What's worse, GMO foods or starving?

[bombus]

This statement is one of those horrible generalisations frequently made by the pseudoreligious. True, many GM crops and foods are very much to do with profit. However, there are many others also. For example : the vitamin A enhanced rice, called golden rice, was developed by a pair of Swiss researchers who were working to develop a better food for the third world, based on the fact that 2 million rice eaters die every year from diseases related to vitamin A deficiency. It was their plan to release it free of charge to those who needed it. Sadly, this has not happened, due to the protest action of the anti-GM organisations. As a result, those 2 million deaths continue each year unabated.

 

This gene, later labelled as the 'terminator' by the anti-GM movement, was developed by the US Dept. of Agriculture (not industry) in order to meet the anti-GM demand for a means to prevent cross pollination. It is quite ironic that a trait developed to meet their demands was immediately attacked by them as a tool of capitalism to tie farmers to one supplier. As a result of the hysterical response of the anti-GM organisations, this gene is not used commercially.

 

It's just about always done for profit. How many companies spend millions of pounds on research only to give away the technology for free? The idea of Golden Rice was just a way of maintaining the status quo so that we don't have to do anything to really help the poor of the world. (Even the tribes of the Amazon basin have a varied diet. The very poorest in the world are denied a healthy diet by western economics.)

 

From wiki:

Terminator Technology is the colloquial name given to proposed methods for restricting the use of genetically modified plants by causing second generation seeds to be sterile. The technology was under development by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land company in the 1990s and is not yet commercially available. Because some stakeholders expressed concerns that this technology might lead to dependence for poor smallholder farmers, Monsanto, an agricultural products company and the world's biggest seed supplier, pledged not to commercialize the technology.

 

The technology was discussed during the 8th Conference of the Parties to the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity in Curitiba, Brazil, March 20-31, 2006.

 

Terminator Technology is one form of Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURT). There are conceptually two types of GURT.

 

1. V-GURT This type of GURT produces sterile seeds meaning that a farmer that had purchased seeds containing v-GURT technology could not save the seed from this crop for future planting. This would not have an immediate impact on the large number of farmers who use hybrid seeds, as they do not produce their own planting seeds, and instead buy specialized hybrid seeds from seed production companies. The technology is restricted at the plant variety level - hence the term V-GURT. Manufacturers of genetically enhanced crops would use this technology to protect their products from unauthorised use.

 

2. T-GURT. A second type of GURT modifies a crop in such a way that the genetic enhancement engineered into the crop does not function until the crop plant is treated with a chemical that is sold by the biotechnology company. Farmers can save seeds for use each year. However, they do not get to use the enhanced trait in the crop unless they purchase the activator compound. The technology is restricted at the trait level - hence the term T-GURT.

 

SkepticLance, you're not really very skeptical!

[SkepticLance]

bombus said

 

The idea of Golden Rice was just a way of maintaining the status quo so that we don't have to do anything to really help the poor of the world. (Even the tribes of the Amazon basin have a varied diet. The very poorest in the world are denied a healthy diet by western economics.)

 

Quite the contrary. The two researchers who developed this product - Swiss scientists Dr. Ingo Potrykus and Dr. Peter Beyer - were not working for any company, but an independent research group, with the intention of releasing the crop free of charge to those who needed it. They even gained written permission from a number of companies to use their patented techniques free of charge to allow golden rice to be free to all.

 

Almost half the human race (3 billion people) rely upon rice as a staple. A large fraction of this group - hundreds of millions - are unable to buy or grow enough other foods to provide full nutrient balance, and 2 million die every year from vitamin A deficiency related illness. WHO estimates, for example, that 100,000 women die every year from childbirth due to vitamin A deficiency related body weakness. Golden rice has the potential to improve the health of hundreds of millions of people. This is not tied in with the profit motive, or else it would not be designed to be given away free of charge.

 

SkepticLance, you're not really very skeptical!

 

I am extremely sceptical of the motives and actions of the anti-GM groups.

[pioneer]

One way to look at GMO food, is not just reject all, but to consider what they splice in. For example, if one splices the genes that make corn grow tall into strawberry bushes, so they grow taller, then what you have are genes that the body can already digest from corn being transferred to strawberries. No new genes have been created. If we can eat corn and eat strawberries, then corn-berries have the same genes as if we ate a spoonful of each at the same time. When the body digest this, it only sees mush dissolved in stomach acids, containing only things eaten before.

 

If you splice a gene from a poison mushroom into a tomato, I might be a little worried. If you go to a salad bar and load the plate with genes from ten veggies, your stomach see all these various genes and eats away. If you were to cross these, all those genes have been eaten before. If you cross some type scrub weed that is slug resistant, I would make sure the makers of that cross demonstrate that they will eat the scrub weed pure with no harmful affects. If they are willing to munch out, I'll try it too. This not a perfect test, but at least genes the body has eaten before will do no harm since it knows how to eat these.

[insane_alien]

pioneer, i think your veiw of genetic biology is a little off. since i'm better aquainted with chemistry i'll use an analogy from there.

 

Sodium is nasty on its own, Chlorine is nasty on it own, combined, they make your chips tastier. mixing genes in plants would likely go along similar lines. this also works vice versa.

[SkepticLance]

insane alien is, of course, quite correct.

 

The key to safety is testing. GM crops and foods are subject to greater regulatory testing requirements than any other food or crop developments at any time in the past. This, no doubt, explains the excellent safety record to the present date.

 

I read a few years back of a disaster with potatoes, using conventional breeding. As many readers will know, potatoes are part of the family Solanaceae, reknowned for its nasty and very toxic alkaloid poisons. Potato leaves are very toxic, containing the poison solanine. Potato tubers, though, tend to be solanine free. In the example I am mentioning (sorry, I lost the reference) cross breeding of a cultured variety with a wild variety resulted in a new strain that had high levels of solanine in the tuber as well as the leaves. One of the researchers took some potatoes home that had been surplus to testing requirements, and cooked them up. He died.

 

There is nothing inherently good or bad about conventional breeding, or about GM. Both are extremely valuable, and both carry hazards. The key is testing. Products must be thoroughly tested be used. To date, unlike conventional breeding, GM has caused no human fatalities. This is due to the robust testing requirements.

[Dak]

The key to safety is testing. GM crops and foods are subject to greater regulatory testing requirements than any other food or crop developments at any time in the past. This, no doubt, explains the excellent safety record to the present date.

 

true. reguarding individual meal safety, it's no more risky than any other food/drink/drug/etc.

 

what conserns me is that, by using GM crops, you are suddenly introducing a new strain of species into the environment, which history has shown can potentially have extremely unsettling effects on the local ecosystem; and afaik no-ones actually worked out what the risks are as far as that's conserned.

 

like YT said earlyer, i'm worried about the greed: it's easy to think of GM crops as 'science' because they utilise science to work, but that doesn't neccesarily mean that the statement 'GM crops are safe to the environment' has been scientifically proven; i'm a tad worried that people are doing it because it's profitable, not because it's good.

[SkepticLance]

Dak said :

 

you are suddenly introducing a new strain of species into the environment, which history has shown can potentially have extremely unsettling effects on the local ecosystem;

 

Hardly a new species. A typical food crop will have up to 50,000 genes in the genome. A typical genetic modification involves insertion, deletion or alteration of a single gene. The overall impact is quite tiny - one 50,000th of the whole. And the beauty of this technology is that the change is deliberate, based on a gene we know. Thus, the ecological impact can be largely predicted. And then field testing is used to pick up unknown impacts. Over 12 years, no serious unpredictable environmental effect has been seen.

 

Compare this to mutations. In the 1950's and 1960's, a favourite plant alteration technique was to expose the reproductive parts of the plant to mutagenic chemicals or to hard radiation to induce mutations. The resulting seeds were planted, and the undesirable mutations removed. A small number of new mutations were considered desirable, and these plants remain part of the human food supply to this day.

 

Those mutations were just as drastic a genetic change as GM. And the results were totally unpredictable. Yet nothing seriously harmful has resulted, and none of the green organisations has set up any kind of opposition to this technology.

 

Natural mutations are just as unpredictable. An example that I consider extremely ironical is herbicide resistant canola. There is a GM canola, resistant to the largely ecologically harmless herbicide glyphosate. And there is another canola, arising from a natural mutation, that is resistant to the extremely environmentally damaging herbicide atrazine. Farmers use both types. The GM canola is grown with glyphosate sprays that do not harm the environment. The natural mutation is grown with atrazine sprays that are extremely harmful to the natural environment. And the anti-GM lobbies attack the use of the GM canola, while ignoring the other, which is far more harmful.

[Dak]

Hardly a new species.

 

I said strain.

 

A typical food crop will have up to 50,000 genes in the genome. A typical genetic modification involves insertion, deletion or alteration of a single gene. The overall impact is quite tiny - one 50,000th of the whole.

 

not true. the change may be small genetically, but is specifically chosen to confer a large phenotypic difference; if people have bothered planting fields of GM crops, then we can assume that the modification is not insignificant.

 

And the beauty of this technology is that the change is deliberate, based on a gene we know. Thus, the ecological impact can be largely predicted.

 

not neccesarily. just because we know that gene x does y, doesn't neccesarily mean that we can predict with any certainty what the ecological repercussions of all, say, wheat suddenly doing y twice as much as previously because the GM-x gene has been introduced to the wild.

 

anyhoo, my point wasn't that GM will initiate the apocolypse, just that i'm not sure we're good enough at ecology to say with any certainty what'd happen if the local ecosystem was suddenly changed in any given way. obviously, ecosystems change over time, and generally are fine with that, but GM could potentially change ecosystems suddenly; the only other examples of this that i can think of (eg introducing new species) can result in general doom for members of the ecosystem.

[SkepticLance]

Dak

 

You ignored my other point, which is that we have been engaging in much riskier crop modifications for many decades, without harm. GM is much more targeted than random mutation, whether natural or artificial, and the results much better understood. Nothing in life is without risk, but we must judge risks relative to each other, and proceed with the lower risks that give greater benefit.

 

GM fits this category. Much more so than some of the alternative techniques that humans have used for so long.

[Pangloss]

Nice work in this thread, SkepticLance.

[SkepticLance]

Thanks, Pangloss. Only nice people stop to give a pat on the back.

[bombus]

bombus said

 

 

Quite the contrary. The two researchers who developed this product - Swiss scientists Dr. Ingo Potrykus and Dr. Peter Beyer - were not working for any company, but an independent research group, with the intention of releasing the crop free of charge to those who needed it. They even gained written permission from a number of companies to use their patented techniques free of charge to allow golden rice to be free to all.

 

Almost half the human race (3 billion people) rely upon rice as a staple. A large fraction of this group - hundreds of millions - are unable to buy or grow enough other foods to provide full nutrient balance, and 2 million die every year from vitamin A deficiency related illness. WHO estimates, for example, that 100,000 women die every year from childbirth due to vitamin A deficiency related body weakness. Golden rice has the potential to improve the health of hundreds of millions of people. This is not tied in with the profit motive, or else it would not be designed to be given away free of charge.

 

Where did they get their funding from? Anyway, while I don't doubt their genuine intentions, the companies that market the product would make profits from it somewhere down the line. That said, this GM development is not particularly worrying (unless gene transfer via bacteria occurs to non-target species) in itself, but is a sticking plaster where major surgery is required. The poorest are forced to eat rice and virtually nothing else due to economic policies. The truth is, there is not really any need for GMOs, solutions to problems already exist.

 

Also, another problem is that relatively benign GM developments open the door for much more harmful ones.

 

 

I am extremely sceptical of the motives and actions of the anti-GM groups.

 

That's fine, and some of the claims by some groups are more-or-less baseless, but you should also be sceptical of those that wish to harness GM technology as well.

 

Dak said :

Natural mutations are just as unpredictable. An example that I consider extremely ironical is herbicide resistant canola. There is a GM canola, resistant to the largely ecologically harmless herbicide glyphosate. And there is another canola, arising from a natural mutation, that is resistant to the extremely environmentally damaging herbicide atrazine. Farmers use both types. The GM canola is grown with glyphosate sprays that do not harm the environment. The natural mutation is grown with atrazine sprays that are extremely harmful to the natural environment. And the anti-GM lobbies attack the use of the GM canola, while ignoring the other, which is far more harmful.

 

Glyphosphate is harmful to the environment, it is just not as harmful as some pesticides as it is less persistent and less likely to spread to non-target areas.

 

To illustrate my point: Between rows of arable plants often grow many 'weeds'. The effect these weeds have on the crop is usually minor, but the farming industry wishes to maximise profits so wants no competition from other species. The area where the GM crop grows is dosed with huge amounts of pesticide which wipe out everything else- all the weeds, so all the invertebrates, so all the birds and mammals etc that feed on them etc etc etc... This results in massive habitat loss for a huge range of species, thusly, localised extinctions.

 

So to say Glyphosphate is not harmful to the environment is not strictly true, and when used on large areas, totally untrue.

[SkepticLance]

bombus said :

 

The poorest are forced to eat rice and virtually nothing else due to economic policies. The truth is, there is not really any need for GMOs, solutions to problems already exist.

 

There are always many solutions. For example, you and a few hundred million others like you in developed nations could accept a 50% cut in salaries, with the other half going to feed the third world. Do you really think those few hundred million will all agree? We have to use whatever solution is at hand. Vitamin A enhanced rice is an excellent way to minimis the harmful health effects of an all (or almost all) rice diet.

 

The area where the GM crop grows is dosed with huge amounts of pesticide which wipe out everything else- all the weeds, so all the invertebrates, so all the birds and mammals etc that feed on them etc etc etc... This results in massive habitat loss for a huge range of species, thusly, localised extinctions.

 

Please detail the localised extinctions coming from glyphosate resistant crops, because I do not believe that they happen. To take your argument to its logical absurd conclusion, if you are going to try to minimise weed control, then you need to take away Granny's hoe to stop her digging them out of her vege garden.

 

Weeds are a pest in agriculture and must be controlled. If they are needed to provide habitat for insects, birds etc., then set aside weed meadows. Indeed, such areas always exist, next to streams, hedgerows etc. There are always sites that are not suitable for growing crops, and your 'localised extinctions' are a fiction.

[pioneer]

There is a one gene to one protein template relationship. If you alter one gene you make one new protein. This extra protein may alter the internal environment of the cell and cause other genes to become expressed. But all the products are still from genes that are part of things we eat anyway. If you can make new things without genes you have disproved genetics.

 

GMO is sort of like mixing two CD's of music. One is a dance CD, that has a message song after three good dance tunes. This message song causes the crowd to sit down to listen. So we take that song out and put another dance song in spot number four, to keep the crowd on its feet, so when the fifth song plays, they are on the dance floor, instead of sitting down at the tables, not wishing to get back up again, to dance. All the songs are good, but sometimes song blending from good two CD's gives a much better final affect. In this case, we want the crops to dance longer.

[Dak]

Dak

 

You ignored my other point, which is that we have been engaging in much riskier crop modifications for many decades, without harm. GM is much more targeted than random mutation, whether natural or artificial, and the results much better understood. Nothing in life is without risk, but we must judge risks relative to each other, and proceed with the lower risks that give greater benefit.

 

GM fits this category. Much more so than some of the alternative techniques that humans have used for so long.

 

yes, but my point is that it is a risk with potentially huge repercussions, and i'm worried that it's a risk that we've entered into without being sufficiently well informed.

 

e.g., do we actually know that it's safe(ish), and what's the worst that could go wrong, and how likely that is to happen? have we actually made an informed descision? or are we doing it because it's cheap?; are we proceeding with the lower-risk higher-benifit technique, or with the higher-benifit hopefully-lower-risk technique?

 

something to consider: it's been mathematically shown that alleles can be designed that will totally wipe out a species. all they need to be is:

 

#a vital deveolopmental allele

#a useless (post development) allele (which, i'd assume, would be common in developmental alleles)

#capable of functioning correctly with only one allele present (not rare)

#broken (combined with above = recessively fatal)

#a transposon that transposes over the analogous allele on the other chromosome post-deveolopment (ok, this bit's rare )

 

then it's a race between the species ability to evolve around this, and the alleles spread throughought the species (which evolution would drive within a suprisingly short number of generations).

 

genetic modification can utilise transposons, and presumably GM would target developmental alleles quite often (to make larger crops). so what'r the chances that an artificial, transposon-delivered, deveolpmental allele mutates into one of these allele-killers?

 

probably extremely unlikely, but i'd like to know that the likelyhood of stuff like that has actually been assessed and deemed vanishingly small, rather than the possibility having not been looked at.

 

where, and by who, has it been descided that GM is safe?

 

(btw, i'd assume that GM is actually pretty safe; i'd just like to know that that's actually been proven)

[SkepticLance]

To Dak

 

Nothing humanity has done is totally risk free. Sure GM carries a risk. However, we can minimise the risk with robust safety testing, which is already being done. We have been doing this large scale for 12 years with no significant safety problems. Why should we expect them now?

 

If you demand 100% safety, you are living in fairyland, since no such thing exists. Rationally, we can only expect low risk for strong benefit. And GM has been giving that.

 

As far as lethal alleles is concerned, it aint gonna happen. The ancestors of humanity have been suffering random changes to alleles (mutations) for 3 to 4 billion years. No extinction results. GM by comparison is not random. It is targeted, using a known genetic alteration, and subject to careful testing. A random mutation is many fold more likely to have unforeseen harmful effects, and in about 3.5 billion years it has not happened. I am afraid your stated fear looks exceedingly irrational.

 

Dak said :

 

(btw, i'd assume that GM is actually pretty safe; i'd just like to know that that's actually been proven)

 

In the United States, between the Dept. of Agriculture, the FDA, and the EPA, there are regulatory requirements for any new GM crop or food that add up to about 1000 safety tests before the item is released. That is a more robust testing regimen than any that has existed any time in history.

 

While it is impossible to 'prove' safety, I would say 1000 failed attempts to disprove it constitute rather strong evidence.

[bombus]

There are always many solutions. For example, you and a few hundred million others like you in developed nations could accept a 50% cut in salaries, with the other half going to feed the third world. Do you really think those few hundred million will all agree? We have to use whatever solution is at hand. Vitamin A enhanced rice is an excellent way to minimis the harmful health effects of an all (or almost all) rice diet.

 

I think you exaggerate somewhat on how much the West would need to cut back its spending to provide a nutritious diet to the 3rd world.

 

 

Please detail the localised extinctions coming from glyphosate resistant crops, because I do not believe that they happen.

 

These GMOs and the pesticides are not yet widely used (thankfully) so the problem has not really occurred yet, but would occur if this method of farming became widespread. I was just illustrating the problem

 

To take your argument to its logical absurd conclusion, if you are going to try to minimise weed control, then you need to take away Granny's hoe to stop her digging them out of her vege garden.

 

The problem is only of major concern when these pesticides are applied over very large areas.

 

Weeds are a pest in agriculture and must be controlled.

 

Some do, some don't. In many cases the effects the weeds growing in-between crops have are very minor, but they benefit wildlife hugely.

 

If they are needed to provide habitat for insects, birds etc., then set aside weed meadows. Indeed, such areas always exist, next to streams, hedgerows etc.

 

Set aside meadows can be a good solution, but it is very doubtful that enough set-aside land could be created to mitigate for the loss of habitat within farmland.

 

There are always sites that are not suitable for growing crops, and your 'localised extinctions' are a fiction.

 

Sites not suitable for growing crops may also not be suitable for the 'weed' species needed by wildlife. The localised extinctions are not so much a fiction as a fact that will occur if we went down the GMO/Pesticide route.

 

Wildlife has a hard enough time trying tolive in areas of monoculture as it is (e.g North American corn belt), so removing ALL weed species is only going to make matters worse.

[iNow]

where, and by who, has it been descided that GM is safe?

I'd suggest that this is a decision we must each make for ourselves. Personally, I couldn't care less. Bring on the mutant celery and the chicken with six legs... I'm good with that.

 

 

Imagine red meat that didn't cause health issues and maximizing the nutritional value of fruits and veggies. I'm hungry!

[SkepticLance]

To iNow

 

Mutant celery might be better than that which is conventionally bred. Celery contains small amounts of the toxic substance celled psoralin. Normally not a problem. A few years ago, some breeders developed and grew a new strain which inadvertently increased psoralin concentration dramatically. Workers harvesting the celery developed massive welts everywhere their skin touched the crop.

 

This is part of the point I have been making all along. There is no such thing as 100% safe. Any new food or crop might be hazardous. The key is the test program. The GM test program is more stringent and thorough than any other in humankind's history. That is why it is actually safer to eat GM foods than foods from a newly developed conventionally bred crop.

[iNow]

This is part of the point I have been making all along. There is no such thing as 100% safe. Any new food or crop might be hazardous. The key is the test program. The GM test program is more stringent and thorough than any other in humankind's history. That is why it is actually safer to eat GM foods than foods from a newly developed conventionally bred crop.

Absolutely, and I think you've done a fantastic job illustrating this point, especially with the discussion around the use of radiation in the middle of the 20th century.

[Dak]

As far as lethal alleles is concerned, it aint gonna happen. The ancestors of humanity have been suffering random changes to alleles (mutations) for 3 to 4 billion years. No extinction results. GM by comparison is not random. It is targeted[...]

 

yes. targeted at developmental genes, often using transposons.

 

like i said, i'm not saying that bad stuff will happen, just that it could. that was clearly a worst-case scenario, and i'd assume that the chances of such an allele arising are virtualy 0 in both nature and GM, but the fact still remains that the risk could be higher in GM foods due to the nature of the modification.

 

In the United States, between the Dept. of Agriculture, the FDA, and the EPA, there are regulatory requirements for any new GM crop or food that add up to about 1000 safety tests before the item is released.

 

do they test individual food safety, or environmental impact (or both)?

[SkepticLance]

To Dak,

 

I am afraid I fail to understand your point. Why do you think that a random mutation is safer than a targeted gene addition, delection or replacement?

 

Your question was

 

do they test individual food safety, or environmental impact (or both)?

 

The answer is both, to the best that they can. Obviously, nothing is perfect (what is?), but the requirements are geared as far as they can to cover all possibilities. Thus, out of the 1000 total tests, about 100 are field tests, looking at possible environmental glitches, among other things. These field tests are carried out after the lab tests are complete, at a point where there is no major problem expected.

[Zep]

Been out of the loop for sooo long, but it seems to me the occurence of dangerous allergies has increased tremendously since the advent of bio-engineered foods. Certainly there may be several reasons for this, and the increased number of occurences hardly outweighs the number of people this feeds. But what if we inadvertently created something that causes all the honey bees to die? How long are these newly altered crops tested before they are released for public use? Are they tested in a closed system for 5-10 years? Can some one link me to the procedures for allowing their use?

[SkepticLance]

Zep

 

Your queries sound a bit like someone who has been exposed to the anti-GM propaganda. I am not going to try to answer all your queries, since it would take all day, and I am about to go off on a business trip - will be out of circulation for a bit.

 

Just as a for instance, I will reply to the honey bee example. This is the latest insinuation from the anti-GM people - that the current outbreaks of honey bee colony collapse are related to GM crops. Since no-one knows for sure what the cause is, it is hard to rebut the insinuation.

 

Latest idea is that an alien virus from Australia is the cause. While this may not prove to be the problem, it is more likely that a widespread problem is caused by a new virus, and than by a crop technique that occurs in localised geographic areas.

 

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1146498