Oy. Wants to show glyphosate has been shown to be toxic. Presents a link to an article about research that shows damage in children exposed to glyphosate and two insecticides that are known to be toxic and cause developmental issues during pregnancy. You can kill sheep with witchcraft if you also feed them arsenic.
Look, glyphosate has had a target on its back for years. The piles of research done on it are not just done by Monsanto. And the research that has come out showing it to be dangerous is thin and weak at best. That's why bullshit sites like sustainablepulse.com and naturalnews.com need to scrape for articles that just sort of imply it's dangerous. Nobody has found the smoking gun because there probably isn't a smoking gun. It's not for lack of trying. It's for lack of evidence.
That not only happens in nature but in domestic crops as well. It could happen in any of the "naturally" bred versions of crops we plant. It has nothing specifically to do with GMO whatsoever. By not planting GMOs, you do absolutely nothing to mitigate that risk. So people who are anti-GMO because of that fear are also not basing their opposition on any good reasoning or science.
In fact, transgenics provide potential solutions to those types of blights when they happen. For example, the papaya industry in Hawaii. More recently, researchers have made progress on the citrus greening problem in Florida, which is on its way to being a major crisis.
I don't think I'm mischaracterizing your position by saying that you think there's no evidence of fraud. Postings of images from the papers that show signs of manipulation and duplication with different labels is evidence of fraud. Conclusive evidence? No. But strong evidence that should be weighed and not dismissed.
Later you wrote:
I don't know why the organizer is misrepresenting the report, or why he organized the thing in the first place.
Would it be unreasonable to characterize this statement as a claim that the organizer was misrepresenting the report? I'll back off on the claim that you accused the organizer of "lying" if you prefer to stick with wordplay and use the word "misrepresenting." But it seems to me like you made an accusation here without any support. What makes you think he's misrepresenting the contents of his own committee's report?
And as for "why he organized the thing in the first place" the reason is clear: He organized it on the instructions of the university rector. And the university rector gave those instructions because he received the evidence of image manipulation from Cattaneo and Bucci.
Organic simply means that no pesticides or chemical fertilizers were used in the production.
Actually, even that is a common myth. Organic growers are allowed to use both pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Just not all of them. And, like most religious strictures, the rules are a little bit arbitrary. They don't like to mention it because a big part of their customer buy-in is because most people erroneously believe that "organic" means "pesticide free." In reality, one of the most common pesticides in organic is the same pesticide that the anti-GMO people freak out about when it's produced by GMO plants. It's super dangerous when plants produce it, but it's totally safe for us to spray it onto organic crops.
I apologize for overstating your position, but claiming somebody is misrepresenting a report from his own committee is a pretty strong accusation to make without presenting your reasoning and evidence.
If you're going to continue to make those types of claims, I recommend taking a look at the images and papers in question and the discussions around them. The summary in Nature is not the only information on this topic. The people they're reporting on are actually making real claims with real data. The fact that you've opted not to look at their evidence and instead wait for the committee's official result and a Nature summary of it (fine--that's what most people will do) is not the same as the evidence not being out there, and it doesn't put you in a good position to be accusing people of anything. The images and arguments are now publicly available and there are open discussions going on about what happened. It looks pretty bad.
I don't know why the organizer is misrepresenting the report, or why he organized the thing in the first place.
So your contention is that the organizer of the report is lying to us about what's in the report, and you're basing it on the fact that Nature's summary of it is written in the journalistic neutral tone? What evidence do you have of misrepresentation? There's a whole bunch of stuff going on here, and none of it is as arbitrary as you're trying to make it appear:
1) Independent scientist finds images in the papers suspicious and commissions an expert to investigate them. Expert says it appears images were reused and manipulated.
2) The author's university starts an investigation. The person coordinating that investigation leaks the results early and says they found manipulation. This is the part you're asserting is a lie. I have no idea why you think so.
3) Investigator from (1) posts his analysis online for people to look at. You're discounting his analysis and the posted images because... it's on the Internet or something like that. Presumably if the images weren't on the Internet, the claims would be untrustworthy because they weren't available for scrutiny.
On the second point, maybe it'll take more to convince me than a personal internet post from someone who claims he found evidence.
This isn't some random guy with no credentials claiming something on his own authority. This is somebody with real expertise posting his claim and the evidence that supports his claim. This isn't, "Trust me, they're manipulated." It's, "Look at this here!"
Notice Nature is being careful to not say they think the images have or not been manipulated.
That's not surprising. It's exactly what every publication writes about preliminary results of investigations of people doing bad things. The serial killer is always the "alleged" serial killer. That doesn't mean there's no evidence. It just means the findings are preliminary or that nothing has been proven in a court of law. You can still actually look at the evidence and make a decision rather than simply asserting that the evidence doesn't exist.
Question: If I asked you before this came out, "What's the probability that this journal article is fraudulent?" and you had to decide on a probability based on nothing, would your estimate have been the same as if I asked you today? Mine certainly would have changed, and that conclusion would be based on evidence.
Still, increased usage to combat increased resistance of a chemical that "Probably" is carcinogenic and definitely kills plants just strikes me as a bad course of action.
There's a good reason we don't use gut feelings for important policy decisions, though. Petroleum products are terribly nasty, but we put up with it so we can run tractors to farm our food. It's a trade off made using data. A substantial decrease in the cost of food production is nothing to just write off without carefully considering the costs and benefits. Given that glyphosate largely replaced more dangerous herbicides and given that a huge amount of research has been done to it and it's coming up pretty clean, that seems like good evidence that the costs are pretty minimal.
The problem with GMO's specifically is that they are engineered and not naturally occurring. Many could not be naturally occurring, and once out in the wild despite whatever controls are used to stop them, no one knows exactly what they will do. Added to that is the secrecy surrounding them, and the battle to not tell anyone if they are being used or not.
I'm looking for how GMOs are different from hybrids and mutants. None of those are naturally occurring, and trade secrets abound. If you're planting seeds for a farm, you're almost certainly planting a weirdo man-made organism that never existed in the wild. So what's special about GMO specifically?
Your point about Pollen almost works, I can see how one might argue about mutation from power lines, Eddie Murphy movies aside, there is a somewhat legitimate body of evidence that living/working under high voltage power lines can lead to cancer. The difference is that any mutation in that crop was not specifically engineered by scientists who inserted a specific gene from a different plant/animal into it.
Yes, I'll agree that that's a difference, but how does that difference affect my point? In both cases, you have a business model predicated on personal aesthetic preferences, which is totally legitimate, but it creates a new burden on neighboring business. Should neighboring businesses have to bow to this new burden to support your business just because you and your customers want it? It's an unfortunate situation with two legitimate interests, but I can't see how you could possibly say yes to this.
Given the size and budget most independent/small American farms have, any threat of legal action has to be viewed as significant because it could put them out of business. Monsanto is abusing that.
I agree that having to let Monsanto test your crops as if it were a government organization is distasteful from a "pit of your stomach" perspective, but is it really a problem in any real sense? If you're not infringing, they test the plants at their own expense and go away. If you are, then I'm not sure that the complaint that they shouldn't have been allowed to discover it is a very strong argument. I'd love for there to be a different way to enforce the patents, but I'm at a loss as to what that might be.
I'm still not buying Salmon though.
Why not? The salmon seem to be one of the things environmentalists should be most excited about. It's not from a big evil ag company and it will allow them to farm salmon with substantially less environmental impact. The fish are sterile and they're farming them in landlocked lakes. Given how destructive salmon farming can be and how much impact fishing can have on wild stocks, this seems like the first steps to taking a bite out of the problem.
He's commenting on leaked allegations of a confidential investigation that "suggest that images in the papers may have been intentionally altered" -- this isn't evidence of anything.
No, I suppose not. It's just the word that the committee that examined the evidence decided that the images had been manipulated. It could be evidence that the committee is a bunch of idiots or that they have an agenda. But is that really what you want to hang your hat on? The findings are coming out in a few weeks, so your complaint seems to be that we're getting a sneak peek and it could be a total rumor.
He "commissioned" a lab to give him a report on the papers, and then posted his "analysis"/"claims" on the Internet -- again this isn't anywhere near evidence of something.
Can you provide me a definition of "evidence" that somehow excludes the analysis of images that are available for all of us to look at and draw conclusions from? Would that definition of "evidence" exclude things like DNA on a murder weapon or an investigator observing that a door appeared to have been kicked in?
And what's up with "commissioned" and "analysis" being scare quotes? He had an analysis done on the images and they found that they were most likely manipulated. And based on the actual images that were posted to the Internet, they look pretty damned manipulated. If this isn't at least "evidence" that suggests the images were manipulated, I have to wonder if we're both speaking the same language.
Your argument seems to be that he didn't provide evidence, just stuff for us to look at and an argument that that stuff points to certain conclusions. Facts, schmacts. You can use facts to prove anything that's remotely true!
First, if you're appealing to nature, transgentic organisms do happen naturally, so the current process "mimics" nature just as much as hybridzation and mutagenesis do. But the key thing here is that your argument isn't addressing what's happening now. If and when we get to the point where it's possible to construct new organisms largely ex nihilo, I'll be with you in being very concerned about what we create. But that's not what people are currently trying to prevent.
What's going on now is these companies are starting with a whole, well understood organism and modifying a gene or two, generally by taking a well-characterized gene from another whole, well understood organism. Comparing that to arbitrary synthetic genomes is like saying that we shouldn't use smart SPAM filtering software because someday, a self-aware computer program may get out of control. We need to take things one step at a time, and the current step is just not that risky.
As it is, we have people saying that taking one gene from one organism and moving it into another well understood organism is crazy, but mashing together two complete genomes with thousands of genes with countless possible permutations in random ways through hybridization is totally safe. Or that moving one gene in a very specific way is super dangerous, but using mutants we've created with radiation and chemicals is nothing to worry about. This is ridiculous. It is objectively not true. Current GMOs are, in many ways, a lot less modified than other new types of crops.
Does it cause cancer? Even Monsanto is saying that "Probably does not mean yes" which sounds a lot like "Invest in Chemo now and save later".
Yes, some organizations (not others) have decided that it is a "likely" carcinogen, but that's not necessarily a major issue. People often confuse the probability that something is a carcinogen with the probability that exposure to a particular carcinogen will cause cancer. The effect is clearly small enough that some regulators put it in the "probable" category and some put it in the "maybe" category. The data is murky enough that multiple organizations looking at the body of evidence come to different conclusions. The fact that the Seralini study is often on the list of studies that support the claim is not a good sign, but let's assume it's true. The level of certainty they're looking at puts it in the same category as emissions from frying food and well below things like alcohol. Being a carcinogen isn't binary. Sawdust is a carcinogen.
Well, the history of escaped hybrids, mutants, and in these cases invasive species can be looked at broadly as devastating to local ecology.
Exactly. So how are GMOs specifically problematic? Just about everything we farm is a crazy hybrid / mutant that looks nothing like its wild cousins, but most people aren't freaking out over those escaping. They want to make it a GMO-specific problem, which it's not.
Organic is not a religion, not even a life style choice, it is a business. A growing business.
If I started a farming business that guaranteed that my plants and their ancestors were never grown near power lines, that would be fine. I could get people all excited about how good it was for them that no stray electrical fields affected my crops or their lineage. But if pollen from another farm started to come in, I couldn't make that guarantee any more. Is it acceptable for me to blame the neighboring farm, and am I entitled to redress? I went to a lot of effort to create my no-powerline guarantee, and my neighbor is mucking it up.
I prefer organic for one simple reason, fewer things are fed to the animals or sprayed on the crops. Note "Fewer". There are strict controls on the what is and is not allowed and in some countries that can be enforced.
Fewer things and different things, but is that better? If organic allowed only one chemical to be applied to their crops and that chemical was benzene, would that be good? Clearly not. So it's not about fewer or different. It's about specifically what gets put on the crop. For example, if you could create a GMO plant that was naturally fungicide resistant, you could avoid the organic solution of applying large quantities of copper. Copper is nasty stuff an broadly toxic. In short, there's nothing inherently wrong with synthetic pesticides that makes "natural" ones better. You'd have to look at the specific chemicals and quantities, something that consumers generally don't do. Organic is happy to coast by on the misperception that they don't use pesticides when in reality, they just use different ones.
Back in the early 90's I became extremely ill after swimming in a pesticide polluted lake in FL near some orange farms, it was later shut down to toxicity. That stuff that made me ill, was sprayed on my food.
What was the pesticide? I mean, pesticides can be really nasty and I don't doubt your story, but it would be interesting to compare the specific properties and uses of that pesticide against the organic equivalent.
As for the legal actions, I've not kept up, but this was the kind of harassment I remember. A bit dated, but I have no doubt still happening. www.cbsnews.com/news/agricultural-giant-battles-small-farmers/
This is the type of story I'm thinking of. It's hysterical nonsense.
It's true of hybrids in the same way as nuclear proliferation is the same as firearms proliferation in regards to the risk to life.
Explain how.
Oh, wait. You used the word "shill" which means you don't actually have to make an argument. You just drop the mic and walk off because you fucking won. Awesome.
A.) It's not a question of human health, it's a question of GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT. There is no way to tell what the global impact will be of these organisms. Natural mutations spread very very very very slowly. GMOs get shipped globally in a very short period of time.
That's not true at all. GMOs "spread" quickly because farmers buy bags of the seeds and plant thousands of acres of them. The same is true of mutant and hybrid crops. If a cool new mutant or hybrid plant comes along, it "spreads" by exactly the same mechanism. It's not like farmers waited for pluots to naturally creep across their fields.
Have you looked a what "vast quantities" actually is? Here's an example done with soybeans. You're looking at 0.75 pounds per acre. If you take my silly table salt LD50 comparison, we're looking at the LD50 equivalent of about 0.3 pounds of salt per acre. Oh, and glyphosate breaks down in the soil. It's a pretty benign chemical in general if you're a human. And it's really benign if you compare it to other pesticides.
If you get into chronic exposure, there's always the theoretical possibility that there's something there. But there isn't a lot of evidence to support it, and once you start talking about the effects of chronic exposure, just about everything is dangerous.
I will let you do the google, but Round Up and similar crops have led to a massive increase in resistant weeds and insects.
I've never understood this line of reasoning. "It seems to be, glyphosate is Satan because it leads to glyphosate resistant weeds!" I don't see why the people who hate glyphosate see this as a problem. Yes, any pest control system is only temporary and is fighting against evolution. If you don't think that weed scientists are well aware of how this works, you're not following the industry literature.
Additionally, we have found GM crops growing in the wild that should not be there. Why are they there, how did they get there, what effect will they have on the eco system?
Why would their effects be anything different from "escaped" versions of any of the weird hybrids and mutants we produce? Are we worried about pluots taking down an ecosystem?
Then you also have to deal with the fact that the discovery of these can lead to farmers losing their Organic certification.
That's unfortunate, but cross pollination has always been a fact of life with farming. The fact that an organic religion that requires purity has sprung up makes it a sticky situation, but I'm not yet inclined to blame conventional farmers for somebody else's theology. If there was a kosher-like designation that required all pollen to be blessed by a rabbi, we wouldn't blame neighboring farms for letting unblessed pollen cross the property lines.
Oh, and Monsanto, that saint of a company, has sued farmers.
Have you looked at the cases at all? Don't put too much money down on a wager that the farmers who were sued were innocent victims.
There are allusions to fraud but no evidence: "sections of images of electrophoresis gels appeared to have been obliterated, and some of the images in different papers appeared to be identical but with captions describing different experiments" -Nature.com
Allusions to fraud but no evidence? Did we read the same set of articles? From Nature:
Tommaso Russo, a molecular biologist at the University of Naples who is responsible for coordinating the investigation, told Nature that the committee has found that the papers contain intentional data manipulation.
and
On 14 January, Bucci posted online his analysis of the papers under investigation, as well as of four more papers on GM feed co-authored by Infascelli, and a PhD thesis from Infascelli’s lab. The analysis claims evidence for image manipulation in all eight papers. Bucci has informed the rector and Infascelli of his findings.
At best, we're looking at somebody who is phenomenally sloppy, but even that's a hard argument to make, and it would really only explain mislabeled images. What's the valid reason for editing gel images? And if there was a valid reason, wouldn't the authors have mentioned it in their defence (or better yet, in the papers themselves) rather than apparently denying that the images were edited?
Well, they clearly understood the reason why IP might be important. They understood the value of agriculture (Jefferson, in particular, was hardcore into ag research himself). When they wrote about "Science and Useful Arts" in the Constitution, I doubt they meant, "everything except agriculture" considering that they were writing a constitution for an agrarian society. At the time, increased farm yields were up there on the list of things everybody wanted right below "getting into heaven" and "not having your kids die."
Given all that, I think they might at least give a passing nod to the idea that something that has so much potential to improve agriculture is worth the trade off that Percy Schemeiser doesn't get to skip out on licensing fees for stuff he intentionally copied. They might not all agree, but I think that at least some of them wouldn't be satisfied by the, "On my own land!" argument.
I don't think people are talking about the crime of fraud in this context. I think they're referring to academic fraud. All the evidence points to this being a pretty serious case of academic fraud.
ROUNDUP ORIGINAL herbicide is no more than slightly toxic based on toxicity studies. No significant adverse health effects are expected to develop if only small amounts (less than a mouthful) are swallowed. Ingestion of similar formulations has been reported to produce gastrointestinal discomfort with irritation of the mouth, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Oral ingestion of large quantities of one similar product has been reported to result in hypotension and lung edema.
With an LD50 more than half that of table salt, we should all be very careful.
If they altered data in an intentionally misleading way, they're fraudsters regardless of why they did it. As for personal gain, having a political agenda may not qualify as personal gain, but it's still a reason to commit fraud. Absent that, being able to publish something that gets a lot of attention may be enough. Publishing widely cited articles is a big deal in the research biz.
I'm all for companies labelling whatever they want as long as the label isn't too misleading. I'm not a big fan of government forcing companies to label things unless there's good reason to, and catering to the anti-GMO fad is not a good reason. It makes about as much sense as my not eating food grown near power lines and then demanding that the government enforce labelling standards so I have "choice" in the matter.
Caterpillars that eat BT crops sure do. But the story that's usually told is that BT crops are wiping out the Monarch butterfly, which does not seem to be true. Roundup is a problem for monarchs because they eat milkweed and milkweed is... a weed. Modern farming techniques are making weeds less and less common, so they are reducing monarch habitats. But that's not a problem of chemical toxicity. Just that we need milkweed patches to keep monarch populations up.
Bees are not sick?
Bee populations have been hit with various problems, but none appear to be traceable to GMOs as far as I'm aware. Did you have some data for that?
The roundup resistant crops are not causing other crops to die in Argentina?
I don't know what this claim maps back to, but the answer is almost certainly that no, they are not.
The same thing is true of hybrids as well, though. You never know when you're going to get something unexpected. But for some reason we treat "traditional" breeding like hybridization and the intentional creation of mutants as doing God's work and direct genetic modification as the thing that will kill us all. The wisdom of creating a novel organism depends entirely on the properties of that organism, not on how you created it.
I have no idea why people use Schmeiser as a poster boy for Monsanto abuse. He's a poster boy for exactly the sort of thing IP protection exists to prevent, not an innocent victim. He intentionally isolated the small percentage of hybrids he found on his property and created his own unlicensed field of Roundup Ready crops. He admitted as much in court and the courts found him to be completely in the wrong. He was nowhere near being an accidental victim of uncontrolled cross-pollination. Actual incidental cross pollination doesn't result in 95% of 1000+ acres carrying the Roundup Ready trait.
Interesting thing to note: All of the anti-GMO web sites post their summary of the Schmeiser story, but none of them that I've found link back to the court documents that actually describe what happened. Monsanto's own web site links to the primary sources. What does that tell you about who is blowing smoke?
More importantly, glyphosate isn't the only herbicide in the world. Its rise in popularity wasn't displacing some benign world where we killed weeds with the Care Bear Stare. It largely replaced nastier, more broadly toxic chemicals.
Slashdot Mirror
Oy. Wants to show glyphosate has been shown to be toxic. Presents a link to an article about research that shows damage in children exposed to glyphosate and two insecticides that are known to be toxic and cause developmental issues during pregnancy. You can kill sheep with witchcraft if you also feed them arsenic.
Look, glyphosate has had a target on its back for years. The piles of research done on it are not just done by Monsanto. And the research that has come out showing it to be dangerous is thin and weak at best. That's why bullshit sites like sustainablepulse.com and naturalnews.com need to scrape for articles that just sort of imply it's dangerous. Nobody has found the smoking gun because there probably isn't a smoking gun. It's not for lack of trying. It's for lack of evidence.
That not only happens in nature but in domestic crops as well. It could happen in any of the "naturally" bred versions of crops we plant. It has nothing specifically to do with GMO whatsoever. By not planting GMOs, you do absolutely nothing to mitigate that risk. So people who are anti-GMO because of that fear are also not basing their opposition on any good reasoning or science.
In fact, transgenics provide potential solutions to those types of blights when they happen. For example, the papaya industry in Hawaii. More recently, researchers have made progress on the citrus greening problem in Florida, which is on its way to being a major crisis.
I don't think I'm mischaracterizing your position by saying that you think there's no evidence of fraud. Postings of images from the papers that show signs of manipulation and duplication with different labels is evidence of fraud. Conclusive evidence? No. But strong evidence that should be weighed and not dismissed.
Later you wrote:
Would it be unreasonable to characterize this statement as a claim that the organizer was misrepresenting the report? I'll back off on the claim that you accused the organizer of "lying" if you prefer to stick with wordplay and use the word "misrepresenting." But it seems to me like you made an accusation here without any support. What makes you think he's misrepresenting the contents of his own committee's report?
And as for "why he organized the thing in the first place" the reason is clear: He organized it on the instructions of the university rector. And the university rector gave those instructions because he received the evidence of image manipulation from Cattaneo and Bucci.
Actually, even that is a common myth. Organic growers are allowed to use both pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Just not all of them. And, like most religious strictures, the rules are a little bit arbitrary. They don't like to mention it because a big part of their customer buy-in is because most people erroneously believe that "organic" means "pesticide free." In reality, one of the most common pesticides in organic is the same pesticide that the anti-GMO people freak out about when it's produced by GMO plants. It's super dangerous when plants produce it, but it's totally safe for us to spray it onto organic crops.
I apologize for overstating your position, but claiming somebody is misrepresenting a report from his own committee is a pretty strong accusation to make without presenting your reasoning and evidence.
If you're going to continue to make those types of claims, I recommend taking a look at the images and papers in question and the discussions around them. The summary in Nature is not the only information on this topic. The people they're reporting on are actually making real claims with real data. The fact that you've opted not to look at their evidence and instead wait for the committee's official result and a Nature summary of it (fine--that's what most people will do) is not the same as the evidence not being out there, and it doesn't put you in a good position to be accusing people of anything. The images and arguments are now publicly available and there are open discussions going on about what happened. It looks pretty bad.
So your contention is that the organizer of the report is lying to us about what's in the report, and you're basing it on the fact that Nature's summary of it is written in the journalistic neutral tone? What evidence do you have of misrepresentation? There's a whole bunch of stuff going on here, and none of it is as arbitrary as you're trying to make it appear:
1) Independent scientist finds images in the papers suspicious and commissions an expert to investigate them. Expert says it appears images were reused and manipulated.
2) The author's university starts an investigation. The person coordinating that investigation leaks the results early and says they found manipulation. This is the part you're asserting is a lie. I have no idea why you think so.
3) Investigator from (1) posts his analysis online for people to look at. You're discounting his analysis and the posted images because... it's on the Internet or something like that. Presumably if the images weren't on the Internet, the claims would be untrustworthy because they weren't available for scrutiny.
This isn't some random guy with no credentials claiming something on his own authority. This is somebody with real expertise posting his claim and the evidence that supports his claim. This isn't, "Trust me, they're manipulated." It's, "Look at this here!"
That's not surprising. It's exactly what every publication writes about preliminary results of investigations of people doing bad things. The serial killer is always the "alleged" serial killer. That doesn't mean there's no evidence. It just means the findings are preliminary or that nothing has been proven in a court of law. You can still actually look at the evidence and make a decision rather than simply asserting that the evidence doesn't exist.
Question: If I asked you before this came out, "What's the probability that this journal article is fraudulent?" and you had to decide on a probability based on nothing, would your estimate have been the same as if I asked you today? Mine certainly would have changed, and that conclusion would be based on evidence.
There's a good reason we don't use gut feelings for important policy decisions, though. Petroleum products are terribly nasty, but we put up with it so we can run tractors to farm our food. It's a trade off made using data. A substantial decrease in the cost of food production is nothing to just write off without carefully considering the costs and benefits. Given that glyphosate largely replaced more dangerous herbicides and given that a huge amount of research has been done to it and it's coming up pretty clean, that seems like good evidence that the costs are pretty minimal.
I'm looking for how GMOs are different from hybrids and mutants. None of those are naturally occurring, and trade secrets abound. If you're planting seeds for a farm, you're almost certainly planting a weirdo man-made organism that never existed in the wild. So what's special about GMO specifically?
Yes, I'll agree that that's a difference, but how does that difference affect my point? In both cases, you have a business model predicated on personal aesthetic preferences, which is totally legitimate, but it creates a new burden on neighboring business. Should neighboring businesses have to bow to this new burden to support your business just because you and your customers want it? It's an unfortunate situation with two legitimate interests, but I can't see how you could possibly say yes to this.
I agree that having to let Monsanto test your crops as if it were a government organization is distasteful from a "pit of your stomach" perspective, but is it really a problem in any real sense? If you're not infringing, they test the plants at their own expense and go away. If you are, then I'm not sure that the complaint that they shouldn't have been allowed to discover it is a very strong argument. I'd love for there to be a different way to enforce the patents, but I'm at a loss as to what that might be.
Why not? The salmon seem to be one of the things environmentalists should be most excited about. It's not from a big evil ag company and it will allow them to farm salmon with substantially less environmental impact. The fish are sterile and they're farming them in landlocked lakes. Given how destructive salmon farming can be and how much impact fishing can have on wild stocks, this seems like the first steps to taking a bite out of the problem.
No, I suppose not. It's just the word that the committee that examined the evidence decided that the images had been manipulated. It could be evidence that the committee is a bunch of idiots or that they have an agenda. But is that really what you want to hang your hat on? The findings are coming out in a few weeks, so your complaint seems to be that we're getting a sneak peek and it could be a total rumor.
Can you provide me a definition of "evidence" that somehow excludes the analysis of images that are available for all of us to look at and draw conclusions from? Would that definition of "evidence" exclude things like DNA on a murder weapon or an investigator observing that a door appeared to have been kicked in?
And what's up with "commissioned" and "analysis" being scare quotes? He had an analysis done on the images and they found that they were most likely manipulated. And based on the actual images that were posted to the Internet, they look pretty damned manipulated. If this isn't at least "evidence" that suggests the images were manipulated, I have to wonder if we're both speaking the same language.
Your argument seems to be that he didn't provide evidence, just stuff for us to look at and an argument that that stuff points to certain conclusions. Facts, schmacts. You can use facts to prove anything that's remotely true!
First, if you're appealing to nature, transgentic organisms do happen naturally, so the current process "mimics" nature just as much as hybridzation and mutagenesis do. But the key thing here is that your argument isn't addressing what's happening now. If and when we get to the point where it's possible to construct new organisms largely ex nihilo, I'll be with you in being very concerned about what we create. But that's not what people are currently trying to prevent.
What's going on now is these companies are starting with a whole, well understood organism and modifying a gene or two, generally by taking a well-characterized gene from another whole, well understood organism. Comparing that to arbitrary synthetic genomes is like saying that we shouldn't use smart SPAM filtering software because someday, a self-aware computer program may get out of control. We need to take things one step at a time, and the current step is just not that risky.
As it is, we have people saying that taking one gene from one organism and moving it into another well understood organism is crazy, but mashing together two complete genomes with thousands of genes with countless possible permutations in random ways through hybridization is totally safe. Or that moving one gene in a very specific way is super dangerous, but using mutants we've created with radiation and chemicals is nothing to worry about. This is ridiculous. It is objectively not true. Current GMOs are, in many ways, a lot less modified than other new types of crops.
Yes, some organizations (not others) have decided that it is a "likely" carcinogen, but that's not necessarily a major issue. People often confuse the probability that something is a carcinogen with the probability that exposure to a particular carcinogen will cause cancer. The effect is clearly small enough that some regulators put it in the "probable" category and some put it in the "maybe" category. The data is murky enough that multiple organizations looking at the body of evidence come to different conclusions. The fact that the Seralini study is often on the list of studies that support the claim is not a good sign, but let's assume it's true. The level of certainty they're looking at puts it in the same category as emissions from frying food and well below things like alcohol. Being a carcinogen isn't binary. Sawdust is a carcinogen.
Exactly. So how are GMOs specifically problematic? Just about everything we farm is a crazy hybrid / mutant that looks nothing like its wild cousins, but most people aren't freaking out over those escaping. They want to make it a GMO-specific problem, which it's not.
If I started a farming business that guaranteed that my plants and their ancestors were never grown near power lines, that would be fine. I could get people all excited about how good it was for them that no stray electrical fields affected my crops or their lineage. But if pollen from another farm started to come in, I couldn't make that guarantee any more. Is it acceptable for me to blame the neighboring farm, and am I entitled to redress? I went to a lot of effort to create my no-powerline guarantee, and my neighbor is mucking it up.
Fewer things and different things, but is that better? If organic allowed only one chemical to be applied to their crops and that chemical was benzene, would that be good? Clearly not. So it's not about fewer or different. It's about specifically what gets put on the crop. For example, if you could create a GMO plant that was naturally fungicide resistant, you could avoid the organic solution of applying large quantities of copper. Copper is nasty stuff an broadly toxic. In short, there's nothing inherently wrong with synthetic pesticides that makes "natural" ones better. You'd have to look at the specific chemicals and quantities, something that consumers generally don't do. Organic is happy to coast by on the misperception that they don't use pesticides when in reality, they just use different ones.
What was the pesticide? I mean, pesticides can be really nasty and I don't doubt your story, but it would be interesting to compare the specific properties and uses of that pesticide against the organic equivalent.
This is the type of story I'm thinking of. It's hysterical nonsense.
AMPA has about the same level of toxicity as glyphosate itself. And it's not the final product--it breaks down further.
Explain how.
Oh, wait. You used the word "shill" which means you don't actually have to make an argument. You just drop the mic and walk off because you fucking won. Awesome.
That's not true at all. GMOs "spread" quickly because farmers buy bags of the seeds and plant thousands of acres of them. The same is true of mutant and hybrid crops. If a cool new mutant or hybrid plant comes along, it "spreads" by exactly the same mechanism. It's not like farmers waited for pluots to naturally creep across their fields.
Have you looked a what "vast quantities" actually is? Here's an example done with soybeans. You're looking at 0.75 pounds per acre. If you take my silly table salt LD50 comparison, we're looking at the LD50 equivalent of about 0.3 pounds of salt per acre. Oh, and glyphosate breaks down in the soil. It's a pretty benign chemical in general if you're a human. And it's really benign if you compare it to other pesticides.
If you get into chronic exposure, there's always the theoretical possibility that there's something there. But there isn't a lot of evidence to support it, and once you start talking about the effects of chronic exposure, just about everything is dangerous.
I've never understood this line of reasoning. "It seems to be, glyphosate is Satan because it leads to glyphosate resistant weeds!" I don't see why the people who hate glyphosate see this as a problem. Yes, any pest control system is only temporary and is fighting against evolution. If you don't think that weed scientists are well aware of how this works, you're not following the industry literature.
Why would their effects be anything different from "escaped" versions of any of the weird hybrids and mutants we produce? Are we worried about pluots taking down an ecosystem?
That's unfortunate, but cross pollination has always been a fact of life with farming. The fact that an organic religion that requires purity has sprung up makes it a sticky situation, but I'm not yet inclined to blame conventional farmers for somebody else's theology. If there was a kosher-like designation that required all pollen to be blessed by a rabbi, we wouldn't blame neighboring farms for letting unblessed pollen cross the property lines.
Have you looked at the cases at all? Don't put too much money down on a wager that the farmers who were sued were innocent victims.
Allusions to fraud but no evidence? Did we read the same set of articles? From Nature:
and
At best, we're looking at somebody who is phenomenally sloppy, but even that's a hard argument to make, and it would really only explain mislabeled images. What's the valid reason for editing gel images? And if there was a valid reason, wouldn't the authors have mentioned it in their defence (or better yet, in the papers themselves) rather than apparently denying that the images were edited?
Well, they clearly understood the reason why IP might be important. They understood the value of agriculture (Jefferson, in particular, was hardcore into ag research himself). When they wrote about "Science and Useful Arts" in the Constitution, I doubt they meant, "everything except agriculture" considering that they were writing a constitution for an agrarian society. At the time, increased farm yields were up there on the list of things everybody wanted right below "getting into heaven" and "not having your kids die."
Given all that, I think they might at least give a passing nod to the idea that something that has so much potential to improve agriculture is worth the trade off that Percy Schemeiser doesn't get to skip out on licensing fees for stuff he intentionally copied. They might not all agree, but I think that at least some of them wouldn't be satisfied by the, "On my own land!" argument.
I don't think people are talking about the crime of fraud in this context. I think they're referring to academic fraud. All the evidence points to this being a pretty serious case of academic fraud.
With an LD50 more than half that of table salt, we should all be very careful.
If they altered data in an intentionally misleading way, they're fraudsters regardless of why they did it. As for personal gain, having a political agenda may not qualify as personal gain, but it's still a reason to commit fraud. Absent that, being able to publish something that gets a lot of attention may be enough. Publishing widely cited articles is a big deal in the research biz.
I'm all for companies labelling whatever they want as long as the label isn't too misleading. I'm not a big fan of government forcing companies to label things unless there's good reason to, and catering to the anti-GMO fad is not a good reason. It makes about as much sense as my not eating food grown near power lines and then demanding that the government enforce labelling standards so I have "choice" in the matter.
Caterpillars that eat BT crops sure do. But the story that's usually told is that BT crops are wiping out the Monarch butterfly, which does not seem to be true. Roundup is a problem for monarchs because they eat milkweed and milkweed is... a weed. Modern farming techniques are making weeds less and less common, so they are reducing monarch habitats. But that's not a problem of chemical toxicity. Just that we need milkweed patches to keep monarch populations up.
Bee populations have been hit with various problems, but none appear to be traceable to GMOs as far as I'm aware. Did you have some data for that?
I don't know what this claim maps back to, but the answer is almost certainly that no, they are not.
The same thing is true of hybrids as well, though. You never know when you're going to get something unexpected. But for some reason we treat "traditional" breeding like hybridization and the intentional creation of mutants as doing God's work and direct genetic modification as the thing that will kill us all. The wisdom of creating a novel organism depends entirely on the properties of that organism, not on how you created it.
I have no idea why people use Schmeiser as a poster boy for Monsanto abuse. He's a poster boy for exactly the sort of thing IP protection exists to prevent, not an innocent victim. He intentionally isolated the small percentage of hybrids he found on his property and created his own unlicensed field of Roundup Ready crops. He admitted as much in court and the courts found him to be completely in the wrong. He was nowhere near being an accidental victim of uncontrolled cross-pollination. Actual incidental cross pollination doesn't result in 95% of 1000+ acres carrying the Roundup Ready trait.
Interesting thing to note: All of the anti-GMO web sites post their summary of the Schmeiser story, but none of them that I've found link back to the court documents that actually describe what happened. Monsanto's own web site links to the primary sources. What does that tell you about who is blowing smoke?
More importantly, glyphosate isn't the only herbicide in the world. Its rise in popularity wasn't displacing some benign world where we killed weeds with the Care Bear Stare. It largely replaced nastier, more broadly toxic chemicals.