We’re Scientists, Moms, And We Avoid Non-GMO Products
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1. Some GMO has a plant produce extra chemicals, specifically, pesticides
2. There is a unknown side to GMO, perhaps it can lead to super species that we can never get rid of in the future and will destroy bio diversity.
(1) are banned in the EU for human consumption, a reasonable choice I think until we have more data.
(2) is a much lower risk than most would thing. But it is one of those things where the naive/amateur answer is far from reality, and that naive answer is scary. (Like nuclear, or more rules vs more responsibility.)
When done responsibly, GMOs are fine. And even necessary if we want to feed 8 billion people and more in the future.
But an article that fails to mention valid (remember the eu) downsides, and discuss the tradeoff, will have a polarizing effect: Those pro GMO will think score and think anti GMO is stupid. But anti GMO will see their biggest concerns not mentioned, and will declare fail and conclude their position is well grounded.
The eu judgement is not the result of a public scare, I don't think.
Also, I cannot find anything but sensationalist articles on this pesticide thing I referenced. It allows mon810 which falls under this definition. It just regulates all GMOs and disallows them by default.
Edit: missed an e
Several GMO crop strains are specifically designed to produce pesticides or fungicides themselves, which offers more powerful effects and saves the effort of applying those chemicals to the growing plants. This is generally valuable for crop yields and profit margins, but it's appreciably different from external application.
The main concern is that producing these pesticides/herbicides inside the plant may include the chemical inside the parts we consume - you can't just stop application prior to harvest or wash off the surface before consumption. There's a lot of conflicting data here: the GMO designers have generally concluded that the chemicals are only produced in leaves/stalks and not the edible parts, but other studies have suggested that the chemicals might be getting passed on at levels which could be relevant to pregnant mothers.
1) That the pesticides/fungicides are bad for humans. You haven't shown that. Some fungi are bad for humans, so it might be better to eat something with a fungicide but no fungus than to eat it with a fungus
2) You're assuming that applied pesticides/fungicides can just be washed off. But it's also possible that the plants absorb them and that the man-made ones are worse than the genetically engineered ones.
For example, if those pesticides result in a drastic reduction of the populations of pollinating insects this may lead to ecological changes beyond the intended crops. It's not hard to imagine other things susceptible to fungicides and pesticides that might be beneficial but can get caught in the crossfire and would suffer, especially from spill-over.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/farmers-say-gmo-c...
1) Lots of pesticides, including some of those we're addressing, are known to be bad for humans. Without going into biochemistry, the GMO-designer argument here isn't "it's safe" but "it isn't produced in the edible part of the crop". I'm content to say take the word of the people selling a pesticide-producing-crop if they say the pesticide is bad to eat.
2) This is a way bigger and harder question. If 'natural' pesticides are being pitted against indiscriminate use of neonicotinoids, we should probably choose the natural/GMO options and not kill all the bees. And I realize that some pesticide/crop combinations absolutely can't be cleaned up by washing - broccoli comes to mind as particularly hard to clean. I only meant to raise the question of dose/harm in pesticidal GMOs, not assert that they're always worse than external application.
My concern was with several cultivars that specifically produce non-mammal-safe pesticides, but are intended to produce them only (or primarily) in non-edible parts of the plant. There are lots of pesticides we absolutely shouldn't eat, and there's been some controversy over whether specific strains (of corn, largely) keep them at safe levels in the edible components of the crop.
I don't mean to imply general opposition to pesticides, just very specific combinations of pesticide/crop/cultivar.
Which crops and cultivars are these? Could you name or link to some examples?
Wikipedia seems to list only crops which produce Bt-toxin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_crops#Pes...
Any risks in GMO could also arise naturally via evolution.
If evolution could produce super plants, then it would have done so.
It's a slower process than direct genetic manipulation, sure, but "evolutionary" implies thousands or even millions of years when the reality is closer to decades.
So agreed, the evolutionary scale isn't applicable here, but it's still worth noting that GMOs represent a substantial acceleration from the directed-breeding scale.
Blanket fear of "GMO crops" is obviously foolish, because the relevant question is "what genes does it have?" rather than "how did the genes get there?" But that doesn't rule out sensible concern about the higher rate of change on GMOs, and the ability to transfer potentially-dangerous genes wholesale.
The basic safety measure of natural selection and human cultivation is the rate of change. If a cultivar makes some people somewhat sick, it won't catch on or become universal, and it won't be intensified to something lethal. The real danger of GMOs is that they suspend that precaution - they can produce abrupt changes in an entire national crop. So the risks aren't different, but they might not be caught until they've done far more harm.
Except that the bans in the EU aren't based on scientific data, and are thus not valid in a scientific discussion.
> (1) are banned in the EU for human consumption, a reasonable choice I think until we have more data.
Seems very reasonable. How much data is enough? How will we know when we've got so much data that we can start just ignoring those who call for more study as unreasonable? When they're convinced, perhaps?
> (2) is a much lower risk than most would thing. But it is one of those things where the naive/amateur answer is far from reality, and that naive answer is scary. (Like nuclear, or more rules vs more responsibility.)
Seems reasonable. How do you propose to address these unknowns? And are you aware that non-GMO plants can product dangerous super species we can never get rid of? Purple loosestrife comes to mind.
Having listened to your concerns and seriously pondered them, all I see is fear. Unbounded fear. Nothing in here leads me to think these fears will be calmed by study. The nature of science is that there's always another unknown to point to, and GMOs are seen by many as inherently scary - unlike safe, cuddly natural plants, obviously.
What I see is people who have a fundamentally emotional position and think that study will validate them. They will continue to want more study until their fears are validated, and every result that fails to do so only feeds their fears.
Double blind study spanning over 100 years.
Modern dwarf wheat strains, for instance, date from the 70s or so.
Is it because you think "enough" data would take longer to gather? Or, as I am assuming is the case, you think it would take less time but are unable to articulate it.
Personally I think 100 years is more than enough, and for most crops I would take 25 years of a double blind as great data.
Also, 100 years effectively makes it "untestable" within a human time-frame. You really think any company is going to spend money to continually monitor and administer a large-scale double-blind test of a product before being allowed to sell it? Even 10 years is ridiculous at this point for drug-products, and we already cry-foul about the cost that "big-pharma" is charging as if it costs nothing to prove that they are safe to the levels that we demand through the FDA.
Also, 100 years is just an answer to effectively shut down all GMO products. Permanently, for 100 years. That is not a solution, it's fear-mongering.
The world isn't responsible for maintaining your business model. If you can't be profitable without slavery, if you're forced to pay taxes, without pervasive monitoring of all human communication, or without walling off the state of Nevada, you can't be profitable.
> Even 10 years is ridiculous at this point for drug-products, and we already cry-foul about the cost that "big-pharma" is charging as if it costs nothing to prove that they are safe to the levels that we demand through the FDA.
The prices of drugs have little or nothing to do with R&D or testing.
Now you're just trolling..
Honestly, there is a tiny but real risk however the benefit for upper middle class westerners is basically non existent. Eventually, someone is going to make a major mistake that harms millions.
PS: It's really not about existing GMO, it's the next change someone makes. IMO, labeling GMO by most recent year would make me feel better. After 10 years it's far more likely to be safe than eating the first major batch.
And it seems to me that we're more likely to see that black swan event when we're just rolling the dice as we used to, compared to today's much more directed and precise manipulations.
The entire argument frustrates me, because the two sides appear to be "GMOs are safe!" and "GMOs are inherently harmful!" I can't take either position, I want a way to assert "GMOs represent rapid and potent change with limited oversight, regulation, and trial periods!"
There's no reason at all to oppose GMOs inherently. If you use CRISPR to turn one strain of well-established corn into another strain of established corn, no one is going to get hurt. But that's not what's happening; the point of concern is that these changes are going into national consumption with minimal testing.
GMO-by-year makes more sense to me than any other position going, and yet somehow your comment is the first time I've seen it proposed.
I think publicly defined testing protocols could go a long way to assuage anti-GMO fears, but my main concern is monopolization of the food supply and an overuse of monocultures.
That is where the disagreement lies. It is not clear to everyone that all current and future GMOs are safe. To patronize and label skeptics as unscientific is intellectually dishonest and a form of orwellian groupthink. There are plenty of people in the industry that claim that GMOs are not very well tested. There is no scientific reason to believe that a dangerous GMO could not be inadvertently created. A degenerate case would be to insert pufferfish toxin genes into a tomato. Obviously no one would do that intentionally, but a much more subtle issue could be carried over in a more seemingly benign gene transfer. To claim that we understand everything that genes do is a utter lie. They are orders of magnitude more complex than software, and yet we introduce bugs into software all the time.
There is also lot of money and political interest behind making GMO critics look bad. There is nothing unscientific about questioning the safety of a complex engineered product that we ingest. Just look at the recent Soylent fiasco, which is a much simpler to understand product than GMOs.
We are not talking about flat earth or reptilian overlords here. This is a totally legitimate thing to question, and decide to opt-out on until there is more time and data available.
There is excellent reason to be skeptical of everything here. GMOs are not special. Given that we know the worst has occurred with non-GMOs, one would expect intense skepticism of non-GMO breeding.
How much data would satisfy you?
And of course I won't claim they're the same thing. They're two different ways to the same goal, though.
How much time and data would convince you? You say you want to opt out until there is more. How much more?
IMO anti-GMO advocates should be pushing for more specific strain/cultivar labels on food, not just a useless label that says "produced with genetic engineering." Then pro-GMO, tentatively accepting, and anti-GMO groups can all be satisfied.
I think you're right that the intended purpose of generic GMO labels is to muddy the issue and spread uncertainty, which is exactly what they do. I am arguing that this strategy is counterproductive in the long-term, both to the anti-GMO cause and to society's health and informational well-being.
What they don't do is continue adding on the risks from the process of selective breeding itself. I don't expect that direct genetic engineering is clean, simple, and interaction-free. I just expect that it has a somewhat easier time targeting specific changes than barnyard breeding by light of Uranium.
It is also no true that it tells you very very little. It tells you that there are transgenic modifications to the product's genes. That's not "very very little".
In anecdotal terms, suppose I'm mildly allergic to a particular cultivar of apples, but some apples are okay. Saying that a product contains apples doesn't help me know whether it's safe for me to eat. This hypothetically allergic me would need to know that it contains red delicious apples, or granny smith apples.
Some GMOs simply add vitamins. Those are likely to be safer than GMOs that increase herbicidal resistance, which are in turn likely to be safer than GMOs that introduce pesticides. If a subset of the population is sensitive to Bt toxin, they need to know what kind of GMO is in a product, not just that something has GMO (as Bt, according to other comments in the thread, can be used even on organic-labeled foods).
Are you saying there are genetic modifications that do _absolutely nothing_ but add vitamins to food? I not an expert, but that's not my understanding of how DNA works.
Lots of genes only seem to do one thing. HERC2 seems to only affect eye color. If you're asking if it's possible that maybe we don't have a 100% perfect understanding of genetics, then of course it's possible. It's always possible there's something we don't know. Science does not deal in perfect certainties.
Would I be correct is following your logic to the implication that there's a significant possibility for effects we didn't anticipate and don't understand in genetic engineering? Of course that's possible. That's why GMOs are tested.
Is it possible that there's some obscure, subtle side-effect we won't notice for a long time to come? Yes. Is it likely? As near as we can tell, no. Can this doubt ever be fully assuaged by science? Not reasonably on anything more complex than the simplest of yeasts.
Is this a special threat, uniquely applicable only to GMOs? No. The same potential is present - even greater, due to number of mutations - in selective breeding.
How do you counter the very obvious profit motive here? "Gee Beta Carotene I Understand That's Good For Your Health, I'll Pay A Premium For That". How do you prevent that profit motive from minimizing unprofitable research into long-term health impacts? Face it, there will NEVER be a money motive to really figure this stuff out, that's why we're only finding out about BPAs now: there's just zero money in doing anything but the minimum due-diligence, as forced on you by the FDA, which is already bought out anyway!
It's like the nuke argument. Sure GMOs are potentially fantastic but as a race, or at least this capitalist version of a race, humans seem to be incapable of managing technology this fearsome.
These additions are a concern to the gmo free vitamin consumers. Both https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/05/03/vitamins-n... and http://www.non-gmoreport.com/articles/oct08/vitamins_gmo_cha... make this claim - both sides. I'll accept it as true.
In your opinion, who are the "reasonable middle" in the questions of (1) is evolution true, (2) are vaccines safe and (3) is climate change true? And are they small?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-entine/post_8915_b_6572130...
That article in no way addresses my point, and I'm not in the camp who believes that GMO's are currently unsafe. If you've been reading the comment chain, you'd be aware that the discussion is about the largely unregulated nature of the beast, not to mention economic implications.
As for a consensus on AGW, IIRC wasn't that more like 97%? I mean, unless you pad out the numbers by looking at people outside of the relevant fields of course.
One thing for certain is that something is causing a marked increase in certain conditions, which our best science ostensibly tells us is as safe as GMOs.
Another shortcoming of testing is that GMOs tend to be tested individually. This tells us nothing about how they may interact or how the "total body burden" of new and foreign proteins might affect us as a higher percentage of our food moves towards GMOs.
I get that all we have is our best science. But, I also find nothing unreasonable about being cautious in choosing what to consume. There is too much belittling of people who elect caution, especially given the history of presumed safe products that turned out to be anything but safe, and--at times--disasterously so.
I applaud caution, but selective caution paired with willful blindness looks like madness.
A convenient, though not entirely accurate dismissal.
Perhaps it's the scale of the usage combined with the financial incentive to declare safety, further combined with the fight to ensure that people are uninformed with regard to what they are ingesting. Where else is it acceptable to deny people information they desire to make their own choice? And, what else is more sensitive and personal than what we choose to consume?
Imagine for a moment that your own review led you to believe the science was still out on GMOs. Then, you might imagine the desire to know.
And, all of this is then combined with a decidedly checkered past in declaring safety through science.
It's no coincidence that all of your arguments could have equally been applied to, say, thalidomide.
Painting anyone who holds a different viewpoint as willfully blind and mad doesn't present you as some sort of enlightened pro-science champion. In fact, the scientific process itself is one of continuous discovery. Some people may prefer to choose whether and when to volunteer their bodies for such discovery.
Reasonable people can disagree here. You'd make a more effective advocate with that understanding.
I don't think "Contains GMOs" is a useful information to provide to consumers. I think it tells them too little to allow for proper decision-making and serves only to fuel fears. It means that something, somewhere, in the package was at some point modified. It says nothing about what was modified, what the modification was, or what the consequences of it are.
I think it's willfully blind to apply one safety standard to GMOs and a wildly different one to crude barnyard breeding with all the radioactive and chemical mutagens a scientist can find. That barnyard breeding has quite a history of producing unintended consequences.
Reasonable people can reasonably differ. I have found this is a subject where being reasonable serves primarily to inflame fears. Suddenly people are painting you with moral brushes made of horrifying birth defects.
The idea of a food chain dates from the 8th century, though. DDT wasn't used in agriculture until the 1940s.
Because we have people doing profoundly unnatural things right now like growing rice in Texas, and we cannot know the full extent of the downstream effects of that either.
I'm hesitant about how we're using GMOs, without being opposed to the basic principle of genetic modification. I'm also vehemently opposed to growing rice in Texas and cotton in Arizona; we know those things are stupid with far greater certainty than we know about GMOs.
For me, this isn't about fear of the unknown. This is about a history of prioritizing short-term gains in agriculture over long-term sustainability. It covers everything from nitrogen fertilizers to neonicotinoids to water-rights law. GMOs concern me as they're currently used in the US; the abuse of the Ogallala Aquifewr horrifies me on a much deeper level.
A lot of bad things human do are know to be bad. Is just that humans refuse to accept it.
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...
And we put down so much DDT that people around my age never had to deal with bed bugs till now.
I'm not advocating for spraying DDT again, I am suggesting that the history and use of DDT far more interesting than can be covered in a string of HN comments!
There's a book [1] about the history of DDT that does a great job of establishing a historical context for its use. I agree that we can't simply un-ban it, but our approach to disease prevention/control has come such a long way since prohibiting it that I can't help but wonder if we could deploy it safely now.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/DDT-American-Century-Environmental-En...
We used intensive farming until it ruined our soils. Then we used rotation farming with heavy irrigation until it collided with a drought. We used DDT until it killed the eagles and condors. We used nitrogen fertilizers until they triggered algae blooms and ruined our waterways. I see no particular reason to expect a different pattern; we keep putting things into widespread usage before their harms are known.
I'm not even sure I'm opposed to this; most of these crises have been mitigated and most of the changes have been reactive, to accommodate a population that grew regardless of agriculture. I'm just skeptical of claims that this time, rushing things into national use without long-term evaluation won't cause any harm.
That sort of competition hasn't gone away. The world of people capable of using CRISPR isn't going all agree to a cartel-type pact to never do certain things. There's too many people and the bar is too low.
How much data do we have? In special, how much data not compiled that a party that would have monetary gains attached to an specific result?
Because, for the specific case of Monsanto varieties, I've never seen any that fits the later requirement. If some exist, the onus of making the public aware should be theirs.
Really, GMO crops were legalized in my country by the most undemocratic procedure we could have at the time. If something similar happened today, we'd probably see politicians losing their job outside of the electoral cycle because of that (and probably some journalists too). But nowadays it's done, and nobody cares, because (1) was mostly a failure anyway. But I don't trust anything anymore on that area unless there's some clear and unbiased validation.
> How much data do we have?
Say we have X. Do we need 2X then? Because that's a request that never ends.
My problem is that this article is polarizing the discussion.
By leaving out the core of anti GMO concerns it lets the pro GMO people feel justified in their position. But the other side will not see their concerns addressed, and will discard the article as stupid, and missing the point, feeling equally justified in their position.
To (1) actually the eu merely regulates GMOs, and by default they are not allowed. Today 51 GMO products are allowed, including 1 that has a herbicide (mon810). I would hope that the strictness of checking and data would depend on a case by case basis.
(2) for me is not a concern. In the wild GMOs will not do better than non GMOs, probably even worse, because the traits added by GMO do cost the plant. It is not like we can create zombie maize. But of course, we do need to apply caution. Think about Australia where foreign plants do become pests pushing existing plants out of the ecosystem.
Listening, engaging, and taking these fears seriously does not result in reasoned debate. It results in pushing people ever-further into fear as every attempt to engage becomes further proof of evil.
Are you saying you've never changed your mind after ruminating over time about information you've received?
When I first heard of GMOs, especially since my information/propaganda channels inexorably linked GMOs with Monsanto's controversial business practices, I was lead to distrust GMOs. A few years later, I read a few articles about GMOs in popular magazines. It turned out that I had some basic misconceptions that are extremely common. The most important being that traditional breeding is far more fraught with uncertainty. The second misconception is that GMO practitioners are just tinkering around; where in reality genetic modification is narrowly targeted and predictable. The outcome is to increase food safety; fewer pesticides are used, causing less damage to waterways and ecosystems. Less food is wasted, meaning more is available for consumption.
What didn't work was overt ridicule of my ignorant position. Several opportunities to digest non-confrontational information were required.
What I've found is that when you use reason and evidence to assuage the particular concerns (certainty, safety, pesticide use), they are generally replaced by others. Distrust of Monsanto, agricultural monoculture, IP law, and so on. What do you think happens when you address them all? Show safety studies, bring up golden rice, and so on?
What you don't get is large masses of people changing their minds. What you do get is people suddenly deeply uncomfortable with the entire conversation, because their fig leaves are gone but their emotions haven't changed. Then someone says that you sound just like those people who work for Monsanto - which has happened to me today on HN.
Yes, I'm a cynical bastard.
Minds change (slowly), yours included.
Politics changes when new ideas become old ones. Not when someone politely opines that it's maybe possible that GMOs aren't literally evil. It's possible that my attempts on the subject have all been ill luck and/or poor execution to run into uniformly hostile responses, but I clearly have some doubts.
I've tried listening to people, taking them seriously, addressing their concerns calmly and rationally. I've found it a reliable way of making people very angry.
Moreover somewhat thinking/reasonable people, who are cautiously not against GMO, and then hear such arguments from the anti side, will wonder why the pro side ignores them and maybe switch.
"engage with people's concerns surrounding GMOs, the result is only more concerns"
So propaganda it is then?
Life is tradeoffs. Please show us the tradeoffs, weigh in the counters, those are a signs of healthy opinions grounded in reason.
Anything else shows me it is an opinion based on feelings, perhaps I can gain some knowledge from it, but overall it is best to ignore it.
* Engage with people's fears, expending time and money and energy. Validate that there's something to be afraid of, because nobody would investigate it otherwise. People come up with different fig leaves for their fears, the goalposts move, and people stay roughly as afraid as before.
* Don't engage. People stay as afraid as before for the same reasons and scarce resource are invested in gainful efforts and research.
In theory there's a hypothetical third option where engaging respectfully with people's fears and doing appropriate research soothes fears and everyone is happy. I don't think that's actually available. Every time I've seen an attempt to do this, it's actually functioned as the first option above. You get nice articles like this one that convince few: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
You're very right, life is tradeoffs. I think expending effort to try to reason people away from unreasoning fear is not a wise tradeoff. Do you ever wonder why most scientists don't engage with astrologers, creationists, or flat-earthers? Do you think it's maybe because the astrologers, creationists, or flat-earthers are right?
My first part on trying to answer that is, you acknowledge the human/emotional side of it, and discuss it.
"What you don't get is large masses of people changing their minds." (from your other comment)
No but what does? Propaganda? Silence? Unfortunately both easily used by the "other" side. I think only honesty works and let people figure it out. If ultimately that means we will not proceed on GMO, a shame in my opinion, but so be it.
"I don't think that's actually available"
You might be right, ...
However, I do think there is a second thing we can use. Show people the difference between knowledge and belief. Between opinions based on feelings and opinions based on knowledge. A strong proxy for belief/feelings not knowing or discussing tradeoffs.
"sound just like those people who work for Monsanto - which has happened to me today on HN." (also other comment)
lol, don't we ;) . Luckily the "other" side usually grossly exaggerate their points.
But you are right, ultimately people still have their fears and just grab other fig leaves.
Relying on the distinction between knowledge and belief is unfortunately much more difficult than it sounds. To a person approaching a subject in total ignorance, there is no good way to determine truth from well-written falsehoods. People tend to use their emotions as a proxy in the absence of any reliable knowledge.
There are small groups like rationalists who attempt otherwise, but they tend to be found taking modafinil and reading the Sequences instead of trying to convince a worried organic-foodie.
We have many areas in this life where this applies: god/politics/health/climate change/vaccinations/gmo and more. And almost everybody is searching.
Instead of rebutting people, ask them where knowledge comes from, explain them the difference between belief/correctness/reasons. And the difference between opinions based on feelings or based on reasons, and how to spot the differences, e.g. do you know tradeoffs. Ask them how they feel about people with different opinions on the subject.
But people do think. And it might surprise you who will ask you for more information. Worst case you lost a few minutes. Even if they don't change their mind, they do become slightly more "liberal".
Anecdotal, but I have been surprised quite a bit lately ;) the whole trump thing has stirred things up, even here in Europe.
We don't have to make people rationalists or skeptics. But just 10% in that direction would be nice. Perhaps most surprising is how little, or how badly, people have thought about knowledge vs belief.
I think we should all be free to eat whatever the hell we want. I think we should all have food that is maximally labeled with information about all strains of all plants and animals that go into them.
I don't want to force the worried organic foodies to eat GMOs. I want them to return the favor, but they seem hellbent on forcing me to live like them for reasons of fear. That same fear, plus some personal experience, leads me to think they're not really people who can be reasoned with.
That's pretty much the definition of politics. I don't see any future in trying to stop people from doing that.
Yes, you're right. This is pure politics, with a veneer of concern for science. Much like AGW or anti-vaxxers.
>They will continue to want more study until their fears are validated, and every result that fails to do so only feeds their fears.
;)
see ::: ''Stop “Gene Spills” Before They Happen'' https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602633/stop-gene-spills-b...
from the link:
"There’s already a precedent for using patents to limit the spread of gene-drive technology. In September, Monsanto purchased a license to CRISPR patents from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in order to genetically engineer new plants. But that license came with an extraordinary proviso: Monsanto was “prohibited” from developing a gene drive. The Broad Institute noted, in a statement explaining the restrictions, that gene drives have “the potential to disrupt ecosystems.”
Esvelt first worked out the idea for a CRISPR gene drive in 2014 and filed his patent. He did his work mostly on paper. But his fears of risky lab work were realized a few months later when a lab in California arrived at the idea independently and used it to turn black fruit flies yellow, implementing less than perfect safety controls.
What if one of the flies had escaped? “My nightmare is a wave of yellow flies spreading across the country,” says Esvelt. He imagines a corresponding wave of negative media coverage and loss of trust in scientists. "
There is more to the issue than concerns over the direct health effects of GMO food. This is a club that is used to intimidate and marginalize GMO detractors by insinuating that health is the only issue.
Do you consider yourself an informed computer user? Do you prefer to use open source software or hardware for ideological or practical reasons, when it is functionally comparable to closed source software competition, or even when it is inferior but satisfactory?
Would you tolerate an operating system or application that had a hidden back-door to control your computer's activity or spy on you? Would you tolerate a computer that had a remote kill-switch? All else being equal, wouldn't you prefer to use open-source software and hardware that had been audited for your safety and security?
Are you comfortable with regulation, enacted or proposed, that attempts to criminalize reverse-engineering or bypassing protection mechanisms of patented, proprietary software?
Would you tolerate patented, proprietary technology built into the genetics of your food itself? Can you envision food organisms becoming subject to regulation akin to the DMCA? Would you tolerate your food being designed with a kill switch?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Monsanto_and_Terminator...
What if the economic advantages of GMO food (yield, shelf life, pest resistance) were so great that they effectively destroyed all traditional farming competition, leaving our nation's food production at the mercy of the rights holder with a genetic kill switch, and consumers never had any economic agency in the matter because labeling was not mandated?
These scenarios are not far fetched if you can make the tiny leap from everything we've learned about the war between open and closed source software, and apply it by analogy to the genetics of our food.
If you and "moms" want to buy GMO food, I say "go ahead", it's your right. If you want better labeling so that it is easier to choose the GMO food you want, that's great! There is NO argument that will ever convince me that we need to remove the agency of CHOICE by removing the burden of package labeling.
As for me personally, I believe food needs its own Free Software Foundation, and I will start selecting GMO foods only when they are open source and their genetics are published, audited, and verifiable.
Also, have you heard of plant breeder's rights? Are you aware of golden rice?
Meanwhile you keep on eating non-GMO food, yet its genetics are not published, audited or verifiable, and it is protected by intellectual property laws [1] and possibly patented [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights
[2] https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/08/07/challengin...
The reasons you cite for avoiding GMOs are really completely non-issues.
("Traditional" ways, non-GMO, mean things like induced mutagenesis: expose seeds to radiation, poisons and other carcinogens; then wait for mutations, pick a few, and cross-breed. You don't know what happened, but somehow that's supposed to be good, better than an engineered change.)
You're perfectly right. We shouldn't ask for evidence for anything, because no amount of evidence will convince everyone.
> Seems reasonable. How do you propose to address these unknowns? And are you aware that non-GMO plants can product dangerous super species we can never get rid of? Purple loosestrife comes to mind.
I see what you mean. If disasters can be caused by things that are not GMOs, then it would be ignorant to try our best to make sure that GMOs do not cause the same sort of disasters. Anyway, the people who make their living from coming up with new GMOs and getting them adopted as widely as possible can be trusted to objectively determine their safety. They're very smart.
> Having listened to your concerns and seriously pondered them, all I see is fear. Unbounded fear.
Having listened to your responses and attempting to detect anything in them that is actually responsive, all I see is sarcasm. Unbounded sarcasm.
What I see is people who have a fundamentally emotional position mixed with people who have a fundamentally venal position insisting that potentially dangerous products (like all products) not be labeled or tested, and rarely giving a reason why other than the strawman that it is ignorant to think that the process of genetic modification itself is dangerous because it is fundamentally similar to human-guided breeding. I'm sure somebody is arguing that somewhere, but the fact that I don't have a problem with GMOs as a class is why I want more labeling. I don't just want to know if something is made from GMOs, I want to know that it's made from GM wheat. I don't just want to know that it's made from GM wheat, I want to know which GM wheat, because I might have entirely different feelings about one than about the other. I don't just want to know for health reasons, I might want to know for environmental reasons that have nothing to do with health.
Most importantly, I do not want to hear that some GMO was allowed into the food system because of a substantial similarity to another GMO that was previously allowed. If the differences are insubstantial enough to avoid testing, then they're insubstantial enough that not allowing them to go to market isn't a significant hardship.
I don't understand how your idea of enlightenment depends on keeping people in ignorance. Not only am I lumped in with people who think that the process of genetic modification is against some nebulous ironically supernatural concept called "nature," but I'm also expected to cheer on limitations on those people's agency to eat as they see fit (and limit my own in the process.)
It's so cynical. I'd rather GMOs be completely disallowed than to be regulated by people who think along these lines.
> I might want to know for environmental reasons that have nothing to do with health.
Sounds like wanting all the details of provenance, which, apart from letting the consumer decide on environmental factors, lets decide on issues like fair trade. So a good thing. But it sounds like "GMO or not" isn't special among "all the details"?
I'm also saying we should apply uniform standards for managing risks. It's not uniform to require GMOs undergo multi-human-generation safety tests (as another user hinted at), but readily approve strains from traditional breeding after a basic "Does it immediately kill people?" test.
I don't just what to know what strains of GMO wheat went into my packaged cookie. I want to know what strains of everything, because I don't think non-GMO is better or safer in any reasonable way. I want a uniform safety standard, not one that only exists for scary science-y new-ish things.
I don't want to keep people in ignorance. I think that people are currently badly misinformed, and I'm in favor of full disclosure all around. I am not in favor of the "Contains GMOs" labels, because those labels do not provide information to make decisions with and only play on fears.
What you said above exactly sounded like those scientists and studies sponsored by Monsanto.
I am no expert on biology and chemistry. And I am aware that majority of the studies on GMO so far has yet to prove any harm to human races. However, I don't know any study can address the long term effect on humans? When I said long term, I mean the a few generations (so hundreds of years) ahead.
Testing long term effects on animals or insects are easy because their generations lasts only very short amoubt of time, but average human life span is 71 years[1] according to Google, so how can you be so sure that GMO food won't affect my great grandchildrens a few hundred years down the road? (We all know that evolution sometimes take a LONG time to appear[2])
Perhaps someone or some new studies can enlight the few of us who does feel uncertain about GMO products?
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=average+life+span&oq=average...
[2]: http://phys.org/news/2011-08-fast-evolutionary-million-years...
How can we be sure of the common strains of dwarf wheat we all eat, developed in the last century? Do you feel safe eating bread? How long a term of study do you need before you feel safe? Is it ever possible for you to feel safe eating human-bred plants?
What level of study would assuage your fears? Three human generations? Six? Ten? Do you think this standard should apply to all foods, or just GMOs?
If you're genuinely curious, you can read this - http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
So what's the difference between a genetic mixture like cherry tomatoes and GMO tomatoes? Why should I be more scared of long-term effect of one over the other?
We all see the potential for human well-being that GMOs offer, but scientists have a long history of misassessing (or lying about) risks early in a field's development. It troubles me that GMO proponents don't address the frequent and life-destroying failures of science when experimenting with new technologies. (For potential GMO trouble, see the honey bee debate.)
I think that much of this will be settled in about 100 years -- the time it takes to run a reasonable 3 generation study on long-term health and epigenetic risks.
Is it really so unreasonable people only want to partially transfer something as critical to the existence and well-being of the species as base food production to a new system until after it's able to sustain a full generational cycle?
Lots of problems are hard to detect in less than 1 or 2 full generations, such as systemic cancer risk.
I think people are being unreasonable because they are trying to assert a degree of control people don't actually have. People want to believe that there are easy, clear controls on this stuff. That we can stay on the safe system we have now if we wish.
There aren't those controls. They aren't possible. CRISPR can be done in a high school biology lab. The genie's out of the bottle, and the bottle is dust. To top it off, the system we have now isn't nearly as safe as we like to pretend. We get famine and agricultural disasters regularly today. without any GMOs involved.
You're absolutely right. There are a lot of problems that are difficult to detect without fifty or seventy years of study. I submit that this is why societies have developed systems for dealing with those problems, instead of avoiding risks entirely.
And that's why I said before we roll over our entire food production system, not any of it.
What I'm saying is we should leave their risk preference up to individuals, and allow them to pick their exposure to new science -- using things like GMO labels. (Tracking numbers for cultivars in a databse would be good, just like chemical data.)
I just find your insistence that the public isn't allowed to give science as an institution a prior on "going to pose a health risk with new technology" to be unethical.
Science has had many high profile safety failures regarding new technologies being rolled out, particularly in food, and it's entirely fair for the public to respond, even if they don't have specific objections at present.
Why trust people with a history of systematic mistakes to be right at first blush?
I do not think it's reasonable that the public is trying to give science-the-institution a prior on "be absolutely, 100% certain that no risks are posed with new technology". I think the public is unreasonably expecting proof of perfection and an impossible level of control via policy. Science doesn't produce infinite sigmas. You can't get that control over CRISPR, the equipment and skill required are too low.
Yes, there is a history that includes a number of failures. That history also includes stunning successes. I think it's unreasonable to demand that science only ever produce successes.
We trust people with a history of systemic mistakes because they're also the only ones with the history of systemic success in this arena.
I get that you want to manipulate people and not allow them choice "for the right reasons", but do you really not understand why Im not okay with that? I can outline the history of that thought, and the dire consequences, if you'd like.
You also misunderstood the prior. The prior is merely on "this technology will be dangerous to use for the first N years". I think that's a perfectly fine prior to have, and science has a history of underestimating those risks because they're (understandably) confident in their work (and bear almost none of the cost).
No one is saying scientists have to always be right, just we should be cognizant of their systematic optimism about technology maturity and risk. And therefore, we should be about 3-4 decades more cautious than scientists call to be on technology rollovers of key infrastructure.
Which, given when they started to be rolled out, would be a couple decades from now for total adoption of GMOs.
Ed: I suppose my question about GMOs is this -- if there's no improper motive, what's the hurry to make the transition? We're not starved for land for farming in the US, farming is making acceptable profits, etc. We have the resources to easily sustain a culture wide trial period of a few more decades (a generation from the start), where I believe that GMOs will be able to mature and show their safety and benefit.
What I don't get is why most GMO proponents go "Nah, fuck safety, science didn't mess up this time." They won't benefit in any appreciable way, only companies of which they're not owners will, but they're taking on the risk for someone else's reward.
PR, eh?
I actually don't think this would frighten people. I think most people would realize they don't actually care. The ones who do could make their own choices.
The current public rhetoric is basically that scientists do have to always be right. That this technology is too scary unless it's perfect every time. People are terrified of berries that don't bruise when they get cold or apples that don't turn brown when cut open.
Of course we should be cognizant of the risks. We should also be cognizant that they are not fully controllable and act accordingly.
The rest of our disagreement is on the role scientists had in public perception of their trade. I think scientists have earned the scepticism they face; you (and another commenter) seem to feel the benefits of rapidly deployed science outweigh the risks; I think you're falling prey to a common human error of underestimating long-tail risk (particularly that others pay), which science has a history of underestimating.
I also think you only address strawman versions of the other side, and much of their blanket rejection of your position stems from openly mocking and strawmanning theirs, which when pressed on technical details, you admit is a valid concern.
To some capacity, GMO proponents arent necessarily wrong, theyre just assholes.
I'm pretty sure we know that one already.
You're right. I don't believe that engaging with the concerns of anti-GMO activists is a productive course of action. I don't think being sympathetic and a good listener here will be any more helpful than being nice to antivaxxers has been. I think you cannot reason people out of a position rooted in fear.
It's very possible that scientists are as bad at handling systemic risks as you say. You very well may be right. However, in this case those systemic risks must be weighed against the other systemic risks we face without GMOs. We are not in a situation where there is a risk-free option on the table, and we do public policy a grave disservice by pretending otherwise for political expediency.
I think that is an equally dangerous thought. More people have died and gotten hurt from being skeptical to science than those who have died due to science.
When science suggested you should clean yourself before doing surgery, delivering babies etc, then Semmelweis got laughed at. People thought they should stick to what they "know".
People of science got burned for suggesting the earth orbited the sun.
A scientific approach determined that we should wear seat-belts in cars. Still a lot of people around the world being skeptical towards these expert suggestions die.
People die from not getting vaccines, because they believe more in their "feelings" then hard science.
The point is there is no alternative to science. If GMO was ever proved unsafe it would be through the scientific method, not by peopling "feeling" their way to an answer.
The actual analogy of my position: "That washing thing is radical, let's trial it in a quarter of the cases based on early results and compare outcomes."
That's the perfectly rational response to a radical, but promising change. Not to switch all the ORs based on preliminary results.
Pretending that "we should roll out GMOs slowly because we're bad at systemic risk and this is important" is the same as "burn people for talking about heliocentric systems" is just nonsense zealotry from you. Which is why people are concerned about GMOs -- doubting zealots is good practice.
This idea that GMOs are unregulated is a myth. If someone wants to argue for more testing, that is one thing, but in doing a simple google search it is easy to see that there is certainly oversight:
>...The three main agencies involved in regulating GMOs are the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
>...APHIS regulates the planting, importation, or transportation of GM plants pursuant to its authority under the Plant Protection Act (PPA),[23] which authorizes the Secretary of Agriculture to “prohibit or restrict the importation, entry, exportation, or movement in interstate commerce of any plant, plant product [etc.] if the Secretary determines [it] is necessary to prevent the introduction . . . of a plant pest or noxious weed within the United States.”[24] By regulation, APHIS classifies most GM plants as plant pests or potential plant pests and as “regulated articles.”[25] Under the PPA, a regulated article must receive prior approval from APHIS before it is introduced.[26]
>APHIS grants authorization to use GM plants in three ways: through a notification process, a permitting process, or a determination of nonregulated status.
>...In a 1992 policy statement, the FDA reaffirmed that in most cases it would treat foods derived from GMOs like those derived from conventionally bred plants, and that most foods derived from GM plants would be presumptively GRAS. However, with respect to a GMO product “that differs significantly in structure, function, or composition from substances found currently in food,” premarket approval of the substance as a food additive would be required.[47]
>...The EPA regulates pesticides and microorganisms developed through genetic engineering.
Except I guess this has been done for so long that pretty much everything already sold in the grocery store as well as organic food would be labeled.
You have already been eating tons of this stuff which is potentially more risky than GMO, yet you want to single out GMO for labeling?
1. I can think there are things wrong with food safety and advocate for new things being done safely at the same time. To some degree, you have to make changes where there's the political will to improve, even if it's not perfect.
2. The rate of mutation and deployment of new cultivars is really the concerning aspect, not the mechanism. I think we should have to label and clone cultivars (while checking for drift) these days, which still isn't perfect but better.
I want to make wider changes, but there's no reason not to start with limited changes at the start, particularly if we can do it for the method that's likely to be the long-term winner.
GMOs have the economic advantage of precision and control, while they also have the political will around them to effect regulation. So you can effect long-term broad legislation by targetting GMOs at this early stage.
So let me ask you this, if I were broadly concerned by food as widely practiced, unregulated pharmacy, why wouldn't I target regulation on a politically hot portion of the market as the wedge for wider reform?
Besides, free markets don't operate well if buyers have information on only half the products.
This has been standard practice since at least the 40s. There's very little "natural" about it.
I have been convinced for a while that it should be possible, easy even, to separate GMOs into two categories:
* those which are designed to kill something, be it an insect, fungus, bacterium, or whatever, by producing a chemical or something reasonably similar
* those which are designed for any other reason than killing pests
I think it isn't unfair that the first category should see more suspicion than the second category. A poison, regardless of what species it's directed at, is still a poison. I also think it would be reasonable to have separate labeling for the first category, but not for the second category, since it should be possible to test for foods being in the first category (by e.g. GC/MS).
One thing that we've learned from the history of antibiotics is that quick-fix chemical solutions to pest control are really hard to get right. In particular, an unexpected antimicrobial compound can interfere with existing microbiota of some person or animal; particularly if they are immune-deficient this is a serious concern.
I suspect you will find most anti-GMO activists do not want and will not support separate labeling as you describe.
You are factually wrong here. Science as we know it today is, what?, 150 years old? Are you really saying that all the achievements of human civilization up to ~1870 were plain dumb luck???? I don't know you, but, when I try to convince people of something, calling them idiots is generally a bad idea.
More over, your claim comes of as self serving and disengineous: "How dare you point out our mistakes, we have had plenty of successes too".
This attitude is eroding faith of the common people in science, and there's no one but the scientists to blame for that. The antivaxes might be all wrong, but I don't blame them for distrusting people that talks them down like that.
Have you seen what happens when antivaxxers are treated with respect, heard out, and their fears listened to?
I have.
Anti-GMOers not eating GMO food doesn't hurt you, antivaxxers doing their thing does.
Their fear has not been without a human cost.
There may be people who would benefit from GMO food, but there aren't any food products that are available only as GMO versions. This makes it a political problem, not a "you can't have it if there is no GMO".
And equating anti-GMOers with anti-vaxxers isn't a solution to any problem nor reasonable.
Still no reason to equate anti-GMOers with anti-vaxxers.
GMO foods are capable of addressing specific problems, like vitamin deficiencies. People should be offered that choice. Anti-GMO activists, like anti-vaxxers, are hurting people by denying them helpful scientific advances.
Who here do you see arguing to ban GMO? Perhaps I just haven't looked closely enough.
What I have seen is people call for more testing, without defining what's enough for them to be confident in results. I've also seen people call for labels, but only on GMOs. I think the former is a backdoor ban. The latter should be applied to all foods.
It's antivaxers' children the ones that suffer the most, but as long as they remain a minority, the risks of an epidemic getting out of control is very small.
And no, we are not going to eliminate infectious disease any time soon. AFAIK, the only disease we have "eliminated" in recorded history is small pox; and what that means is that maybe a dozen governments have their stash of samples that they can turn in biological weapons... all while the rest of us slowly breed resistance out of the gene pool.
Plus since we can't just off the anti-vaxxers or let their sprogs die, society bears the cost of dealing with the messes they create.
But as long as you are donning the hat of Kalium-the-spokeperson-of-Science, you are displaying ignorance and comptept for human nature. You seem to confuse the fact that Science is able to get the material facts more or less right, with the assertation that people should automatically trust/obey what scientists say.
They did just that, during the 20th century... and then (some of) the scientist sold out to moneyed interests. They made claims that were not 100% supported by the facts, but they did it anyways because their sponsors asked for it very nicely. Then, when (some of) those claims turned out to be false... it was not the sponsors or the guilable individual scientists who received the hit to their reputations, Science-the-institution did.
So, people have reason to distrust. And the fact that you refuse to acknowledge that much and demand compliance because you happen to be donning a white labcoat makes all of us look bad.
You say that it is unfair that others only point to our mistakes and forget our successes. That's Standard-Operations-Procedure in politics, everybody does it. Heck, even you do the same, it is just that you don't notice.
So given that the other people are not going to listen to you... what's to do? Throw a tantrum? Or engage the others with the tools of the politician?
Also, big news. High school kids have knives at schools! Is that also a case of... "The genie's out of the bootle" BS?
I expect many starving people would elect to eat experimental food. But I also think it's unethical to not tell them it's experimental.
Is that position unfair in your mind? I certainly don't believe it's fair to claim tons of people would have starved if we'd added a little label.
Wrong. And Talib spoke about this and warned against it. Nuclear has a predictable and limited effect, both in area and time. The effect of an organism released into the wild (speak CRISPR e.g.) are can be unpredictable and unlimited regarding area and time.
Being too cautious has been the default position throughout history and pre-history. It used to be about not offending the gods or deviating from tribal customs (e.g. a tribe goes extinct from starvation next to a river full of fish, because they can't or won't conceive of eating fish)
The same impulse is nowadays wrapped in scientific clothing.
And as far as "feed 8 billion people", I hate to say this because it's unpopular, but when has pouring gasoline on a fire ever extinguished it? The goal of feeding the world will annihilate it.
On another note, I see GMO as similar to global warming. Avoiding the catastrophic risk doesn't seem to have a huge cost, so why don't we just avoid it.
Regarding nuclear: when the Fukushima Disaster was just starting, a senior engineer/executive at my company was so certain nothing would happen. He gave a presentation on all the technology and safety mechanisms and how the engineers thought of everything... Yes, the naive answer is scary.
I think the goal of the piece was to address the feelings portion of GMO avoidance. The use of "moms" and the attention to the butterfly logo highlight this emotional appeal. I think this piece was written to address an audience that approaches these decisions from a different level. Many consumers don't approach GMO avoidance with your concerns; they see prominent non-GMO labeling and make an emotional decision from that. The article intends to discuss that aspect.
I'm not using emotional decision making as a pejorative; it is the default when a person doesn't have time to learn about a subject in-depth. Many people simply do not have the bandwidth to look up GMO articles while at work or while taking care of their families.
2. The alternative to GMO is mutagenesis which has been used for decades and means massive random mutations through radiation. This is how a lot of non-GMO food is developed. It can even be labeled organic. Obviously this is far more dangerous than doing a controlled changed of specific genes.
This fact alone demonstrates how the anti-GMO crowd is scientific illiterate people engaging in scaremongering. There is no scientific basis for the anti-GMO position.
(1) No it isn't reasonable as it allows uncontrolled mutations to be utilized rather than safe and controlled genetic changes.
The concern and safety steps taking towards GMO is hysterical. Every day plants like potatoes would be illegal to eat today if they were required the same testing regime as GMO food.
The real valid concern I think is the commercial aspect. Especially in the US with its insane patent laws one allows companies to take control over too much of what is important for society and life.
This is not "obvious". Actually, I think it's obviously wrong. That's like saying, "Oh, nuclear research doesn't matter, nature could just randomly create a nuclear bomb." Well, no. (Although nuclear reactors do happen naturally.) If you're trying to create super-organisms/weapons, chances are, you'll succeed.
If you are going to attack my argument at least take the time to understand it.
"insane patent laws one allows companies to take control" Nobody is mandating their use. Farmers would not use them unless it makes commercial sense.
But the point is, of all the issues raised in the article, these they kept quiet on. And it is these that anti-GMO people are the most concerned over. No matter how you feel about GMO, it is best to categorize this article as "propaganda", even if every word of it is true. This article polarizes the debate, not add to it. (And note I am pro GMO.)
Why do some US schools teach creationism? Sadly, the anti-science lobby in EU is surprisingly strong.
EU even had a chief scientific officer position, but they ended the whole position when the plant scientist in the position was defending the scientific view that GMOs are safe.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/14/sack-s...
This question is very much like the justification of lynch mob: "If he didn't do it, why are they hanging him? Of course he did it, and hanging him is the proof!"
TLDR: "genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides"
https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/10/31/strawmen-s...
https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/10/31/danny-haki...
http://kfolta.blogspot.com/2016/10/rehashing-tired-argument....
http://kfolta.blogspot.com/2016/11/some-actual-yield-data.ht...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kavinsenapathy/2016/11/03/expert...
> At the same time, herbicide use has increased in the United States,…in France, use of insecticides and fungicides has fallen by a far greater percentage — 65 percent — and herbicide use has decreased as well, by 36 percent.
by answering this:
> I have to say this comparison seems borderline disingenuous; the figures used to compare pesticide use in France vs the USA are convoluted and misleading. First, the data is presented in different units (thousand metric tons for France, compared to million pounds in the US), making a direct comparison nearly impossible.
Oh boy... How does this address the point of the original article you quote? It does not talk about absolute values, it talks about evolution: increase on one side, decrease on the other one. Who cares about comparing absolutes values? That's a strawman.
And he goes on:
> Second, the pesticide amounts are not standardized per unit area, which is critically important since the USA has over 9 times the amount of farmland that France does; it would be shocking if the U.S. didn’t use far more pesticide when expressed this way.
Same failure to address the point which was e-vo-lu-tion.
> It is true that France has been reducing pesticide use,
Ah.. so?
> but France still uses more pesticides per arable hectare than we do in the USA.
Because it is much more intensive agriculture and that's why there was no comparison of yelds. But a comparison of e-vol-lu-tions. And the yelds evolved the same way with and without GMO. But GMO users did not decrease pesticide use, and increased herbicide use, whereas non-GMO users did decrease both and yet kept their yields growing as fast.
Jesus boy, how can you start your "debunking" article with such mistakes and fallacies...
2. This side effect is something we have been dealing with for a very long time. A hybrid - manual GMO sort of plant - runs the same risk.
Furthermore, GMOs aren't exactly banned in the EU. In 2014, 49 were approved. Countries can restrict futher, but not all do. Spain is the biggest producer here. [1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_genetically_modi...
It was however not the point. The point is there are tradeoffs to GMOs. Very valid ones with arguments to both sides. Not presenting those is polarizing the discussion, not adding to it.
You are referring to GMO varieties of potato, corn, cotton and soybean. These plants have been engineered to produce Bt Cry proteins.
These proteins become toxic in the alkaline (basic, pH > 7) digestive systems of certain insects [1]. No signs of toxicity has ever been found for these proteins in the acidic (pH < 7) digestive systems of mammals, including humans [2].
Also, these Bt toxins are naturally produced by a species of bacteria, Bacillus thuringiensis. And either bacterial spores or extracted Bt toxins have been used as pesticides in agriculture since the 1920s. Also, as the Bt toxin is produced by bacteria, not a chemical factory, it is considered a natural product and is approved and widely used as a pesticide in organic farming [3].
Your fear of GMO based Bt-producing crops as "plants which produce chemicals" is wrong and misguided in two levels. Bt is not toxic to humans, and you cannot avoid digesting some Bt proteins by avoiding just GMO crops, as Bt is also used in non-GMO farming and also in organic farming.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis#Mechani...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis#Safety_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis#Use_of_...
Given that external application means it can be largely washed off; yet a possibly lesser amount may be required for GMOs, in which scenario do we consume more?
How would you have a chance to find that out without long-term testing?
Is this just blatantly incorrect, based on outdated science (given that it was published so long ago), or is it not the whole story?
[1]: http://www.iatp.org/news/poison-risk-is-greater-from-organic...
[...]
When ingested, the bacterium produces endotoxins which attack the walls of the insects' guts. In mammals, they can cause death from septic shock."
We have to make the difference between Bt bacteria, and Bt toxin. Bt toxin is a protein produced by the Bt bacteria. As far as I understand, the professor here is talking about spraying the crop with live Bt bacteria, and apparently the bacteria can produce other toxins than just Bt proteins.
I thought so as well, but after a quick search my understanding is that they are not, they are subject to approval at EU level, and the member states have the final word whether to prohibit them or not (opt-out):
http://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/gmo/authorisation_en
http://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/gmo/authorisation/decision_ma...
There is a database of the ones currently approved :
http://ec.europa.eu/food/dyna/gm_register/index_en.cfm
Handy reference I just found for current legislation in various countries :
It is necessary to reduce or not grow animal product production and favor vegetable diet. Animals are a terrible inefficient food source.
Given what we've learnt in the past 50 years, we should want less industrial agriculture. And gmos are not the way to go. They're useless, potentially harmful, and industrial-level shit products.
I can see how this kind of fear stems from watching scifi-movies, but it is totally unfounded.
When we breed super-productive or super-muscular beef cattle, for example the Belgian Blue [1], absolutely no one is afraid that these bodybuilder-looking muscular cows could survive alone in the wild, kicking the ass of natural populations of deer, elk, wolf and bear, and take over the ecosystems.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Belgian+Blue&tbm=isch
Yet somehow, when breeding high-yield crops, people mistake the high productivity in the controlled, pest-controlled, fertilized, irrigated farming conditions to some kind of general life vigor, ready to spread outside the farm and outcompete the natural vegetation.
Nothing could be further from the truth. No crop plant, GMO or non-GMO, could ever stand a change outside the farmer's care.
There is no wild corn or wild soybean or wild potatoes in the forest or meadow across the fence which the farmer's crop could pollinate.
Also it has never happened that a potato (or any crop plant) escaped into the wild and survived there.
But the truth be said, by not eating GMO's, you are too making a decision. And we don't know what we're doing eating good old fashioned food either. And the argument from historical data "we've been doing this for thousands of years, so it must be ok" is a pretty weak one. We've been smoking for over 7000 years now. We've filled our guts with carcinogens, practiced sham medicines and doing plenty of stupid things for a long time now. We did it not because it was "healthy", or out of some ancient wisdom, we did it because it was we knew, and we were making the best of a strange situation.
3: Many of the companies behind GMO products are what I'd call bad actors. Monsanto rightly gets a lot of the focus for the unconscionable stuff they do, but there are others as well. These companies, to my mind, make the world a worse place to live and I don't want to support them. And since there's no way to trace the provenance of the resulting food to determine who is supported by purchasing it, I have to avoid all GMO food.
Thankfully, GMO will thrive without your support and produce better food to feed the world.
It'd be great to have a full provenance system where it was possible to see how studies were financed in the matter, if bills were lobbied and how it overlaps with independent research. It'd also be good to see an international debate.
It costs them a premium, but they say they're doing it for their children. I can't argue against it to their faces, but quietly I wonder if they wouldn't be more financially free if they weren't so willingly chained to 7 dollar gallons of milk.
What is the most sustainable and ecologically friendly way to get food then? Local farms, farmers markets, or growing your own food seems like the best but I don't think that's sustainable for the whole population.
Citation? I can't imagine they would use little or none unless they were farming something specific, like rice, which can grow under water or if it's grown indoors.
> What is the most sustainable and ecologically friendly way to get food then? Local farms, farmers markets, or growing your own food seems like the best but I don't think that's sustainable for the whole population.
So I'm having trouble finding the study I read a few years back but it essentially found that large, centralized farms are the most efficient because our transportation has gotten so good and many plants grow better in specific climates versus growing everything locally. So if you have enough scale then centralized, huge farms seems to be the way to go.
However that's using today's farming. I've seen many write-ups calling for entire buildings with hundreds of floors for farming. If we can get those energy efficient then we should be able to create the perfect climate for each plant and we'll be taking up vertical space so it'll be better land usage too.
Though that would suck if power died from, say, a solar flare and all of our food was in these towers...heh
I don't really have a source for that more than anecdotal evidence. I've been involved with local farms that don't use any pesticides, however they were on the scale of ~5-15 acres. On a commercial scale it's probably not really possible. And organic food you'd buy in a supermarket is definitely not grown in this way.
The link you provided also only mentions two types of organic pesticides when there are thousands of USDA approved organic pesticides. I'm sure there are some USDA Organic pesticides that are just as harmful if not more so than some conventional pesticides but that's really just an argument for better USDA regulations.
>So I'm having trouble finding the study I read a few years back but it essentially found that large, centralized farms are the most efficient because our transportation has gotten so good and many plants grow better in specific climates versus growing everything locally. So if you have enough scale then centralized, huge farms seems to be the way to go.
I'm sure that large, centralized farms are most efficient in the short term. But long term effects on food production and soil could offset that. If in 50 years the soil is nutritionally drained and farms have to continue to pump more nutrients in then the cost and effeciency is going to drop. [1][2]
I think near-term, some combination is required because the level of food production needed is so high. Long-term, incorporating more sustainable practices into commercial scale farms or moving production into greenhouses like you mentioned is a better idea.
I'll add that after doing more research today, the label "Organic" doesn't mean better for the environment. That much is now clear to me. However, sustainable farming practices that can usually be found a small-local farms and backyard gardens are more environmentally friendly. Though scaling that for worldwide production is a difficult problem.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4552827/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160305010056/https://nature.be...
Basically, french state's scientific body reviewed this organic permaculture farm for 4 years. They do not use pesticides, do not use thermic engines, and are so productive that it allows farmers to earn the median french salary while doing 35h/week on average.
How? No tilling of the soils. Worms do it for you. No weeds, since the soil is always cultivated, leaving no room for them. No need for a lot of fertilisers : the organic soil is actually growing from the constant adjunction of carbon, and beans are fixing the nitrogen in the soil. No need for excessive watering : the soil retains humidity. Etc...
Science, guys.
See this article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-organic-m...
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Just like the right-wing has their anti-government extremists, the left-wing has their anti-corporate extremists. However, the latter group is interesting in the sense that they actually think science is on their side.
sorry to anyone who was confused by my edit.
In other words, nutters think GMOs are Spiderman when they're actually just Batman.
Ultimately it comes down to an ignorance in how the farming process works and an ignorance in how genetics work when modifying plants either in a laboratory or though breading.
I've also never met a person who supports organic who also knew about the practice of using radioactivity to cause random mutations in organic farming.
If you're engaging someone who doesn't agree with you on an issue, purely throwing facts at them is very unlikely to convince them of your point, and is going to end up frustrating both sides. Human psychology just doesn't work that way. We're not purely rational, evidence-based beings.
How much time have you taken to understand their positions and the reasons they hold them? Are they just irrational? Ignorant? Obstinate? Willfully uneducated? If you think this is the case, how can you convince them anyway? After all, they're irrational, ignorant, obstinate, and willfully uneducated :)
If you can understand (that's not necessarily the same as agree with) where they're coming from, that goes a long way towards understanding how you can reach some kind of shared understanding and agreement where none existed before. That might seem like it's a slower process, and takes too much time. But if it actually works, and the other method (throwing facts) doesn't, it's actually accomplished something.
There's a lot of contentious issues right now that are very important for us to reconcile. Working on skills like this, figuring out how to come to agreements and compromises, working solutions, is vital.
So I _try_ to figure out where they're coming from and relate to it. But I can never do it. I've never figured out a way to argue with someone in a productive way.
In fact if you know of any good reads on the topic I'd love to check them out. I've been told I'm not empathetic enough though I try to be and I'm not entirely sure how to fix it.
- Crocker's Rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881288
- Principle of Charity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774600
- Rapaport's Rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774692
I also found Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"[0] really worthwhile. I mean to read it again in the next week or so. What I find particularly impressive with his work is that he found that his research actually changed his own thinking.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt
And you know, re-reading your response "I've never had facts change anyone's mind", I think even if you don't change someone's mind at the time, finding some common ground, something you agree on is a worthwhile accomplishment. Sometimes it seems the gulf between us is so large. Recognizing that it might not be is reassuring.
I hope you find these useful!
While perhaps a bit of a hyperbole, this video lines up pretty well with me real-world experience (unfortunately): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzEr23XJwFY
I imagine this is most of America.
Is this comparing with organic products, or also non-organic? What is a "prosumer" in the food/grocery sense? I'm not familiar with the term in that context.
The community is sharing their money or work to keep the agriculture running. They are actively engaged in their food production and therefore prosumers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agricultur...
Sounds like price comparison is an open question, unless there are more definitive/rigorous comparisons out there. At the very least, it sounds like there's a tradeoff between quality and selection (when you walk into a supermarket you can choose to buy whatever you want, whereas a CSA is limited to what's currently being harvested at a particular farm).
I'd certainly be open to making this tradeoff for some of my food, though when I've had CSA deliveries redirected to me by neighbors on vacation, I found that much of the food (even oranges, which I think of as moderately durable) went bad within just a few days.
That turned out to be an big advantage of the CSA for me. It is very satisfactory to be in natures rhythm, be engaged in the growing of things I eat and therefore in the growing of myself. I learned a lot of new products and recipes I even did not know exists.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/12/peter-wo...
I can imagine you have more sympathy for animals than plants since they are more like us, but I suspect bias if you use that as a basis for morality.
This makes absolutely no sense. "free-range" is a question about chicken health, not egg safety.
See http://www.localharvest.org/csa/ for an in-depth explanation of the concept.
I'm pretty much right down the middle on this stuff, but I tend to regard the latter as a bigger problem simply because the amount of money and lobbying involved. Think of the amount of money to be made by increasing grain yields by 1%, can we really expect industry to determine objectively that a higher yield grain is nutritionally equivalent?
Part of my biggest issue is that a company can patent the gene modifications they make and then say, "You're eating our proprietary cucumber now." I understand their business model, but I think if anything should be "open source", it should be our food.
Also the results of non-GMO breeding can be, and have been patented.
1: http://www.arcticapples.com/how-did-we-make-nonbrowning-appl...
I achieve the same thing by slicing apples with ceramic instead of metal. Think of how much I saved on R&D!
I don't see how you can say that for the later case - most of the requirements mentioned here (for example) http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/organic/index_en for Organic food seem like they would be better for the environment.
In take of less potent and lower quantities of non-food chemicals used as pesticides, herbicides and reduced presence of antibiotics seem like things that would lead to better human health (either directly or indirectly) too.
Can you explain how focus on a local supply chain, say, as one element of Organic farming practice is detrimental to either of those things, [human] health or environment?
Oh, you don't even have to accept global warming to see how using diesel to till the soil can cause harm. Particulate matter in the air is really harmful. (both the diesel exhaust and the soil getting churned up into the air) Disturbed soil runs off into streams, leading to dead zones. Competition for crude oil seems to support war, which has lots of bad effects on the environment.
So... eat GMO to save the environment.
> A recent study compared the effectiveness of a rotenone-pyrethrin mixture versus a synthetic pesticide, imidan. Rotenone and pyrethrin are two common organic pesticides; imidan is considered a "soft" synthetic pesticide (i.e., designed to have a brief lifetime after application, and other traits that minimize unwanted effects). It was found that up to 7 applications of the rotenone- pyrethrin mixture were required to obtain the level of protection provided by 2 applications of imidan.
> It seems unlikely that 7 applications of rotenone and pyrethrin are really better for the environment than 2 applications of imidan, especially when rotenone is extremely toxic to fish and other aquatic life.
I know it is anecdotal evidence, but organic farmers would not care if the fertilizer/pesticide made from mined minerals are better/worse for the environment or not as long as it passes the "organic" criteria. A rather more useful criteria IMO would be "relatively harmless to the environment"
http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-local...
"Forsaking comparative advantage in agriculture by localizing means it will take more inputs to grow a given quantity of food, including more land and more chemicals—all of which come at a cost of carbon emissions."
Of course with the commercialization of public institutions and the insane pressure to publish, one can not trust scientific publications as well as before. What is it 60% of life science publications can't be reproduced?
There is a real need for change in system, so we can trust research more. I think the capitalistic thinking has ruined science. One looks at science as some production process which needs to increase yield. Thus one ends up focusing on quantity rather than quality.
I'd rather see a lot fewer publications and stuff of actual quality which can be reproduced than what is going on now.
The two seem to be polar opposites to me. In the case of vaccines, you have thousands of years of history that demonstrates the danger of diseases and recent history showing how effective vaccines are. Those arguing against vaccines need to show serious harm caused before it would cancel out the benefits.
In the case of GMO foods, history argues against the technology. We know that non-GMO food is healthy. We have thousands of years of evidence to support that fact. The problems GMO are solving are on the producer's side, not the consumer's.
You can argue that the problem being solved is providing enough food to feed everyone and that history also shows the devastating effects of famine and starvation, but there are other ways to solve that problem that have none of the risks of GMO foods (less reliance on meats, for example, would make much more efficient use of our agricultural resources). Show me an alternative way of dealing with measles, flu, tetanus, hep and all the other illnesses we vaccinate that's even half as effective as vaccines and I'll concede that the two debates are similar.
If you don't believe in the safety of "unnatural" foods, you'll need to stop eating corn, bananas, beef, pork, and any other domesticated plant or animal. Recent history has shown that GMOs are much more precise and effective at domesticating plants for our purposes.
As the current US presidential election has shown, when money and lobbying collides with emotions and FUD, the latter wins every time, and thus I consider the latter a bigger problem.
I live in Europe though and we don't seem to suffer yet from the hostility of anti-organic people.
It is difficult to farm at scale and sell produce year round across a continent; time to consumption is a luxury beaten out of it at that scale and food often suffers under it. Only the varieties of tomatoes, etc. that can withstand changing temperatures and conditions, make it to market weeks later, and still look good enough to sell will be used, and these are often not as flavorful both initially and after several weeks.
Why is it "strange and unearned"? In many states / countries there are specific regulations that qualify what can be labelled "organic" or not (having to do largely with whether certain classes of pesticides or fertilizer were used in their production or not, for example).
Are you saying that pesticides in the food chain are complete red herring, and that any concern about them is "strange and unearned"? I'm not sure I quite follow you, actually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_o...
Using epidemiological methods the outbreaks in 2011 were traced to a shipment of seeds from Egypt that arrived in Germany in December 2009.
Citing as a source:
http://phys.org/news/2012-02-insight-whole-genome-sequencing...
From what I've observed, people buying organic may be wrong about organic food specifically, but they pretty obviously have something else figured out. They cook fresh food every day, they eat together as a family (often with friends), none of them are overweight. For them, cooking and eating are a social activity and O can't escape the observation that they're happier than those families eating a 20pc chicken nuggets box in front of the TV.
1. They're absolutely more likely to be harmful to the environment based on the general behavior of the companies that make them (Syngenta, Monstanto, etc.). There shouldn't really be any debate on this.
2. They have massive potential for global-scale, subtle, negative externalities. I say this as someone who knows a bit of the history of science and has seen how many times we don't understand the full effects of something new until many years later (see most of the fun and variegated chemicals we came up with in the 30s-50s). In science, the burden of proof is on the new thing to unequivocally prove itself true...not 'harmless until proven harmful.' The U.S. is very pro-business and one of the only countries in the world where you can get away with 'harmless until proven harmful.' Obviously GMOs are not going to kill you overnight and seem to have no acute ill effects. I'm a fan of having a choice in this matter and not being forcibly blinded.
3. Most of the studies declaring them safe have industry funding at their root. Most of the studies with "impartial" funding sources declare them potentially unsafe or are inconclusive. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" Careerism and loose morals in this field give me plenty of reason to at least be skeptical of a Pro-GMO general consensus...and of overly enthusiastic new science in general.
4. I'm morally opposed to supporting products that support mucking with an already perfect product, namely real, clean, unadulterated food. To feed the world, we need better distribution and smarter farming practices, not the sort of "solutions" that Monsanto et all have peddled (see what's happened in India where adoption of GMO seeds was widespread).
Edit: spelling.
Sounds like this isn't a fundamental problem with GMO's, it just allows farmers to fight milkweed more effectively than they could before. The best solution is to balance both interests, not to tie the hands of farmers or to eliminate milkweed. (I'm not sure how we do that)
a 2007 congressional ethanol mandate increased the price of corn and soybeans, which encouraged farmers to convert grassland -- where milkweed grows -- into cropland
Sounds like a policy problem, not a GMO problem?
GMO milkweed, and other weeds, I presume. Perhaps Monsanto can create and patent an entire polyculture to be grown as a unit?
The people who hate radio waves would also argue that cell phones haven't been unequivocatively proven safe over the long term.
I had a near family member that died from cancer in the army while working for the army near the microwave tower.
Most of the people that worked with him died of the same cancer, the people working before him died of the same cancer.
When we sued the Government on this they did the trick to account the general army population(that was not working near the tower) into the statistics to say it was all normal.
That is, your argument by analogy proves nothing, especially since there are equally-valid analogs that disprove the point you're trying to make.
I have a PhD in Plant Genetics, if we're doing the whole credentials thing...
>They're absolutely more likely to be harmful to the environment based on the general behavior of the companies that make them
Original sin?
These companies have done bad things in the past, that doesn't mean anything they produce is bad.
>In science, the burden of proof is on the new thing to unequivocally prove itself true...
2000+ studies affirm safety of GMOs, how many more do you need? : https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/10/08/with-2000-...
>Most of the studies declaring them safe have industry funding at their root.
Half of all GMO safety studies have independent funding.
http://genera.biofortified.org/wp/genera-announces-beta-test...
>Most of the studies with "impartial" funding sources declare them potentially unsafe or are inconclusive.
Yeah. That's complete BS.
The wealth of evidence for safety is crushingly large.
>I'm morally opposed to
If you are morally opposed to something why are you prefacing it with technical expertise? Really disingenuous.
Your food is not perfect. Your food is not real. Your food is not clean.
Often, your food is trying to kill you with poisons. It's contaminated with listeria and ecoli. It's a hodgepodge of traits and chromosomes that looks nothing like their wild progenitors.
Have you heard about the sexually inviable hybrid that is manually cloned, with zero genetic diversity around the globe? It's called the banana.
Or, how the ancestor to the Fuji apple was tiny, sour, and tough until we selectively bred them to be large and full of sugar?
How about chickens that were bred to be so heavy they can't stand up? Supermarket chickens used to be a lot more like cornish hens.
I like your second point more, but the reality is that at the moment the risks seem tiny and the benefits are fairly large. There is essentially no way to prove that any technology doesn't have subtle, negative externalities (what kind of evidence would you like to see?) and in practice any "rule" so risk adverse that it bans GMOs would also ban many, many modern conveniences (for example, cell phones). Is that a net positive? I don't think so, but I know some people who might.
Three is a bit generic so it's hard for me to argue. Yes, industry support for "independent" science is problematic, but the problem swings both ways. Supplements and "health food" are a massive industry and sponsor research/lobby the government the same way Monsanto does. That being said, it's unfortunate that companies muddy the waters, but the bottom line is that there is essentially no credible evidence that GMOs are in general harmful to humans and a lot of evidence that they are not. (Additionally, you used the word "most", which implies that you know of at least some studies that do not have industry funding and declare them safe. Are those studies not conclusive enough for you?)
For four, "unadulterated food" seems clearly not perfect (at least to me) given the amount of time and energy that farmers spend trying to grow it. At the very least, you must surely agree that there is some variation in the desirability of "natural" plants. Doesn't that imply that not all "natural" plants are perfect? Additionally, the "unadulterated" food you buy in a grocery store has been bred over thousands of years to be more appealing, resilient, etc. Is it only the "natural" variety of the food that is perfect, or the version in the grocery store? If the latter, when did they reach the global optimum and at what point did any further variation become bad? Finally, if natural plants are perfect, how do you explain cost and risk sensitive farmers using the presumably less perfect GMO products?
OK.
>They're absolutely more likely to be harmful to the environment based on the general behavior of the companies that make them (Syngenta, Monstanto, etc.). There shouldn't really be any debate on this.
Guilt by association is bad science. Saying "shouldn't really be any debate" is not an attitude a good scientist has.
Also, "absolutely more likely" doesn't make sense.
>In science, the burden of proof is on the new thing to unequivocally prove itself true...not 'harmless until proven harmful.'
Actually, science is not on either side. Science is science. Putting the burden on one side or the other is purely a human policy decision. It has nothing to do with scientific principles.
> Most of the studies declaring them safe have industry funding at their root. ... Careerism and loose morals in this field give me plenty of reason to at least be skeptical of a Pro-GMO general consensus...and of overly enthusiastic new science in general.
Do you avoid pharmaceutical products as well? They suffer from the same problems.
>I'm morally opposed to supporting products that support mucking with an already perfect product, namely real, clean, unadulterated food
Again, this has nothing to do with science. And, I can assure you: Many, many people disagree with the characterization of "already perfect product"
Science and Industry exist in a tight, codependent feedback loop. Industry gets many of its most important new breakthroughs by funding new science; science gets to happen exponentially faster than it would otherwise through industry funding. This is inevitable; I'm simply arguing for 1) not checking our skepticism at the door, and 2) allowing for consumers to make their own choices in the matter.
> Actually, science is not on either side. Science is science. Putting the burden on one side or the other is purely a human policy decision. It has nothing to do with scientific principles.
I think you are actually wrong about this. In order for a hypothesis to be scientific, it must be falsifiable. This is reflective of the principle in reason that the burden of proof falls of the claimant of the positive claim.
The real question here is, "which is actually the negative claim?" Is claiming something safe a negative claim, or is claiming something is harmful a negative claim?
This is where I think OP is incorrect: safety is merely lack of harmfulness. Therefore, claiming that something is safe is the negative claim, and claiming that something is harmful is the positive claim. A reasonable person should assume things are safe until there is significant evidence that they are harmful.
Name one food you eat that is "real, clean, unadulterated".
You are conflating "food I ate as a child" with "food in its original natural state".
So-called "heritage" varieties of vegetables, as well as their still-"wild" counterparts, come close to what I perceive to be perfectly nutritious. Pastured meats, fed with the above if supplemented with feed, also come close.
You have to get into the nitty-gritty on which plants were hybridized which way to know for sure what, for example, your increased allergen risk might be as a result of that breeding. Heritage/wild/pastured is an imperfect but helpful heuristic IMO.
GMOs are regulated by the EPA, USDA, and FDA.
Traditionally bred varieties are regulated by NO ONE.
Traditionally bred varieties routinely poison people. From potatoes (solanin) to celery (psoralens) they produce toxic and potentially deadly chemicals that nobody checks for.
Your perfect "heritage" (do you mean heirloom?) varieties have poisoned more people this year than GMO crops have in their entire history.
Get off your naturalistic fallacy high horse.
The former statement does not imply the latter--it depends on whether you default to "we assume, as a null hypothesis, that everything is harmless until proven harmful", as in the US, or "we assume, as a null hypothesis, that everything is harmful until proven harmless", as in the European Union (which, by the way, is not "the rest of the world").
It's barely a step above NIMBY, next you are going to get into your car running on dead dinosaurs, accelerating to speeds no animal can reach on top of sealed land to go to some council meeting and complain about the "unpredictable effects".
It's less about GMO, and more about mechanisms.
I've heard many stories about how Monsanto sets up incentives to the seed-sellers, which end up increasing the prices of seeds by 4-5x (plus all the propreitary round-up stuff one has to buy) ... all this, apparently for yields that are no better. People like Vandana Shiva have claimed that this increased financial burden (note that INR is undervalued by about 4-5 times) has been responsible for the suicides of many cotton farmers.
This is the kind of crony-capitalism that makes people run the other way into the arms of an all powerful state (which often is no different from such corporations). Very very sad, to be honest. I think someone said that between the powerless and the mighty, rules are liberating and freedom is oppressive. I understand now what this means (and why I'm not a libertarian); then again one can use this excuse to make so many damn rules and keep a captive impovershed population (as in India). It's really hard to claim any one "ideology" is good; finding the middle path with binaries is rather a bit like Zeno's runner.
The current government of ostensible "nationalists"/"nativists" in power in India, and their mouthpieces, appear to already have been bought out by the American big-ag people. Here's the kind of stuff one such mouthpiece puts out (with striking frequency),
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=GMO+site%3Aswarajyamag.com&ia=web
The instrumentality by which India's politicians and elite act (and let's be honest, this is no different from most democracies) is very very despicable; status quo-ist bourgeoisie all these people are. This is often well known in Socialist circles, but really though, they are often far far worse.
For contrast, check out some work on India's historical agricultural traditions,
In practice, GMO agriculture creates a trade imbalance. Instead of simply exporting produce, many countries will find themselves importing huge volumes of proprietary products from the likes of Monsanto. This includes buying new breed of patented seeds every year, fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides, etc. And of course, once a farm goes GMO, soil damage makes it almost impossible to go back to organic farming. High level of lock in.
http://sustainablepulse.com/2015/10/22/gm-crops-now-banned-i...
GMO seeds have been modified to create plants that won't make new seeds, great for recurring revenue
As for terminator seed, this is a valuable technology that addresses concerns that transgenes could spread into the environment. It's also quite irrelevant to any crop that relies on hybrid vigor for yield; F1 seed must be specifically developed from inbred parents, thus no seed saving is possible. In this context, a terminator line would only serve to protect the environment.
That's not a refutation, that's a goalpost shift.
In the real world today, you can't separate transgenetic modification from intellectual property and economic practices, when the intellectual property is technologically enforced in the transgenetic modification.
Great, you're parents and scientists. I'm a parent and a scientist too. But I understand that many of the arguments against GMOs have nothing to do with science (at least biological science) and everything to do with economics and human rights.
Just because something involves biology doesn't mean that arguments about it can be reduced to that.
You seem to hold the false belief that only GMO plants are patentable.
In reality, the US Plant Patent Act is from 1930. The First plant patent (in US) was granted in 1931. Everyday examples: Honeycrisp apple was patented in 1988 (so expired in 2008). 20 different mutant cultivars of Fuji apples are patented. Over 1000 plant patents are granted every year, and these don't go to only GMO plants.
This technology was developed in the 1990s, but it was never taken into use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_techno...
Exactly! Terminator genes are banned by law in India and Brazil, the UN has a moratorium on them. There are no terminator genes available in sold seeds!
For example, the avoidance of food grown from Roundup Ready seeds because of its likely contamination with harmful herbicide.
Key takes:
"On average, GM technology adoption has reduced chemical pesticide use by 37%, increased crop yields by 22%, and increased farmer profits by 68%. Yield gains and pesticide reductions are larger for insect-resistant crops than for herbicide-tolerant crops. Yield and profit gains are higher in developing countries than in developed countries."
So pesticide use goes down, yields go up, resulting in fewer acres planted for the same yield resulting in even further pesticide use.
[1]http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Basically, we need to be careful about accepting the results of meta-analyses as scientific fact. They are useful for illustrative purposes but really, at the end of the day if you're going to settle an argument you're going to need rigorous methodology, data-collection and reporting, as well as the all important reproducibility, falsifiability and verifiablity.
"Buy our GMO seeds and spend more on inputs" would be a fucking terrible sales pitch.
Roundup is a very effective herbicide.
[1]http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top...
ATM the most common application for GMO is adding tolerance against specific herbicides/pesticides/funghicides. I see three problems with this:
1. Overuse of the …cides a tolerance was added for
2. Said overuse causes evolutionary pressure on "the stuff you don't want to grow there" which in the long term may cause the same trouble as with MRSAs and similar superbugs.
3. Loss of genetic diversity (within the crops used for farming). It's a simple cost/benefit evaluation which crops to modify, limiting these modifications to a small subset of the genetic pool. Already the disparity between the breeds in existence and the breeds are actually used is worrying.
Also a still unclear topic is the stability of genetic modifications, i.e. if genetic modifications "stick" or if they get "repaired out" or "spread out over" of an organisms genome over generations (still an active research topic and in plants a wide field, because of the huge genomes and large set of pathways).
IMHO the more cost effective and long term sustainable path would be marker assisted breeding, which often can lead to desireable results faster and with higher yield than straight on genetic modification.
Monocultures, super-weeds/pests, and potentially political/economic issues (Im not a fan of Monsanto controlling all of the seeds of the world) are the real issues, not "we dont know what we are doing to the plants!" We know now more than ever.
At the moment, there is quite a lot of companies selling seeds:
http://gmo.geneticliteracyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/201...
Farmers aren't stupid. They're not wasting extremely expensive chemicals.
The reason roundup use has grown is because it has replaced entire spectrums of more harmful chemicals.
Don't confuse increase in market share with increase in use.
>Said overuse causes evolutionary pressure on "the stuff you don't want to grow there"
That's no different from any biologic.
Should we stop using antibiotics because resistance might occur? No. They should be used more intelligently.
>Loss of genetic diversity
You can insert a gene into any crop. That crop can be diverse or not. It's completely independent.
Diversity is lost when farmers breed traditional (and organic) hybrid strains, not at the insertion of a single gene.
>Also a still unclear topic is the stability of genetic modifications
If you are worried about genetic stability, don't google "transposons".
But seriously. Transgenic insertions are incredibly stable. They are selected specifically to be stable. We know exactly where insertions happen. In fact the entire patent process depends on this.
>IMHO the more cost effective and long term sustainable path would be marker assisted breeding,
Breeding is crazy expensive compared to genetic modification.
Why limit our toolbox? Why force breeders to build birdhouses with sledgehammers on the moon, instead of a hammer and a nail?
There are good arguments that we shouldn't be using antibiotics in farming, period.
You missed my point. Genetic modification does not come for free. So the varieties which are chosen for modification will be only a small subset of the varieties in existence. Hence you shrink the size of the set of crops with an economic interest.
Worrying about glyphosate residue in food is completely disproportionate to the risk. It is like people in rural Iowa worried about being killed by terrorists.
Easier for me to just avoid gluten whenever I can, and stick to organic if I need to purchase.
http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/real-reason-for-toxic...
Of course, the pesticide residues (in both cases) are generally far, far less than any amount even thought to have once caused harm to someone.
[1] http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/pdf/MonographVol...
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/05/monsantos-roundup-herbicide-ca...
I would refuse to buy GMO products because I don't want multinationals to "own" genomes. That requires far more trust than I'm willing to put in a corporation, especially a foreign one.
It's like creating a video using licensed/patented technology and then complaining that the video doesn't specify the license information.
https://gmoanswers.com/studies/gm-papaya-saved-hawaii-papaya...
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539746/as-patents-expire-...
Basically, a variant of a twenty year-old version of Roundup Ready soybeans.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516376#9517286
The WHO link there appears to be dead.
There are also some off-patent GM varieties where the patent has expired, but the technology is so new. The first Monsanto Bt patent has expired in 2015, so now there's at least one variety from the University of Arkansas selling their own variety based on that patent: https://www.biofortified.org/2014/12/off-patent-gmo-soybeans...
If farmers practiced sustainable agriculture and grew a variety of crops instead of one or two, they wouldn't have nearly as much need for GMO 'tools'. Our agricultural system encourages non-sustainable practices that practically require GMO seeds, pesticides, herbicides, and many others in order to continue to function. The companies that make these products want to ensure this continues.
GMO on it's own is fine, to me. But we need to stop looking at it as the solution to the problem we've created, and focus on fixing the root causes of big agriculture. These 'challenges' that are being addressed are often man-made.
I think the current GMO-reality is harmful because it seems to cater to the people who care less about sustainable practices. And possibly even promote anti-sustainable thinking.
For that reason I avoid GMO products. There is simply no reason for me to support the kind of farmers who don't care about sustainable practices. And right now GMO seems to be a strong signal about that.
If you google their name you find out that they work at Biology Fortified.
>Biology Fortified, Inc. (BFI) is an independent educational tax-exempt non-profit organization incorporated in Wisconsin. Our mission is to strengthen the public discussion of issues in biology, with particular emphasis on genetics and genetic engineering in agriculture. Biology Fortified is independently run on a volunteer basis, and is not supported by any funding from any companies or government entities.
So they are paid to have this particular public (!) opinion.
"So they are paid to have this particular public (!) opinion."
One of these things is not like the others...
But the fat that they do not disclose they work at the same non-profit that has a goals that is much related to the topic they address, this does not seem "transparent science-y" to me.
Their argument completely side-steps a very simple point many unpaid people agree on: we want to have choice. A no-GMO label is clearly not as good as mandatory "this product contains GMO ingredient(s)".
There's been some serious doubt cast on that assumption recently: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/business/gmo-promise-falls...
For more in depth criticism of the NYT article:
http://weedcontrolfreaks.com/2016/10/the-tiresome-discussion...
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/01/492091546/how...
>...Unlike genetically modified crops, which typically involve the insertion of one or two target genes, plants developed via mutagenic processes with random, multiple and unspecific genetic changes[17] have been discussed as a concern[18] but are not prohibited by any nation's organic standards. Reports from the US National Academy of Sciences state that there is no scientific justification for regulating genetic engineered crops while not doing so for mutation breeding crops.[5]
So, these crops with random genetic mutations are sold as organic and have been in the food supply since 1930:
>...From 1930 to 2014 more than 3200 mutagenic plant varietals have been released[1][2] that have been derived either as direct mutants (70%) or from their progeny (30%)
I think you're right in pointing out that there is general ignorance about the roles of radiation and chemical mutagens. These have been around for a long time, introduced when there was less focus on the methods of food production. I think if there were more awareness placed on these aspects as well, people would be interested in, say, labeling for this, too.
As for the labeling of organic, what is acceptable under that label is also a contentious issue, with lobbying on both sides. To assume that those who prefer to buy organic are knowingly accepting that mutation-bred foods should be labeled organic I think is a little disingenuous. Of course, lines have to be drawn somewhere, if we've got a binary label, and that's why some would like more detailed labelling.
Disingenuous? I certainly didn't claim that people who buy organic understand what they are buying and I don't appreciate your insinuation. I simply said that these crops have not prohibited by any nation's organic standards.
I'm responding to this phrase:
"crops with random genetic mutations are sold as organic and have been in the food supply since 1930"
As you say, this simply says that these crops are allowed to carry the organic label. It's a small move from here to say that people accept these crops as organic. And then another small move to say that since transgenic crops are no different from these other crops, that transgenic crops should also be accepted as organic. Is this fair? This is the sense I get when reading your "What is ironic about the GMO debate" phrase. Perhaps the shoulds are a bit strong. How would you change my analysis?
You've rightly pointed out where I made a mistake in my use of "disingenuous". What do you think of the rest of what I wrote? Is there anything you agree with, at least in part? If not, what's your take?
>…It's a small move from here to say that people accept these crops as organic. And then another small move to say that since transgenic crops are no different from these other crops, that transgenic crops should also be accepted as organic. Is this fair? This is the sense I get when reading your "What is ironic about the GMO debate" phrase. Perhaps the shoulds are a bit strong. How would you change my analysis?
What I find ironic about the GMO debate is simply that it appears many of the people opposed to GMOs know little about the precursor to GMO even though mutation breeding has produced many of the crops we grow. If someone is worried about inserting one known gene into a plant, I would assume they would be much more worried about eating plants that were exposed to radiation/chemicals to create multiple random genetic changes. (Or maybe people wouldn't be as worried about GMO crops if they did know the long history with mutation breeding - I don't know.)
I don't think most people have any idea that crops created through mutation breeding are labelled "organic" so that was another unexpected fact. In terms of the "organic" label, I just believe in truth in advertising. It seems like it should be very clear to the consumer what it means when a food is labelled "organic". I wasn't trying to make a judgement as to what should be labelled "organic". I wouldn't say the marketing of the "organic" label has been fraudulent, but many consumers do have a misleading idea of what they are buying.
- There are people who don't know a lot about earlier methods of causing mutations such as chemicals and radiation as applied to crops (labeled organic or otherwise, I suspect)
- There should truth in advertising/labeling for food. We've been talking about the organic label, but I think we both agree that it shouldn't be limited to just organic, correct?
I think your points about random mutation possibly being more worrisome than targeted (transgenic) mutation, or perhaps knowledge of what's been done in the past may alleviate fears is right on the money. It'd be good to raise awareness of this as well.
What do you think? Substantially accurate representation? Anything to add/subtract/modify?
Well... I think we agree on part of this and disagree on other parts...
I think producers should be free to market their products as organic, cage free, free range, kosher, etc, and the consumers should understand what the label means. I think more work needs to be done here to make sure consumers know what they are buying.
I am opposed to mandated labeling of anything unless there is a scientific basis for it being a safety concern - potential allergens, etc. For that reason, a GMO food that has passed EPA, FDA, USDA and state regulations as being safe should not have to be labeled - besides imposing a cost on food, it would likely confuse the customer as the implication would be there are health risks compared to other food. If a producer wants to indicate a product as GMO or not GMO, they should be free to do so, but it shouldn't be imposed on them by the government.
GMOs are perfectly safe and beneficial. There is no dispute about the safety of GMOs as a class. Feel free to pick apart the corporations and individual crops though.
It's like saying "hey don't diss DIVX [1] but instead those who created it".
No, products and production methods that are questionable should be critiqued.
Also, follow the money. It seems to work almost every single time.
Software engineers can't predict every side effect of modifications to code that they created.
I read that some of these GMO products have only been on the market 10 years and have not existed more than 20. So it is impossible for these "scientist" to know the long term effects.
[1] http://www.scidev.net/global/gm/news/gm-potato-uses-frog-gen...
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/05/40419855...
Not with a gene gun, they didn't. Genetic modifications through hybridisation and other traditional methods are protected by cellular mechanisms that are bypassed in GMO.
We'll only see the problems after the corporations make their buck, just like when they gave Thalidomide to pregnant women, blood products with HIV and hepatitis C to haemophiliacs and baby bottles with endocrine disruptors to parents who believed in the magical power of science.
If they actually are bypassed, the modifications wouldn't give rise to any viable organisms.
Prove it and I bet Nature or Science will publish your proof.
In the mean time, we artificially introduce whole genes in a system made to deal with single nucleotide mutations. It's not like we completely figured out gene overlap, control sequences, that which looks to us like dead code, etc., but we'll fire the gene gun anyway and see what sticks. Meanwhile, the consumers are imagining CRISPR/Cas9-like techniques done by people who understand exactly what and where they are modifying...
Dismissing unfounded science about your field is a good practice.
Overall, it was an okay article... at least they didn't try to sell us a product right from the article...
"How are these scientist be so sure" <- Not how science works. There will never be a point at which anyone will be able to accurately state with absolute certainty that any food is "surely" without danger or side effect, GMO or otherwise.
"Software engineers can't predict every side effect of modifications to code that they created." <- So? We still fly to the moon, Mars, even Pluto on software. We save and improve so many lives every day with software written by engineers who can't "predict every side effect".
This is not a standard you live by, and not a standard anyone actually uses. It's ignorance, and honestly this kind of "HOW CAN WE BE SURE" argument that should embarrass anyone making it.
but they are lying because
> There will never be a point at which anyone will be able to accurately state with absolute certainty that any food is "surely" without danger or side effect
By any reasonable measure, we have plenty of evidence to declare GMO products to be completely safe for human consumption. So far none of the GMO products available to the consumers show any sign that they would be at all more dangerous than the equivalent non-GMO products. Drawing the line at GMO is completely arbitrary, since there is no evidence that GMO would in any way make food less safe to eat.
Or you can think of it this way: you are at least hundred times more likely to choke on your food and die rather than to get ill from the effects of GMO.
That is, you can't say anything about the safety of GMO organisms. You can only say something about the safety of the ones that have been created and studied so far.
(For that matter, Russia had a bioweapon laboratory that, IIRC, was doing something like adding smallpox toxins to anthrax. Does that count as GMO?)
I'd like to hear the rational for trusting food which is produced be massive amounts of random mutations through radiation, is somehow more inherently safe than GMO.
That being said, I was deeply disappointed to hear that our 'groundbreaking technology' amounts to stuff like "make plants pesticide resistant" > "dump more pesticide on plants" > "apply for patent". This is really disappointingly stupid.
Also it turns out that crop yields are almost not at all affected by genetic modification [1]
[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/10/gm-...
Agree completely on the pesticides comment though.
Biggest innovation in crop yield seems to be hydroponics and vertical growing. Fraction of the water use and don't need to worry about soil.
The, IMHO, obvious fix is a mandatory "contains GMO" labeling. Which they obviously do not mention.
Well I think it is our right to know. Doctoring with DNA? At least let me know. Period.
[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/06/23/senat...
As a reminder, the only items for which a GMO counterpart
is currently available to consumers are: alfalfa, canola,
corn (field and sweet, but not popcorn), cotton, papaya,
potatoes, soybeans (but not tofu or edamame varieties),
sugar beet, and squash. Genetically engineered apples and
salmon will be available soon.
I believe that many people are not against using GM bacteria/fungi/... to produce stuff (lots of medicine is manufactured that way, for example), they just don't want GMOs in the fields because:
1) they are (rightfully) afraid that unexpected side-effects happen when modified organisms are able to spread beyond the field
2) they do not like the stranglehold that Big Ag can impose on farmers (which is more a socio-economic issue, but nevertheless valid given the actions of e.g. Monsanto https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...)
A food crop could be modified to be dangerous I'm sure. And likewise I'm sure one could be selectively bred (over enough generations) to be dangerous. If someone engineers Sarin-secreting corn or something we'll figure it out pretty quickly and the issue won't be it being GMO, it will be human malevolence. But I really couldn't care less about that.
Rather, I like seeing GMO labels because it's the closest analogue for determining if my food is proprietary. I am incredibly against reproducing organisms that are a living patent violation, and I don't want to support such things if possible. Above so said, I would much prefer to see marking indicating that none of the product was patented, copyrighted, licensed, or otherwise encumbered.
Another thing I think that perhaps gets (erroneously) mixed into the GMO debate is biodiversity. Many people have concerns that monoculture is dangerous and somehow mix and/or conflate non-GMO with heirloom/native varietal foods.
Obviously the shadow over all of the above is the "organic" label, which blurs things a little but further. But the primary consumer for organic overlaps with the primary consumer for non-GMO which overlaps with the primary consumer for local/heirloom/native produce, and the net result is that all the terms get muddied.
Given the above, while I concur that GMO labeling is not ideal as is, and I concur that GMO foods are fine or mostly fine, we don't actually have a sufficient food labeling system. People want to know if proprietary organisms are in their food. They want to know if it was grown with pesticides. They want to know where it was grown. Etc.
In many ways food labels are a product of bizarre anti-consumer compromises. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to be able to get non-proprietary food grown with low pesticide usage. Complaining about the GMO label doesn't really seem to address this.
(PS: Love getting downvoted in the interval between posting my comment and refreshing the thread... almost like somebody didn't even read it.)
To me, the pro-gmo crowd seems to be about taking away my rights to have my food correctly labeled. This is a morally indefensible position, regardless of safety of gmo.
This is a reason I added to my more "traditional" reasons for being a vegetarian - as it stands, it is very hard to reason about the likely supply chain of food that I purchase. Nevertheless, it is easier in my view with vegetables as they are lower down in the food chain. With meat, there are a whole bunch of extra parameters governing things beyond the feed composition and structure.
This also meshes well with the original ideas behind the virtues of free markets, which depend upon customers making informed, rational choices. "Openness" regarding the supply chain is essential for the critical "informed" aspect.
It's hard to believe the sincerity of your claim, given that you can reasonably infer anything not advertising itself as "non-GMO" contains GMO.
It seems to me that a lot of food is labeled as kosher, low fat, sugar free, contains peanuts, gluten-free, etc. I am not sure where your comment comes from.
His point is that all of these labels are voluntary. There is no need to enforce a law mandating these labels.
Do you think it should be illegal for a food supplier to add a 'non-gmo' label?
This is like selling a PC with the label "No need to change oil!". I like not having to change oil, but there's no need to do that for _any_ PC.
The morally indefensible position is the one that vilifies, through ignorance, a set of plant breeding techniques that have the ability to save wildlife habitat and reduce pesticide use and carbon emissions worldwide by making agriculture more efficient.
If you want to adopt a morally defensible position on this issue, may I suggest asking for labeling with estimates of water, herbicide, and acreage use of your food? Or carbon footprint estimates? Because a "correct" GMO label that actually carries any meaning will look like the methods section of a Science article.
It takes between 4000 to 5000 gallons of water per pound of beef produced. Chicken production uses about 5% the resources of beef. Vegan is better still.
I think we are in agreement on protecting the environment, but we have different strategies for doing that. Fair enough.
My two primary (I have more) objections to GMO are:
1) Lack of rigorous testing, especially long term testing. Many of the GMO products in production spent a minimal amount of time in the lab before being selected for production, with little to no long term testing being done. (to find any number of potential issues and side chain-effect issues that can happen.) For example, while at the sequencing company, I learned that it's not just about the genome of the thing itself, but it's surrounding microbiome, which of course is almost an after thought to the big-ag gmo producers.
2) The way in which the pro GMO big ag has essentially corrupted the bodies set up to regulate itself. Monsanto is a perfect example of this, but only one of many. They have a supreme court justice who has refused to recuse himself on cases with obvious conflicts of interest. They have a massive online pr (read: propaganda) operation to keep these things out of the limelight or at least remove them quickly. They have basically taken over the most prominent FDA positions. They abuse K-street beyond what even most of the K-Street abusers do. It's this kind of systematic corporate corruption that makes me sympathetic with those who are anti-gmo.
I also have a huge issue with the whole patent system when it comes to genomes, the system is broke enough for normal tech, but there have been some dangerous precedents set that I don't have the time to get into but they will have major consequences as sequencing costs and manipulation costs are reduced and therefore it becomes a more prevalent tech.
Now, all that being said, I see a ton of FUD on the anti-gmo side that is easily refuted, but the problem is that I far too often see the illogical/irrational FUD of anti-GMO being the strawman used by pro-gmo people against the more reasonable and scientific anti-gmo arguments, which seems to be intellectually dishonest, very much like I find articles like this.
I could go on, but just wanted to offer a quick two-cents.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the horrible state of peer-reviewed science. As a layman with a huge interest in science, I held the process up on a pedestal, that is until I saw it from the inside. Bad science abounds and is rarely challenged, which only gives fuel to the anti-intellectual/anti-science movements which is the last thing we need as a species!
My thoughts exactly, just better crystallized.
There have been hundreds of studies over decades testing the safety of these gene products. Just because you choose to ignore them does not mean they do not exist.
Also, just because something isn't tested each time you re-make it, doesn't me it isn't safe. How long would it take to build a car if you re-tested every part, every time?
> They have a supreme court justice who has refused to recuse himself on cases with obvious conflicts of interest. They have a massive online pr (read: propaganda) operation to keep these things out of the limelight or at least remove them quickly. They have basically taken over the most prominent FDA positions.
This is extremely paranoid and nowhere close to the truth.
They also act as if nature is static. More genes are changed in plants by the environment they live in than through GMO methods.
This idea that getting genes from frogs and putting them in wheat is somehow dangerous deceives people by playing on their ignorance of how closely related living things are.
I share 50% of my genes with a banana. An anti-GMO person might spin this has me being filled with unnatural banana genes which should never have been in a human.
>More genes are changed in plants by the environment they live in than through GMO methods. //
Which is to pretend that the potency of any genetic alteration is simply down to the number of genes altered. So, ADA deficiency (a disease caused by a single mutated gene) is less troubling than having red hair (due to [possibly] 4 pairs of genes, AFAIK).
We're making alterations that it would be mathematically impossible to occur by natural mutation, to pretend that direct gene manipulation is only an evolution (eh!) of normal farming methods is exceedingly disingenuous IMO.
And you seem to suggest that doing deliberate and controlled altering of specific genes is somehow MORE dangerous than doing RANDOM changes or any number of genes. How does that even compute?
Would you drive a car at 100 mph where the car mechanics had just made massive amounts of random changes hoping it made the car better, or would you drive the car where they carefully studied the engine and made selected changes?
There are no laws in physics which prevent the DNA from getting altered at exactly the same spots through deliberate random mutations than through GMO methods.
Speaking of your ADA deficiency example. If you wanted to avoid accidentally mutating a gene to cause ADA, you would be most certain to avoid that using a the GMO method of specifically altering specific genes than if you just nuked the seed.
Do you mean laboratory mutagenesis initiated by human action or other types? You know humans don't have to do mutagenesis to do farming?? It sounds like you're presenting a false dichotomy. It's not my field, can you explain why these are the only options?
>'There are no laws in physics which prevent the DNA from getting altered at exactly the same spots through deliberate random mutations than through GMO methods.' //
And a seed could spontaneously form from a confluence of cosmic rays. but it doesn't. Which is why I invoked the mathematical impossibility.
And just because mutagenesis can occur without human action doesn't mean we should run in slipshod. Stabbing can occur by accident, doesn't make purposeful stabbings a good idea.
Your car analogy needs a small adjustment, the mechanic thinks they know everything and has already written off several cars by modifying them; oh, and their alterations could spread to other cars, houses, tables, and make the entirety of manufactured products fail. But hey, nitroglycerine explodes well, let's try filling fuel tanks with that, and liquid oxygen in the air-conditioning.
* Drink milk, it has a lot of calcium and will prevent osteoporosis.
* Sugar is not that bad. Fat is the devil!
* AAA CDO's are a good and safe way to invest your money!
The previous sentences are all lies sponsored by big companies and lobbies which have/had the seal of approval of different governments and politicians.
Big companies fight for their own interests and politicians fight for the interests of those who "sponsor" their campaigns and offer jobs in their boards once their political career is done.
GMO is a technique. As a technique is it not good or bad. The problem is the big geopolitics and economic interests behind it.
The article got my attention until I've read this line. Sorry, but the WHO doesn't have a good track record when it comes to nutritional advice and I actually believe that "food fortification" is amongst the worst things that could have happened to us. Not only because there's zero evidence that this has led to better health, but also because it's used as a blatant lie when marketing unhealthy products. So now you have children that eat vitamin-enriched cereals instead of apples.
And what do you know, we now have an obesity epidemic on our hands that our grandparents didn't have and guess what else they didn't have? Vitamins enriched bread or freaking corn syrup in everything. Or the health problems we are confronted with, even without such extensive knowledge about good vs bad cholesterol.
Let's face it, when it comes to nutrition, can you imagine what would happen if tens of thousands of medical professionals suddenly admitted wrong doings which directly led to the deaths of an unimaginable number of people? WHO is never going to recognize that and that line above is bullshit.
And if you think about it, because of such fuckups is why many people have lost faith in the healthcare industry and why we now have a significant minority refusing vaccinations for their children, which is fucked up and stupid, but then again you can't really blame them.
She might truly believe what she has written, but she is clearly economically vested into people consuming more GMO products.
Until a stronger desease will come and wipe all of your DNA clones. Think about Dedale's fate, the first engineer that lost his son after going from poor solution to poor solution.
A forest is a very productive environment, without the need of GMOs or glyphosate. Why?
Flavor
Local small farms don't embrace it.
If local farms did embrace it, I'd still be stuck with the flavor problem.
Yeah, I think that is largely my big worry about "GMOs". It isn't about the crops themselves but the corporations making them.
Even if you don't buy from them, if a seed of "theirs" drifts to your land (which, anyone with a basic understanding of biology will know, will happen), you have to pay them. If not, they will tie you up in a lawsuit till you go broke.
GMOs: Fine
Greedy Corporations: Baaad.
Monsanto won the suit because they demonstrated that the seeds didn't just drift there by accident: he knew what they were, and he went out of his way to plant them. He intentionally concentrated the seeds and planted them for a new crop in commercial levels. Of course the sensationalist media had to treat Schmeiser's defense as gospel, but here's a quote covering the ruling:
> "The court record shows, however, that it was not just a few seeds from a passing truck, but that Mr Schmeiser was growing a crop of 95–98% pure Roundup Ready plants, a commercial level of purity far higher than one would expect from inadvertent or accidental presence. The judge could not account for how a few wayward seeds or pollen grains could come to dominate hundreds of acres without Mr Schmeiser’s active participation, saying ‘...none of the suggested sources could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality evident from the results of tests on Schmeiser’s crop’"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmei...
These are entirely reasonable concerns, well proven out by past experience with agricultural monocultures and counterproductive "improvements" in the shelf product. And so while it's fair and probably justified to avoid the "Non-GMO" certification label itself, it's not justifiable to dismiss concerns about trends in GMO produce overall by quoting "science" that only addresses the safety of GMO produce and not the larger concerns.
So non-gmo labels can be misleading, but not labeling gmo isn't. Wow. Welcome to Animal Farm.
And of course, a non-gmo label doesn't mean anything good. But a cool gmo non-label of course means something positive.
Also I am a scientist, and I avoid gmo products... wait... actually I don't have to avoid it since they are banned in the EU and in France. But we are only a bunch of retards I guess.
http://geneticexperts.org/national-academies-report-looks-at...
It's also disingenuous to claim that GMO isn't needed if we adopt sustainable farming, when the economics and scale of industrial farming make this fantasy impossible.
Edit to add: I've taken a look at the responses of 31 commenters (not comments) in this thread (starting at the top, working down until I got tired of keeping track), looking to determine if they were pro/anti-GMO and pro/anti-GMO-labelling. Of those 31, I dismissed 10 that I couldn't categorize. Here are my completely unscientific, eye-balled results:
3 strongly pro-GMO, no labeling
10 pro-labeling, including one for detailed labeling if labels are required
6 who expressed some desire for nuanced discussion, no discernible position on labeling
2 who expressed restraint in moving forward, but not anti-GMO
Science at its core is about scepticism and degrees of certainty - never about absolute truth (see: inductive logic, etc.). Using "science" as an appeal to authority to end debate is the opposite of scepticism.
I personally do not have strong opinions about this debate, but I think it is completely acceptable for someone to take a 'wait-and-see' approach, especially considering the number of times "scientific consensus" has been wrong in the past (see: smoking, fats, etc.).
Moreover, it seems to me that there isn't any immediate danger from people who are "GMO sceptics" since all they do is pay extra for organic products. Market forces will regulate this behaviour if any shortages occur; which I don't think is likely.
So overall I find the "pro-GMO" attitude (such as that displayed in the article) to be strangely insistent on influencing the choices of individual's, dispite such low stakes.
"Sky, not Skynet."
"Google is not the Creator."
You just found the cure for the obesity epidemic! Double win!
Quick, what's the logical fallacy here?