since the 1930's. Facepalm
In Europe we take a much more sceptical view of genetically modified food. We aren't about to allow organisms to be released into our environment that have only been tested by people who have a very strong financial incentive to keep quiet about the dangers.
Which is exactly what this government funded potato trial was doing. Europeans aren't being skeptical, they're being ignorant science hating denialists.
Ok, it isn't actually true that conventional breeding increases biodiversity. I mean, sometimes yes, but mostly what has been done is to take a founding population and narror it down from there. That's why there's Common beans, for instance, came from just two domestication events, just about all of them, leaving the rest of the biodiversity in the wild. While it is true that dividing populations and breeding them from there creates diversity in some cases by and large, in the commercial scene for the past century anyway, the opposite has been true. Companies have been doing this since the early 1900's. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but I must repeat, associating it with anything is a weak connection. And again, those plants are NOT sterile. I don't know where people are getting this. They're hybrids. The seeds can be planted, they just gain genetic instability in the second generation, and hybrid crossings are actually the origins of many stable heirloom lines. And I don't know what you know about genetic engineering, but the notion that those companies want to shut down traditional techniques is absurd because you need them in genetic engineering too. If you are producing a hybrid line you need a line for the initial cross, so companies first breed stable transgenic line from their originally regenerated transformed plant (the one coming out of the petri dish). And I can get if you don't like the companies, a lot of people don't, but that is not relevant to the products they produce if those products have been shown safe and effective.
Each of these are not produced commercially not because they lack proper marketing, but because of various reasons from producing low yields per acre, requiring fairly specific growing environments and so being limited in where they can be grown, producing food which is not particularly appetizing, producing a fruit with very low shelf life, and so forth. The foods which are most popular to grow today are that way because they are tasty, simple to grow, have a large tolerance for growing environment, keep well, and produce a high yield per growing area.
Not at all. Chaya is a leaf vegetable that is much more productive than lettuce. In places where they need extensive irrigation, kutjera and garambullo could very well be more efficient choices. My goumi is more productive than my cherry, and as a nitrogen fixing plant, it would be very suitable to poor land. The best example I know of are lychees...best fruit in the world IMO yet most people outside Asia have never heard of them. These things can't all be assumed to be quite so flawed. And it is true that a good number of them have not received the proper development that other crops had, that is a breeding issue, not a GMO one. Compare a wild apple or pear or cherry or grape or potato or tomato or bean or brassica or teosinte or wheat to their cultivated counterparts. The wild counterparts are seedy, small, sour, bitter, poisionous, and/or generally inedible. Breeding has done that. In that sense, breeding has done more for monoculture than genetic engineering ever has. In fact, biotech just might be the answer to undoing that. It has been estimated that (if someone wanted to fund the research) we could replicate a thousand years of breeding by changing a teosinte into corn in just three years with the techniques we have now. Think about that, and what tit means for underdeveloped crops. Like the pawpaw, for instance. To find what genes promote delayed ripening (this has already been done in tomatoes) and insert them from another plant or make the pawpaw's stronger, insert a sterility trait or induce polyploidy for seedlessness, and you've got a commercially viable fruit (and by the way, yours sounds like maybe a seed grown one. There are numerous cultivated varieties out there that lose the unpleasantness in some pawpaws. Just a suggestion, but you might want to give that a shot. Never heard of problems with canning it). Not that there's any funding to do t
They have done multigenerational studies. These have turned up negative. They have also looked at the complete proteomics of GM crops. These have also turned up nothing. I don't know how long you mean by long term, but considering the science and the fact that we've been eating them for quite some time now to still expect something drifts dangerously close to invisible pink unicorn territory. I really can't say that there won't be negative long term health effects because that isn't something science can prove. It's non-falsifiable, and you can't prove a negative (and since safety is really just lack of harm, it is indeed a negative). All I can say is there's no evidence it will happen. There's only three traits in GMOs approved fro commercial consumption, the Bt trait, an EPSP synthase trait, and viral resistance traits, and the proteins those traits produce are highly unlikely to hurt you. One has been used in organic gardening for decades, one is just a slightly altered form of something already found in plants, and one is just a viral coat protein. These really aren't nearly as scary as anti-GMO organizations make them out to be. I guess you could say the transformation process itself is what makes things questionable, but that doesn't really make much sense considering that there are radically different ways of doing that and that again there is a grand total of zero evidence to indicate that is the case. If you feed edgy enough about it, that's your call, heck, people still do the same thing with vaccines after nearly a century of use. However, you should be aware that, scientifically, such a fear is misplaced. Who would be responsible if something did happen? I don't know. Who would be responsible if pasteurization had long term negative health effects, as some allege? The evidence so strongly suggests otherwise that a lot of people, and not just companies, would be wrong if there really were an unknown unknown that made GMOs dangerous.
As for your garden, if you're a seed saver you should know the importance of preventing all cross pollination (bagging blossoms and stuff), transgenes or no. If you're not a seed saver, than you don't need to worry about it.
Whoa there, monoculture and genetic engineering are two radically different things. Monoculture is a bad thing, polycuture is a very good thin, and biodiverse crops do not receive nearly the funding they should. I mean, you'd really be shocked at how little people care about that one. But keep in mind that this has been a problem long before GMOs came to the market. You wouldn't blame conventional breeding for it, so why would you blame an old problem on new technology? That doesn't make sense. Go the the store. How often do you see salak, yacon, jujube, tef, marula, yellowhorn, chaya, ensete, jaboticaba, pawpaw, oca, fonio, agretti, kutjera, or garambullo? I'm guessing never, and genetic engineering isn't the reason why. If you had to look those up, if you've never heard of them, that's why farmers aren't growing it. It isn't technology, it's people. Sorry to say, but you may very well be part of the problem. This is a problem, yes, but it has nothing do do with genetic engineering. Ideally, we would combine biotechnology AND biotechnology. They're not opposites! I'm a big supporter of both, and I wish people would quite pretending that there was a conflict between the two. In this sense genetic engineering is just a way of improving a plant, just like conventional breeding. And the same thing goes for intra-species variability. Tomatoes for example are not commercially genetically modified, but when was the last time you saw an Ananas Noire, Green Moldovan, Carbon, White Tomesol, Huge Yellow Oxhart, or Kellogg's Breakfast at the store?
And I've never heard of any company selling sterile seed to third world countries. Where did you get that? Hybrid seed, yet, but hybrid seed, GMO seed, and sterile seed are three totally different descriptions and are not to be used interchangeably (which they often are). I have to explain this all the time, but hybrid seed are better the first generation due to hybrid vigor, but lose genetic stability the second generation, and while that seed can be planted, indeed hybridization is how most stable varieties got started, it tends to have much higher variability, which is not desirable. This happens if it is a non-GMO hybrid or a GMO hybrid. Again, old issue being blamed on a new technology for some reason.
I also disagree about the regulation. If anything it is too strict. Companies go through years of testing and millions of dollars to bring a GMO to market. If it wasn't so darned strict, maybe Monsanto would have some decent competition, maybe more than just one university developed GMO (that one being the Rainbow papaya) would make it to market. Remember, the stricter you make regulation, the higher the barriers to entry, the fewer people are able to break into the industry, better off Monsanto is at holding a monopolistic position. Remember the true consequences of regulation. Not to say there should be none of curse, this is a serious issue and should have serious regulation, but it should be appropriate, not excessive.
And no, you shouldn't trust the companies. Everything I've said can be verified by your local land grant university's agriculture extension office. Monsanto's trustworthiness might be questionable but I assure you theirs is not.
What a lot of people don't know (and what you'd learn in an introductory biology course if the anti-GMO people actually took one) is that farmers don't save seed anyway. Here's the deal; there are two types of seed, the hybrid lines, and the open pollinated (or heirloom) lines. Hybrid are better due to hybrid vigor, but only for one generation, and then next year (that is, if you save the seed), they lose genetic stability and you get all sorts of traits in a field you ideally want to be uniform. Farmers have found that the benefits of purchasing new hybrid seed every year outweighs the costs, so typically, they don't save their seed anyway, and that's how it's been since the early 1900's (so buying new seed every year predated GMOs by a long time, but you can't tell that to the people who confuse hybrid seed with GMO seed), which means that the terminator trait doesn't actually affect most farmers (to a degree neither do the contracts, unless one was planning to piggyback on Monsanto and after they get the transgene out there breed it into your own line). So who does it affect? Those who grow the other type. Open pollinated seeds can be saved year after year, but only if they don't cross with something. Even another variety of heirloom will hybridize with them, and if you want to keep saving your seed, this is not desirable. The terminator seed technology was not designed to force hybrid growing farmers into having to buy seed year after year (because they already do that), but to protect those who do, because that way, any crossed seeds just wouldn't grow, and they wouldn't have to worry about cross pollination. You'd think the anti-GMO people would be pleased by that, but Monsanto grossly underestimated just how ignorant and crazy the anti-GMO people are. People make the terminator seed tech out to be so evil, but really, it isn't. Unfortunately, it has largely become such an emotional issue that there's no way to defend it without people who have no idea what's going on calling you evil for preventing farmers from saving seed. I'm not saying it's my favorite genetic trait, but it is very misunderstood.
Kiwis are in the food supply. Autism diagnosis is on the rise. Prove to me that kiwis do not cause autism in the long term.
Do you understand why that argument is so poor? The only three traits used in commercially approved GMOs are the Bt trait, which has been used in organic farming for decades, an EPSE synthase gene, a form of which is in plants already, and viral protein coat proteins that would be naturally found in non-GMO infected plants. None of those are particularly good candidates for long term harm.
If you want to hear a real bad one, there were some GMO grape in the news a while back. They were viral resistant, funded by the French government so no corporate stuff involved, and they were rootstocks, meaning no above ground part, so the fruit itself wasn't GMO and there wasn't even the chance of them cross pollinating anything. Yep, they were destroyed too. This is what we're dealing with here. The is no reason here, only excuses, and these people aren't enlightened activists with a noble cause, they're just violently ignorant scientifically illiterate thugs looking for a chance to destroy something. I hope they all rot in prison.
But of course, I'm just one of those evil GMO scientists trying to contaminate the whole world with my science experiment because we're all just Saturday morning cartoon villains twisting our mustaches and cackling maniacally in out stone castle laboratories guarded by alligator filled moats at the thought of being evil for some vaguely defined end goal. We sure are evil with our virus/fungus/insect/drought resistance genes and nitrogen use efficiency traits and Golden Rice and BioCassava.to prevent blindness, malnutrition, nutrient deficiency, and starvation in the developing world. Yep, people should definitely spit on us and destroy our research and tell us how mean & nasty we are for that stuff.
Nope, that's just an excuse. These same poeple are also against the Rainbow papaya, a GMO produced by the University of Hawaii, the copyright of which is nothing of the sort. You argument is invalid. Anti-GMO people are just common scientifically illiterate denialists looking for something to make themselves appear reasonable to those not familiar with the field.
First off, that study was a piece of shit. They detected the Bt at levels well below the levels their test was capable of detecting. Have you ever considered that maybe people put out crap studies? Have you ever considered that maybe whenever a study is propped up by journalists and not scientists there's a reason for it? Have you ever considered that those of us in genetic engineering aren't morons? Why don't you cite the Wakefield study while you're at it? Second, whenever any seed is cross pollinated by any other variety, not just GM ones, then farmers can't save the seed. If they planned on doing that anyway. Which most don't because they use hybrids. Third, it was terrorism, no matter what psuedoscience is used to justify it. Fourth, if you know nothing about plant biology, and you very clearly don't please don't talk about it.
According to the beliefs of most anti-GMO folk, Monsanto is responsible for all genetic engineering. It doesn't make much sense from a logical standpoint, but unfortunately ignorance is considered a legitimate point of view. If you are against something, but almost every relevant expert and scientist is for it (and yes, they are, I've spoken to a good number of them at my university), then you need a conspiracy to back your point, something to tie everything you don't like to a single shadowy intricate target so that it can be collectively demonized and dismissed. In the case of the anti-vaxxers, it's the pharmaceutical industry. For the 9/11 truthers, it's the US government. For the GMO denialists, it is Monsanto. Monsanto owning an entire branch of science is absolutely critical to the anti-GMO position, therefore, despite the fact that the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology is publicly funded, this research is in their minds done by Monsanto. And there really isn't any point arguing that 'fact' with them because, in my experience, you're better off talking to a brick wall.
That's about the size of it. Most anti-GMO idiots live in the developed world where food is so abundant and plentiful that for the first time in human history obesity is a problem. Much of the world doesn't even have enough food to get by. Why do we have so much food? Agricultural technology. Where it has been implemented, GM crops have made pretty good strides in warding off pests, and other things like fungal and viral resistant GMOs have proven themselves in field conditions (well, the ones where they aren't destroyed by science hating douchebags anyway). The technology is solidly proven. This is not a controversy among scientists, just the public. And to reject science and oppose a technology that could save the lives of millions of starving people just because you have the heebie-jeebies, can't be bothered to crack a science book or take a few minutes to actually understand the topic, and have a let-them-eat-cake mentality towards people in the developing world, that is just insane. And yes, people are dying. And yes, the technology is just sitting on the shelf. And it isn't that people are going to die over rejection of biotechnology, it's that they ALREADY ARE. But it's true, those poeple are a world away, and if you don't want to take the time to really learn about them you can just keep going on in ignorance, stuffing your face with over-priced organic garbage while telling starving people how to live.
And you know, by the time you finish reading this post, people will have starved to death somewhere. Maybe if they would've had plants that could resist insect/viral/fungal attach, resist drought, or produce more vital nutrients, they'd still be alive. And that is just sickening. Fuck those illiterate anti-GMO jackasses.
Oh, it gets juicier. You haven't even hit the good part. Rio Red, one of the most popular grapefruit varieties, was produced by more than just hybridization. You see, most varieties are grown from seeds, one of perhaps tens of thousands of seedlings is selected for the right combination of genetic alterations (conventional breeding is based on mixing thousands of recessive genes & random mutations and hoping for the best, yet people have the huevos to complain about genetic engineering inserting only a few genes), and shoots of the selection grafted en masse to rootstocks, shipped to orchards, and grown. Not in this case. Ruby Red, not Rio Red, came from the seed. Rio Red came from Ruby Red. They exposed Ruby Red cells to radiation and selected the best mutant produced to get Rio Red. That's right, they use mutation inducing radiation and chemicals in plant breeding, and odds are you've eaten this. The only reason those ignorant anti-GMO twats don't complain is because they don't have the level of biological knowledge to see past popular stuff like genetic engineering. Even the organic ones are like this (and for the same reason, the people who set the organic standards are also idiots). Read all about it. Next time you're in that situation, drop that bombshell on them. Might also show them a picture of teosinte, tell them just how much of the genetic code of just about everything is made up of jumping genes (a good chunk, I forget the average amount, but that weirdo corn is 75% genes that move themselves), let them know that something like 30% of the human genome is junk left behind from viruses, and explain to them how many food crops are polyploids that have had their entire genome doubled, sometimes several times (where do they think seedless fruits come from).
Those anti-GMO people get on my nerves so much. They don't know anything about genetics or botany or agriculture or molecular biology or biochemistry or anything else but love to talk about it. And yes, IIAGE, well, studying to be one anyway. Most of the misinformed comments here make my head hurt, I wish I had the time and moxie to correct them all, but since there's hundreds of them, I think I too shall laugh and get on with my life...at least until they're destroying my research anyway.
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Anti-science protesters come just as much from the left as the right. The only difference is the flavor of anti-science. The right protests evolutionary and climate science, and the left protests medical and agricultural science. Lest we forget, it is typically the hippie dippy moonbats who are protesting, say, vaccines.
Sometimes that can be useful to have a huge mass of data to fall back on. When some study comes out that says something unexpected, then you have a bunch of data to act as a buffer so that people have some context, because most people think the truth is the whatever study the media misrepresented last, not the body of evidence as a whole. The more info you've got, the harder it is to deny something when its convenient. It might be a waste of time if people were rational creatures, but if something is being done to add to a body of evidence that people are still questioning, then maybe it isn't such a waste after all. And I suppose having some study to back your case if you want to make a policy change or legal claim too, rather than just rely on what should be common sense, for example, saying that studies show tired people preform poorly is better than just saying that you're tired and have a hard time working when you're tired.
You mean like Ug99, the wheat fungus that could kill millions if it gets even worse? I guarantee you, these anti-GMO morons in rich developed countries would be the first to start screaming for this technology if THEY were the ones who had to go to bed hungry. But when some poor schmuck in Africa or Asia starves to death or gets some nasty medical condition like blindness because of malnutrition, well, that's ok, as long as we aren't tainting the nature goddess's purity with evil technology, or some asinine bullshit like that. Out of sight out of mind.
That's the point! This was government funded research, NOT a giant corporation. How often does that need to be said? Why do people think a single corporation owns biology itself? Destroying this research to get at Monsanto would be like burning down your local burger joint then standing back and saying 'I sure taught McDonalds a lesson.' No, you've lessened the competition, that's what you've done. These anti-GMO fucktards are always going on and on ad nauseum about how corporations are so bad and can't be trusted with this stuff, then they trash publicly funded research too, which basically means that the anti-corporate thing is just a mask for their science hating nature worship.
You are the same kind of person that brought back preventable diseases like measles because some vacuous fear based argument is all it takes to make you stop thinking rationally. These people did nothing noble. They're just science hating thugs who complain about corporations while destroying completely unrelated research and ignoring the mountains of evidence proving them wrong.
will be honest that I don't know enough about how they genetically manipulated specifically these potatoes but I find the whole idea of directly genetically engineering food is bloody scary when you consider _all_ the risks and potential disadvantages.
I know that hybridising and cross breeding for selective traits has been going on for millenia and the food crops we have today wouldn't ever have evolved naturally, however direct modification of the core organic mechanisms of our food is a whole other level. Doing it while at the same time admitting we don't know everything is plain crazy.
Like what? I mean, it really isn't that big of a deal, it's just inserting a few genes. It isn't like this is going to cause some sort of crazy chain reaction or something. If that were possible, we'd all be dead already - 30% of the human genome is inserted leftover viral genes. No, you can't know anything with omnipotence, but also keep in mind that you can't live in perpetual fear of unknown unknowns that probably don't exist. I mean, you could have made that exact same argument against the smallpox vaccine, and no one could prove it wrong, but without evidence, there would be no reason to think so. I'm studying plants and plant biotech, and I have never seen a convincing peice of evidence to suggest GMOs are dangerous. I've seen some pretty crappy studies claiming it, hears some guys lying their assess off to sell their new books, but nothing convincing. It is true that we don't know everything, but we don't know everything about normal breeding either. And I simply don't understand how moving around one gene is inherently more unpredictable than moving around thousands of genes. Yes, genetic engineering is new and different, but it isn't that far removed, and it can cross species barriers, I do not see how that is relevant outside an appeal to nature fallacy. Plants don't care where they got their genes from, they really don't, and once a trasngene has integrated into the genome, it's just the same as any other gene basically. All the concern about companies and stuff is fine, but about the science itself, it is hugely misplaced.
Apart from the whole safety of our food issues, do we really want our whole food ecosystem to be under tight patent control by megacorps like Monsanto?
History shows us over and over that with any decision made by a megacorp, maximising profit is the ONLY factor. Morality, safety, common sense and whats actually the best for the people/planet NEVER affect corporate decisions.
This was government research.
These are the same people who destroyed a French government GMO grape test too a while back. Considering that the anti-GMO folks destroy government funded research, and also oppose university developed GMOs like the Rainbow papaya (a virus resistant papaya developed by the University of Hawaii), and charity NGO ones like Golden Rice and BioCassava, the whole anti-corporation thing looks an awful lot like just an excuse to justify their unscientific beliefs.
Here is some good info. Plenty of information from just about every government and university in the world. Just need to look.
This was Dutch government funded research, no Monsanto involved. Why do people keep saying that? It makes no sense. Saying that everyone who does genetic engineering is Monsanto is like saying that everyone who cooks hamburgers is a McDonalds.
Is GM food "bad"? Dunno, jury's still out on that and it really depends which camp you want to listen to.
You could just as easily replace 'Are GMOs bad' with 'Do vaccines cause autism' or 'Is evolution real' and get the same conclusion for the same reasons. Just because there are two conflicting sides does not mean the jury is still out on an issue, as one side may be entirely wrong. If you ask any scientist in a relevant field, odds are they've pro-GMO. I'm at a major university in plant biology/agriculture, and of all the plant biology and agriculture and biochemistry and molecular biology and genetics experts I've met, not one has been even remotely anti-GMO; in fact, many strongly support it, some very much so. On the other hand, if you ask some uneducated activist, odds are they will be anti-GMO. But you need to realize that the opinions of those two groups, quite frankly, are not equal. People don't like being told that not everyone's take on something is equal, but it's true, ignorance isn't a point of view.
That's not true. Go look at, say, Naked Juice. You can label something as non-GMO. You just don't have to label things as containing GMO products if they do. Just like you can label something as kosher or halal if you choose, but no one makes you label them as non-kosher or haram if you don't want to. You want to make an informed decision? Learn about it. Study the topic, and not from bullshit scare stories, but from an actual science text. You want everyone to label things so that you don't have to learn about it to support your magical thinking based superstitions about GMOs. Nope, not happening.
So, what part of government funded trials aren't you understanding? No corporation owns an entire branch of science. That's like saying that any restaurant that cooks burgers is a McDonalds. By your logic, and I'm using the term logic very loosely, because I don't like Wal-Mart I should burn down the local mom & pop grocery.
3) They can't cross breed, but I'm also guessing you'd complain if they're sterile. (i.e. seeds need to be bought each year.)
They actually developed transgenic lines that are sterile to avoid the cross-pollination issues, but they underestimated just how crazy and ignorant the anti-GMO lot really is. They completely flipped out at the thought of farmers needing to buy their seed every year...you know, like farmers have been doing with hybrid seed since the 1930's. Facepalm
In Europe we take a much more sceptical view of genetically modified food. We aren't about to allow organisms to be released into our environment that have only been tested by people who have a very strong financial incentive to keep quiet about the dangers.
Which is exactly what this government funded potato trial was doing. Europeans aren't being skeptical, they're being ignorant science hating denialists.
Ok, it isn't actually true that conventional breeding increases biodiversity. I mean, sometimes yes, but mostly what has been done is to take a founding population and narror it down from there. That's why there's Common beans, for instance, came from just two domestication events, just about all of them, leaving the rest of the biodiversity in the wild. While it is true that dividing populations and breeding them from there creates diversity in some cases by and large, in the commercial scene for the past century anyway, the opposite has been true. Companies have been doing this since the early 1900's. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but I must repeat, associating it with anything is a weak connection. And again, those plants are NOT sterile. I don't know where people are getting this. They're hybrids. The seeds can be planted, they just gain genetic instability in the second generation, and hybrid crossings are actually the origins of many stable heirloom lines. And I don't know what you know about genetic engineering, but the notion that those companies want to shut down traditional techniques is absurd because you need them in genetic engineering too. If you are producing a hybrid line you need a line for the initial cross, so companies first breed stable transgenic line from their originally regenerated transformed plant (the one coming out of the petri dish). And I can get if you don't like the companies, a lot of people don't, but that is not relevant to the products they produce if those products have been shown safe and effective.
Each of these are not produced commercially not because they lack proper marketing, but because of various reasons from producing low yields per acre, requiring fairly specific growing environments and so being limited in where they can be grown, producing food which is not particularly appetizing, producing a fruit with very low shelf life, and so forth. The foods which are most popular to grow today are that way because they are tasty, simple to grow, have a large tolerance for growing environment, keep well, and produce a high yield per growing area.
Not at all. Chaya is a leaf vegetable that is much more productive than lettuce. In places where they need extensive irrigation, kutjera and garambullo could very well be more efficient choices. My goumi is more productive than my cherry, and as a nitrogen fixing plant, it would be very suitable to poor land. The best example I know of are lychees...best fruit in the world IMO yet most people outside Asia have never heard of them. These things can't all be assumed to be quite so flawed. And it is true that a good number of them have not received the proper development that other crops had, that is a breeding issue, not a GMO one. Compare a wild apple or pear or cherry or grape or potato or tomato or bean or brassica or teosinte or wheat to their cultivated counterparts. The wild counterparts are seedy, small, sour, bitter, poisionous, and/or generally inedible. Breeding has done that. In that sense, breeding has done more for monoculture than genetic engineering ever has. In fact, biotech just might be the answer to undoing that. It has been estimated that (if someone wanted to fund the research) we could replicate a thousand years of breeding by changing a teosinte into corn in just three years with the techniques we have now. Think about that, and what tit means for underdeveloped crops. Like the pawpaw, for instance. To find what genes promote delayed ripening (this has already been done in tomatoes) and insert them from another plant or make the pawpaw's stronger, insert a sterility trait or induce polyploidy for seedlessness, and you've got a commercially viable fruit (and by the way, yours sounds like maybe a seed grown one. There are numerous cultivated varieties out there that lose the unpleasantness in some pawpaws. Just a suggestion, but you might want to give that a shot. Never heard of problems with canning it). Not that there's any funding to do t
They have done multigenerational studies. These have turned up negative. They have also looked at the complete proteomics of GM crops. These have also turned up nothing. I don't know how long you mean by long term, but considering the science and the fact that we've been eating them for quite some time now to still expect something drifts dangerously close to invisible pink unicorn territory. I really can't say that there won't be negative long term health effects because that isn't something science can prove. It's non-falsifiable, and you can't prove a negative (and since safety is really just lack of harm, it is indeed a negative). All I can say is there's no evidence it will happen. There's only three traits in GMOs approved fro commercial consumption, the Bt trait, an EPSP synthase trait, and viral resistance traits, and the proteins those traits produce are highly unlikely to hurt you. One has been used in organic gardening for decades, one is just a slightly altered form of something already found in plants, and one is just a viral coat protein. These really aren't nearly as scary as anti-GMO organizations make them out to be. I guess you could say the transformation process itself is what makes things questionable, but that doesn't really make much sense considering that there are radically different ways of doing that and that again there is a grand total of zero evidence to indicate that is the case. If you feed edgy enough about it, that's your call, heck, people still do the same thing with vaccines after nearly a century of use. However, you should be aware that, scientifically, such a fear is misplaced. Who would be responsible if something did happen? I don't know. Who would be responsible if pasteurization had long term negative health effects, as some allege? The evidence so strongly suggests otherwise that a lot of people, and not just companies, would be wrong if there really were an unknown unknown that made GMOs dangerous.
As for your garden, if you're a seed saver you should know the importance of preventing all cross pollination (bagging blossoms and stuff), transgenes or no. If you're not a seed saver, than you don't need to worry about it.
Whoa there, monoculture and genetic engineering are two radically different things. Monoculture is a bad thing, polycuture is a very good thin, and biodiverse crops do not receive nearly the funding they should. I mean, you'd really be shocked at how little people care about that one. But keep in mind that this has been a problem long before GMOs came to the market. You wouldn't blame conventional breeding for it, so why would you blame an old problem on new technology? That doesn't make sense. Go the the store. How often do you see salak, yacon, jujube, tef, marula, yellowhorn, chaya, ensete, jaboticaba, pawpaw, oca, fonio, agretti, kutjera, or garambullo? I'm guessing never, and genetic engineering isn't the reason why. If you had to look those up, if you've never heard of them, that's why farmers aren't growing it. It isn't technology, it's people. Sorry to say, but you may very well be part of the problem. This is a problem, yes, but it has nothing do do with genetic engineering. Ideally, we would combine biotechnology AND biotechnology. They're not opposites! I'm a big supporter of both, and I wish people would quite pretending that there was a conflict between the two. In this sense genetic engineering is just a way of improving a plant, just like conventional breeding. And the same thing goes for intra-species variability. Tomatoes for example are not commercially genetically modified, but when was the last time you saw an Ananas Noire, Green Moldovan, Carbon, White Tomesol, Huge Yellow Oxhart, or Kellogg's Breakfast at the store?
And I've never heard of any company selling sterile seed to third world countries. Where did you get that? Hybrid seed, yet, but hybrid seed, GMO seed, and sterile seed are three totally different descriptions and are not to be used interchangeably (which they often are). I have to explain this all the time, but hybrid seed are better the first generation due to hybrid vigor, but lose genetic stability the second generation, and while that seed can be planted, indeed hybridization is how most stable varieties got started, it tends to have much higher variability, which is not desirable. This happens if it is a non-GMO hybrid or a GMO hybrid. Again, old issue being blamed on a new technology for some reason.
I also disagree about the regulation. If anything it is too strict. Companies go through years of testing and millions of dollars to bring a GMO to market. If it wasn't so darned strict, maybe Monsanto would have some decent competition, maybe more than just one university developed GMO (that one being the Rainbow papaya) would make it to market. Remember, the stricter you make regulation, the higher the barriers to entry, the fewer people are able to break into the industry, better off Monsanto is at holding a monopolistic position. Remember the true consequences of regulation. Not to say there should be none of curse, this is a serious issue and should have serious regulation, but it should be appropriate, not excessive.
And no, you shouldn't trust the companies. Everything I've said can be verified by your local land grant university's agriculture extension office. Monsanto's trustworthiness might be questionable but I assure you theirs is not.
What a lot of people don't know (and what you'd learn in an introductory biology course if the anti-GMO people actually took one) is that farmers don't save seed anyway. Here's the deal; there are two types of seed, the hybrid lines, and the open pollinated (or heirloom) lines. Hybrid are better due to hybrid vigor, but only for one generation, and then next year (that is, if you save the seed), they lose genetic stability and you get all sorts of traits in a field you ideally want to be uniform. Farmers have found that the benefits of purchasing new hybrid seed every year outweighs the costs, so typically, they don't save their seed anyway, and that's how it's been since the early 1900's (so buying new seed every year predated GMOs by a long time, but you can't tell that to the people who confuse hybrid seed with GMO seed), which means that the terminator trait doesn't actually affect most farmers (to a degree neither do the contracts, unless one was planning to piggyback on Monsanto and after they get the transgene out there breed it into your own line). So who does it affect? Those who grow the other type. Open pollinated seeds can be saved year after year, but only if they don't cross with something. Even another variety of heirloom will hybridize with them, and if you want to keep saving your seed, this is not desirable. The terminator seed technology was not designed to force hybrid growing farmers into having to buy seed year after year (because they already do that), but to protect those who do, because that way, any crossed seeds just wouldn't grow, and they wouldn't have to worry about cross pollination. You'd think the anti-GMO people would be pleased by that, but Monsanto grossly underestimated just how ignorant and crazy the anti-GMO people are. People make the terminator seed tech out to be so evil, but really, it isn't. Unfortunately, it has largely become such an emotional issue that there's no way to defend it without people who have no idea what's going on calling you evil for preventing farmers from saving seed. I'm not saying it's my favorite genetic trait, but it is very misunderstood.
Kiwis are in the food supply. Autism diagnosis is on the rise. Prove to me that kiwis do not cause autism in the long term.
Do you understand why that argument is so poor? The only three traits used in commercially approved GMOs are the Bt trait, which has been used in organic farming for decades, an EPSE synthase gene, a form of which is in plants already, and viral protein coat proteins that would be naturally found in non-GMO infected plants. None of those are particularly good candidates for long term harm.
If you want to hear a real bad one, there were some GMO grape in the news a while back. They were viral resistant, funded by the French government so no corporate stuff involved, and they were rootstocks, meaning no above ground part, so the fruit itself wasn't GMO and there wasn't even the chance of them cross pollinating anything. Yep, they were destroyed too. This is what we're dealing with here. The is no reason here, only excuses, and these people aren't enlightened activists with a noble cause, they're just violently ignorant scientifically illiterate thugs looking for a chance to destroy something. I hope they all rot in prison.
But of course, I'm just one of those evil GMO scientists trying to contaminate the whole world with my science experiment because we're all just Saturday morning cartoon villains twisting our mustaches and cackling maniacally in out stone castle laboratories guarded by alligator filled moats at the thought of being evil for some vaguely defined end goal. We sure are evil with our virus/fungus/insect/drought resistance genes and nitrogen use efficiency traits and Golden Rice and BioCassava.to prevent blindness, malnutrition, nutrient deficiency, and starvation in the developing world. Yep, people should definitely spit on us and destroy our research and tell us how mean & nasty we are for that stuff.
Nope, that's just an excuse. These same poeple are also against the Rainbow papaya, a GMO produced by the University of Hawaii, the copyright of which is nothing of the sort. You argument is invalid. Anti-GMO people are just common scientifically illiterate denialists looking for something to make themselves appear reasonable to those not familiar with the field.
First off, that study was a piece of shit. They detected the Bt at levels well below the levels their test was capable of detecting. Have you ever considered that maybe people put out crap studies? Have you ever considered that maybe whenever a study is propped up by journalists and not scientists there's a reason for it? Have you ever considered that those of us in genetic engineering aren't morons? Why don't you cite the Wakefield study while you're at it? Second, whenever any seed is cross pollinated by any other variety, not just GM ones, then farmers can't save the seed. If they planned on doing that anyway. Which most don't because they use hybrids. Third, it was terrorism, no matter what psuedoscience is used to justify it. Fourth, if you know nothing about plant biology, and you very clearly don't please don't talk about it.
According to the beliefs of most anti-GMO folk, Monsanto is responsible for all genetic engineering. It doesn't make much sense from a logical standpoint, but unfortunately ignorance is considered a legitimate point of view. If you are against something, but almost every relevant expert and scientist is for it (and yes, they are, I've spoken to a good number of them at my university), then you need a conspiracy to back your point, something to tie everything you don't like to a single shadowy intricate target so that it can be collectively demonized and dismissed. In the case of the anti-vaxxers, it's the pharmaceutical industry. For the 9/11 truthers, it's the US government. For the GMO denialists, it is Monsanto. Monsanto owning an entire branch of science is absolutely critical to the anti-GMO position, therefore, despite the fact that the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology is publicly funded, this research is in their minds done by Monsanto. And there really isn't any point arguing that 'fact' with them because, in my experience, you're better off talking to a brick wall.
That's about the size of it. Most anti-GMO idiots live in the developed world where food is so abundant and plentiful that for the first time in human history obesity is a problem. Much of the world doesn't even have enough food to get by. Why do we have so much food? Agricultural technology. Where it has been implemented, GM crops have made pretty good strides in warding off pests, and other things like fungal and viral resistant GMOs have proven themselves in field conditions (well, the ones where they aren't destroyed by science hating douchebags anyway). The technology is solidly proven. This is not a controversy among scientists, just the public. And to reject science and oppose a technology that could save the lives of millions of starving people just because you have the heebie-jeebies, can't be bothered to crack a science book or take a few minutes to actually understand the topic, and have a let-them-eat-cake mentality towards people in the developing world, that is just insane. And yes, people are dying. And yes, the technology is just sitting on the shelf. And it isn't that people are going to die over rejection of biotechnology, it's that they ALREADY ARE. But it's true, those poeple are a world away, and if you don't want to take the time to really learn about them you can just keep going on in ignorance, stuffing your face with over-priced organic garbage while telling starving people how to live.
And you know, by the time you finish reading this post, people will have starved to death somewhere. Maybe if they would've had plants that could resist insect/viral/fungal attach, resist drought, or produce more vital nutrients, they'd still be alive. And that is just sickening. Fuck those illiterate anti-GMO jackasses.
Oh, it gets juicier. You haven't even hit the good part. Rio Red, one of the most popular grapefruit varieties, was produced by more than just hybridization. You see, most varieties are grown from seeds, one of perhaps tens of thousands of seedlings is selected for the right combination of genetic alterations (conventional breeding is based on mixing thousands of recessive genes & random mutations and hoping for the best, yet people have the huevos to complain about genetic engineering inserting only a few genes), and shoots of the selection grafted en masse to rootstocks, shipped to orchards, and grown. Not in this case. Ruby Red, not Rio Red, came from the seed. Rio Red came from Ruby Red. They exposed Ruby Red cells to radiation and selected the best mutant produced to get Rio Red. That's right, they use mutation inducing radiation and chemicals in plant breeding, and odds are you've eaten this. The only reason those ignorant anti-GMO twats don't complain is because they don't have the level of biological knowledge to see past popular stuff like genetic engineering. Even the organic ones are like this (and for the same reason, the people who set the organic standards are also idiots). Read all about it. Next time you're in that situation, drop that bombshell on them. Might also show them a picture of teosinte, tell them just how much of the genetic code of just about everything is made up of jumping genes (a good chunk, I forget the average amount, but that weirdo corn is 75% genes that move themselves), let them know that something like 30% of the human genome is junk left behind from viruses, and explain to them how many food crops are polyploids that have had their entire genome doubled, sometimes several times (where do they think seedless fruits come from).
Those anti-GMO people get on my nerves so much. They don't know anything about genetics or botany or agriculture or molecular biology or biochemistry or anything else but love to talk about it. And yes, IIAGE, well, studying to be one anyway. Most of the misinformed comments here make my head hurt, I wish I had the time and moxie to correct them all, but since there's hundreds of them, I think I too shall laugh and get on with my life...at least until they're destroying my research anyway.