Watchhttp://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/02/184189/commentary-where-is-the-science.html
If this column appeared under the headline, “Massive defeat for the anti-science forces,” you would naturally assume I’m talking about some kind of setback for conservative Republicans, right? And you would be completely wrong. The losers in this case are the luddite shock troops of progressivism like Greenpeace. And the winners are the children of the Philippines, thousands of whom will not go blind or die because the anti-science wing of modern liberalism finally is getting some pushback. The Filipino government has finally approved the planting of genetically modified rice that contains vitamin A. “Golden rice,” as the stuff is...
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My one concern about genetically modified crops is economic, not health. These crops are patented and often cannot reproduce. This forces farmers to buy new seeds from a GM food company every year as they cannot grow food from the plants they grew from the original seeds. This makes farmers, and the entire food supply, dependent on the GM food company. And that is a terrible thing.
Deliberately preventing crops from being able to reproduce in order to create a world-wide dependency on companies with "intellectual property" is not acceptable when the world's food supply is on the line.
When top-tier ISPs get into a fight over profits, tens of millions of people lose Internet access. When top-tier GM food providers get into a fight over profits, tens of millions of people starve to death. That's a situation I think we have the right to avoid using the fullest extent of the law.
GM crops should not be infertile. GM genes should not be patentable. In fact, no gene should be patentable. There is already enough profit motivation that we don't need to add to it at the risk of mass starvation.
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They don't HAVE to grow GM crops. They can grow traditional crops and use the seeds all they like. Obviously, farmers who use GM seeds have made an economic decision that it is better for their business, even considering that they can't re-use the seeds. Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head, so what's the problem? If it weren't economically viable for them, they wouldn't do it, and the GM companies would have to close up shop.
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This actually seems like a variation on the meme that there should be no patents on anything (or the extension of that, that there should be no copyright). This idea is not viable. There would be no innovation if innovators knew that their idea would be immediately stolen as soon as they perfect it.
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I confer my comments and opinions to Dan's spot on post.
Though I would add, it gets more ugly than that. GM crops also mutate and destroy non GM crops for miles around. Making those farmer's neighbors that didn't plant GM crops, dependent on GM as well.
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This brief commentary is a microcosm of what the original article is talking about.
First, I am a card carrying, Ph.D. holding Plant Molecular Physiologist. I have been in the field since 1994. I have no reason to trick or pursued you. I am not trying to sell you, the general public a product or service.
GM seeds do not reproduce due to the restrictions placed on how we treat GMO's in the natural environment. We don't want them breeding and spreading or accepting genetic material because that is the best way to stop carryover of genes being introduced into the environment. So called male sterility. Of course there is an economic benefit to Monsanto insuring thier crops don't produce viable seeds, due to the need of farmers to keep buying them every year, but that's now Seeds work.
Even in the best of times, and natural crops, crops are finely engineered. The crossing of two purely bred strains, results in poor performance for thier offspring. The crossing of GMO's would result in a certain amount (25% off the top of my head) that wouldn't carry the GMO gene of interest.
Farmers are used to purchasing seeds every year. Seed stock, and "crops" or seeds from crops are too different genetic animals. Seed isn't that expensive and farmers have choices. They could "buy" the risk of using more pesticides/herbicides or gamble and hope they will not lose entire acres to disease/pest/drought. Or hedge their bets and pay a little more for seeds that are guaranteed to withstand known ailments.
GM crops can't mutate or destroy non-GM crops. Farmers are quite informed of what is going on. If my neighbor JOE grows GM SOY, I know this, and I don't try to grow organic SOY. I probably grow organic Corn or Lettuce. GM crops don't have the ability to spontaeously Mutate. In fact, something known to spontaneously mutate crops is the SUN. It also spontaneously mutates your skin cells.
SO WHAT'S NEXT? LET'S CAMPAIGN TO BAN THE SUN!
Don't be so naive. I don't intend to insult your intelligence, but if you put yourself out there, I will.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/01/03/mark_lynas_environmentalist_who_opposed_gmos_admits_he_was_wrong.html?wpisrc=most_viral
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donjumpsuit says
Wow, Monsanto found the cure for cancer!!! How long before we get this Depurination-proof technology over to humans?
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thunderlips11 says
Yeah, I don't get how DNA could be made mutation proof. Don perhaps you could shed more light on this.
CaptainShuddup says
I have heard similar stories as well. Is there any evidence of this happening? I think I saw in a documentary a farmer who was being sued into bankruptcy by Monsanto(?) because he was "using" patented GMO genes that ended up in his crops. I looked around a bit on Google but could not find an actual reference to this.
donjumpsuit says
Why should you be restricted in what you choose to grow because Joe chose to grow GM soy? If there is no danger in DNA drift from Joe's field to yours why would it matter what you grow?
CaptainShuddup says
Yeah, me too.
I am much more worried about the food supply depending on the good graces, ethics and morality of big agribusiness than I am worried about GM crops in general.
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So,
In regards to the spontaneous mutation, without going into it with scientific speak that would make your head explode, over 60% of the DNA in a typical crop (plant) genome is as a result of something called transposons. These are ancient elements that have been stolen from viruses that allow for some degree of mutation each time a plant reproduces to improve it's fitness for the environment.
Biology, GM, or synthetic biology uses these tools to place sequences of known proteins into locations that have the greatest reward, and produce the least unwanted effects. Because of this, 'purists' have targeted this tool and misrepresent it as having the ability to go around mutating things willy nilly.
Honestly, most of this horseshit comes from movies and science fiction. They think that mutation results in grand effects like "Little Shop of Horrors"
Realistically, 99.9% of mutations a deleterious to the success of future generations and make the crop unfit for reproduction. Also most GM components are something that is so designer, that they wouldn't benefit a wild plant, or alternate crop. In some cases, people are worried about antibiotics or chemicals being produced in other plants, not the GM ones, but this is also so remote, that God himself would have to come down with a lightning bolt before such a circumstance would be statistically possible.
That Monsanto case, where the farmer was suing Monsanto, is because farmers can purchase after market seeds (from China or other sources) that have patents on specific GM functions. In some weird set of circumstances, a farmer got caught using crops without the licence. (say for round-up ready). Then he claimed it was crop transfer, which was a lie. He was buying pirated seeds and someone or entity whistleblew him.
Life is tough. If your neighbor his growing GM corn, and you want to grow organic corn, it's probably not going to work out. Farmers deal with this all the time. Some farmers plant different varietys of corn, and those who do, know that you have to space them 300 to 700 feet away from each other. Is that far away from a neighbors farm? I don't know. There is freak situations, dust storms and such. It is so easy to get a couple of pollen grains to make a test positive. Just look at the horse meat scandal. It could be true that 99.8% of all Kernels are not effected, but this is a 0.2% world. It's not like if you are a Corn farmer, you do that exclusively and nothing else. Your argument is valid. IF the price of Soy is 10X what it is for other crops, you would be pissed as an organic farmer knowing you couldn't capitalize the market because all your neighbors are growing GM Soy. However, for the most part, most farmers grow crops in a rotation, based on soil health, and other factors, so it's not a big deal, just as long as you know.
This blog (in my opinion) is mostly about housing. Housing has turned into a tremendous problem. For our society, you never ever ever ever have to worry about where you are going to get your next meal. Our food supply has never been greater and more robust. Most of our agribusiness is dedicated to producing corn flakes and bread for pennies.
Once you get out there and start to sow some seeds, I bet you would have a different opinion on their morality and ethics. It's not a high margin business like banking or the pharmaceutical industry. You should know that feeding America is a noble task, this task really isn't about keeping the 1%'s floating in their yachts.
Aim your guns elsewhere.
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leo707 says
That's where I saw it as well. How ever, as we all very well know that in this day and age. A company like Masanto with their abyssal pockets, coupled with the new internet laws that are Corporation friendly, can send cease and desist orders to every web site that makes reference to it.
Just try to Google for alternate or non traditional Cancer treatments. The only pages you'll find are chocked for of people selling supplements or forums where there is so much conflicting information, that no one in their right mind would draw a conclusion based on the content on those pages.
Where as any websites, blogs or studies dedicated to alternate treatments are curiously missing. The most complete information you can find on Cancer research on the internet is pro traditional expensive treatments.
From Webmd chocked full of big pharma ads.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to depend on alternate treatment information. But it would be nice if it was there to be read and researched so people could draw their own conclusions.
I'd like to see real numbers of survival rates of people that underwent traditional treatment against the survival rate of non traditional. Those studies are missing, and it's suspect.
When you consider, there's not a topic known to man, that there is not either a website or porn dedicated to it.
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The key to remember here is that GM crops in many ways were responsible for dramatically increasing the food supply not only in the US, but also in many third world countries and thus eradicating hunger from 10's of millions of people.
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I suppose one can argue the pros and cons of GMOs.
But not the right to know whether you are eating them or not.
And certainly not the fact that Monsanto is a hideously immoral, malign, corporation.
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Maybe you should. The original claim was that the toxins were supposed to be destroyed in the gut. But apparently that isn't the case. Moving forward, I'm not sure what implications this has in the grand scheme of things, but I wouldn't stop eating organic just yet, as much as one can possibly do, anyway.
One risk of GM foods is the possibility of antibiotic genes transferring. It hasn't been shown to happen as yet, but it's certainly plausible, if not probable.
As it is, the world is having a hard time with drug resistant antibiotics
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=35681&Cr=ILLNESS&Cr1=#.UTUpBXy93fY
GM food toxins found in the blood of 93% of unborn babies. The claim was that such toxins would be destroyed in the gut. If the antibiotic gene inserted into most GM crops were to transfer, it could create antibiotic-resistant diseases. This is not completely improbable, as a significant part of human DNA is actually viral DNA
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1388888/GM-food-toxins-blood-93-unborn-babies.html
Dan8267 says
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MMR says
That's an article about antibiotics used to treat people with illnesses. It has nothing to do with GM food.
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MMR says
I'll admit that, at first, this sounded pretty serious, so I decided to do my own reading on it. After doing some research, I discovered that, like all your other hysterical wailing about this and that, it's just patent nonsense.
All kinds of things were wrong with that study. First of all, finding Bt proteins in humans wasn't even the point of the study. They were looking for a way to track whether pesticides/herbicides like Roundup are getting to fetuses. Second, Bt proteins are not harmful to humans; they are only harmful to certain insects, so why does it matter if they find traces of it in people? It's stupid to even call this stuff a "toxin", as it is not toxic to humans in the least. Third, they had no way of knowing if the Bt even came from GM food. Bt has been sprayed on crops for a long time, even by so-called organic farmers. Fourth, all that notwithstanding, their methodology was fatally flawed. They used the wrong test to identify the Bt. They actually claimed to find amounts of Bt SMALLER than the minimum amount the test they used is able to detect. That's not right.
Start by reading this article:
http://soursaltybittersweet.com/content/organic-lies-about-bt-sweet-corn
Then read this, which shows in detail the flaws in the study, and in the conclusions drawn by the media:
http://www.biofortified.org/2011/04/nonsense/
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(continued due to post size restrictions):
Another rebuttal to the study:
http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/consumerinformation/gmfoods/fsanzresponsetostudy5185.cfm
Then read this, debunking the claims of Bt harm:
http://academicsreview.org/reviewed-content/genetic-roulette/section-3/3-4-bt-in-crops-and-bacteria/
Then read this:
http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/24d-captan/bt-ext.html
And here's Vegans for a rational look at transgenic technology:
http://www.vegangmo.com/?p=132
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Most GM food is soaked with Roundup while it is grown. It is engineered not to die while everything around it does. Technology makes weeding easy. But does it make healthy food? A quick look at Wikipedia: On two occasions, the United States EPA has caught scientists deliberately falsifying test results at research laboratories hired by Monsanto to study glyphosate.[117] The first incident involved Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT). The United States Justice Department closed the laboratory in 1978, and its leadership was found guilty in 1983 of charges of falsifying statements, falsifying scientific data submitted to the government, and mail fraud.[118] In 1991, Don Craven, the owner of Craven Laboratories and three employees were indicted on 20 felony counts. Craven, along with fourteen employees were found guilty of similar crimes.[119]In a 2001, three groups of pregnant rats were fed, respectively, a regular diet with clean water, a regular diet with 0.2 ml glyphosate/ml drinking water; and a regular diet with 0.4 ml glyphosate/ml drinking water. Glyphosate induces a variety of functional abnormalities in fetuses and pregnant rats.[70] Also in recent mammalian research, glyphosate has been found to interfere with an enzyme involved testosterone production in mouse cell culture.[63] A study by the Seralini lab published in 2005 found that glyphosate interferes with aromatase, an estrogen biosynthesis enzyme, in cultures of human placental cells and that the Roundup formulation of glyphosate had stronger such activity.[64] A follow up study by the Seralini lab, published in 2009, showed similar results in human liver cells.[65] A study on rats published in 2010 found that administering Roundup Transorb orally to prepubescent rats at a dose of 0.25 mL/100 g of body weight, once a day for 30 days, reduced testosterone production and affected testicle morphology, but did not affect levels of estradiol and corticosterone.[66]
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Sure hope this stuff is good for you: Global Glyphosate Market to Reach 1.35 Million Metric Tons by 2017, According to a New Report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc. http://www.prweb.com/releases/glyphosate_agrochemical/technical_glyphosate/prweb8857231.htm
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Lord have mercy.
Glyphosphate is one of the safest herbicides known to man.
It is an analog of an amino acid. When it contacts soil it breaks down, when sunlight hits it, it breaks down and inactivates. Half-lifes typically range from 3 days to 2 weeks.
Other herbicides used in the past NEVER breakdown. Get into our water table, and poison fields for decades. They also tend to destroy any sort of aquatic life, but NOT Glyphosphate.
These studies, where they feed rats pounds of glyphosphate a day are ridiculous. If I ate the same amount of sugar or salt that they feed the rat glyphosphate a day, I can sure tell you that I would have severe health effects.
Glyphosphate only effects actively growing plants, which is another plus. It's not agent orange. It's not going to kill something that is robust and mature. It only targets (Grasses and weeds). Not every plant, some have natural defenses.
I can explain this 100 different ways in scientific speak, but you want to read studies that are flawed and unrealistic. Glyphosphate is as natural as it gets. It is almost an "organic" herbicide, or "natural" as it is.
The reason Monsanto has it, and produces it, is because they isolated and patented the gene that defeats it. So they can place that gene in all the crops that are related to weeds ( crops such as corn, rice, canola, cotton, sugarbeets, alpha)
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Great thread, very interesting. I am all for great crop yields to help feed the poor but from what I have read it does not always work out that way with GMO seeds. Farmers in India have been offing themselves over promises of greater crop yield that failed to materialize.
http://www.naturalnews.com/032422_GM_crops_suicide.html/crops.
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I suppose it depends on what your definition os "saving lives", is
That and I guess you'd have to consider corn and soy as "food", but not me, no thanks. I avoid that crap like the plague, and feel immensely healthier because of it.
Enjoy your mass helpings of soy, corn, and grains,,,,,ill stick to food myself
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As much as it surprises me to agree with Homeboy about something, I think he's right not to worry about GM crops promoting antibiotic resistance. If you look at the data, antibiotic resistant bacteria occur primarily in hospitals:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/03/05/173526084/infections-with-nightmare-bacteria-are-on-the-rise-in-u-s-hospitals
One reason is because hospital ICUs seem designed to spread infection, which is very lucrative for the hospital corporations:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-american-health-care-killed-my-father/307617/?single_page=true
That isn't a conspiracy theory per se, it isn't some star chamber cabal deciding to kill people. It's rather the predictable result of the relevant corporate machines and the people inside them following their own individual self-interest. Read Noam Chomsky to understand the difference; some people call him a conspiracy theorist, but he isn't.
BTW, most antibiotics in America are used in animals, i.e. the mass production of meat and dairy, so if you want to avoid antibiotics then avoid those products. Look for organic milk made without antibiotics etc. An issue with rBST is, although it might not directly cause problems, it tends to increase the cows' risk of bacterial infection, which gets treated with more antibiotics.