It makes it easier for and given locality to grow more food, so it makes it easier to distribute that food.
It means that you can tolerate greater levels of waste. In a world where logistics are imperfect, there will always be some waste.
Also, if you have greater yield for a given input of labor, more people can go work in a factory make latex gloves or some huge number of life-saving products.
If you can grow food in more hostile environments, won't that mean people move to those more hostile environments and again end up dependent on unreliable food supplies, but now slightly further into the desert/salt flats/etc than before?
How is "privatising/patenting seeds" synonymous with "G.M.O. Foods"?
The Nobel Laureates are not talking about the business-practice of certain companies, but rather about fear-mongering about G.M.O.s themselves, e.g. appeals to nature as basis for "health concerns", etc.
They are simply ignoring the real world economic impacts though, which is stubborn to say the least.
The world is no utopia, and as long as money / economic gain is the utmost priority for most of humanity and its corporations, allowing widespread use of patented G.M.O.s will only cause more damage in the long run.
Imagine a whole countries population being dependent upon a companies patented seeds. Now add some secret courts implemented via trade agreements so the country is effectively unable to just "use" these seeds without paying up incredible amounts of money and suddenly you got yourself a situation where the country might end up under effective control by the company.
Yes there's probably still a way out of this dilemma, but with the right/wrong people coming to power through the course of action, you might quickly end up with nationalist government for which the most easy solution is out is a war.
They are synonymous because that's the current situation: GMOs are the product of billion of dollars of R&D, on which the owners fully expect a return on investment.
Which means protecting the IP of GMOs, aka. sterilizing / privatizing / patenting seeds, and usually selling additional chemical products related to the GMOs, as in RoundUp resistant seeds, with their own set of problems when deployed on a massive scale.
The Laureates are effectively saying: "GMOs are OK to eat. This scientific / statistical fact has no direct link to how they are developed and sold in practice and what consequences that will have on society, the economy, and the environment. That's a different problem. Stop bashing GMOs."
They are not only missing the point: they are behaving in a very irresponsible way.
I still remember a statement by Armand Hammer or one of his lackeys at Occidental Petroleum in the '80s when asked why they bought IBP, then the largest meat-packing company in the US: "We think food is going to be the oil of the '90s."
Sure - it is the current situation to some extent.
But I think would be solvable via regulation, not to mention that this is a different discussion entirely.
I don't think they are necessarily behaving in an irresponsible way, though. They are evaluating G.M.O.s with regard to health, safety, nutrition, poverty/famine and so on - not with regards to social and economical consequences (which I think would fall more within the purview of policy and regulation).
Ultimately, this issue is highly politicized, and the debate (including the comments here on HN) is often fraught with personal opinion.
It's not different discussion. It's like someone saying "Don't buy iPhones!" and you answering "But they're totally safe, they won't kill you." while ignoring they're produced using child labour.
(Probably iPhones aren't, but almost surely some other products are.)
I see it more like someone saying (to stick with your example):
"Don't buy iPhones - they'll kill you!", and scientists answering "But they're totally safe, they won't kill you."
Meanwhile, they may be products of child-labour (or whatever other horrible circumstance we may imagine), but that's a different issue from what we are discussing.
> They are not only missing the point: they are behaving in a very irresponsible way.
It's actually the opposite. It's them who advocate responsible and reasonable behaviour.
Discouraging GMOs because of "current situation" is the same thing anti-nuclear proponents do with nuclear energy. They'll scare you with Chernobyl and Fukushima in order to discourage all work on nuclear energy, no matter how safe, no matter how different from the things that caused (few, very scope-limited) disasters.
Bashing GMO and genetic engineering in general just because some companies behave somewhat irresponsibly only makes it harder for responsible people to enter this market. Not to mention the very idea that bullshiting people is good for them is kind of stretched.
GMO is a very vague term, we can engineer plants to make them toxic in which case no, eating GMO would not be OK. We are also most probably able to engineer interesting new kinds of crop that would have a very positive impact on humanity and our natural resource consumption.
There are several issues here that are not addressed by these Nobel Laureates which makes their letter dangerous and irresponsible:
- as of now, Monsanto and co. are engineering their seeds so that it's impossible to keep part of the harvest and use it to grow the next one (as peoples have done for thousands of years), essentially forcing farmers to come back next year and buy new seeds. This is a very efficient way to keep farmers poor and under control. It is also very unethical, but of course the optimal choice economically speaking...
- Monsanto is also engineering seeds to resist RoundUp in order to shove said RoundUp down the throats of farmers. At this point I don't think I need to debate the negative impact of roundup on human beings and nature, it's known well enough. The main point though is that it's important to remember that the goal of these companies is to maximize profit, not benefit the world. Pushing RoundUp like this is a good example: there is no incentive for them to improve the resistance of seeds to diseases as it would bring down sales of their main product.
- GMO is not all good or all bad, but it is complex and a powerful tool, thus requiring caution and thorough TESTING. Testing that GMO lobbies are not exactly diligent to run.
- Speaking of lobbying, most of the problems mentioned in this thread could be solved with a better regulation as they're due to bad actors. they're not intrinsic to GMO. But Monsanto being a very powerful lobby, I'm personally not too confident about the outcome.
> Monsanto and co. are engineering their seeds so that it's impossible to keep part of the harvest and use it to grow the next one
Are you referring to hybrid crops? While it is true that we wouldn't want to save such seed, they are not necessarily lumped under the GMO umbrella. The whole patent debate doesn't affect us with such crops because we wouldn't consider saving the seeds in the first place, GMO or not, patent or not.
On my farm, non-hybrid wheat is one crop we might save, but there are no GMO varieties of wheat on the market to begin with so again it is a complete non-issue. That said, rarely do we have the cleaning and treating equipment necessary to reuse the seed on the farm, so by the time you contract out that work, it's easier to just buy new seed from a dealer anyway.
> Monsanto is also engineering seeds to resist RoundUp in order to shove said RoundUp down the throats of farmers.
What do you mean by shove? We willing use glyphosate (not necessary Roundup™ since it is off patent and anyone can produce it) even on our non-roundup ready crops, just as farmers have done since the 1970s when glyphosate was invented. What Roundup Ready crops do allow is the use of only glyphosate, as opposed to a crazy cocktail of chemicals necessary on the non-RR crops, reducing input and application costs.
I will also add that Roundup Ready 1 is also off patent now. Anyone can use the technology that was invented by Monsanto that spearheaded this whole GMO debate in the first place.
> there is no incentive for them to improve the resistance of seeds to diseases as it would bring down sales of their main product.
Well, ultimately, we buy what works.
If, hypothetically, someone creates a viable seed that is immune to pests by itself, negating the need to apply any chemicals at all, we'd be quite willing to pay more for it. That would be a huge cost savings. Chemical applicators alone can run into half a million dollars pretty quickly, let alone the product being applied and labour costs. There are many companies (and governments) working on GMOs – it's not just Monsanto. There is a lot of incentive to come up with such a seed to become a more dominant player in the game.
"as of now, Monsanto and co. are engineering their seeds so that it's impossible to keep part of the harvest and use it to grow the next one (as peoples have done for thousands of years"
Seed production has been a separate specialty for well over 100 years. No large-scale farmer "keeps part of the harvest and uses it to grow the next one", and the small-scale "organic" (or whatever) farmers who do do that don't buy commercial seeds in the first place.
Patenting and privatizing is different from GMO itself.
Food surplus means nothing if it can't be distributed reliably. It matters nothing if you can spread food nice and even in 2017 if we get famines in 2018. Transporting and trading food makes it vulnerable to problems in transport and economics. So nothing beats locally grown high yield nutritious crops. And GMO can improve yields and nutritional values.
Do you have a source for GMO improving yield and nutrition? I thought most GM was Roundup Ready and similar, designed to be herbicide resistant. I've heard of e.g., Golden Rice being more nutritious with beta carotene, but was under the impressioname that yields weren't great. Even with non-GMO there's a well known tradeoff between yield and nutrition (search dilution effect), so this would be a big deal
>Do you have a source for GMO improving nutrition?
Golden Rice comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
>Golden rice is a variety of rice (Oryza sativa) produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, in the edible parts of rice.
Yes, exactly. The same even more true with grains, where the production of "organic" grain using heirloom varieties is even smaller than it is with vegetables (it's basically a rounding error).
The bulk of seed grain is produced by specialized seed companies who hybridize Cool Variety #1 with Cool Variety #2 and sell the resulting seed which produces Cool Variety #3. The problem is that if you plant Cool Variety #3 seeds, only a minority of them will be Cool Variety #3. This is a real problem.
If you kept growing the seeds for many generations, ruthlessly weeding out anything that didn't exhibit CV #3 traits, you'd eventually get something close to a pure CV #3 strain, but most farmers don't want to do that.
Let's say that CV #1 is resistant to "gray-green rot" (made up names here), while CV #2 is resistant to "early leaf blight". CV #3 is resistant to both, thanks to having one GGR-resistant gene from CV #1 and one ELB-resistant gene from CV #2.
But what happens if you grow CV #3 seeds? The kicker is that genes (usually) come in pairs. You'll get 25% offspring that are resistant to both (what you want), 25% resistant to GGR (but not ELB) 25% resistant to ELB (but not GGR), and 25% resistant to neither. If both GGR and ELB kill the plant, congratulations! You've managed to reduce your crop yield by 75%.
That is why most modern farmers do not save seeds.
1) You can't patent seeds unless you have modified them genetically. Occurrences of nature are not patentable. No GMO, no associated business practice.
2) Some of the modifications (I'm looking at you Monsanto roundup ready) allow plants to be tolerant of increased quantities of herbicide. This is obviously not something you want to encourage on a global industrial scale. Like you said, we have the food, we don't have the distribution.
3) That said, there is absolutely no inherent danger of genetic modification. We do it all the time, it's well controlled for effectively getting a specific modification. Calling GMO "frankenfoods" or implying there is some inherent health risk to GMO food (outside specific problematic modifications) is just bullshit.
I agree with your points but the genetic modification is not just about tinkering with the existing set of genes that the plant has but adding new ones from sources that would never happen naturally, https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/gefood/glowing.... This is where the "frankenfood" moniker comes from. Apologies for the partisan/political link objective data is not so easy to come by.
The point is, we know pretty well (based on millions of years of "natural" mutation and evolution) what can and cannot happen in "nature". If you introduce mutation based on human engineering, you could easily (even inadvertedly) develop something very dangerous, e.g. move a gene from a bacterium to a plant, but now all of a sudden this plant becomes as resistant/dangerous as the bacterium was, on a much larger scale!
Compare this with nuclear weapons - humans have in a few decated managed to engineer something way more dangerous than millions of years of "natural" permutations/combinations of atoms.
> If you introduce mutation based on human engineering, you could easily (even inadvertedly) develop something very dangerous, e.g. move a gene from a bacterium to a plant, but now all of a sudden this plant becomes as resistant/dangerous as the bacterium was, on a much larger scale!
This is 100% False. There is essentially no risk of accidentally transferring a bacterial protein to a plant. The molecular machinery involved in transfection is complex and fragile. The transfer process is gated and specific. Even if there was a transfer of the wrong gene the result would be a dead organism, not a super-organism.
Eukaryotes do not tolerate random prokaryotic genes in their genome in place of a functioning gene. The introduced gene has to be specifically designed/selected to be compatible with the target organism.
Whoever is telling you this is doing the exact fear mongering these Nobel laureates are advising against.
It is so much the opposite of easy to do what you describe that it is essentially impossible.
While not a bacteria to plant situation could you comment on the example by dekhn below [1] (Link or search for Brazil Nuts in this page). He references a paper with an NIH link. The gist of it was protein from one plant transplanted into another and causing allergies. Is this kind of situation not a concern?
Yes, thank you for pointing that out (upvoted it and yours).
GMOs should certainly be regulated for safety and transparency, which is part of the job of the FDA in the United States.
Dekhn's statement in the comment about the allergenicity was this:
A gene from Brazil Nuts that coded for a protein high in methionine was cloned into soy plants; soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in subjects.
An important missing part of that ...in subjects with an allergy to brazil nuts. In otherwords they found some allergic reaction to the brazil nut protein in people allergic to brazil nuts. It did not create an unknown or novel allergen (although allergenicity should be a standard test for GMO food products).
For 8/9 subjects it was not the primary allergen (and for one it was the allergen that causes a dangerous reaction). Regardless an allergen is present and it is good that it was identified. The paper concludes with this:
"It is prudent to assess the allergenicity of proteins in
transgenic foods if those proteins have been derived
from sources that are commonly allergenic. The use
of currently available animal models alone to predict
allergenicity in humans does not produce accurate
results. Techniques such as radioallergosorbent tests,
SDS-PAGE with immunoblotting, and skin-prick testing
can identify IgE-binding proteins that are probable allergens
in transgenic foods derived from sources known
to be allergenic. This strategy will not be useful in assessing
the allergenicity of transgenic foods in which
the allergenicity of the source of donor genetic material
is unknown. Most current applications in the field of
plant biotechnology fall into the latter category."
There is no doubt (in my mind) that GMO needs to be regulated and reported. If there is any protein from an allergic source that source needs to be listed on the food product specifically as "contains material from X" -- in this case X = brazil nuts.
The fact that the source donor material could be unknown (proprietary secret) is completely unacceptable. The FDA should have full regulatory control over GMO and they should be treated with a scrutiny closer to drugs rather than food. There should be absolutely no "proprietary secrets" regarding the source material or process used to make the modifications. There should be complete transparency and rigorous testing for allergic potential.
Maybe increased regulatory control is all that GMO doomsayers are after, but I think the hyperbole hurts their argument when there are sound scientific arguments for increased transparency and regulation.
tl;dr: This is a legitimate concern that should be included in a regulatory framework that supports safety and transparency.
Thanks for the response. I too ended up with the "contains material from X" as a requirement (no different from may contain peanuts).
There is still a small chance that someone who did not know they were allergic to Brazil Nuts but already consumes soy products could be impacted by the new product. However I am not sure how to mitigate that and still have GMO food products. From a consumer perspective they could be introduced to allergens that are now present in their "new" existing diet. I would sympathize with a consumer who said "hey I did not change anything and now I am impacted." So in this case labelling would be insufficient. Perhaps the answer is to say that "known allergenic introductions" are not allowed for GMO food.
Many benefits and concerns lie ahead. In such cases, for their sake, the consumer needs access to valuable information.
What we know is what has happened in "nature", and while we can try to extrapolate from that, we really have no clue as to what is possible.
Even though you grossly exaggerate how genes work with regards to resistance/danger, the possibility of phenotypes that could lead to negative effects in human consumers is just as real by "natural" means.
I don't really think your comparison with nuclear weapons works though; for one, there is no such thing as a "natural" nuclear weapon - not to mention that a "natural" (objective) concept of "weapon" (irrespective of any subject making/wielding/using/thinking about/whatever) would have to exist if we were to compare apples to apples.
> I don't really think your comparison with nuclear weapons works though
The idea behind my comparison is simply, that we can engineer things much more dangerous than nature can, that would never appear in nature by themselves.
In this case, dangerous literally equals useful. Anything capable of working with vast amounts of energy is dangerous by the very virtue of humans being very fragile. Whether something is dangerous or useful is a function of how we handle/apply it.
But, generally, that's what we do. With brains, we can do in a few months what would take natural selection millions of years to "discover". Doing that, using our brains, seems kind of like the whole point of being a human.
I don't think that everything has to occur naturally for it to be good. There are plenty of deadly natural things. Arsenic is natural, hemlock is natural. We have been influencing the genetics of plants and livestock for millennia through selective breeding. If you have a good gene that can be transferred to a food crop and there are no patent restrictions I think we should do that. Roundup ready is definitely a bad one.
A "good" modification would require:
No patents
No suing farmers that grow your seed without a license/purchase
No boosted tolerance to plant poison
No convenient requirement that "improvements" rely on additional product that the company sells (eg roundup)
RE link, the only thing one should say about a glowing potato is: "fucking awesome".
People won't buy such things for a long time anyway, and that it doesn't occur in nature doesn't matter. Hell, give it a million year and it might start occuring in nature by itself, because why not? Nature does what nature does, it already mixed up a lot of stuff in a weird way (except we don't call them "weird", just "natural").
Few other things that "never happen naturally" - clothes on human beings. Bricks. Steel. Airplanes. Colorful paint on canvas. Should we discourage them all, because they're not "natural"?
In addition to other points listed here, keep in mind that horizontal genetic transfer happens in nature through viral vectors, so pretty much anything we can do genetic modification wise is also possible in nature.
Re #2, it's tolerance to an extremely awesome herbicide. Glyphosate is extremely toxic to plants and extremely non-toxic to everything else. Doesn't kill mammals or insects, doesn't migrate to the water table (it binds to soil and then breaks down when unbinding), doesn't cause cancer. There's a reason farmers love it, especially the ones who remember all the toxic, carcinogenic chemicals they used in the 50's and 60's.
> How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that?
The patent on the first generation of Roundup-Ready soybeans expired last year. A third party immediately produced a generic version of Roundup-Ready soybeans and sold it for half the price of the Monsanto seeds, with no restriction on seed saving. Madness! A company created something new, obtained a patent, and enjoyed a limited monopoly until their patent expired and the free market used the now-public information to undercut them. This is an example of the system working.
Regarding your greater point -- the claim that we are producing many times more food than we need -- the important question isn't how much food we're "wasting" but how much food waste is avoidable, given the constraints we want to live under.
The difficulty in food distribution -- as the article you linked pointed out -- isn't just a matter of warlords hording food or rich westerners cramming their maws with too much food[1]. The larger problem is that food is an organic product (as in, literally, not philosophically) produced in messy conditions with a limited shelf-life. Some food produced will be of substandard quality; some food produced will spoil before reaching a consumer. Agriculture is a leaky pipeline between the farmer and the hungry consumer, and most of the leaks that are left are difficult to plug, or shouldn't be plugged. Consumers shouldn't eat spoiled or fouled food, so if you can't prevent the food from being fouled or spoiling you should let it fall out of the system.
What all this means is that we need to be producing some multiple of the amount of food people consume to actually get that amount to them. We should try to improve distribution as well, of course, but the returns there will be as diminishing as they are everywhere else. By 2050 we'd like 60%-85% more food to be reaching end consumers than is now, to both keep up with population growth and to feed those who are hungry now. Some of that will almost certainly come from improvements in distribution, some of it will probably come from shifting diets away from meat and other inefficient crops, but we'll also need to ultimately produce more food per acre than we are now.
[1]: I found this sentence in the article particularly offensive:
> "And yet more people in the world—1.7 billion—are considered obese or overweight from a daily caloric intake that in some cases is at least six to seven times the minimum."
There may be someone out there eating 6-7 times some minimum (1500 calories?), but that is a weird abnormality and ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As someone who is mildly overweight, my calorie surplus is about 50-100 calories, about 2% extra, which adds about 5 pounds per year. That is the typical overfed westerner. Adding in the extra calories to support my extra body weight amounts to about 10% more calories than would need at my ideal weight. If 30% of the world consumed 10% fewer calories, it would indeed have a measurable impact on the global food supply, but it is a bit of a red herring.
Wouldn't a 1998 prize year mean that their major work was done in the 60s and 70s? The average age of Nobel laureates is ~60, which would mean many could be in their 80s now.
I'm not sure about a quantitative source, but Wikipedia has a discussion on the subject [1]. There's a database [2] of all nominations, but it does not have the year of publishing of the research in question (if there is a specific item).
I find it a fallacy with these types of things where it is simply implied very smart people have this opinion and since they are smart, it must be correct.
As an engineer in my field, there are so many specialized skills, even other engineers in the same field often are not qualified to analyze certain technologies without training, experience etc.
Well all valid points I guess. Better than GM plants running loose, but if no seeds come from it and it's "closed-source" you are at the mercy of the supplier for the next year.
This already happens without GMOs, e.g. Africanized bees. Meanwhile, having a dead man switch would turn GMO-based food systems into a potential weapon (i.e. don't mess with us or we'll put your country into a famine).
Exactly, so probably we don't want more of it, no?
And the bees might be an invasive species, but they have no superpowers. I'm not sure how wide the biological niche of a GMO plant can get.
For the dead man switch: maybe the activator could be something simple and well known, just not so common in normal surface soil. But I don't even know how big this risk is...
I'm totally pro science by default. But I really have huge issues with GMO foods. The patenting is worrisome. The seeds are more resistant than natural occurring seeds and they tend to take over and annihilate other species (Google what's happening with the corn crops in Mexico) and then ponder if a scenario like what happened in Finland in the 70s with the potatoes (they were just farming one kind of crop and it was infected with virus) would happen to a GMO crop (thankfully we have Svalbard Global Seed Vault now).
One other issue is the lack of oversight - the EU was fighting for 12 years to be able to scientifically test and publish the results of feeding Monsanto GMO foods to rats. After this unstable battle, they finally published the results and they were not good: rats fed with GMO food had developed tumors that were as big as their original size.
And worst of all, we are running a massive world scale experiment where the large majority of the the world is feed with GMO food without any prior proof of its long term safety.
The other issue is whether we can trust their studies. They're notorious about fraudulent data to push their agenda. I remember reading about all the bribery happening at every level thinking it's probably overstated. There'd be way more whistleblowers or something. Then I see something like the $10,000 policy referenced below:
The original article I read on that said they basically couldn't find enough people taking less than $10,000 from the institutions whose science or products they were reviewing. I'm thinking, "Holy shit! Almost all the "independent" researchers are getting enough bribes to buy a car. How is their validation in any way trustworthy?"
I had to stop there. Especially watching Monsanto's games with seeds and such plus history of hiding health dangers of stuff they intend to sell with bogus studies. I don't trust GMO's or about any highly-profitable thing coming out of such organizations until I see what they do to a lot of people over a long period of time.
We've been using mutagenesis (through radiation or carcinogens) in food crops to introduce random, unspecific genetic changes for many decades hoping to get lucky and make better crops, with no ill effects. These crops are approved under USDA organics standards.
Now, when we specifically modify one or two quantifiable genes in an organism (instead of potentially thousands through mutagenesis or breeding), everyone loses their minds.
Our bodies are built to process DNA that we consume without adding it to our genome. This is why we can eat a steak without suddenly inheriting bovine genes. For a time, DNA can be found in our bodies from things we consume, but a fragment of DNA is not the same thing as a functional gene, and even if it were, it'd have to actively put itself in our cells somehow, and replicate.
A basic high school understanding of genetics is really all you need to understand that these breeding techniques are largely the same as what happens in the wild and what we've been doing for ages, if not actually safer since they're far more controlled.
"We've been using mutagenesis (through radiation or carcinogens) in food crops to introduce random, unspecific genetic changes for many decades hoping to get lucky and make better crops, with no ill effects."
Ill effects in general have been going up for decades. Isolating what was or wasn't contributing to that is a hard problem. I'd be interested in studies that compared large numbers of people using crops with and without that property. Both should also avoid as many carcinogens as possible and eat healthy in general to reduce those variables. Know any like this which weren't tied to a specific, profit-hungry corporation? I'd be interested in reading it.
"A basic high school understanding of genetics is really all you need to understand that these breeding techniques are largely the same as what happens in the wild"
My info on this subject is way outdated as I studied it around 10 years ago. That's why I'm not talking about the biotech or risks themselves. However, that quote jumped out because they were using retroviruses or something back when I studied it. Not just selective breeding or limited effects of background radiation. The risk analysis is necessarily different. Do you have a list of what methods they use today with descriptions laypersons can follow? Especially how they address any risks in each? I'm long overdue for an update on this topic.
My "high school understanding" comment was poorly-written, and I was really trying to express that, at the end of the day, DNA is DNA, and our bodies can't tell the difference when we consume it. Different genes could indeed cause unexpected behaviors or proteins to be expressed in plants, but these are easy to spot during the testing that occurs, and largely, the issues that pop up during this process are failure to get cellular material to accept a transgene, and then to regenerate a whole plant after modified cells have the desired transgene.
Put quite simply, the engineered varieties undergo toxicity studies and in-depth chemical and molecular analysis, and their agronomic impact is assessed through things like soil samples, and all of this data is compared to the same studies which are also done on their non-GM counterparts to assure that nothing unexpected has changed, and that the end result is "substantially equivalent." It usually costs around $30m, and takes between 10 and 15 years to complete the testing, regulatory, and approval process over many many generations of the engineered variety.
I'm really not aware of any studies like what you're looking for, but the data would be much more valuable looking at specific varieties of organisms, rather than based on what method was used to create them. Even then, confirming their chemical, molecular, nutritional, and agronomic equivalence with their non-GM counterparts really negates the need for those sorts of studies, because the crop ends up being indistinguishable (aside from a few crops engineered for the end consumer, such as vegetables with higher levels of antioxidants or higher levels of certain vitamins).
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I'm not really familiar with the methods used for varieties derived from breeding or mutagenesis, but I recall the last time that I looked, there was not any major standard testing being done there.
The first step in adding an isolated gene to a genome is to do a few modifications to the genetic payload itself. A marker gene is added as well as a promoter, and a termination sequence is appended to the transgene. The marker gene is used to differentiate which cells have successfully taken the transgene. In short, the targeted cells are grown in a medium that is normally toxic to the target plant. The marker gene encodes proteins which provide resistance to that medium, thus, the cells that survive in the medium are the ones which have had successful uptake of the gene. The promoter sequence controls when and how the transgene is expressed over the life of the plant, and the termination sequence simply marks the end of the payload.
Once you have your genetic payload, there are several methods used to get it into a plant cell. The first, and simplest, is a gene gun, which quite literally blasts a cluster of cells with particles coated in genetic material. Some of the cells survive and successfully envelope a particle coated with DNA, which eventually integrates into a chromosome. This is used for plants which don't readily accept other forms of modification, and was the method used to create Bt corn as well as golden rice.
Agrobacterium is another method which is generally more precise about delivering genetic material to a desired location, but various plants are resistant to the method. Unmodified, the agrobacterium infects plant cells through open wounds, and deposits a DNA payload during replication which causes tumors. The tumor-causing DNA payload is removed, replaced with the transgenic payload, and the bacteria carries out its job, infecting the plant and depositing the payload for a desired trait.
Soon, we will probably start seeing newer methods such as CRISPR/Cas9 become more popular (assuming they aren't as resisted as agrobacterium can be).
By precisely controlling the genetic payloads added to the genome, it is far easier to monitor protein expression and see exactly what has changed throughout a plant's lifecycle.
The study you refer to, "rats fed with GMO food had developed tumors that were as big as their original size" used Sprague-Dawley rats, typically chosen in lab studies because the breed is known to quickly develop massive tumors regardless of other factors. The results in this study were not statistically significant, and were drawn from a sample size way too small, on a type of animal that is known to develop tumors on its own.
Furthermore, the numbers in the study actually showed that male rats who consumed glyphosate in their drinking water (because simultaneously testing multiple variables on groups of like 5 rats makes sense, right?) actually lived longer than those which did not, and all rats in the study grew massive tumors, even the control group.
If you're going to base an opinion on "science", please make sure you actually read the study and have enough knowledge to determine whether it's bullshit or not.
It's still a scientific study, or an attempt at it at least. The way to go, is not to dismiss it because it was retracted under dubious circumstances but rather to have several third parties replicate the study correcting the flaws that were found in the original one.
Here's an article they published about aliens and the CIA causing the deaths of migratory birds by spraying "chemtrails".
The fact of the matter is that GMOs contain the same genetic material we already consume on a daily basis. We understand how it impacts our bodies (it pretty much doesn't) and there is no distinction between genetic material from a GM organism versus a conventional organism. It's chemically and functionally identical (derived from the exact same nucleotide bases and the genes already exist elsewhere with the same function), and has the same impact on your body. This is something that we've studied for a very long time, and understand fairly well.
Crops have been genetically modified by man for thousands of years, first by selection, beginning of last century by putting a specimen infront of gamma source and hoping for the best, and now with specific modification of genes, but this is irrelevant really.
What Greenpeace et al should fight is shady business ethics, there is the real danger.
As far as I've seen, there have been quite a few studies on GMOs. Though, it seems like an odd classification to study since GMOs are all very different.
Certainly a lot of FUD on my part - nothing wrong with that, that how scientific progress should be validated IMO).
"The bizarre reports come only six months after Elsevier created a special new position, Associate Editor for Biotechnology (i.e. GMO), and filled it with a former Monsanto employee who worked for the giant Monsanto front-organization, the International Life Sciences Institute, which develops industry-friendly risk assessment methods for GM foods and chemical food contaminants and inserts them into government regulations. Sound like something wrong with this picture?"
Which obviously is from an NGO created by the GMO lobby. They are free to expose arguments but ending in "we consider this a "crime against humanity"" is this fallacy:
I am not against GMOs but either for it. In the end is going to improve lives, but in the process experimentation will harm others(like with X-Rays with pregnant women, nuclear radiation, substances that are mutagens).
People are dying in India for lots of complex reasons. It is not going to be solved because of "Golden Rice". India has very fertile land, when I worked there as a volunteer the problems came mainly from overpopulation, pollution and inequality in big cities.
By "overpopulation" I mean "people against people" fighting for resources. Like Buddhist against Muslims, Rich versus poor or poor against poor, like people cutting legs or removing eyes from children so tourist feel sorry and give those bastards(that legs cutters) money.
I wonder how many of those Nobel laureates have lived in India, are Indians or have worked with them. Looking at a glance the names it seems the list contains more or less zero Indians names, so they have total ignorance in the specific problem.
Talking about 2050...by that time nuclear war could had been destroyed the entire wold, the West could had collapsed because of derivatives and debt weapons of mass destruction financial instruments, we could be using nuclear fusion for cheap energy in order to plant on Sahara dessert or Australia, or just using LEDs indoors in order not to need GMOs or pesticides...
I don't think it's useful to not do anything merely because it's possible the future might turn out like you describe. We (as in humanity) should try to solve the food problem while also preventing nuclear war etc.
I agree let's not bash GMO on principle. But Golden Rice is not the silver bullet it's billed as:
> Golden Rice showed that beta carotene was produced at consistently high levels in the grain, and that grain quality was comparable to the conventional variety. However, yields of candidate lines were not consistent across locations and seasons, prompting research direction toward assessing Golden Rice versions such as GR2-E and others. [1]
Let's keep researching (whether GM or not) ways to make crops more nutritious and higher yielding (search dilution effect e.g. [2], [3]), not just more herbicide resistant. Let's get the cost of GM research down so that we can end the terrible business and ecological practices surrounding GMO.
While I agree that Greenpeace is not helping here, this article is too friendly to GMO. Ignoring Monsanto in an article about GM is totally disingenuous.*
How convenient - scientists ignoring all non-scientific problems that GMOs have (e.g. legal, social, economic, environmental impacts, monoculture diseases, ...). Oh well, kind of what I would expect from a group of scientists...
Was just going to say the same thing. Appeal to Scientific Consensus becomes the new Appeal to Popularity or Authority fallacy, just due to scope of study.
Before the Green Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution) the world was facing a truly bleak scenario that involved massive food shortages. Of course, a large part of the Green Revolution was the usage of new fertilizers and pesticides, which we now understand have significant impact on the environment. GMOs provide a way to continue to realize the benefits of the Green Revolution without all of the chemical-related downsides.
Well...unless you put Monsanto in charge. The real travesty of the current state of GMOs is that things like "Roundup-Ready" plants do nothing to reduce the usage of chemicals. There's also the cautionary lesson of bt-Corn and its impact on Monarch butterflies.
Learn the lessons of the Green Revolution: you can feed the world with modified farming techniques, but those techniques should strive to lessen the impact on the environment and should be implemented carefully to avoid further unintended consequences.
> The real travesty of the current state of GMOs is that things like "Roundup-Ready" plants do nothing to reduce the usage of chemicals.
In my understanding, this is not quite accurate. The perception of "organic" farming is that they do not use pesticides, but this is not accurate. Organic farming does use pesticides, but they just happen to not be synthetic - that is, the pesticides happen to be "naturally" occurring. But that does not necessarily make them safer.
So, if you have a crop which is engineered to be resistant to a very particular, effective pesticide, then it is possible that you will end up using less overall pesticides when compared to organic farming. See http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/organic-pestici...
Sure, there are many, many nuances surrounding the whole GMO debate. It turns out that while bt-Corn could pose a threat to Monarchs, in practice (in the wild) the risk is negligible. (One might also ponder how to weigh protection of an insect species against providing food for humans.) And, as you point out, the whole pesticide/GMO equation is not as simple as it might seem.
Nuance, moderation, and caution are the orders of the day, but these values seem to be increasingly scarce in a world of self-selecting echo chambers...
Lots of them [1]. Anything you buy at the store labeled "organic" could involve any of these substances, among others. In addition, because organic pesticides are less effective per unit, much more is applied to get the same benefit. [2]
> But when you farm crops as a business, you have to do something.
Several family farms at my local farmers market claim their crops are pesticide free. Now granted they are probably 10s of acres, not 1000s of acres, but they are still making a living.
Off the top of my head: Bt proteins, copper. There are many more, you can easily google and find a long list.
And yes, that's the same Bt that's in Bt crops, by the way (proteins from Bt bacteria). Organic farmers use it in a spray. It's a natural substance, and they argue the spray causes less resistance than the GM varieties. I really don't have the domain knowledge to say whether they're right.
Not all organic farmers are the same, and over time the meaning of 'organic' has been diluted. Smaller, more idealistic organic farmers mostly don't use pesticides, but there are large commercial organic growers out there who meet the bare minimum for certification and will use whatever pesticides are allowed.
Nicotine, rotenone, pyrethrins are just a few examples [1]. They are mostly derived from other plants so are regarded as organic although they can be quite toxic to humans.
"There's also the cautionary lesson of bt-Corn and its impact on Monarch butterflies."
What is/was the solution to that ?
If it is indeed a "cautionary tale" there is some response that we should be involved in, which, as far as I can tell is simply the anti GMO sentiment that (100 nobels) decry.
The "cautionary tale" is that releasing GMO crops before their full impact has been studied and assessed only adds fuel to the GMO/anti-GMO fire. When it was found that bt-Corn could pose a risk to Monarchs, those in the anti-GMO camp had all the ammunition they needed to start shouting about GMOs being unsafe. When it was later found that the risk was negligible in practice, the GMO camp had all the reason they needed to continue turning a deaf ear to the anti-GMO camp.
> Of course, a large part of the Green Revolution was the usage of new fertilizers and pesticides, which we now understand have significant impact on the environment. GMOs provide a way to continue to realize the benefits of the Green Revolution without all of the chemical-related downsides.
Yes, but there very well may be other downsides. A lot of the utopian ideas for GMOs basically involve creating invasive species. We here about the potential of making species that can easily grow in areas where they couldn't grow at all before. But doing so could well pose an environmental risk (if these end up growing so well in areas that they end up disrupting the ecosystem).
It might seem strange to think that too many edible plants could cause a problem, but it wouldn't be the first time (Kudzu is a good example). We're also not nearly at that point yet with current GMOs, but it seems to be what a lot of people are advocating. It'd be nice if we thought of the environmental downsides ahead of time, so that we don't keep saying "we now understand the environmental downsides of the tech we were using 30 years ago; but this new tech should be just fine" every few years.
It was specifically planted in many visible areas like highway banks etc, so people's perception is wrongly skewed towards it being everywhere, when it's really not.
Thanks, though that doesn't seem to be saying that kudzu being a problem is a myth, but rather that there have been myths exaggerating the problems with kudzu (“I thought the whole world would someday be covered by it, that it would grow as fast as Jack’s beanstalk, and that every person on earth would have to live forever knee-deep in its leaves"). There does seem to be a consensus that kudzu is a problem (you can look at the USDA page about it), and the article doesn't dispute it.
An aside: Organic farmers use Bt too. As a spray. Bt proteins are a naturally occuring substance, after all.
They argue the spray is not as bad as the GM crops due to the timing of exposure. I really don't know enough about insect biology to say if that makes sense.
Glyphosate is certainly not a sustainable weed control solution but it's no worse than the herbicides that it replaced.
I wonder if the biggest negative impact of biotech firms is not the chemicals but on IP and patents, hindering the positive development of GMOs, and to what extent proprietary software IP and patent rulings paved the way for them.
How about stopping to use stupid and confusing terms like "G.M.O."?!
Manufacturers should be forced to label their plants explicitly with one of a set of standard labels like:
- "engineered to be tolerant to spececific herbicides" - ETH
- "engineered to be tolerant to specific insecticides" - ETI
- "engineered to be tolerant to specific fungicides" - ETF
- "engineered for better performance with the use of specific synthetic fertilizers" - EPSF
- "engineered for improved performance in all conditions" - EP"
- "engineered for better nutritional profile" - ENP
etc. And I should see this on the ingredients listing on my cereals package, like "ETH/I/F corn" or "EP corn" instead of just "corn".
There is no way to both (a) respect consumers' rights and (b) shield them from technical details. And what such technical terms mean should actually be inserted into secondary education curriculums worldwide - children should have to learn what genetical engineering is and how it is used just as they have to learn to read and write. We live in a world where technical details make all the difference and we should start educating ourselves and our children to be less illiterate about them!
Lets stop this whole process of consumer dumbification and extensive usage of "blanket terms" in all areas. This is the most damaging thing for consumer rights imho, because you can't have clear meaningful discussion about things without making clear distinctions about what specifically are you talking about! "GMO" can mean... anything!
There's a big gap between "shielding [consumers] from technical details" and legally mandating that all packaging contain those details. Why is it imperative for consumers to know the types of poisons to which a plant was given resistance? And why do they need to know how the plant came by the nutrition it contains? Nutrition information already required on packaging.
For that matter, why isn't the method of genetic modification something you consider important. All modern (and even not so modern) crops are genetically modified in some fashion, whether by selective breeding or exposure to high-energy radiation.
> Why is it imperative for consumers to know the types of poisons to which a plant was given resistance?
Because this is the specific case in which the economical incentives of producers are massively unaligned with the health interest of the consumers: as a producer, once I start using a crop engineered for resistance to a chemical, then I will be motivated to increase the dosage of that chemical until I get to the best yield.
And realistically, I will do this regardless of the fact that the chemical is at some point proven to "increase by 30% the chances for group X to get cancer of type Y" or other such risk.
We don't live in an ideal world: if a producer knows that 0.01 mg of chemical X pe 100g of product is the maximum he's allowed to have in a product, he will 99% of the time still accept it to 0.1 mg (10x!) if he knows that nobody ever checks for quantity and that in the rare case this happens, he will most likely be able to blame it to some technical manufacturing error and just pay a fine and re-tweak the process...
Laws and regulations should be about practically guarding against what happens when you combine human greed+stupidity with advances in science and technology, not about what's technically and theoretically correct!
And about:
> why isn't the method of genetic modification something you consider important
If we later discover that such technical details can have harmful effects with a propensity to be amplified by misaligned economical incentives, then YES, we should legally mandate that all packaging contains this information too, because this is the only way to re-align the incentives (because this way some of the producers will, for example, be able to exploit through marketing campaings the fact that they use "EP corn" or "ENP corn" instead of "ETF corn", and get a rightful economic advantage over the other ones whose incentives have become misaligned with the ones of the consumer).
Market economies need regulatory adjustment to keep the interests aligned, "market forces" will do this in theory, but with a delay of decades and a cost measured in lost human lives. Full market freedom is cool, but if we can engineer systems with faster response times I think it's worth the cost of some "lost efficiency" in the short term and on narrow niches.
All food including organic has been modified genetically over the thousands/millions of years. What we really need, and the only way to be fair, is to just list everything used for everything. The GED'd idiots who think "organic = no pesticides" will try to read the long list of stuff applied to their food and immediately die, win/win.
All food including organic has been modified genetically over the thousands/millions of years. What we really need, and the only way to be fair, is to just list everything used for everything. The GED'd idiots who think "organic = no pesticides" will try to read the long list of stuff applied to their food and immediately die, win/win.
- "engineered to be vulnerable to confidential substance" - EV
Probably the biggest threat of GMOs is that if you can make them more resilient to a herbicide, fungicide or what have you, that you can also make them more vulnerable to some substance that could then be later used to trigger famines.
Let's have at least some faith in humanity and not go that far, ok? :) 'cause if you're talking about what using bio engineering for war would mean (and what you're talking is in that category: a country damaged by such a tactic would instantly start a hot war!), this example is just the rosy tip of the iceberg...
And after reviewing that thread again, it appears such technology has already been commercially developed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_techno...). Although in this instance it doesn't make the plant susceptible so much as it creates a food system dependency on the company that sells the GMO in order to grow the food in the first place.
I don't object to GMO foods but I do want accurate food labeling. I find the big push by the corporate food producers to make this accurate food labeling illegal to be very disturbing.
Consumers have the right to know what the are buying.
BTW, for people arguing that GMO foods are a hard requirement for feeding the world, I have another suggestion: beef uses a 100 times the water and resources per gram of protein as lentils do. The beef industry requires HUGE subsidies from the government in the form of free or cheap water. Eating a single hamburger uses the water most people use for 3 months of taking showers, just to put things in perspective. As a tax payer, I am sick and tired of supporting people eating beef - make them pay they actual cost of production.
In theory, yes. In practice, it's obviously a push by anti-GMO groups in the hope that the labels will irrationally scare customers. It's not unlike the recent Texas law that pretended to be about health and safety standards for abortion clinics, but everyone on both sides knew that the actual goal was to shut them down.
I find the big push by the corporate food producers to make this accurate food labeling illegal to be very disturbing.
Is anyone actually saying that "contains no GMOs" labels should be illegal? Certainly that shouldn't be the case, although when I see a label like that I lower my opinion of the producer on the grounds that they're promoting unfounded fear.
As a tax payer, I am sick and tired of supporting people eating beef - make them pay they actual cost of production.
In principle I agree with this. Do you have a source on the hamburger/shower figure? That's amazing if true, and it would mean that telling people to take shorter showers to conserve water is silly.
Regarding the hamburger/shower figure, it seems to be a popular pro-veg rhetoric but here's a good breakdown on skeptics.stackexchange that seems to support it (for a quarter pound patty even!)
Thanks for posting that link! It seems like the 3 month figure I have read is not very accurate, perhaps 1 to 2 months of showers is more accurate.
BTW, I do (very) occasionally eat beef, I just don't like the cost being subsidized with tax money. It takes much less water to raise pork and chicken, so when I decide not to eat vegan or vegetarian, I prefer pork or chicken. Just my opinion, but I think one or two small portions of meat a week, and vegan (or vegetarian) the rest of the time is best for me health-wise.
I don't think people should be scared of GMO foods, but I tend to prefer non-GMO. Honest labeling does make sense to me.
My wife and I eat very little processed or otherwise packaged food. We eat mostly vegetables we grow ourselves or buy from local farmers, buy lentils, beans, and rice in bulk, and some locally raised cage free chicken and eggs. Both my wife and I are fantastic cooks, and food is a very big deal to us.
A gene from Brazil Nuts that coded for a protein high in methionine was cloned into soy plants; soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in subjects.
Had this rolled out globally (at the scale that GMO soy is currently deployed) it probably would have (I'm assuming the paper had all the details correct and did in fact show a causal relationship between the transferred gene and the resulting allergenicity) had an enormous negative health effect.
...soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in subjects allergic to brazil nuts.
Not a novel unknown allergic reaction, but still important and something that should always be evaluated during the regulatory process. GMO should definitely be regulated and reported with greater scrutiny and transparency than regular food precisely because of this potential. This was caused specifically because of the protein chosen to be introduced into the soybean to increase nutritional value.
From the other (longer) response tl;dr: This is a legitimate concern that should be included in a regulatory framework that supports safety and transparency.
GMO are probably perfectly healthy. They're probably not much worse than "hybrid" seeds. The problem is handing control of feeding the world to large multinational corporations.
It's been proved again and again that it's perfectly possible to feed the world organically. The "Green Revolution" was essentially a sham, pushing one energy, resource and chemical intensive way of growing food as the only one possible. It's perfectly possible to produce as much with much less standardization.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadhttp://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/global-econ...
It means that you can tolerate greater levels of waste. In a world where logistics are imperfect, there will always be some waste.
Also, if you have greater yield for a given input of labor, more people can go work in a factory make latex gloves or some huge number of life-saving products.
The Nobel Laureates are not talking about the business-practice of certain companies, but rather about fear-mongering about G.M.O.s themselves, e.g. appeals to nature as basis for "health concerns", etc.
The world is no utopia, and as long as money / economic gain is the utmost priority for most of humanity and its corporations, allowing widespread use of patented G.M.O.s will only cause more damage in the long run.
Imagine a whole countries population being dependent upon a companies patented seeds. Now add some secret courts implemented via trade agreements so the country is effectively unable to just "use" these seeds without paying up incredible amounts of money and suddenly you got yourself a situation where the country might end up under effective control by the company.
Yes there's probably still a way out of this dilemma, but with the right/wrong people coming to power through the course of action, you might quickly end up with nationalist government for which the most easy solution is out is a war.
Let's try not to end up as the Century of the GMO Wars.
Which means protecting the IP of GMOs, aka. sterilizing / privatizing / patenting seeds, and usually selling additional chemical products related to the GMOs, as in RoundUp resistant seeds, with their own set of problems when deployed on a massive scale.
The Laureates are effectively saying: "GMOs are OK to eat. This scientific / statistical fact has no direct link to how they are developed and sold in practice and what consequences that will have on society, the economy, and the environment. That's a different problem. Stop bashing GMOs."
They are not only missing the point: they are behaving in a very irresponsible way.
But I think would be solvable via regulation, not to mention that this is a different discussion entirely.
I don't think they are necessarily behaving in an irresponsible way, though. They are evaluating G.M.O.s with regard to health, safety, nutrition, poverty/famine and so on - not with regards to social and economical consequences (which I think would fall more within the purview of policy and regulation).
Ultimately, this issue is highly politicized, and the debate (including the comments here on HN) is often fraught with personal opinion.
(Probably iPhones aren't, but almost surely some other products are.)
I see it more like someone saying (to stick with your example): "Don't buy iPhones - they'll kill you!", and scientists answering "But they're totally safe, they won't kill you."
Meanwhile, they may be products of child-labour (or whatever other horrible circumstance we may imagine), but that's a different issue from what we are discussing.
Anyway, we're getting off track here:P
Why is that a bad thing? Would you rather they invested the billion of dollars on marketing?
It's actually the opposite. It's them who advocate responsible and reasonable behaviour.
Discouraging GMOs because of "current situation" is the same thing anti-nuclear proponents do with nuclear energy. They'll scare you with Chernobyl and Fukushima in order to discourage all work on nuclear energy, no matter how safe, no matter how different from the things that caused (few, very scope-limited) disasters.
Bashing GMO and genetic engineering in general just because some companies behave somewhat irresponsibly only makes it harder for responsible people to enter this market. Not to mention the very idea that bullshiting people is good for them is kind of stretched.
GMO is a very vague term, we can engineer plants to make them toxic in which case no, eating GMO would not be OK. We are also most probably able to engineer interesting new kinds of crop that would have a very positive impact on humanity and our natural resource consumption.
There are several issues here that are not addressed by these Nobel Laureates which makes their letter dangerous and irresponsible:
- as of now, Monsanto and co. are engineering their seeds so that it's impossible to keep part of the harvest and use it to grow the next one (as peoples have done for thousands of years), essentially forcing farmers to come back next year and buy new seeds. This is a very efficient way to keep farmers poor and under control. It is also very unethical, but of course the optimal choice economically speaking...
- Monsanto is also engineering seeds to resist RoundUp in order to shove said RoundUp down the throats of farmers. At this point I don't think I need to debate the negative impact of roundup on human beings and nature, it's known well enough. The main point though is that it's important to remember that the goal of these companies is to maximize profit, not benefit the world. Pushing RoundUp like this is a good example: there is no incentive for them to improve the resistance of seeds to diseases as it would bring down sales of their main product.
- GMO is not all good or all bad, but it is complex and a powerful tool, thus requiring caution and thorough TESTING. Testing that GMO lobbies are not exactly diligent to run.
- Speaking of lobbying, most of the problems mentioned in this thread could be solved with a better regulation as they're due to bad actors. they're not intrinsic to GMO. But Monsanto being a very powerful lobby, I'm personally not too confident about the outcome.
> Monsanto and co. are engineering their seeds so that it's impossible to keep part of the harvest and use it to grow the next one
Are you referring to hybrid crops? While it is true that we wouldn't want to save such seed, they are not necessarily lumped under the GMO umbrella. The whole patent debate doesn't affect us with such crops because we wouldn't consider saving the seeds in the first place, GMO or not, patent or not.
On my farm, non-hybrid wheat is one crop we might save, but there are no GMO varieties of wheat on the market to begin with so again it is a complete non-issue. That said, rarely do we have the cleaning and treating equipment necessary to reuse the seed on the farm, so by the time you contract out that work, it's easier to just buy new seed from a dealer anyway.
> Monsanto is also engineering seeds to resist RoundUp in order to shove said RoundUp down the throats of farmers.
What do you mean by shove? We willing use glyphosate (not necessary Roundup™ since it is off patent and anyone can produce it) even on our non-roundup ready crops, just as farmers have done since the 1970s when glyphosate was invented. What Roundup Ready crops do allow is the use of only glyphosate, as opposed to a crazy cocktail of chemicals necessary on the non-RR crops, reducing input and application costs.
I will also add that Roundup Ready 1 is also off patent now. Anyone can use the technology that was invented by Monsanto that spearheaded this whole GMO debate in the first place.
> there is no incentive for them to improve the resistance of seeds to diseases as it would bring down sales of their main product.
Well, ultimately, we buy what works.
If, hypothetically, someone creates a viable seed that is immune to pests by itself, negating the need to apply any chemicals at all, we'd be quite willing to pay more for it. That would be a huge cost savings. Chemical applicators alone can run into half a million dollars pretty quickly, let alone the product being applied and labour costs. There are many companies (and governments) working on GMOs – it's not just Monsanto. There is a lot of incentive to come up with such a seed to become a more dominant player in the game.
Seed production has been a separate specialty for well over 100 years. No large-scale farmer "keeps part of the harvest and uses it to grow the next one", and the small-scale "organic" (or whatever) farmers who do do that don't buy commercial seeds in the first place.
Food surplus means nothing if it can't be distributed reliably. It matters nothing if you can spread food nice and even in 2017 if we get famines in 2018. Transporting and trading food makes it vulnerable to problems in transport and economics. So nothing beats locally grown high yield nutritious crops. And GMO can improve yields and nutritional values.
Golden Rice comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice >Golden rice is a variety of rice (Oryza sativa) produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, in the edible parts of rice.
But see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12015708
That's exactly what happens with sterile GMOs if you throw away all your non-GMO seeds then can't pay next year's GMO licencing costs.
Patent laws are completely different set of problems. They don't necessarily need to have anything to do with GMO as process.
The bulk of seed grain is produced by specialized seed companies who hybridize Cool Variety #1 with Cool Variety #2 and sell the resulting seed which produces Cool Variety #3. The problem is that if you plant Cool Variety #3 seeds, only a minority of them will be Cool Variety #3. This is a real problem.
If you kept growing the seeds for many generations, ruthlessly weeding out anything that didn't exhibit CV #3 traits, you'd eventually get something close to a pure CV #3 strain, but most farmers don't want to do that.
Let's say that CV #1 is resistant to "gray-green rot" (made up names here), while CV #2 is resistant to "early leaf blight". CV #3 is resistant to both, thanks to having one GGR-resistant gene from CV #1 and one ELB-resistant gene from CV #2.
But what happens if you grow CV #3 seeds? The kicker is that genes (usually) come in pairs. You'll get 25% offspring that are resistant to both (what you want), 25% resistant to GGR (but not ELB) 25% resistant to ELB (but not GGR), and 25% resistant to neither. If both GGR and ELB kill the plant, congratulations! You've managed to reduce your crop yield by 75%.
That is why most modern farmers do not save seeds.
1) You can't patent seeds unless you have modified them genetically. Occurrences of nature are not patentable. No GMO, no associated business practice.
2) Some of the modifications (I'm looking at you Monsanto roundup ready) allow plants to be tolerant of increased quantities of herbicide. This is obviously not something you want to encourage on a global industrial scale. Like you said, we have the food, we don't have the distribution.
3) That said, there is absolutely no inherent danger of genetic modification. We do it all the time, it's well controlled for effectively getting a specific modification. Calling GMO "frankenfoods" or implying there is some inherent health risk to GMO food (outside specific problematic modifications) is just bullshit.
Compare this with nuclear weapons - humans have in a few decated managed to engineer something way more dangerous than millions of years of "natural" permutations/combinations of atoms.
This is 100% False. There is essentially no risk of accidentally transferring a bacterial protein to a plant. The molecular machinery involved in transfection is complex and fragile. The transfer process is gated and specific. Even if there was a transfer of the wrong gene the result would be a dead organism, not a super-organism.
Eukaryotes do not tolerate random prokaryotic genes in their genome in place of a functioning gene. The introduced gene has to be specifically designed/selected to be compatible with the target organism.
Whoever is telling you this is doing the exact fear mongering these Nobel laureates are advising against.
It is so much the opposite of easy to do what you describe that it is essentially impossible.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12016159
GMOs should certainly be regulated for safety and transparency, which is part of the job of the FDA in the United States.
Dekhn's statement in the comment about the allergenicity was this:
A gene from Brazil Nuts that coded for a protein high in methionine was cloned into soy plants; soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in subjects.
An important missing part of that ...in subjects with an allergy to brazil nuts. In otherwords they found some allergic reaction to the brazil nut protein in people allergic to brazil nuts. It did not create an unknown or novel allergen (although allergenicity should be a standard test for GMO food products).
For 8/9 subjects it was not the primary allergen (and for one it was the allergen that causes a dangerous reaction). Regardless an allergen is present and it is good that it was identified. The paper concludes with this:
"It is prudent to assess the allergenicity of proteins in transgenic foods if those proteins have been derived from sources that are commonly allergenic. The use of currently available animal models alone to predict allergenicity in humans does not produce accurate results. Techniques such as radioallergosorbent tests, SDS-PAGE with immunoblotting, and skin-prick testing can identify IgE-binding proteins that are probable allergens in transgenic foods derived from sources known to be allergenic. This strategy will not be useful in assessing the allergenicity of transgenic foods in which the allergenicity of the source of donor genetic material is unknown. Most current applications in the field of plant biotechnology fall into the latter category."
There is no doubt (in my mind) that GMO needs to be regulated and reported. If there is any protein from an allergic source that source needs to be listed on the food product specifically as "contains material from X" -- in this case X = brazil nuts.
The fact that the source donor material could be unknown (proprietary secret) is completely unacceptable. The FDA should have full regulatory control over GMO and they should be treated with a scrutiny closer to drugs rather than food. There should be absolutely no "proprietary secrets" regarding the source material or process used to make the modifications. There should be complete transparency and rigorous testing for allergic potential.
Maybe increased regulatory control is all that GMO doomsayers are after, but I think the hyperbole hurts their argument when there are sound scientific arguments for increased transparency and regulation.
tl;dr: This is a legitimate concern that should be included in a regulatory framework that supports safety and transparency.
There is still a small chance that someone who did not know they were allergic to Brazil Nuts but already consumes soy products could be impacted by the new product. However I am not sure how to mitigate that and still have GMO food products. From a consumer perspective they could be introduced to allergens that are now present in their "new" existing diet. I would sympathize with a consumer who said "hey I did not change anything and now I am impacted." So in this case labelling would be insufficient. Perhaps the answer is to say that "known allergenic introductions" are not allowed for GMO food.
Many benefits and concerns lie ahead. In such cases, for their sake, the consumer needs access to valuable information.
Please consider that the vast majority of scientists who work in this area disagree with your logic - that is what the entire NYT piece is about.
What we know is what has happened in "nature", and while we can try to extrapolate from that, we really have no clue as to what is possible.
Even though you grossly exaggerate how genes work with regards to resistance/danger, the possibility of phenotypes that could lead to negative effects in human consumers is just as real by "natural" means.
I don't really think your comparison with nuclear weapons works though; for one, there is no such thing as a "natural" nuclear weapon - not to mention that a "natural" (objective) concept of "weapon" (irrespective of any subject making/wielding/using/thinking about/whatever) would have to exist if we were to compare apples to apples.
The idea behind my comparison is simply, that we can engineer things much more dangerous than nature can, that would never appear in nature by themselves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst
But, generally, that's what we do. With brains, we can do in a few months what would take natural selection millions of years to "discover". Doing that, using our brains, seems kind of like the whole point of being a human.
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/05/40419855...
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/05/40419855...
A "good" modification would require:
No patents
No suing farmers that grow your seed without a license/purchase
No boosted tolerance to plant poison
No convenient requirement that "improvements" rely on additional product that the company sells (eg roundup)
Edit: formatting
People won't buy such things for a long time anyway, and that it doesn't occur in nature doesn't matter. Hell, give it a million year and it might start occuring in nature by itself, because why not? Nature does what nature does, it already mixed up a lot of stuff in a weird way (except we don't call them "weird", just "natural").
Few other things that "never happen naturally" - clothes on human beings. Bricks. Steel. Airplanes. Colorful paint on canvas. Should we discourage them all, because they're not "natural"?
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/05/40419855...
> How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that?
The patent on the first generation of Roundup-Ready soybeans expired last year. A third party immediately produced a generic version of Roundup-Ready soybeans and sold it for half the price of the Monsanto seeds, with no restriction on seed saving. Madness! A company created something new, obtained a patent, and enjoyed a limited monopoly until their patent expired and the free market used the now-public information to undercut them. This is an example of the system working.
Regarding your greater point -- the claim that we are producing many times more food than we need -- the important question isn't how much food we're "wasting" but how much food waste is avoidable, given the constraints we want to live under.
The difficulty in food distribution -- as the article you linked pointed out -- isn't just a matter of warlords hording food or rich westerners cramming their maws with too much food[1]. The larger problem is that food is an organic product (as in, literally, not philosophically) produced in messy conditions with a limited shelf-life. Some food produced will be of substandard quality; some food produced will spoil before reaching a consumer. Agriculture is a leaky pipeline between the farmer and the hungry consumer, and most of the leaks that are left are difficult to plug, or shouldn't be plugged. Consumers shouldn't eat spoiled or fouled food, so if you can't prevent the food from being fouled or spoiling you should let it fall out of the system.
What all this means is that we need to be producing some multiple of the amount of food people consume to actually get that amount to them. We should try to improve distribution as well, of course, but the returns there will be as diminishing as they are everywhere else. By 2050 we'd like 60%-85% more food to be reaching end consumers than is now, to both keep up with population growth and to feed those who are hungry now. Some of that will almost certainly come from improvements in distribution, some of it will probably come from shifting diets away from meat and other inefficient crops, but we'll also need to ultimately produce more food per acre than we are now.
[1]: I found this sentence in the article particularly offensive:
> "And yet more people in the world—1.7 billion—are considered obese or overweight from a daily caloric intake that in some cases is at least six to seven times the minimum."
There may be someone out there eating 6-7 times some minimum (1500 calories?), but that is a weird abnormality and ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As someone who is mildly overweight, my calorie surplus is about 50-100 calories, about 2% extra, which adds about 5 pounds per year. That is the typical overfed westerner. Adding in the extra calories to support my extra body weight amounts to about 10% more calories than would need at my ideal weight. If 30% of the world consumed 10% fewer calories, it would indeed have a measurable impact on the global food supply, but it is a bit of a red herring.
Tl;dr - mostly scientists, mostly still working.
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/laureates_ages...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Recognition_time_l... [2] https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/manual.html
As an engineer in my field, there are so many specialized skills, even other engineers in the same field often are not qualified to analyze certain technologies without training, experience etc.
Or do we already have some commonly used dead man switch so the plants can only survive with additional chemicals put on to the fields?
Well all valid points I guess. Better than GM plants running loose, but if no seeds come from it and it's "closed-source" you are at the mercy of the supplier for the next year.
And the bees might be an invasive species, but they have no superpowers. I'm not sure how wide the biological niche of a GMO plant can get.
For the dead man switch: maybe the activator could be something simple and well known, just not so common in normal surface soil. But I don't even know how big this risk is...
One other issue is the lack of oversight - the EU was fighting for 12 years to be able to scientifically test and publish the results of feeding Monsanto GMO foods to rats. After this unstable battle, they finally published the results and they were not good: rats fed with GMO food had developed tumors that were as big as their original size.
And worst of all, we are running a massive world scale experiment where the large majority of the the world is feed with GMO food without any prior proof of its long term safety.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/04/05/new-england-jou...
The original article I read on that said they basically couldn't find enough people taking less than $10,000 from the institutions whose science or products they were reviewing. I'm thinking, "Holy shit! Almost all the "independent" researchers are getting enough bribes to buy a car. How is their validation in any way trustworthy?"
I had to stop there. Especially watching Monsanto's games with seeds and such plus history of hiding health dangers of stuff they intend to sell with bogus studies. I don't trust GMO's or about any highly-profitable thing coming out of such organizations until I see what they do to a lot of people over a long period of time.
Now, when we specifically modify one or two quantifiable genes in an organism (instead of potentially thousands through mutagenesis or breeding), everyone loses their minds.
Our bodies are built to process DNA that we consume without adding it to our genome. This is why we can eat a steak without suddenly inheriting bovine genes. For a time, DNA can be found in our bodies from things we consume, but a fragment of DNA is not the same thing as a functional gene, and even if it were, it'd have to actively put itself in our cells somehow, and replicate.
A basic high school understanding of genetics is really all you need to understand that these breeding techniques are largely the same as what happens in the wild and what we've been doing for ages, if not actually safer since they're far more controlled.
Ill effects in general have been going up for decades. Isolating what was or wasn't contributing to that is a hard problem. I'd be interested in studies that compared large numbers of people using crops with and without that property. Both should also avoid as many carcinogens as possible and eat healthy in general to reduce those variables. Know any like this which weren't tied to a specific, profit-hungry corporation? I'd be interested in reading it.
"A basic high school understanding of genetics is really all you need to understand that these breeding techniques are largely the same as what happens in the wild"
My info on this subject is way outdated as I studied it around 10 years ago. That's why I'm not talking about the biotech or risks themselves. However, that quote jumped out because they were using retroviruses or something back when I studied it. Not just selective breeding or limited effects of background radiation. The risk analysis is necessarily different. Do you have a list of what methods they use today with descriptions laypersons can follow? Especially how they address any risks in each? I'm long overdue for an update on this topic.
Put quite simply, the engineered varieties undergo toxicity studies and in-depth chemical and molecular analysis, and their agronomic impact is assessed through things like soil samples, and all of this data is compared to the same studies which are also done on their non-GM counterparts to assure that nothing unexpected has changed, and that the end result is "substantially equivalent." It usually costs around $30m, and takes between 10 and 15 years to complete the testing, regulatory, and approval process over many many generations of the engineered variety.
I'm really not aware of any studies like what you're looking for, but the data would be much more valuable looking at specific varieties of organisms, rather than based on what method was used to create them. Even then, confirming their chemical, molecular, nutritional, and agronomic equivalence with their non-GM counterparts really negates the need for those sorts of studies, because the crop ends up being indistinguishable (aside from a few crops engineered for the end consumer, such as vegetables with higher levels of antioxidants or higher levels of certain vitamins).
A wall of text follows.
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I'm not really familiar with the methods used for varieties derived from breeding or mutagenesis, but I recall the last time that I looked, there was not any major standard testing being done there.
The first step in adding an isolated gene to a genome is to do a few modifications to the genetic payload itself. A marker gene is added as well as a promoter, and a termination sequence is appended to the transgene. The marker gene is used to differentiate which cells have successfully taken the transgene. In short, the targeted cells are grown in a medium that is normally toxic to the target plant. The marker gene encodes proteins which provide resistance to that medium, thus, the cells that survive in the medium are the ones which have had successful uptake of the gene. The promoter sequence controls when and how the transgene is expressed over the life of the plant, and the termination sequence simply marks the end of the payload.
Once you have your genetic payload, there are several methods used to get it into a plant cell. The first, and simplest, is a gene gun, which quite literally blasts a cluster of cells with particles coated in genetic material. Some of the cells survive and successfully envelope a particle coated with DNA, which eventually integrates into a chromosome. This is used for plants which don't readily accept other forms of modification, and was the method used to create Bt corn as well as golden rice.
Agrobacterium is another method which is generally more precise about delivering genetic material to a desired location, but various plants are resistant to the method. Unmodified, the agrobacterium infects plant cells through open wounds, and deposits a DNA payload during replication which causes tumors. The tumor-causing DNA payload is removed, replaced with the transgenic payload, and the bacteria carries out its job, infecting the plant and depositing the payload for a desired trait.
Soon, we will probably start seeing newer methods such as CRISPR/Cas9 become more popular (assuming they aren't as resisted as agrobacterium can be).
By precisely controlling the genetic payloads added to the genome, it is far easier to monitor protein expression and see exactly what has changed throughout a plant's lifecycle.
If ...
The study you refer to, "rats fed with GMO food had developed tumors that were as big as their original size" used Sprague-Dawley rats, typically chosen in lab studies because the breed is known to quickly develop massive tumors regardless of other factors. The results in this study were not statistically significant, and were drawn from a sample size way too small, on a type of animal that is known to develop tumors on its own.
Furthermore, the numbers in the study actually showed that male rats who consumed glyphosate in their drinking water (because simultaneously testing multiple variables on groups of like 5 rats makes sense, right?) actually lived longer than those which did not, and all rats in the study grew massive tumors, even the control group.
If you're going to base an opinion on "science", please make sure you actually read the study and have enough knowledge to determine whether it's bullshit or not.
Thanks,
Someone who actually is "pro science"
If you are curious why I said dubious circumstances, read https://www.rt.com/op-edge/monsanto-gmo-studies-reports-588/.
https://www.rt.com/usa/alien-bird-deaths-cia-un/
Here's an article they published about aliens and the CIA causing the deaths of migratory birds by spraying "chemtrails".
The fact of the matter is that GMOs contain the same genetic material we already consume on a daily basis. We understand how it impacts our bodies (it pretty much doesn't) and there is no distinction between genetic material from a GM organism versus a conventional organism. It's chemically and functionally identical (derived from the exact same nucleotide bases and the genes already exist elsewhere with the same function), and has the same impact on your body. This is something that we've studied for a very long time, and understand fairly well.
What Greenpeace et al should fight is shady business ethics, there is the real danger.
The rat tumor study is also not convincing (to scientists). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9ralini_affair
As far as I've seen, there have been quite a few studies on GMOs. Though, it seems like an odd classification to study since GMOs are all very different.
There's alot of FUD in this post
"The bizarre reports come only six months after Elsevier created a special new position, Associate Editor for Biotechnology (i.e. GMO), and filled it with a former Monsanto employee who worked for the giant Monsanto front-organization, the International Life Sciences Institute, which develops industry-friendly risk assessment methods for GM foods and chemical food contaminants and inserts them into government regulations. Sound like something wrong with this picture?"
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/monsanto-gmo-studies-reports-588/
The original source of this comes from: http://supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-le...
Which obviously is from an NGO created by the GMO lobby. They are free to expose arguments but ending in "we consider this a "crime against humanity"" is this fallacy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion
I am not against GMOs but either for it. In the end is going to improve lives, but in the process experimentation will harm others(like with X-Rays with pregnant women, nuclear radiation, substances that are mutagens).
People are dying in India for lots of complex reasons. It is not going to be solved because of "Golden Rice". India has very fertile land, when I worked there as a volunteer the problems came mainly from overpopulation, pollution and inequality in big cities.
By "overpopulation" I mean "people against people" fighting for resources. Like Buddhist against Muslims, Rich versus poor or poor against poor, like people cutting legs or removing eyes from children so tourist feel sorry and give those bastards(that legs cutters) money.
I wonder how many of those Nobel laureates have lived in India, are Indians or have worked with them. Looking at a glance the names it seems the list contains more or less zero Indians names, so they have total ignorance in the specific problem.
Talking about 2050...by that time nuclear war could had been destroyed the entire wold, the West could had collapsed because of derivatives and debt weapons of mass destruction financial instruments, we could be using nuclear fusion for cheap energy in order to plant on Sahara dessert or Australia, or just using LEDs indoors in order not to need GMOs or pesticides...
I don't think it's useful to not do anything merely because it's possible the future might turn out like you describe. We (as in humanity) should try to solve the food problem while also preventing nuclear war etc.
Or did I misunderstand what you're saying?
> Golden Rice showed that beta carotene was produced at consistently high levels in the grain, and that grain quality was comparable to the conventional variety. However, yields of candidate lines were not consistent across locations and seasons, prompting research direction toward assessing Golden Rice versions such as GR2-E and others. [1]
Let's keep researching (whether GM or not) ways to make crops more nutritious and higher yielding (search dilution effect e.g. [2], [3]), not just more herbicide resistant. Let's get the cost of GM research down so that we can end the terrible business and ecological practices surrounding GMO.
While I agree that Greenpeace is not helping here, this article is too friendly to GMO. Ignoring Monsanto in an article about GM is totally disingenuous.*
[1] http://irri.org/golden-rice/faqs/what-is-the-status-of-the-g...
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065211308...
[3] http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/44/1/15.full
*Showing a picture of their Bangalore Center does not count
1. Feed the world
2. Produce food organically
3. Don't genetically modify foods
Before the Green Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution) the world was facing a truly bleak scenario that involved massive food shortages. Of course, a large part of the Green Revolution was the usage of new fertilizers and pesticides, which we now understand have significant impact on the environment. GMOs provide a way to continue to realize the benefits of the Green Revolution without all of the chemical-related downsides.
Well...unless you put Monsanto in charge. The real travesty of the current state of GMOs is that things like "Roundup-Ready" plants do nothing to reduce the usage of chemicals. There's also the cautionary lesson of bt-Corn and its impact on Monarch butterflies.
Learn the lessons of the Green Revolution: you can feed the world with modified farming techniques, but those techniques should strive to lessen the impact on the environment and should be implemented carefully to avoid further unintended consequences.
In my understanding, this is not quite accurate. The perception of "organic" farming is that they do not use pesticides, but this is not accurate. Organic farming does use pesticides, but they just happen to not be synthetic - that is, the pesticides happen to be "naturally" occurring. But that does not necessarily make them safer.
So, if you have a crop which is engineered to be resistant to a very particular, effective pesticide, then it is possible that you will end up using less overall pesticides when compared to organic farming. See http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/organic-pestici...
Nuance, moderation, and caution are the orders of the day, but these values seem to be increasingly scarce in a world of self-selecting echo chambers...
Edit: changed farm to garden
[1] http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f10...
[2] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/httpblogss...
When "gardening", you can probably do just fine without using pesticides. But when you farm crops as a business, you have to do something.
Several family farms at my local farmers market claim their crops are pesticide free. Now granted they are probably 10s of acres, not 1000s of acres, but they are still making a living.
And yes, that's the same Bt that's in Bt crops, by the way (proteins from Bt bacteria). Organic farmers use it in a spray. It's a natural substance, and they argue the spray causes less resistance than the GM varieties. I really don't have the domain knowledge to say whether they're right.
Not all organic farmers are the same, and over time the meaning of 'organic' has been diluted. Smaller, more idealistic organic farmers mostly don't use pesticides, but there are large commercial organic growers out there who meet the bare minimum for certification and will use whatever pesticides are allowed.
[1]http://www.colostate.edu/Dept/CoopExt/4dmg/VegFruit/organic....
What is/was the solution to that ?
If it is indeed a "cautionary tale" there is some response that we should be involved in, which, as far as I can tell is simply the anti GMO sentiment that (100 nobels) decry.
What other response has there been ?
The "cautionary tale" is that releasing GMO crops before their full impact has been studied and assessed only adds fuel to the GMO/anti-GMO fire. When it was found that bt-Corn could pose a risk to Monarchs, those in the anti-GMO camp had all the ammunition they needed to start shouting about GMOs being unsafe. When it was later found that the risk was negligible in practice, the GMO camp had all the reason they needed to continue turning a deaf ear to the anti-GMO camp.
Yes, but there very well may be other downsides. A lot of the utopian ideas for GMOs basically involve creating invasive species. We here about the potential of making species that can easily grow in areas where they couldn't grow at all before. But doing so could well pose an environmental risk (if these end up growing so well in areas that they end up disrupting the ecosystem).
It might seem strange to think that too many edible plants could cause a problem, but it wouldn't be the first time (Kudzu is a good example). We're also not nearly at that point yet with current GMOs, but it seems to be what a lot of people are advocating. It'd be nice if we thought of the environmental downsides ahead of time, so that we don't keep saying "we now understand the environmental downsides of the tech we were using 30 years ago; but this new tech should be just fine" every few years.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/true-story-kudz...
It was specifically planted in many visible areas like highway banks etc, so people's perception is wrongly skewed towards it being everywhere, when it's really not.
5. Redistribute food more equally
They argue the spray is not as bad as the GM crops due to the timing of exposure. I really don't know enough about insect biology to say if that makes sense.
Glyphosate is certainly not a sustainable weed control solution but it's no worse than the herbicides that it replaced.
I wonder if the biggest negative impact of biotech firms is not the chemicals but on IP and patents, hindering the positive development of GMOs, and to what extent proprietary software IP and patent rulings paved the way for them.
Manufacturers should be forced to label their plants explicitly with one of a set of standard labels like:
- "engineered to be tolerant to spececific herbicides" - ETH
- "engineered to be tolerant to specific insecticides" - ETI
- "engineered to be tolerant to specific fungicides" - ETF
- "engineered for better performance with the use of specific synthetic fertilizers" - EPSF
- "engineered for improved performance in all conditions" - EP"
- "engineered for better nutritional profile" - ENP
etc. And I should see this on the ingredients listing on my cereals package, like "ETH/I/F corn" or "EP corn" instead of just "corn".
There is no way to both (a) respect consumers' rights and (b) shield them from technical details. And what such technical terms mean should actually be inserted into secondary education curriculums worldwide - children should have to learn what genetical engineering is and how it is used just as they have to learn to read and write. We live in a world where technical details make all the difference and we should start educating ourselves and our children to be less illiterate about them!
Lets stop this whole process of consumer dumbification and extensive usage of "blanket terms" in all areas. This is the most damaging thing for consumer rights imho, because you can't have clear meaningful discussion about things without making clear distinctions about what specifically are you talking about! "GMO" can mean... anything!
For that matter, why isn't the method of genetic modification something you consider important. All modern (and even not so modern) crops are genetically modified in some fashion, whether by selective breeding or exposure to high-energy radiation.
Because this is the specific case in which the economical incentives of producers are massively unaligned with the health interest of the consumers: as a producer, once I start using a crop engineered for resistance to a chemical, then I will be motivated to increase the dosage of that chemical until I get to the best yield.
And realistically, I will do this regardless of the fact that the chemical is at some point proven to "increase by 30% the chances for group X to get cancer of type Y" or other such risk.
We don't live in an ideal world: if a producer knows that 0.01 mg of chemical X pe 100g of product is the maximum he's allowed to have in a product, he will 99% of the time still accept it to 0.1 mg (10x!) if he knows that nobody ever checks for quantity and that in the rare case this happens, he will most likely be able to blame it to some technical manufacturing error and just pay a fine and re-tweak the process...
Laws and regulations should be about practically guarding against what happens when you combine human greed+stupidity with advances in science and technology, not about what's technically and theoretically correct!
And about:
> why isn't the method of genetic modification something you consider important
If we later discover that such technical details can have harmful effects with a propensity to be amplified by misaligned economical incentives, then YES, we should legally mandate that all packaging contains this information too, because this is the only way to re-align the incentives (because this way some of the producers will, for example, be able to exploit through marketing campaings the fact that they use "EP corn" or "ENP corn" instead of "ETF corn", and get a rightful economic advantage over the other ones whose incentives have become misaligned with the ones of the consumer).
Market economies need regulatory adjustment to keep the interests aligned, "market forces" will do this in theory, but with a delay of decades and a cost measured in lost human lives. Full market freedom is cool, but if we can engineer systems with faster response times I think it's worth the cost of some "lost efficiency" in the short term and on narrow niches.
Probably the biggest threat of GMOs is that if you can make them more resilient to a herbicide, fungicide or what have you, that you can also make them more vulnerable to some substance that could then be later used to trigger famines.
Except you don't advertise that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12015572
And after reviewing that thread again, it appears such technology has already been commercially developed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_techno...). Although in this instance it doesn't make the plant susceptible so much as it creates a food system dependency on the company that sells the GMO in order to grow the food in the first place.
Consumers have the right to know what the are buying.
BTW, for people arguing that GMO foods are a hard requirement for feeding the world, I have another suggestion: beef uses a 100 times the water and resources per gram of protein as lentils do. The beef industry requires HUGE subsidies from the government in the form of free or cheap water. Eating a single hamburger uses the water most people use for 3 months of taking showers, just to put things in perspective. As a tax payer, I am sick and tired of supporting people eating beef - make them pay they actual cost of production.
In theory, yes. In practice, it's obviously a push by anti-GMO groups in the hope that the labels will irrationally scare customers. It's not unlike the recent Texas law that pretended to be about health and safety standards for abortion clinics, but everyone on both sides knew that the actual goal was to shut them down.
I find the big push by the corporate food producers to make this accurate food labeling illegal to be very disturbing.
Is anyone actually saying that "contains no GMOs" labels should be illegal? Certainly that shouldn't be the case, although when I see a label like that I lower my opinion of the producer on the grounds that they're promoting unfounded fear.
As a tax payer, I am sick and tired of supporting people eating beef - make them pay they actual cost of production.
In principle I agree with this. Do you have a source on the hamburger/shower figure? That's amazing if true, and it would mean that telling people to take shorter showers to conserve water is silly.
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23921/does-one-h...
This might push me over the edge from part-time vegetarian.
BTW, I do (very) occasionally eat beef, I just don't like the cost being subsidized with tax money. It takes much less water to raise pork and chicken, so when I decide not to eat vegan or vegetarian, I prefer pork or chicken. Just my opinion, but I think one or two small portions of meat a week, and vegan (or vegetarian) the rest of the time is best for me health-wise.
My wife and I eat very little processed or otherwise packaged food. We eat mostly vegetables we grow ourselves or buy from local farmers, buy lentils, beans, and rice in bulk, and some locally raised cage free chicken and eggs. Both my wife and I are fantastic cooks, and food is a very big deal to us.
A gene from Brazil Nuts that coded for a protein high in methionine was cloned into soy plants; soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in subjects.
Had this rolled out globally (at the scale that GMO soy is currently deployed) it probably would have (I'm assuming the paper had all the details correct and did in fact show a causal relationship between the transferred gene and the resulting allergenicity) had an enormous negative health effect.
Briefly two points:
...soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in subjects allergic to brazil nuts.
Not a novel unknown allergic reaction, but still important and something that should always be evaluated during the regulatory process. GMO should definitely be regulated and reported with greater scrutiny and transparency than regular food precisely because of this potential. This was caused specifically because of the protein chosen to be introduced into the soybean to increase nutritional value.
From the other (longer) response tl;dr: This is a legitimate concern that should be included in a regulatory framework that supports safety and transparency.
It's been proved again and again that it's perfectly possible to feed the world organically. The "Green Revolution" was essentially a sham, pushing one energy, resource and chemical intensive way of growing food as the only one possible. It's perfectly possible to produce as much with much less standardization.