I nave not seen any kind of standardized test so far that I thought was a remotely accurate prediction of skill.
Overall humanity has a huge problem with education at this point. We have done the research and we know that memorization does not work for actual learning. However, no amount of research seems to turn into actual changes.
At this point I think we are going to have to just destroy the entire education system from grade school through grad school. They won't change and they live in their own world divorced from reality.
Even when you see a university publish major papers on how ineffective their own memorization based systems are they refuse to change. I have talked with some university professors about this and usually the reasons that are given for keeping the memorization based systems are politics, culture, history etc. None of which have anything to do with education.
The human race is being held back by the education system at this point and since they won't evolve they need to be replaced.
The way we teach calculus is based off of rote memorization. You need all the rules to solve the integrals. However, functional analysis is an almost entirely different kind of skill. Functional analysis is based on the theory that underlies calculus but that is usually skipped in order to just teach straight problem solving.
I see skills like functional analysis as more important since you learn what to expect from functions and why. The exact answer a computer can give you but a better understanding of functions will tell you very quickly if you made a major error in setting up the system on a computer, or if there are multiple answer how to determine which is the correct one for your system.
There is just not enough time to teach understanding (since it takes so much experience to gain it) and the memorization of rules for solving integrals and derivatives. Since any cellphone, laptop, tablet, etc can solve integrals and differentials but they can't give you understanding I think we should be spending time on the parts that computers can't do. As a result you can solve more realistic (and FAR harder) problems and you learn far more valuable skills in problem solving.
I can't even imagine dong that for my subject. It is impressive that you managed to do it and I am thankful I don't have to go down that path.
My Master's thesis will be on chromatography simulations at industrial concentrations with industrial bio-molecules.
Overall I think that computers have helped a lot if used wisely and have enabled entirely new areas of research that are saving hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
They can also definitely be abused but that is a reason to learn how to integrate them effectively that is not a reason to ban them.
Tech to read textbooks is great for engineering texts!
With an ebook you can SEARCH. Trying to find out where a table of values I need to pipe roughness or viscosity relationships vs temperature for a certain chemical is so much easier to do with searching. Most engineering books seem to have about a hundred pages or so of just tables, graphs etc at the end.
Not using tech also limits the problems you can solve and the kinds of approaches you can take.
During an exam there is just no way to solve coupled ODEs or god forbid PDEs but there are a few calculators that can solve those kinds of problems now. This means you can give more realistic equations and get more realistic answers instead of dumbing problems down to the point where a human can do them.
At this point there is no real need to solve an integral, a differential, ODE, PDE, coupled system etc by hand Too much time is spent on this skill a computer can do and not spent on WHY you should setup that ODE. What does it mean? What kind of answers should you get? Will the problem have multiple answers? How do you know which one is the correct one?
We need a better understanding of why. Knowing how to setup a problem to the point where a computer can solve it and knowing that it is the right problem to solve is far more important than memorizing derivative rules and applying them. I can teach a computer to solve a derivative I can't teach it to figure out what the right set of equations to model a problem is.
At the college level though I see a different kind of problem. Many of the people from 3rd world countries I have encountered do VERY well at rote memorization tasks and can often solve engineering problems that are almost exactly what they have done before but when you step outside of that they quickly run into problems. I find that american and canadian engineers are more likely to rely on a computer to solve the hard math part but they are much better at figuring out how to define the problem and what should be done to solve it.
I am not sure why but most european countries still seem to do rote memorization for many disciplines and base all grades on a single 2 hour exam. It is all pretty silly. Maybe some day education won't be confused with memorization.
In grade school I can't think of many good uses of constant tech but there should be times specifically for it to learn.
At the college level it depends on the type of courses. I find that a laptop helps a lot in my engineering classes at bother the undergraduate and now at the masters level.
Especially at the masters level it is easy to look up subjects you need to read more on as the professor mentions then so you can read the articles later. After some classes I will have 20 tabs queued up to read.
Some of my classes even expect you to have a laptop with you since the lessons are sometimes done interactively. Recently we have been working on molecular dynamics simulations and looking at the importance of minimizing energy before a simulation, making sure the random starting point is stable, figuring out the free energy of a reaction etc.
There is a huge gaping difference between someone telling you those things are important and you actually doing them and working along with the class. All of our simulations have also required data analysis and visualization of the data and you are expected to quickly be able to parse various strange text formats and do some fairly complex calculations on the data. We normally use python or matlab.
It is also very useful for solving some of the math problems we run into in classes now. Even when an ODE has an analytically solution you don't want to solve it by hand and a computer present allows you to focus on the understanding of the problem and let the computer solve the math part.
Actually there is work on making plants more nutritious.
Golden rice is the biggest example of this. It sure is nice that the EU has worked so hard to spread disinformation about it so that tens of millions can be safe, organic and blind without the vitamin A the rice provides.
A more recent example is a tomato that has a tuna protein put in it to prevent freezing. What this allows is to go tomatoes in climates that can not normally grow tomatoes and also grow them later in the year. This is not directly more nutritious but it is indirectly more nutritious since it means more of the tomatoes are allowed to ripen on the vine. Normally many tomatoes are grown far away and ripened synthetically and currently our synthetic ripening is not very good and does not generate the same nutrition content. The local tomatoes are healthier and more environmentally friendly.
The more we learn the harder the science gets. Mostly we end up working on harder and harder problems and many things we are doing today is at the very edges of what we can do. We are at the point where we are designing systems based on atomic arrangements. We can even change the types of bonds being formed not just the atomic arrangements.
No amount of testing with ever catching everything and realistically during the development of new technology we are probably going to kill a lot of people. However, at the same time we have developed drugs to regenerate your white blood cells after chemotherapy. The lethality rates of many cancers went from 90% to 5% since most of the deaths where from infections. We have saved a HUGE number of people with that one. Right now there is work being done to target the actual mutations that cause cancer and destroy the cells that have them. We even have drugs that work for that we just can't manufacture them at scale.
It is hard to explain how brutally difficult modern manufacturing is. Imagine having to assembly a few thousand atoms in EXACTLY the right order. If you get one bond wrong the result can be lethal. Even worse these arrangements like to spontaneously hook together and those combinations are almost always lethal. If you have those combinations at greater than.001% that usually means the patient dies. Oh and you need to make on the order of 10^23 of those arrangements for a patient.
We are going to screw this up. There is no doubt about it but we also know that if we stop trying then even more people die.
GMO is NOT fundamentally different than chemical mutagens and radioactive substances to create crossbreeds or try to get specific traits except that it is MORE dangerous. Traditional ways of selective breeding are MORE dangerous from a genetic perspective than genetic engineering.
Just because they have been used for a long time does not mean that they are not dangerous. People do die from it, we just accept it as a part of life.
Just labeling something as GMO does not give you ANY information at all and is nothing to base a decision on.
What I don't like is a company patenting something just to keep anyone from using it.
I don't think it should be legal to buy a competing technology for instance and then license it so high or refuse to license it such that the technology is dead until the patent has expired. Too many technologies related to battery technology have been slowed down that way.
What I would be looking for is a serious effort to sell the patented product and actual people paying for it. if it is determined that you don't hold the patent in good faith then it should be invalid. Remember a patent is something that society grants in exchange for what we get from the patent. At least in the USA a patent is not some kind of natural right.
That should be true of all patents. Society gives up something so that a patent can exist. If the agreement is not held up it should be invalid and the invalid state is the information is generally available.
That toxin was already sprayed on plants and is still being sprayed on plants. The GMO version has not changed the usage by much at all. What is HAS changed is the amount that runs off into the environment.
There is poison in everything you eat. The skins of potatoes are naturally poisonous, the seeds on strawberries are naturally poisonous. However, the health benefits in these items outweigh the damage the poison does. Like everything how a poison impacts you depends on the dosage.
Lots of poisons are safe for humans at the levels we ingest them. There is no way you could eat any food without dealing with some level of poison.
The rat study you mentioned has LONG since been discredited and not been replicable by other experts in the field. The scientist that did the work is largely considered to be a fraud in the field and at this point articles published under his name are no longer accepted by reputable journals and he has resorted to destroying students reputations in the field instead by getting them to submit his articles under their names.
I would say that scientist B is guilty of patent infringement and should probably be prosecuted for it but only if the therapy was for sale on the market at a reasonable price (based on cost to develop etc).
However, any children that resulted from that patent would be completely free and clear in my view. They had no part in it. I would even extend that to other animals and plants so long as profit is not being made from the patent violation.
If you violate the patent and create a plain strain that you then sell then I think that normal patent law would apply.
I do want to do more research on this and actually confirm it. The whole thing seems pretty strange compared to other source I have looked at and I want to be as accurate as possible on this issue since it is closely related to some of the work I do.
This is why I can't support the GMO labeling laws I keep seeing. So many just want to label something as GMO which is just based on fear and does not lead to any understanding.
For ALL kinds of food (organic, gmo, etc) I want to know exactly what is in the food. I want to know the DNA sequence so I can search it or write an app to test it against things i don't want. That is true for GMO and Organic foods. Remember that pink grapefruit was a random mutation. There was no guarantee it would be safe. Same with organic certified chemical mutagens used on organic foods.
I want all food help to the same high standard. Not this fear based approach that thinks that GMO is different.
Monsanto developed that system and last I checked they had NEVER used it for any regular seeds. It was only used in test fields to prevent genes escaping into the wild during testing.
My view on gene patenting is that any natural gene should not be patent able but the process for insertion should be. However, for any custom developed gene that should be patent able.
Why do you think that GMO foods have more pesticides sprayed on them?
GMOs usually need far fewer pesticides sprayed on them, that is pretty much the point of them most of the time. They also wash off far fewer pesticides to the environment.
Large scale growing tends to use a lot of pesticides regardless of the type of growing that is used. Organic has the image of being all natural and no chemicals etc. That is completely and utter BS.
Now for your home garden that is easy to do organic and without using a lot of pesticides but that does not scale up.
I am a Chemical and Biological Engineer and overall I think that GMO food is safe. I would also like us to use more nuclear power. My views on nuclear power are less informed than my knowledge of GMO is. However, my views on nuclear power are still FAR more informed than the average person.
I think that is where the major difference comes in.
Many normal people don't research anything and have very strong opinions. Most scientists and engineers I know do tend to do research before holding a viewpoint.
Most scientists and engineers I know also find other scientists and engineers they trust in other fields and will accept the more qualified persons viewpoint if it seems reasonable. Most mechanical engineers trust my viewpoint more on chemical and biological stuff and I trust theirs more on aerodynamics.
It makes sense to listen to more qualified people.
You mean the toxin that is classified as organic and can and is sprayed on plants as an organic pesticide?
You know the one where the only way to harm a human with it is to inhale it as a powder and in that form it causes the same damage as inhaling almost any other powder. Even inhaling sugar as a powder is bad for you.
That toxin is COMPLETELY inert inside humans. However insects and some fish can cleave the protein and can then be killed by the toxin.
The organic version is sprayed on plants, washes off and damages local aquatic life. The GMO version does not wash off and has no impact on local aquatic life. The GMO version also concentrates in the parts of the plant we don't eat.
The organic way of using BT toxin is worse in ALL WAYS than the GMO version.
The problem I have is that when we use chemical mutagens on Organic food it has many of the same dangers and some different ones. The same when we use radiation to mutate foods.
I can't find any scientific reason to single GMO out. I want them ALL labeled. Anything that makes sense to label for GMO we should label for any other food also.
At this point we can fully type out a DNA sequence for a few thousand dollars. I think that should just be standard practice for food and made available online.
Look at all the pink grapefruit around. Those where a random mutation that we kept alive. However, some mutations end up being harmful to us or harmful to some of us. Many food allergens we can match based on DNA sequence. Imagine food items put into a database and then ever food item could be checked against every know allergy or problem DNA sequence. You would immediately know who should not eat the food, who should be warned etc.
I want actually safe food and labeling just GMO is a fear response and it is based on not understanding the actual genetics.
GMO also encompasses things like genetically engineered bacteria that we use to make most modern drugs. There are also other companies that do GMO than Monsanto. GMO is even correct when we look at modifying humans to cure diseases.
Are you saying that Golden rice is bad and that we should not have it and that instead we should have millions of people go blind? what about the work being done to engineer potatoes to be non-carcinogenic when fried? It looks like soon we are going to be modifying beef to remove the protein in it that causes inflammation in humans and is a major source of cancer.
However I guess all of that does not matter and we should just say GMO is bad and there can be no discussion about it. Pros and cons can't be discussed. We can't study it and make rational decisions. The whole issue must boil down to a soundbyte and that ends it.
The problem is that it is not a sane choice. This is ENTIRELY based on fear. If all you do is label something as GMO that tells you nothing at all. This does not help you make any kind of informed decision at all.
Was the GMO done to make the plant drought resistance? does it resist cold? was it modified to be less carcinogenic? was it modified to make a certain companies fertilizer more profitable? etc
Just saying something is GMO is worthless.
It should also be pointed out that Organic foods can be grown with heavy metals, modified with radiation or treated with chemical mutagens. However all of those are FAR more dangerous than GMO techniques and they are all just labeled as Organic.
If you want to know what is in your food then that is the kind of law you should pass. Have something that tells you exactly what is in your food so you can make an informed decision if you want.
The reason I came here was to learn how to use computer simulations to manufacture drugs. There are so many cures for diseases we know of that we just can't figure out how to manufacture and using computer simulations to figure out how to manufacture the drugs is an extremely new area for drug development.
I ended up here because I solved a problem that was considered impossible for doing drug development in computers.
It is very cool to do and the classes are very difficult but I am learning a lot at least. It is just sad that I will have to go back to the USA after I am done so I can actually do the drug development since protein, DNA, RNA etc type drugs are basically forbidden for development in Europe.
So hopefully in about 4 years I will be back in the USA and working on bringing drugs to market that we can't manufacture right now.
The problem is that while they say do no harm that is not what they actually do.
In Ireland a scientist figured out how to make regular potatoes immune to blight by taking some genes from wild potatoes and inserting them in the kind we eat. The atni GMO crowd managed to kill any kind of testing of that and instead potatoes are still done using the "normal organic methods" of killing blight on potatoes which is to put heavy metals on them. So safety is clearly not the issue and can't even be studied.
Actually the whole cross breading thing overall is pretty screwed up in many cases. Farmers discovered natural thing they could put on plants to increase the chance of cross breeds working. It turns that that nearly all of them are chemical mutagens and are FAR more dangerous than precise genetic engineering is.
I am not saying that we should blindly trust GMO or Organic stuff. What we need to do is fully allow the scientific development and analysis to see what truly works for us for safety, nutrition and environmental damage. Right now though that is not what is happening and decisions are made based on fear.
What I do want to see is all products on the market should have their full DNA mapped out and put online in a searchable data base (BLAST) and that includes all the ingredients that go into your product along with any other chemical species in there we know of. Then you would have an app on your phone and could select what you are allergic to, what you don't want in your food etc and then scan a tag on the food and your phone would tell you if it is safe for you. Right now there are thousands of food allergies and we only list about 20 or so on food. This anti-GMO stance I see now does not help knowledge or safety in any way it is just fear.
I want to see actual information on food and people able to make real choices. So long as this is just fear based that will not happen.
Slashdot Mirror
I nave not seen any kind of standardized test so far that I thought was a remotely accurate prediction of skill.
Overall humanity has a huge problem with education at this point. We have done the research and we know that memorization does not work for actual learning. However, no amount of research seems to turn into actual changes.
At this point I think we are going to have to just destroy the entire education system from grade school through grad school. They won't change and they live in their own world divorced from reality.
Even when you see a university publish major papers on how ineffective their own memorization based systems are they refuse to change. I have talked with some university professors about this and usually the reasons that are given for keeping the memorization based systems are politics, culture, history etc. None of which have anything to do with education.
The human race is being held back by the education system at this point and since they won't evolve they need to be replaced.
The way we teach calculus is based off of rote memorization. You need all the rules to solve the integrals. However, functional analysis is an almost entirely different kind of skill. Functional analysis is based on the theory that underlies calculus but that is usually skipped in order to just teach straight problem solving.
I see skills like functional analysis as more important since you learn what to expect from functions and why. The exact answer a computer can give you but a better understanding of functions will tell you very quickly if you made a major error in setting up the system on a computer, or if there are multiple answer how to determine which is the correct one for your system.
There is just not enough time to teach understanding (since it takes so much experience to gain it) and the memorization of rules for solving integrals and derivatives. Since any cellphone, laptop, tablet, etc can solve integrals and differentials but they can't give you understanding I think we should be spending time on the parts that computers can't do. As a result you can solve more realistic (and FAR harder) problems and you learn far more valuable skills in problem solving.
I can't even imagine dong that for my subject. It is impressive that you managed to do it and I am thankful I don't have to go down that path.
My Master's thesis will be on chromatography simulations at industrial concentrations with industrial bio-molecules.
Overall I think that computers have helped a lot if used wisely and have enabled entirely new areas of research that are saving hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
They can also definitely be abused but that is a reason to learn how to integrate them effectively that is not a reason to ban them.
Tech to read textbooks is great for engineering texts!
With an ebook you can SEARCH. Trying to find out where a table of values I need to pipe roughness or viscosity relationships vs temperature for a certain chemical is so much easier to do with searching. Most engineering books seem to have about a hundred pages or so of just tables, graphs etc at the end.
Not using tech also limits the problems you can solve and the kinds of approaches you can take.
During an exam there is just no way to solve coupled ODEs or god forbid PDEs but there are a few calculators that can solve those kinds of problems now. This means you can give more realistic equations and get more realistic answers instead of dumbing problems down to the point where a human can do them.
At this point there is no real need to solve an integral, a differential, ODE, PDE, coupled system etc by hand Too much time is spent on this skill a computer can do and not spent on WHY you should setup that ODE. What does it mean? What kind of answers should you get? Will the problem have multiple answers? How do you know which one is the correct one?
We need a better understanding of why. Knowing how to setup a problem to the point where a computer can solve it and knowing that it is the right problem to solve is far more important than memorizing derivative rules and applying them. I can teach a computer to solve a derivative I can't teach it to figure out what the right set of equations to model a problem is.
At the college level though I see a different kind of problem. Many of the people from 3rd world countries I have encountered do VERY well at rote memorization tasks and can often solve engineering problems that are almost exactly what they have done before but when you step outside of that they quickly run into problems. I find that american and canadian engineers are more likely to rely on a computer to solve the hard math part but they are much better at figuring out how to define the problem and what should be done to solve it.
I am not sure why but most european countries still seem to do rote memorization for many disciplines and base all grades on a single 2 hour exam. It is all pretty silly. Maybe some day education won't be confused with memorization.
In grade school I can't think of many good uses of constant tech but there should be times specifically for it to learn.
At the college level it depends on the type of courses. I find that a laptop helps a lot in my engineering classes at bother the undergraduate and now at the masters level.
Especially at the masters level it is easy to look up subjects you need to read more on as the professor mentions then so you can read the articles later. After some classes I will have 20 tabs queued up to read.
Some of my classes even expect you to have a laptop with you since the lessons are sometimes done interactively. Recently we have been working on molecular dynamics simulations and looking at the importance of minimizing energy before a simulation, making sure the random starting point is stable, figuring out the free energy of a reaction etc.
There is a huge gaping difference between someone telling you those things are important and you actually doing them and working along with the class. All of our simulations have also required data analysis and visualization of the data and you are expected to quickly be able to parse various strange text formats and do some fairly complex calculations on the data. We normally use python or matlab.
It is also very useful for solving some of the math problems we run into in classes now. Even when an ODE has an analytically solution you don't want to solve it by hand and a computer present allows you to focus on the understanding of the problem and let the computer solve the math part.
Actually there is work on making plants more nutritious.
Golden rice is the biggest example of this. It sure is nice that the EU has worked so hard to spread disinformation about it so that tens of millions can be safe, organic and blind without the vitamin A the rice provides.
A more recent example is a tomato that has a tuna protein put in it to prevent freezing. What this allows is to go tomatoes in climates that can not normally grow tomatoes and also grow them later in the year. This is not directly more nutritious but it is indirectly more nutritious since it means more of the tomatoes are allowed to ripen on the vine. Normally many tomatoes are grown far away and ripened synthetically and currently our synthetic ripening is not very good and does not generate the same nutrition content. The local tomatoes are healthier and more environmentally friendly.
The more we learn the harder the science gets. Mostly we end up working on harder and harder problems and many things we are doing today is at the very edges of what we can do. We are at the point where we are designing systems based on atomic arrangements. We can even change the types of bonds being formed not just the atomic arrangements.
No amount of testing with ever catching everything and realistically during the development of new technology we are probably going to kill a lot of people. However, at the same time we have developed drugs to regenerate your white blood cells after chemotherapy. The lethality rates of many cancers went from 90% to 5% since most of the deaths where from infections. We have saved a HUGE number of people with that one. Right now there is work being done to target the actual mutations that cause cancer and destroy the cells that have them. We even have drugs that work for that we just can't manufacture them at scale.
It is hard to explain how brutally difficult modern manufacturing is. Imagine having to assembly a few thousand atoms in EXACTLY the right order. If you get one bond wrong the result can be lethal. Even worse these arrangements like to spontaneously hook together and those combinations are almost always lethal. If you have those combinations at greater than .001% that usually means the patient dies. Oh and you need to make on the order of 10^23 of those arrangements for a patient.
We are going to screw this up. There is no doubt about it but we also know that if we stop trying then even more people die.
GMO is NOT fundamentally different than chemical mutagens and radioactive substances to create crossbreeds or try to get specific traits except that it is MORE dangerous. Traditional ways of selective breeding are MORE dangerous from a genetic perspective than genetic engineering.
Just because they have been used for a long time does not mean that they are not dangerous. People do die from it, we just accept it as a part of life.
Just labeling something as GMO does not give you ANY information at all and is nothing to base a decision on.
What I don't like is a company patenting something just to keep anyone from using it.
I don't think it should be legal to buy a competing technology for instance and then license it so high or refuse to license it such that the technology is dead until the patent has expired. Too many technologies related to battery technology have been slowed down that way.
What I would be looking for is a serious effort to sell the patented product and actual people paying for it. if it is determined that you don't hold the patent in good faith then it should be invalid. Remember a patent is something that society grants in exchange for what we get from the patent. At least in the USA a patent is not some kind of natural right.
That should be true of all patents. Society gives up something so that a patent can exist. If the agreement is not held up it should be invalid and the invalid state is the information is generally available.
That toxin was already sprayed on plants and is still being sprayed on plants. The GMO version has not changed the usage by much at all. What is HAS changed is the amount that runs off into the environment.
There is poison in everything you eat. The skins of potatoes are naturally poisonous, the seeds on strawberries are naturally poisonous. However, the health benefits in these items outweigh the damage the poison does. Like everything how a poison impacts you depends on the dosage.
Lots of poisons are safe for humans at the levels we ingest them. There is no way you could eat any food without dealing with some level of poison.
The rat study you mentioned has LONG since been discredited and not been replicable by other experts in the field. The scientist that did the work is largely considered to be a fraud in the field and at this point articles published under his name are no longer accepted by reputable journals and he has resorted to destroying students reputations in the field instead by getting them to submit his articles under their names.
The paper in question was retracted http://www.scientificamerican.... and is widely considered to be fraudulent.
I would say that scientist B is guilty of patent infringement and should probably be prosecuted for it but only if the therapy was for sale on the market at a reasonable price (based on cost to develop etc).
However, any children that resulted from that patent would be completely free and clear in my view. They had no part in it. I would even extend that to other animals and plants so long as profit is not being made from the patent violation.
If you violate the patent and create a plain strain that you then sell then I think that normal patent law would apply.
I do want to do more research on this and actually confirm it. The whole thing seems pretty strange compared to other source I have looked at and I want to be as accurate as possible on this issue since it is closely related to some of the work I do.
This I agree 100% with.
This is why I can't support the GMO labeling laws I keep seeing. So many just want to label something as GMO which is just based on fear and does not lead to any understanding.
For ALL kinds of food (organic, gmo, etc) I want to know exactly what is in the food. I want to know the DNA sequence so I can search it or write an app to test it against things i don't want. That is true for GMO and Organic foods. Remember that pink grapefruit was a random mutation. There was no guarantee it would be safe. Same with organic certified chemical mutagens used on organic foods.
I want all food help to the same high standard. Not this fear based approach that thinks that GMO is different.
Sterile plants are almost never used.
Monsanto developed that system and last I checked they had NEVER used it for any regular seeds. It was only used in test fields to prevent genes escaping into the wild during testing.
My view on gene patenting is that any natural gene should not be patent able but the process for insertion should be. However, for any custom developed gene that should be patent able.
Why do you think that GMO foods have more pesticides sprayed on them?
GMOs usually need far fewer pesticides sprayed on them, that is pretty much the point of them most of the time. They also wash off far fewer pesticides to the environment.
Large scale growing tends to use a lot of pesticides regardless of the type of growing that is used. Organic has the image of being all natural and no chemicals etc. That is completely and utter BS.
Now for your home garden that is easy to do organic and without using a lot of pesticides but that does not scale up.
I am a Chemical and Biological Engineer and overall I think that GMO food is safe. I would also like us to use more nuclear power. My views on nuclear power are less informed than my knowledge of GMO is. However, my views on nuclear power are still FAR more informed than the average person.
I think that is where the major difference comes in.
Many normal people don't research anything and have very strong opinions. Most scientists and engineers I know do tend to do research before holding a viewpoint.
Most scientists and engineers I know also find other scientists and engineers they trust in other fields and will accept the more qualified persons viewpoint if it seems reasonable. Most mechanical engineers trust my viewpoint more on chemical and biological stuff and I trust theirs more on aerodynamics.
It makes sense to listen to more qualified people.
Do you mean Bacillus thuringiensis toxin?
You mean the toxin that is classified as organic and can and is sprayed on plants as an organic pesticide?
You know the one where the only way to harm a human with it is to inhale it as a powder and in that form it causes the same damage as inhaling almost any other powder. Even inhaling sugar as a powder is bad for you.
That toxin is COMPLETELY inert inside humans. However insects and some fish can cleave the protein and can then be killed by the toxin.
The organic version is sprayed on plants, washes off and damages local aquatic life. The GMO version does not wash off and has no impact on local aquatic life. The GMO version also concentrates in the parts of the plant we don't eat.
The organic way of using BT toxin is worse in ALL WAYS than the GMO version.
The problem I have is that when we use chemical mutagens on Organic food it has many of the same dangers and some different ones. The same when we use radiation to mutate foods.
I can't find any scientific reason to single GMO out. I want them ALL labeled. Anything that makes sense to label for GMO we should label for any other food also.
At this point we can fully type out a DNA sequence for a few thousand dollars. I think that should just be standard practice for food and made available online.
Look at all the pink grapefruit around. Those where a random mutation that we kept alive. However, some mutations end up being harmful to us or harmful to some of us. Many food allergens we can match based on DNA sequence. Imagine food items put into a database and then ever food item could be checked against every know allergy or problem DNA sequence. You would immediately know who should not eat the food, who should be warned etc.
I want actually safe food and labeling just GMO is a fear response and it is based on not understanding the actual genetics.
GMO also encompasses things like genetically engineered bacteria that we use to make most modern drugs. There are also other companies that do GMO than Monsanto. GMO is even correct when we look at modifying humans to cure diseases.
Are you saying that Golden rice is bad and that we should not have it and that instead we should have millions of people go blind? what about the work being done to engineer potatoes to be non-carcinogenic when fried? It looks like soon we are going to be modifying beef to remove the protein in it that causes inflammation in humans and is a major source of cancer.
However I guess all of that does not matter and we should just say GMO is bad and there can be no discussion about it. Pros and cons can't be discussed. We can't study it and make rational decisions. The whole issue must boil down to a soundbyte and that ends it.
The problem is that it is not a sane choice. This is ENTIRELY based on fear. If all you do is label something as GMO that tells you nothing at all. This does not help you make any kind of informed decision at all.
Was the GMO done to make the plant drought resistance? does it resist cold? was it modified to be less carcinogenic? was it modified to make a certain companies fertilizer more profitable? etc
Just saying something is GMO is worthless.
It should also be pointed out that Organic foods can be grown with heavy metals, modified with radiation or treated with chemical mutagens. However all of those are FAR more dangerous than GMO techniques and they are all just labeled as Organic.
If you want to know what is in your food then that is the kind of law you should pass. Have something that tells you exactly what is in your food so you can make an informed decision if you want.
Thank you.
The reason I came here was to learn how to use computer simulations to manufacture drugs. There are so many cures for diseases we know of that we just can't figure out how to manufacture and using computer simulations to figure out how to manufacture the drugs is an extremely new area for drug development.
I ended up here because I solved a problem that was considered impossible for doing drug development in computers.
It is very cool to do and the classes are very difficult but I am learning a lot at least. It is just sad that I will have to go back to the USA after I am done so I can actually do the drug development since protein, DNA, RNA etc type drugs are basically forbidden for development in Europe.
So hopefully in about 4 years I will be back in the USA and working on bringing drugs to market that we can't manufacture right now.
The problem is that while they say do no harm that is not what they actually do.
In Ireland a scientist figured out how to make regular potatoes immune to blight by taking some genes from wild potatoes and inserting them in the kind we eat. The atni GMO crowd managed to kill any kind of testing of that and instead potatoes are still done using the "normal organic methods" of killing blight on potatoes which is to put heavy metals on them. So safety is clearly not the issue and can't even be studied.
Actually the whole cross breading thing overall is pretty screwed up in many cases. Farmers discovered natural thing they could put on plants to increase the chance of cross breeds working. It turns that that nearly all of them are chemical mutagens and are FAR more dangerous than precise genetic engineering is.
I am not saying that we should blindly trust GMO or Organic stuff. What we need to do is fully allow the scientific development and analysis to see what truly works for us for safety, nutrition and environmental damage. Right now though that is not what is happening and decisions are made based on fear.
What I do want to see is all products on the market should have their full DNA mapped out and put online in a searchable data base (BLAST) and that includes all the ingredients that go into your product along with any other chemical species in there we know of. Then you would have an app on your phone and could select what you are allergic to, what you don't want in your food etc and then scan a tag on the food and your phone would tell you if it is safe for you. Right now there are thousands of food allergies and we only list about 20 or so on food. This anti-GMO stance I see now does not help knowledge or safety in any way it is just fear.
I want to see actual information on food and people able to make real choices. So long as this is just fear based that will not happen.