The real problem is that all oranges are clones - genetically identical. That means anything that can overcome one orange tree can overcome them all. Shuffling genes around will just delay the next killer. It will be interesting to see if they can come up with a way to cause sexual reproduction to happen again. The resulting genetic diversity will make oranges less of a target.
Somewhat related is how they and much other modern agriculture is done - huge fields of exactly the same species only - a monoculture. This too makes it easy for invaders. The fix of multiple species being grown together is often shown to work, but makes the farming and harvesting considerably more complicated and expensive.
Yes. In the citrus estate near where I grew up they did not mix species. ie you had an orchard of orange only, next to an orchard of mandarin only, next to mineola only etc. All vegetation between the trees was also cleared except some grass appeared.
> Somewhat related is how they and much other modern agriculture is done - huge fields of exactly the same species only - a monoculture. This too makes it easy for invaders. The fix of multiple species being grown together is often shown to work, but makes the farming and harvesting considerably more complicated and expensive.
It's not necessarily optional. Humans have cultivated the food supply through cross breeding since we have been around and even common foods aren't "natural" anymore. A lot of what we like to eat doesn't like to reproduce itself so we end up reproducing what we like to eat.
The quoted bit was about growing conditions - ie instead of a field of only one species, combine multiple species. The species diversity helps control pests, and allows for a greater variety of birds etc. And is way harder to harvest.
Your point was about reproduction. Sexual reproduction doesn't have to be out in the wild - it is offspring combining DNA from parents producing something a little different. It is possible to try and introduce genes to make out in the field reproduction more likely to happen, and also to work out some lab based way of reproduction. Admittedly it is way harder than making cuttings, but does bring benefits.
At this point I'm suffering "alarm fatigue," having been told all my life that $food_X is endangered and will soon vanish from the Earth. It never seems to happen as long as there's still a market for $food_X.
Life will find a way, and if it doesn't, science will.
We actually already lost a variety of bananas back in the 50s due to Panama Disease and it never recovered. The kind we eat now are reported to be less flavorful yet were resistant to the disease up until recently. There's plenty of other varieties of bananas, but the ones sold in most groceries (with the exception of a few exotics like red bananas) are all the same because they're durable and easy to grow/ship compared to others.
Also chestnuts have yet to make a real comeback since being nearly wiped out in North America[1]. Although it's not a plant, people used to eat passenger pigeons quite a bit in the 19th century and science has yet to bring those back.
Edit: Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World[2], is a great book on the history of the banana for anyone interested. Delves into the good and the bad of the banana and also how it shaped American Foreign Policy and Central/South America.
...if people wouldn't be so freaked off of GMOs and they could just push on with the science instead of considering the public reaction to everything. Heck, I'd a take a glass of oj made from fruits with pig and monkey genes in it over a "natural and non-GMO" one made from plants that need tons of herbicides and pesticides to grow.
...and if I were a producer that discovered how to make a resistant orange by genetic engineering, I'd just do my best to spread the damn disease and wipe out natural oranges together with the competition, making more money to finance more genetic engineering research, hopefully doing more interesting stuff than pest resistance genes, like actually improving the flavor and nutrient profile of grown plants.
>...and if I were a producer that discovered how to make a resistant orange by genetic engineering, I'd just do my best to spread the damn disease and wipe out natural oranges together with the competition, making more money to finance more genetic engineering research...
No, you'd be thrown in jail for bioterrorism. What you propose is seriously unethical, even if it weren't criminal. Furthermore, your attitude would convince much of the populace that people who promote GMO food are completely insane and unethical.
I wish them good luck in overcoming the anti-scientific hysteria. But I fear relying on scientific literacy is going to end in failure.
How many other advances in agriculture are we going to sacrifice to appease these superstitions? (Not to mention similar superstitions of anti-vaccine activists, who are probably the same people in many cases.)
I don't think the hysteria is anti-scientific. It is more a suspicion of agricultural corporations, of secrecy and of American companies. The perception of Monsanto is an excellent example. Corporate paternalism is not appreciated. Consider why companies lobbied so hard for GMO to not be labelled as such.
If almost every product was labelled as GMO then after a while consumers would not care. They would be able to make their own choices about "regular" versus GMO. Instead the fight has been to "trust us" and to keep GMO secret.
"Known to the State of California to cause cancer" is everywhere. No one bats an eyelid any more.
The poster didn't mean that the hysteria was against Science itself, rather that it wasn't based upon any type of Scientific analysis or investigation.
The fact that people will become apathetic to GMO labeling eventually doesn't mean that the industry won't fight to avoid the unwanted (and undeserved) stigma for now.
> ... avoid the unwanted (and undeserved) stigma for now
There is that paternalism again. It is not up to the producers of any product to decide if attention is undeserved. Consumers get to decide that. And yes some will be wrong etc. Shining a light and being truthful is the right way of doing things.
The hysteria is not against science - it is against paternalism hiding itself as "trust us because science". Science requires being open and honest.
I actually think it is more fair for it to be up to the FDA to decide. The reason companies don't want labels is that people then assume the product is unsafe. Here is an MIT study finding exactly that for GMO labels: http://courantblogs.com/capitol-watch/gmo-labels-send-a-mess...
The FDA decides if a product can even be sold. So what if truthfully labelled products are considered unsafe by some? Why shouldn't people be able to make up their own minds? The freedom that allows them to do that also also means sometimes they will be wrong. Again, so what? Sweeping it under the rug ("trust us") is not adequate.
You do not foster understanding, science, progress or freedom by hiding things.
you say anti-scientific hysteria, I say reasonable fears regularly ignored by industry and whitewashed by an industry captured fda. example 1: bpa
from the wiki article [1]:
In 2006, the US Government sponsored an assessment of the scientific
literature on BPA. Thirty-eight experts in fields involved with bisphenol A
gathered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to review several hundred studies on
BPA, many conducted by members of the group. At the end of the meeting, the
group issued the Chapel Hill Consensus Statement,[100] which stated BPA at
concentrations found in the human body is associated with organizational
changes in the prostate, breast, testis, mammary glands, body size, brain
structure and chemistry, and behavior of laboratory animals.[101]
The Chapel Hill Consensus Statement found that average levels in people are
above those that cause harm to many animals in laboratory experiments. They
noted that while BPA is not persistent in the environment or in humans,
biomonitoring surveys indicate that exposure is continuous, which is
problematic because acute animal exposure studies are used to estimate daily
human exposure to BPA, and no studies that had examined BPA pharmacokinetics
in animal models had followed continuous low-level exposures. They added
that measurement of BPA levels in serum and other body fluids suggests the
possibilities that BPA intake is much higher than accounted for, and/or that
BPA can bioaccumulate in some conditions (such as pregnancy).[100]
A 2008 report by the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human
Reproduction within the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP), which is
within the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, reported the
results of its exhaustive review of the literature. Its conclusions,
expressed relative to current estimates of general population exposure
levels in the U.S., were the following:
and yet bpa is still used. So when we hear that monsanto pinky-swears their experiments, even when they contaminate neighboring fields, are super duper safe, or orange growers promise up and down that, well, their genetic modifications they introduced to prevent their business from being destroyed are absolutely positively safe (we promise!)... forgive me for being skeptical.
Not to mention the freakout about labeling foods; if they weren't knowingly poisoning us, why exactly would corporations be so very afraid of properly labeling foods? Any reasonable adult should have his or her bullshit detector going off when they are told gmo is absolutely safe, but it's the end of the world if we tell people which foods have gmo ingredients so that they can choose what to eat.
There's a difference between chemicals and genetically modified foods.
We know that human health can be damaged by all sorts of different chemicals. That being established, the task at hand is identifying which are harmful (or usually in what quantities do they become harmful).
Meanwhile there is no persuasive evidence that any foods become harmful simple because they have been genetically modified. Completely different.
> if they weren't knowingly poisoning us, why exactly would corporations be so very afraid of properly labeling foods?
Perhaps precisely because of this hysteria surrounding GMO?
if they weren't knowingly poisoning us, why exactly would corporations be so very afraid of properly labeling foods
For the same reason that measles infections are on the rise? Because the public is largely ignorant and doesn't understand much about Science or genetic engineering and thus is easily influenced by Hollywood and celebrities who in their ignorance push their favorite environmental/medical causes (Jenny McCarthy).
See the wiki article for evidence published in medical journals that bpa harms human beings. There's plenty of evidence to say it should be banned, at bare minimum until long term studies at actual dosing levels have been performed.
You cut off the quote just before it details the experts' estimate that, extrapolating from animal studies, the threat of BPA ranges from "some concern" for fetuses (the FDA banned the use of BPA in baby bottles) to "negligible concern" for adults. From a much more recent meta-analysis of existing data: "The analysis showed that BPA levels were often so low that it was below the ability of current toxicological methods to detect it, raising the possibility that most instances of high BPA dose might have been the result of contamination from tubes and plastics in hospitals."http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/15/no-toxic-effec...
Anyway, I agree it's hard to argue with "label the product and let the consumer decide." But I think the case could be made that it plays on people's unscientific views of what is and isn't healthy. As with "organic" or "locally sourced" there's nothing stopping companies that don't use GMOs from putting a "No GMO" label on their food. Some already do.
No I didn't and you misquoted the paragraph and accidentally (I hope ?) changed the meaning.
What was actually said was:
For adults, the Expert Panel has negligible concern for adverse reproductive
effects following exposures in the general population to Bisphenol A
you'll note that does not say "negligible concern" for adults, it says "negligible concern for adverse reproductive effects".
And you know what was never studied? General safety for adults under actual dosing as experienced in reality. Further on down the same wiki article, just one of many concerns:
The authors found that higher bisphenol A levels were significantly
associated with heart disease, diabetes, and abnormally high levels of
certain liver enzymes
I think this thread is increasingly unlikely to be productive, but I'm puzzled why you think I've changed the meaning. I think it is accurate to say that the expert panel concluded the threat of BPA ranges from "some concern" to the most vulnerable groups to "negligible concern" for most healthy adults. Are you suggesting the expert panel found that BPA posed more than a "minimal" threat to adults in regards to something besides reproductive harm? I don't see that in the report...
Anyway, I think you nail the exact point I was trying to make: no studies have shown BPA to be dangerous in adults at the levels that are actually encountered in the environment. (There's little doubt that BPA is bad for you at doses orders of magnitude higher than those normally encountered, but that's true of a great many things.)
Expect a lot more: the banana for example that had it's reportedly most tasty variant (Gros Michel) gone extinct in the last century. The variant you are buying today (Cavendish) is under great strain and is likely to go down the same route.
Species have been disappearing long before humans existed, there is nothing new here. We have always developed close cultural ties to what we eat, this made changes expensive. Hard to imagine a world without orange juice, bananas, plum fruit or a tasty tomato. Our ancestors lacked the tools to prevent losses. We have it and this only makes the loss more painful.
When did we all become so codependent? I can grow an orange if I want to.
As far as Im concerned, those folks who make their living growing oranges are responsible for their own outcomes.
I dont need oranges from them. And maybe I dont even want them at all. If the growers have become so incompetent as to not be able to grow them I wont miss them. (or the oranges).
What are you trying to say? Maybe you can grow an orange but I can't, I live in an apartment in New York even if I had access to the ground and room to grow an orange tree the climate is wrong. You might be able to grow your own oranges but can you make your own clothes, build your own furniture, manufacture your own car, fab your own chips, or drill your own oil? We have been codependent since whenever your ancestor stopped being subsistence farmers. This could be centuries ago if you come from an old money family, or weeks ago if you a recent immigrant from the poor rural China or India.
Next it sounds like the growers are actively working on fixing the problem of a plague killing their oranges. Do you think they should be working faster or just that their isn't a problem in the first place? In the end I don't really understand your comment.
Im sorry you cant grow an orange, and Im not sure why you need one.
Also Im saying Im not dependent in any way on citrus farms. If they fail, its their own fault, and someone, in fact anyone could do better.
I guess when I think about it, a corporate citrus farm isnt much more than a hedge fund to me. Their crops dying are just a stock going down. "Oh the oranges are dying!"
They will be replaced. Oranges will be here long after we are gone.
These downvotes are AWESOME - (hellban me I can change my IP in 30 seconds)
SO, the rules of VC and SV dont apply to oranges, I assume my posts were downvoted because oranges are a "precious" resource, even though no other country in the world has problems growing them, so Im being downvoted (and HOPEFULLY hellbanned) for calling out a corrupt, piece of shit US food cartel that is committing ritual suicide in its own crops.
Oh "boo fucking hoo". Fact: No one needs OJ. Fact: The idiots that have pissed on their own crops are complaining about the fact they cant do their jobs. FACT: no one in silicon valley would have the fucking balls to complain when they cant run their own business but they feel sorry for pussy farmers who CANT RUN THEIR BUSINESS.
In fact if these farmers were SV startups they would be taken out and shot by their own parents and pushed into the bay in front of hungry sharks.
Think of this as a practice session. What happens if a blight strikes one of the world's staples? Like rice, or corn? If that happens, you're talking starvation on a global scale, not just disrupting someone's breakfast routine. So acquiring the skills to defend/defeat something like this will be very important to the race.
Way to miss the point of the article, it's about the future of oranges not the future of any orange grower. If you live in one of the few places in the world than can grow an orange you will soon find the very same disease affecting your precious personal orange supply.
Asked if tomatoes containing a gene from a fish would “taste fishy” in a question on a 2004 poll conducted by the Food Policy Institute at Rutgers University that referred to one company’s efforts to forge a frost-resistant tomato with a gene from the winter flounder, fewer than half correctly answered “no.”
Genetic manipulation will define the next major shift in human progress. Computers transformed inanimate things, giving them function and pseudo-life. DNA hacking will transform living things, allowing us to customize ourselves, our pets, our food, our plants, and entirely new forms of life.
43 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 55.3 ms ] threadAlmost all fruits have problems, but solution is limiting non native plagues. Even if it's almost impossible. Like with bananas.
Somewhat related is how they and much other modern agriculture is done - huge fields of exactly the same species only - a monoculture. This too makes it easy for invaders. The fix of multiple species being grown together is often shown to work, but makes the farming and harvesting considerably more complicated and expensive.
Recommended reading is Michael Pollan whose books and articles about food are great http://michaelpollan.com/articles/
It's not necessarily optional. Humans have cultivated the food supply through cross breeding since we have been around and even common foods aren't "natural" anymore. A lot of what we like to eat doesn't like to reproduce itself so we end up reproducing what we like to eat.
Your point was about reproduction. Sexual reproduction doesn't have to be out in the wild - it is offspring combining DNA from parents producing something a little different. It is possible to try and introduce genes to make out in the field reproduction more likely to happen, and also to work out some lab based way of reproduction. Admittedly it is way harder than making cuttings, but does bring benefits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease
Life will find a way, and if it doesn't, science will.
Also chestnuts have yet to make a real comeback since being nearly wiped out in North America[1]. Although it's not a plant, people used to eat passenger pigeons quite a bit in the 19th century and science has yet to bring those back.
Edit: Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World[2], is a great book on the history of the banana for anyone interested. Delves into the good and the bad of the banana and also how it shaped American Foreign Policy and Central/South America.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chestnut
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Banana-Fate-Fruit-Changed-World/dp/045...
...and if I were a producer that discovered how to make a resistant orange by genetic engineering, I'd just do my best to spread the damn disease and wipe out natural oranges together with the competition, making more money to finance more genetic engineering research, hopefully doing more interesting stuff than pest resistance genes, like actually improving the flavor and nutrient profile of grown plants.
No, you'd be thrown in jail for bioterrorism. What you propose is seriously unethical, even if it weren't criminal. Furthermore, your attitude would convince much of the populace that people who promote GMO food are completely insane and unethical.
Throw in some Monsanto-style "you cannot plant the seeds" and you have a real problem.
How many other advances in agriculture are we going to sacrifice to appease these superstitions? (Not to mention similar superstitions of anti-vaccine activists, who are probably the same people in many cases.)
If almost every product was labelled as GMO then after a while consumers would not care. They would be able to make their own choices about "regular" versus GMO. Instead the fight has been to "trust us" and to keep GMO secret.
"Known to the State of California to cause cancer" is everywhere. No one bats an eyelid any more.
The fact that people will become apathetic to GMO labeling eventually doesn't mean that the industry won't fight to avoid the unwanted (and undeserved) stigma for now.
There is that paternalism again. It is not up to the producers of any product to decide if attention is undeserved. Consumers get to decide that. And yes some will be wrong etc. Shining a light and being truthful is the right way of doing things.
The hysteria is not against science - it is against paternalism hiding itself as "trust us because science". Science requires being open and honest.
You do not foster understanding, science, progress or freedom by hiding things.
from the wiki article [1]:
and yet bpa is still used. So when we hear that monsanto pinky-swears their experiments, even when they contaminate neighboring fields, are super duper safe, or orange growers promise up and down that, well, their genetic modifications they introduced to prevent their business from being destroyed are absolutely positively safe (we promise!)... forgive me for being skeptical.Not to mention the freakout about labeling foods; if they weren't knowingly poisoning us, why exactly would corporations be so very afraid of properly labeling foods? Any reasonable adult should have his or her bullshit detector going off when they are told gmo is absolutely safe, but it's the end of the world if we tell people which foods have gmo ingredients so that they can choose what to eat.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A
We know that human health can be damaged by all sorts of different chemicals. That being established, the task at hand is identifying which are harmful (or usually in what quantities do they become harmful).
Meanwhile there is no persuasive evidence that any foods become harmful simple because they have been genetically modified. Completely different.
> if they weren't knowingly poisoning us, why exactly would corporations be so very afraid of properly labeling foods?
Perhaps precisely because of this hysteria surrounding GMO?
For the same reason that measles infections are on the rise? Because the public is largely ignorant and doesn't understand much about Science or genetic engineering and thus is easily influenced by Hollywood and celebrities who in their ignorance push their favorite environmental/medical causes (Jenny McCarthy).
See the wiki article for evidence published in medical journals that bpa harms human beings. There's plenty of evidence to say it should be banned, at bare minimum until long term studies at actual dosing levels have been performed.
Anyway, I agree it's hard to argue with "label the product and let the consumer decide." But I think the case could be made that it plays on people's unscientific views of what is and isn't healthy. As with "organic" or "locally sourced" there's nothing stopping companies that don't use GMOs from putting a "No GMO" label on their food. Some already do.
What was actually said was:
you'll note that does not say "negligible concern" for adults, it says "negligible concern for adverse reproductive effects".And you know what was never studied? General safety for adults under actual dosing as experienced in reality. Further on down the same wiki article, just one of many concerns:
Anyway, I think you nail the exact point I was trying to make: no studies have shown BPA to be dangerous in adults at the levels that are actually encountered in the environment. (There's little doubt that BPA is bad for you at doses orders of magnitude higher than those normally encountered, but that's true of a great many things.)
Because when you label something consumers assume it is bad for them. That's why we don't force companies to label things that aren't actually dangerous. See study from MIT on GMO labels: http://courantblogs.com/capitol-watch/gmo-labels-send-a-mess...
Species have been disappearing long before humans existed, there is nothing new here. We have always developed close cultural ties to what we eat, this made changes expensive. Hard to imagine a world without orange juice, bananas, plum fruit or a tasty tomato. Our ancestors lacked the tools to prevent losses. We have it and this only makes the loss more painful.
As far as Im concerned, those folks who make their living growing oranges are responsible for their own outcomes.
I dont need oranges from them. And maybe I dont even want them at all. If the growers have become so incompetent as to not be able to grow them I wont miss them. (or the oranges).
Next it sounds like the growers are actively working on fixing the problem of a plague killing their oranges. Do you think they should be working faster or just that their isn't a problem in the first place? In the end I don't really understand your comment.
Also Im saying Im not dependent in any way on citrus farms. If they fail, its their own fault, and someone, in fact anyone could do better.
I guess when I think about it, a corporate citrus farm isnt much more than a hedge fund to me. Their crops dying are just a stock going down. "Oh the oranges are dying!"
They will be replaced. Oranges will be here long after we are gone.
SO, the rules of VC and SV dont apply to oranges, I assume my posts were downvoted because oranges are a "precious" resource, even though no other country in the world has problems growing them, so Im being downvoted (and HOPEFULLY hellbanned) for calling out a corrupt, piece of shit US food cartel that is committing ritual suicide in its own crops.
Oh "boo fucking hoo". Fact: No one needs OJ. Fact: The idiots that have pissed on their own crops are complaining about the fact they cant do their jobs. FACT: no one in silicon valley would have the fucking balls to complain when they cant run their own business but they feel sorry for pussy farmers who CANT RUN THEIR BUSINESS.
In fact if these farmers were SV startups they would be taken out and shot by their own parents and pushed into the bay in front of hungry sharks.
The entire worlds production of oranges is falling. And there is absolutely NOTHING the growers can do about it.
> and HOPEFULLY hellbanned
If you are an idiot only about oranges then fine (everyone has their sore spot). But if you are an idiot for other things too then don't come back.
Think of this as a practice session. What happens if a blight strikes one of the world's staples? Like rice, or corn? If that happens, you're talking starvation on a global scale, not just disrupting someone's breakfast routine. So acquiring the skills to defend/defeat something like this will be very important to the race.
Genetic manipulation will define the next major shift in human progress. Computers transformed inanimate things, giving them function and pseudo-life. DNA hacking will transform living things, allowing us to customize ourselves, our pets, our food, our plants, and entirely new forms of life.