My apologies. As others have pointed out, I was mistaken. What I was referencing was an incident in oakland years ago. Not sure why I thought people would be rioting now about it, but the circumstances were different. The man was not restrained.
The rioters aren't impoverished, at least not all of them. Don't romanticize it. Economic causes may have been the spark, but the rioting was greed. These were not Robin Hoods.
You understand the core of the argument, but we seem to be disagreeing about the implications of it. I'm saying that the small number of metabolites changed with GMO means there are fewer chances that one is toxic.
It only takes one to kill you, sure, but traditionally farmers change thousands of them at a time. Now we're only changing a few of them. Fewer chances that a carcinogenic one is going to be increased. How is that less safe?
The protests are about a cop shooting a man as he was restrained on the ground. Granted, I think it's pretty clear from the video that it was an accident, but you could argue that knockout gas would be a step up from what they've already done.
It's not very egalitarian. One set of rules for royalty and certain classes of people, the rest of us peasants have to strip down (virtually of course) and get molested.
If the pilots don't like this idiocy at the gate, then they should stand with us and do something about it. The uber-wealthy elites with their private jets are already exempt unless I'm mistaken. Pilots are getting a pass now. Airline personnel and anyone else who has a strong interest in real, efficient security will too. They're not going to be lobbying for sanity there now.
TSA is also talking about allowing first class members to skip security, so then it really will be just us poor peons getting groped and prodded. Welcome to America, where it was once said that all men are created equal... of course some are more equal than others. You're not one of them. Now bend over.
You're missing my point: MORE METABOLITES ARE CHANGED WITH NATURAL METHODS. GMOs involve targeted modifications. Instead of 12 metabolites changed with GMO, artificial selection (practiced by farmers since prehistoric times) produces hundreds or thousands of changed metabolites.
To go with your comparison, it's like a bucket of ten oranges and a bucket of 400 apples. Each fruit independently has a very slight chance of being poisoned. You're saying "Don't eat the bucket of oranges, they could be poisoned. Eat the apples."
The problem with your analysis is that you've picked an arbitrary criteria - the quantity of different metabolites. That criteria says nothing about the quality of the metabolites.
I'm not an expert, but I think it does actually. The lecture on the subject that I saw, the conclusion was that aside from the metabolite or metabolites that were intentionally changed with the genetic modifications, the GMO potatoes were nearly identical to the potato lines they were derived from. Between "natural" strains, on the other hand, there were hundreds or thousands of differences.
I see no reason to assume that the small number of metabolites changed with GMO would be the toxic ones. Seems like you're more likely to get a toxic enrichment with the natural crossing, since so many more genes are blindly changed. At least that's my hypothesis unless you know of a specific reason why tropane alkaloids would be enriched in GMOs and then not tested for.
It is a systematic failure. The drilling companies will -always- drill if their investors want them to and will -never- avoid wells just because the public wants them to. It's a bit like saying "Meth is just a normal chemical and should be legal, getting addicted to it is a failure of the individual." Both may be philosophically pure with certain political ideologies, but in practice would create far more problems for society, and both should be regulated or banned.
Seconded. It doesn't just recycle AP or reuters stories. It doesn't make outlandish statements just to sell more. And it has less to do with religion than Fox or other fake news services do.
There's also the limited release factor working for it. If you could just buy them at the store year round, people might get used to them. We tolerate it though because we assume the girl scouts are a good cause, and there is enough junk food out there year round.
Me personally, I'd rather have egg nog available anytime I want it.
That's been more true of most of recorded history than it is true now. When farmers were cultivating maize centuries ago, blindly mixing genes, they weren't optimizing for least carcinogenic or best for health. They were, in fact, mixing and matching without knowing what the outcome was going to be.
GMOs, on the other hand, are tested for health effects when they're made.
Furthermore, when you modify a strain of crops, you only are trying to modify it a little. When you use artificial selection to change your crops, you're usually changing quite a bit to get the desired outcome. The end result is that genetically modified crops have been found to be much more similar to their parent strain than "natural" strains are to each other. Source.
I mean The Stand. Could somebody with a reasonable knowledge of GM organisms please offer some reassurance that this technique couldn't backfire in some disastrous way?
Well, c.elegans doesn't cause disease, they eat bacteria. They are also far, far, far too macroscopic to be airborne even if they were to suddenly take a liking to human flesh.
As far as assurances that this technique couldn't backfire, there are nearly infinite ways that absolutely anything could backfire if you don't look at probability. Turning on your car could backfire in that the engine might explode due to a defect, could explode due to some quirk of quantum physics, could produce through the burning of hydrocarbons a new microorganism that would cause the end of the world. All fairly unlikely.
The best way to reassure you might be that biologists have, for years, been fooling around with the genetics of C. elegans. A lot. During a lab rotation a few years ago, I introduced an HIV protein into worms. Thus far I have not died a horrible death. One common technique to look for genes involves soaking the worms in mutagens. The goal being to get a worm with a mutation in one of its genes, for every single gene in the worm genome. That's a lot of completely random genetic fiddling. We're not juggling with vials of ebola here. With this specific case, this is an artificial amino acid. If the worm got out, it wouldn't find any of that amino acid, it would just be a normal worm basically.
With GMO, the most down-to-earth concern is that the mutations will get out into the population. That's not really a concern with these worms. They evolve so quickly that the lab strains are probably obsolete, having been used since the 50s or so, and they really don't affect us eating bacteria as they do. Weeds becoming resistant to roundup are exponentially more of a concern than genetically modified c.elegans.
They did reprogram the worms. No doubt people have done DIY genetics with these worms before too. It's not as easy as genetic splicing with yeast or ecoli, but enthusiasts could definitely make their own transgenic worms in their garage. If you buy or make your own PCR machine, that's probably the biggest barrier right there.
The breakthrough here is not artificial biological fluorescence, which has been around for a long time. The breakthrough is also not that this is a fluorescent amino acid (as opposed to full proteins made up of many amino acids, like GFP, which is again what you're talking about), evidently those have been demonstrated for a few years. This is tricking an organism into -using- an artificial amino acid, a fluorescent one.
Being able to incorporate fluorescent amino acids into a protein -looks- pretty striking, but people have been able to get cells to attach a fluorescent protein onto other proteins for years. The fluorescence here was just an easy assay to tell if they had gotten the c elegans to use a different, entirely artificial building block. Fluorescent amino acids may turn out to be the biggest use for this discovery, but the real story here is that we have a new tool, not that the tool can be used to make organisms glow.
You're thinking of lead bullets. The BART incident was not with rubber bullets, and the daily shootings there are also not rubber bullets. Riots in Oakland like the type that were happening in London would not involve rubber bullets, there would be real bullets on both sides.
I'd argue it doesn't matter if one or two people stealing TVs actually think they are taking a principled stand on something and they're morally justified. Such people are not the majority, and they're deluded anyway. The riots are about greed. If you have a problem with that generalization, why exactly?
It's not just bash google day, of course. A short list of companies that get bashed a lot on slashdot:
Apple
Google
Facebook
MS
Sony
Steam
Oracle
Canonical
Nokia
Motorola
Activision
Comcast
EA
Companies that receive very little hate on slashdot:
Samsung I guess?
Some indie game makers
Appleseed, diaspora, and a bunch of other social networking sites you've probably never heard of
Any company that doesn't actually make anything (except for patent trolls, who we also hate)
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My apologies. As others have pointed out, I was mistaken. What I was referencing was an incident in oakland years ago. Not sure why I thought people would be rioting now about it, but the circumstances were different. The man was not restrained.
It was my mistake, I was referring to the Oakland incident.
Don't beat yourself up, it was my mistake. I was indeed thinking of the Oakland incident, without having bothered to read the story.
Slashdot really needs a self mod option, a "-5 redacted" that you could only apply to your own posts, since there are people like me.
The rioters aren't impoverished, at least not all of them. Don't romanticize it. Economic causes may have been the spark, but the rioting was greed. These were not Robin Hoods.
Oops. Still BART though, and still worse than KO gas. But I would retract my post if that were an option.
You understand the core of the argument, but we seem to be disagreeing about the implications of it. I'm saying that the small number of metabolites changed with GMO means there are fewer chances that one is toxic.
It only takes one to kill you, sure, but traditionally farmers change thousands of them at a time. Now we're only changing a few of them. Fewer chances that a carcinogenic one is going to be increased. How is that less safe?
The protests are about a cop shooting a man as he was restrained on the ground. Granted, I think it's pretty clear from the video that it was an accident, but you could argue that knockout gas would be a step up from what they've already done.
Sure, though I think that neither one carries much risk, given that testing has been done in both cases.
It's not very egalitarian. One set of rules for royalty and certain classes of people, the rest of us peasants have to strip down (virtually of course) and get molested.
If the pilots don't like this idiocy at the gate, then they should stand with us and do something about it. The uber-wealthy elites with their private jets are already exempt unless I'm mistaken. Pilots are getting a pass now. Airline personnel and anyone else who has a strong interest in real, efficient security will too. They're not going to be lobbying for sanity there now.
TSA is also talking about allowing first class members to skip security, so then it really will be just us poor peons getting groped and prodded. Welcome to America, where it was once said that all men are created equal... of course some are more equal than others. You're not one of them. Now bend over.
You're missing my point: MORE METABOLITES ARE CHANGED WITH NATURAL METHODS. GMOs involve targeted modifications. Instead of 12 metabolites changed with GMO, artificial selection (practiced by farmers since prehistoric times) produces hundreds or thousands of changed metabolites.
To go with your comparison, it's like a bucket of ten oranges and a bucket of 400 apples. Each fruit independently has a very slight chance of being poisoned. You're saying "Don't eat the bucket of oranges, they could be poisoned. Eat the apples."
The problem with your analysis is that you've picked an arbitrary criteria - the quantity of different metabolites. That criteria says nothing about the quality of the metabolites.
I'm not an expert, but I think it does actually. The lecture on the subject that I saw, the conclusion was that aside from the metabolite or metabolites that were intentionally changed with the genetic modifications, the GMO potatoes were nearly identical to the potato lines they were derived from. Between "natural" strains, on the other hand, there were hundreds or thousands of differences.
I see no reason to assume that the small number of metabolites changed with GMO would be the toxic ones. Seems like you're more likely to get a toxic enrichment with the natural crossing, since so many more genes are blindly changed. At least that's my hypothesis unless you know of a specific reason why tropane alkaloids would be enriched in GMOs and then not tested for.
It is a systematic failure. The drilling companies will -always- drill if their investors want them to and will -never- avoid wells just because the public wants them to. It's a bit like saying "Meth is just a normal chemical and should be legal, getting addicted to it is a failure of the individual." Both may be philosophically pure with certain political ideologies, but in practice would create far more problems for society, and both should be regulated or banned.
Seconded. It doesn't just recycle AP or reuters stories. It doesn't make outlandish statements just to sell more. And it has less to do with religion than Fox or other fake news services do.
Good. They should all attempt it.
There's also the limited release factor working for it. If you could just buy them at the store year round, people might get used to them. We tolerate it though because we assume the girl scouts are a good cause, and there is enough junk food out there year round.
Me personally, I'd rather have egg nog available anytime I want it.
He didn't really say -what- he was cooking, or what he was cooking with. His oven might be a "Easy supernova oven 2000"
Another contribution is probably made by American hip-hop culture which seems to glorify anything which is anti-establishment
No, that's just normal youthful rebelliousness. We learned it from you guys a few generations ago.
That's been more true of most of recorded history than it is true now. When farmers were cultivating maize centuries ago, blindly mixing genes, they weren't optimizing for least carcinogenic or best for health. They were, in fact, mixing and matching without knowing what the outcome was going to be.
GMOs, on the other hand, are tested for health effects when they're made.
Furthermore, when you modify a strain of crops, you only are trying to modify it a little. When you use artificial selection to change your crops, you're usually changing quite a bit to get the desired outcome. The end result is that genetically modified crops have been found to be much more similar to their parent strain than "natural" strains are to each other. Source.
I mean The Stand. Could somebody with a reasonable knowledge of GM organisms please offer some reassurance that this technique couldn't backfire in some disastrous way?
Well, c.elegans doesn't cause disease, they eat bacteria. They are also far, far, far too macroscopic to be airborne even if they were to suddenly take a liking to human flesh.
As far as assurances that this technique couldn't backfire, there are nearly infinite ways that absolutely anything could backfire if you don't look at probability. Turning on your car could backfire in that the engine might explode due to a defect, could explode due to some quirk of quantum physics, could produce through the burning of hydrocarbons a new microorganism that would cause the end of the world. All fairly unlikely.
The best way to reassure you might be that biologists have, for years, been fooling around with the genetics of C. elegans. A lot. During a lab rotation a few years ago, I introduced an HIV protein into worms. Thus far I have not died a horrible death. One common technique to look for genes involves soaking the worms in mutagens. The goal being to get a worm with a mutation in one of its genes, for every single gene in the worm genome. That's a lot of completely random genetic fiddling. We're not juggling with vials of ebola here. With this specific case, this is an artificial amino acid. If the worm got out, it wouldn't find any of that amino acid, it would just be a normal worm basically.
With GMO, the most down-to-earth concern is that the mutations will get out into the population. That's not really a concern with these worms. They evolve so quickly that the lab strains are probably obsolete, having been used since the 50s or so, and they really don't affect us eating bacteria as they do. Weeds becoming resistant to roundup are exponentially more of a concern than genetically modified c.elegans.
I also forgot yahoo and AOL, though I guess they don't get a lot of hate because even acknowledging their continued existence is beneath us.
They did reprogram the worms. No doubt people have done DIY genetics with these worms before too. It's not as easy as genetic splicing with yeast or ecoli, but enthusiasts could definitely make their own transgenic worms in their garage. If you buy or make your own PCR machine, that's probably the biggest barrier right there.
The breakthrough here is not artificial biological fluorescence, which has been around for a long time. The breakthrough is also not that this is a fluorescent amino acid (as opposed to full proteins made up of many amino acids, like GFP, which is again what you're talking about), evidently those have been demonstrated for a few years. This is tricking an organism into -using- an artificial amino acid, a fluorescent one.
Being able to incorporate fluorescent amino acids into a protein -looks- pretty striking, but people have been able to get cells to attach a fluorescent protein onto other proteins for years. The fluorescence here was just an easy assay to tell if they had gotten the c elegans to use a different, entirely artificial building block. Fluorescent amino acids may turn out to be the biggest use for this discovery, but the real story here is that we have a new tool, not that the tool can be used to make organisms glow.
You're thinking of lead bullets. The BART incident was not with rubber bullets, and the daily shootings there are also not rubber bullets. Riots in Oakland like the type that were happening in London would not involve rubber bullets, there would be real bullets on both sides.
I'd argue it doesn't matter if one or two people stealing TVs actually think they are taking a principled stand on something and they're morally justified. Such people are not the majority, and they're deluded anyway. The riots are about greed. If you have a problem with that generalization, why exactly?
It's not just bash google day, of course. A short list of companies that get bashed a lot on slashdot:
Apple
Google
Facebook
MS
Sony
Steam
Oracle
Canonical
Nokia
Motorola
Activision
Comcast
EA
Companies that receive very little hate on slashdot:
Samsung I guess?
Some indie game makers
Appleseed, diaspora, and a bunch of other social networking sites you've probably never heard of
Any company that doesn't actually make anything (except for patent trolls, who we also hate)
Slashdot: news for tech and software hipsters.