I find myself constantly talking about GMO's to non-biologists

[paputsza]

Personally, I'm tired of defending gmo's but that seems to be what I'm constantly having to do. I kind of see the gmo-free craze as something like the "natural" craze, where most of the people who obsess about it don't know what it even means. Normally, I just let most people just poison themselves with ignorance, assuming they figure it out eventually in an effort not to sound too nerdy.

 

However, I guess the cat is out of the bag now and I've been ranting and raving to everyone who will listen (everyone, because everyone I've raved around is ignorant about it). Does anyone have similar problems? I'm relatively for all the health labels, even if I don't always believe them, and I don't work for monsomato or any of those companies and I don't plan to(I'm in biology for the brains), but when people say that "gmo's are bad for you" and have no reason why other than "science" I want to bludgeon them.

[Fuzzwood]

You have just reached the "Why are all non-science people so stupid!?"-phase. Don't worry, you will grow over it.

[CharonY]

Yeh, and with sufficient training you may advance to: "why are the grad students so ignorant" and eventually graduate to, "why are the PhDs so bloody daft?".

[chadn737]

I've encountered this a lot over the years, particularly when I was living in Missouri where Monsanto is based.

 

A lot of the animosity actually is not rooted in real fear of GMOs. Rather it is rooted in good old fashioned anti-corporatism, which has deep roots in the environmentalist movements. These fears are further flamed by large corporate giants (Whole Foods, Chipotle, etc) which actually profit immensely off of these fears. If you look at a lot of the protests, the arguments, etc...much of it is based on how evil supposedly Monsanto is. All the horror stories of Monsanto suing farmers. My family have been farming for three generations and I have seen the introduction of GMOs onto farms and the evolution of the seed industry, it has really been nothing like what you hear about from the anti-GMO people. These horror stories are pretty much lies and in the very few cases where Monsanto has taken a farmer to court, it was justified. As a farmer, you have the option to grow non-GMO seed....its really easy to obtain. If you choose to grow GMOs, because of all the advantages they offer, you sign a contract. Farmers are not all pure wholesome people. They are small business men. Some will cheat the system if they can. They will knowingly violate a contract to make a few extra bucks. For instance, one farmer bought seed from an elevator and then grew it up, deliberately spraying it with Roundup to select for the Roundup-resistant varieties. It was an outright attempt to bypass the patent, yet people like these are made out to be martyrs for deliberately stealing. All the stories about Monsanto suing over pollen contamination...bullshit. All the stories about "terminator genes" also bullshit. By the way, the creator of the terminator gene technology, he works for the USDA and is an academic (I've met him, can't say I like him). The technology has never been used in any commercial seed sold to farmers. The fact that farmers buy their seed every year has been going on long before Monsanto was in on the game. Hybrid corn has to be developed fresh every year because in the second generation you loose the benefits of heterosis. Its too expensive and hard for most farmers to develop their own hybrid corn, so they buy it from companies. This has been going on since the 50s, long before GMOs were even around.

 

I can rant a lot about this, but the point I am trying to make is that much of the anti-GMO sentiment is fueled by anti-corporatism and not actual health concerns. Ironically and hypocritically, companies like Monsanto are seen as evil corporate giants, even though in terms of sales and profit, they are much smaller than the Organic food industry which makes several billions more off of selling organic food than Monsanto makes off of selling GMO seed. There is a reason why companies like Whole Foods push for labeling. Its not because they are actually concerned about health or openness....its because they will increase profits.

 

Now besides the anti-corporatism, there are all the health and environmental arguments, which there is so much evidence against that its ridiculous how some of these claims persist. Its really like the anti-vaccine arguments. For instance, recently there was a report that "plant DNA" was found circulating in human blood. This was immediately taken up by all the anti-GMO crowd and focused on the presence of GMO DNA in peoples blood. What was never pointed out was that if this is true, then plant DNA from organic food and all human plant food is circulating in your blood. Our ancestors 10,000 years ago would have had plant DNA circulating around, long before "GMOs".

 

The simple fact is that many people are idiots and gullible, but then there is another segment who have political agendas and will spread lies to or misrepresent facts to further those ends.

 

The problem is further plagued by bad studies (see pretty much all the work done by Seralini) that incorrectly propose links to GMOs and disease. Consider the Roundup Ready gene, 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase. This gene is involved in the Shikimate pathway. Glyphosate (Roundup), inhibnits this enzyme. The Shikimate pathway is found in plants and bacteria, but not in mammals and definitely not in humans. All plants contain a copy of this enzyme, its just that those enzymes are susceptible to glyphosate, whereas there is a bacterial species with a few alleles in its copy that makes it resistant. In making Roundup-ready crops, all Monsanto did was insert a different copy of an enzyme that plants already have. Everybody that eats organic food is eating 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase. It really is irrational the fear that is associated with GMOs.

Edited March 3, 2014 by chadn737

[overtone]

When faced with ignorance and hype, it's easy to lose track of the real arguments. Get caught up in this

 

- much of the anti-GMO sentiment is fueled by anti-corporatism and not actual health concerns. -

and you lose track of what's involved in, say, having allowed conversion of 3/4 of the North American agricultural production to a couple of still untested bottleneck genetic complexes of largely unknown potential and largely private corporate benefit as well as control, in less than a third of a generation.

 

And that's just one bit of engineering - one of the unique properties of this brand new and completely unfamiliar arena of capability is how different from the others each new innovation is - one GMO is can be as different from another as one organism is different from another. Safety in one implies little or nothing about safety in another, and by safety we have to include economic, ecological, and political aspects as well as the comparatively narrow but still enormously complex area of human medical effects.

 

I'm seeing the self-congratulatory scientific crowd display a level of gullibility regarding GMOs that is kind of discouraging - the closest parallel I can find, and it's far less flagrantly clueless, is the attitude of the early nuke researchers - like the folks at Los Alamos that were using chunks of plutonium alloy as doorstops for their offices and planning to dig harbors in the high Arcitic and subway tunnels across continents with nuclear explosives. They were the experts in their day.

 

Not the only experts, of course. A bit of investigation will find quite a few very well informed and capable biologists, like the American physicists who reined in Teller's grander schemes and put their careers and reputations on the line to force things like containment shells for power plant reactors, who can keep you from the gross foolishness displayed by the people who post stuff this:

 

all Monsanto did was insert a different copy of an enzyme that plants already have

 

Or this: " We already do genetic engineering. All our domestic crops and animals have been genetically engineered, for thousands of years. "

 

Or this:"Ordinary breeding affects hundreds or thousands of genes, and we see that it is reasonably safe. Genetic engineering just affects a couple genes, so it is less dangerous."

 

Or this "We have no evidence of anyone harmed, so it's safe."

 

Or this: " We have thirty years of experience with GMOs, and no harm done, so the evidence is that they are safe."

 

Or this:

 

The scientific consensus is that GMOs are safe

We are about to bet our food supply and landscape ecology on the oversight of bureaucrats and vice-presidents of corporations who are being advised and supported by folks - and these are often biologists, scientists, trading on their credentials - who are willing to spout nonsense like that in public. Food for thought, eh?

Edited March 16, 2014 by overtone

[John Cuthber]

"and you lose track of what's involved in, say, having allowed conversion of 3/4 of the North American agricultural production to a couple of still untested bottleneck genetic complexes of largely unknown potential and largely private corporate benefit as well as control,"

 

Just exactly what has been "untested" here?

I can google sheds full of testing results.

You might want to hold a mirror up to this statement

"who can keep you from the gross foolishness displayed by the people who post stuff this:"

[Ophiolite]

It really is irrational the fear that is associated with GMOs.

Any member who has nothing better to do with there time than note the general tender of my posts is likely aware that I am not prone to either fear, or irrationality. (I believe, but am ready to stand corrected, that the staff decision to award me Expert Status is a reflection of that.)

 

I am not afraid that GMOs will poison me.

I am not afraid that GMOs will cause me to develop cancer.

I am not afraid that GMOs will suddenly enter a period of abnormal mutation and turn into bizarre 'monsters'.¹

 

However, I do have three - quite different - concerns.

 

1. I never had this conversation, but I could have asked my grandfather what he remembered hearing from his father about the Irish Potato Famine. Monocultures are dangerous. GMOs encourage the development of monocultures and suppress diversity.

2. GMOs are controlled by large corporations. I am not using the knee jerk reaction that accompanies some leftist rants that put this down to corporate greed, but I've seen how large corporations work from the inside. Their interest is in enhancing shareholder value. Their focus is short-term. (If there is any greed involved that's down to you and me failing to direct our retirement plans away from fast growing, quick return companies. But that's another matter.) This constitutes a political and economic danger.

3. I am wholly unconvinced that we yet understand the potential consequences of some of the changes we are making. Some assurances have already failed - modified genes found in organisms distances beyond the control zone. The probability of a negative consequence may be low, but the consequence itself may be devastating. (I have never needed the seat belt on an aircraft, but I dutifully buckle up each time I fly.)

 

I hope that none of my concerns lead to unpleasant or catastrophic consequences, but I am pleased that in Europe we have taken a more cautious approach to GM.

 

Footnote:

 

1: And I no one here has said that, so I am not erecting a strawman, but it is one of the accusations I've heard from fringe anti-GM persons.

Edited March 16, 2014 by Ophiolite

[CharonY]

1) I agree, but the same is already the case with modern agriculture in general

2) My biggest concern overall, especially with the existence of quasi-monopolies.

3) For the vast majority of GMOs I think the biochemical consequences are lower than the context they are being used for (e.g. pesticide use). I do not think it is worse than the toxins we spray around already.

 

I think we underestimate the consequences of modern agricultural practices and are overly concerned about a (relatively) minor aspect of it. For example, the majority of our foodstock is based on a handful of highly inbred strains. And there already have been massive losses due to viral infections. Just because we have been comfortable with it for a longer time, it does not mean it is safe or safer.

[John Cuthber]

The Irish famine and the surfeit of "Golden delicious" apples and cavendish bananas show that monocultures are nothing new. They come from farming practices. GMO does nothing to stop them, but it's not a cause per se.

An outright ban on GMO would still leave us with monocultures.

 

All food supplies are controlled by big business. Seed and pesticide companies are using GMO technology but, if that technology were banned they would continue to do much the same sort of business.

 

As a species, we are seldom, if ever, aware of the full consequences of our actions. Why pick on GMO?

 

Edit (cross posted with CharonY)

Edited March 16, 2014 by John Cuthber

[chadn737]

When faced with ignorance and hype, it's easy to lose track of the real arguments. Get caught up in this

Quote - much of the anti-GMO sentiment is fueled by anti-corporatism and not actual health concerns. -

and you lose track of what's involved in, say, having allowed conversion of 3/4 of the North American agricultural production to a couple of still untested bottleneck genetic complexes of largely unknown potential and largely private corporate benefit as well as control, in less than a third of a generation.

 

 

For once I would like to have a GMO discussion that is not poisoned with knee-jerk anti-corporatism, but I have long since given up hope. There are non-corporate GMOs, the most note-worthy being Golden Rice, but there are many others. For instance, the Virus Resistant Cassava for Africa (VIRCA) group at the Danforth Center. I know some of the VIRCA researchers. There are research groups in South Africa I spent some time with who are developing the Golden Rice equivalent in maize and sorghum for humanitarian purposes. All around the world there are numerous large scale efforts to develop GMOs for humanitarian purposes, run by private charities, academic researchers, etc. The only goal of Golden Rice is to save millions of children from blindness and even death due to Vitamin A deficiency. But in the GMO discussions, these example are ignored or swept under the rug, or even worse...implied to be part of some corporate conspiracy. From this point forward any vague, unsupported, knee-jerk anti-corporate argument regarding GMOs will simply be ignored as the unscientific, unsupported nonsense that it is.

 

Now you have made one semi-valid point...the potential of genetic bottleneck in our crop species. I agree it is a concern. In fact, so do the corporations, thats why they have been spending a great deal of effort on preserving and utilizing genetic diversity. The largest corn hybrid company, Pioneer, has assembled one of the largest collections of maize varieties in the world, which they are using to improve and diversify the lines they market.

 

The real question, however, is whether or not the loss of crop genetic diversity has anything really to do with GMOs or more practical underlying reasons. If it has nothing to do with GMOs, then this is an invalid argument against GMOs. Most of the loss of genetic diversity has been to the development of high-yielding elite lines by traditional breeding that out-perform any other variety. What people seem to forget is that the family farmer is first and foremost a business man. Farming is how they make their money, feed their families. If they can increase yields by 5% using variety A over variety B, then they will use variety A. I talk to so many people who have this cartoon image has the farmer being a somewhat dumb, wholesome person in a straw hat, more concerned about his chickens than his finances. Nobody forced farmers to grow the varieties they do...they chose so because it affected their bottom line.

 

Breeding crops, particularly for complex traits such as yield, is a very difficult, expensive, and intensive process. The elite lines that are the basis for modern agriculture have been under development for decades by entire teams of geneticists. Pioneer's lines have been under continuous development for 80 years now. The yield potential in just one of these lines compared to some old landrace is incomparable and a farmer would go bankrupt trying to make a profit off of old varieties that yield a fraction of the modern ones.

 

The loss of crop genetic diversity has been ongoing for decades before the introduction of GMOs. One of the most recent near disasters resulting from this loss was in the 1969-1970 due to the over-reliance of cytoplasmic male sterility in maize, which made the development of hybrid corn immensely easier and cheaper. The first GMO crop planted (Tobacco) was in 1983. The major GMOs you see now, were not approved for commercial use until 1995, including the first GMO maize. In 1972, the National Academies of Science commented on the dangers of Crop Diversity loss. So in the case of maize genetic diversity, we have a clear timeline and evidence showing that the genetic diversity had already eroded by 1969, a full 25-26 years before the first GMO maize was made available to farmers. In the 19 years since the introduction of GMO maize, the seed companies have put forth great effort to actually increase the genetic diversity and the preserve germplasm. This demonstrates that the cause of crop diversity loss is not a factor GMO use, at least not in maize, but of other factors, the primary one being that farmers want to grow the highest yielding crops.

 

Other crops have also been studied for the potential of erosion of genetic diversity due to the use of GMOs. In soybeans, it has been demonstrated that there has been no loss of genetic diversity due to the use of the Roundup Ready trait. This is because the Roundup Ready trait has been introduced into numerous elite varieties. More diversity has been lost through the use of a few select elite lines than the use of GMOs. As in the case of maize, it is easier to introduce a transgene into a line than to develop a high-yield elite line. The biggest loss of genetic diversity in soybeans in fact came very earlier on through the bottleneck induced by their introduction into the US in the first place, rather than modern breeding or GMOs.

 

If anything, GMOs have the potential to increase genetic diversity. It is easier to improve varieties with traits like disease resistance through genetic engineering than traditional outcrossing and backcrossing.

 

So while I agree that the the loss of genetic diversity is a concern, the evidence shows that this is not due to GMOs and that this argument against GMOs is unfounded.

 

And that's just one bit of engineering - one of the unique properties of this brand new and completely unfamiliar arena of capability is how different from the others each new innovation is - one GMO is can be as different from another as one organism is different from another. Safety in one implies little or nothing about safety in another, and by safety we have to include economic, ecological, and political aspects as well as the comparatively narrow but still enormously complex area of human medical effects.

 

 

1) Brand new.......since when is 30 years "brand new"? This technology has been worked with and studied continuously for the last 30 years, with 1783 papers assessing different risk factors involved. For all interested, here is a spread sheet of all 1783 papers that studied the impact of GMOs. That is neither "brand new" or "completely unfamiliar". The use of this language is unjustified and meant to induce fear into readers.

 

2) I really have no idea what you mean by "one GMO is can be as different from another as one organism is different from another". Do you mean to imply that BT corn is as different from Roundup Ready soybeans....well of course...they are different species entirely. Or do you mean to imply that BT corn is as different from Roundup Ready corn, which biologically is nonsense.

 

3) I agree the risk of each GMO should be assessed independently....in fact it is. Every new trait is extensively tested and has to be approved. For the assessment of all the individual traits, there is a clear consensus of little risk and great benefit. Again, over 1783 papers have assessed the technology.

 

 

I'm seeing the self-congratulatory scientific crowd display a level of gullibility regarding GMOs that is kind of discouraging - the closest parallel I can find, and it's far less flagrantly clueless, is the attitude of the early nuke researchers - like the folks at Los Alamos that were using chunks of plutonium alloy as doorstops for their offices and planning to dig harbors in the high Arcitic and subway tunnels across continents with nuclear explosives. They were the experts in their day.

Not the only experts, of course. A bit of investigation will find quite a few very well informed and capable biologists, like the American physicists who reined in Teller's grander schemes and put their careers and reputations on the line to force things like containment shells for power plant reactors, who can keep you from the gross foolishness displayed by the people who post stuff this:

 

You are poisoning the well, making vague, unsupported accusations about the scientists who have assessed the evidence. You offer no support, its vague, you make allusions to past mistakes. There is nothing here for me to even address other than to point out that its one big ad hominem.

 

Quote: all Monsanto did was insert a different copy of an enzyme that plants already have

Or this: " We already do genetic engineering. All our domestic crops and animals have been genetically engineered, for thousands of years. "

Or this:"Ordinary breeding affects hundreds or thousands of genes, and we see that it is reasonably safe. Genetic engineering just affects a couple genes, so it is less dangerous."

Or this "We have no evidence of anyone harmed, so it's safe."

Or this: " We have thirty years of experience with GMOs, and no harm done, so the evidence is that they are safe."

Or this:

Quote: The scientific consensus is that GMOs are safe

 

These arguments, however, are based on clear evidence. The scientific consensus on GMOs is based on the vast body of research on GMOs, which totals nearly 1800 different studies spread over thirty years. Its not just that its been 30 years of "no harm"....its that for the past 30 years people have been taking a critical look at GMOs, testing all levels of safety and risk, from environmental to health to genetic diversity, and have found clear evidence showing their safety. Within the species we eat, there are hundreds of thousands, millions even, of variants of different proteins. We eat them without fear, because they pose no health risk to us, even though they are of consequence to the plant. Yet when we introduce a new variant of a protein that are already in plants and the food we eat, suddenly we expect the worse? Thats simply not logical.

 

This just seems like denial to me. That 30 years and 1800 scientific papers later the evidence supports the safety of GMOs is not enough, makes me believe that no amount of evidence would be sufficient for you.

 

If you really want to have a discussion of GMOs overtone, lets dispense with the unsupported ad hom attacks on scientists and discuss the actual evidence. I just gave you a list of 1783 papers on the matter. I'm happy to discuss the science of any aspect of GMOs, as long as it does not boil down to knee-jerk anti-corporatism or unsupported neo-Luddism. Lets discuss the actual science.

Any member who has nothing better to do with there time than note the general tender of my posts is likely aware that I am not prone to either fear, or irrationality. (I believe, but am ready to stand corrected, that the staff decision to award me Expert Status is a reflection of that.)

 

I am not afraid that GMOs will poison me.

I am not afraid that GMOs will cause me to develop cancer.

I am not afraid that GMOs will suddenly enter a period of abnormal mutation and turn into bizarre 'monsters'.¹

 

However, I do have three - quite different - concerns.

 

1. I never had this conversation, but I could have asked my grandfather what he remembered hearing from his father about the Irish Potato Famine. Monocultures are dangerous. GMOs encourage the development of monocultures and suppress diversity.

2. GMOs are controlled by large corporations. I am not using the knee jerk reaction that accompanies some leftist rants that put this down to corporate greed, but I've seen how large corporations work from the inside. Their interest is in enhancing shareholder value. Their focus is short-term. (If there is any greed involved that's down to you and me failing to direct our retirement plans away from fast growing, quick return companies. But that's another matter.) This constitutes a political and economic danger.

3. I am wholly unconvinced that we yet understand the potential consequences of some of the changes we are making. Some assurances have already failed - modified genes found in organisms distances beyond the control zone. The probability of a negative consequence may be low, but the consequence itself may be devastating. (I have never needed the seat belt on an aircraft, but I dutifully buckle up each time I fly.)

 

I hope that none of my concerns lead to unpleasant or catastrophic consequences, but I am pleased that in Europe we have taken a more cautious approach to GM.

 

Footnote:

 

1: And I no one here has said that, so I am not erecting a strawman, but it is one of the accusations I've heard from fringe anti-GM persons.

 

1) As other members have pointed out, the use of monocultures is not a cause or even directly related to the use of GMOs. Just consider your own argument. The Irish Potato Famine. That occurred in 1845-1852....the first GMO used in a field was in 1983. That tells you that monocultures were preceding the first GMOs by 131 years...and in a period when the majority of people were small farmers and there were no large corporate seed companies or industrial scale agriculture. If you drive through the Midwest, there is a mix of corn and soybeans, pastures, hay ground, etc. Most of these farmers rotate the crops, breaking up the monoculture. These farms are amongst the heaviest users of GMOs in the world The largest monocultures are typically large scale fruit/vegetable plantations, such as bananas (as John Cuthbar pointed out). Several years ago I toured through Costa Rican farms as part of a university group, looking at tropical agriculture practice. There are entire valleys planted with nothing but melons, or bananas, or pineapple. None of these are GMO, all are true monocultures, planted year after year with the same crop. The amount of pesticide usage makes what we spray on corn and soybeans seem like nothing in both terms of amount and toxicity. The banana plantations are almost sterile. If GMOs were the actual cause of monocultures, then we should expect the exact opposite. GMOs can be effectively implemented into any polyculture farming practice and in fact can make it more effective. Consider double cropping, especially the winter wheat/soybean practice that is fairly common in certain parts of the Midwest. Roundup ready soybeans actually make this easier and more effective as one can avoid tillage.

 

2) I really have nothing to say about the corporations. Its not an scientific argument or actual assessment of the safety/risk and though you claim it is a political/economic risk, what is the hard evidence of this? I have a very different perspective of many of these companies, because my family has dealt with them and worked with them. My father is the third generation in my family to farm the same land. He has contracted for many years with companies like Pioneer to grow soybeans and corn for seed, while also growing these crops independently for commercial sale. What exactly are the political and economic risks? As I told overtone, I have nothing to say to vague or unsupported anti-corporate arguments.

 

3) I understand your concerns, but the technology is not new, having been around for 30 years with the number of studies into the various risks and safety of individual traits quickly approaching 2000. We know quite a bit about the risk. I am happy to address and debate specific questions and/or arguments, but what can one say to vague assertions of unknown risk? Nothing.

 

4) In Europe (and the US) you have the luxury of taking a cautious approach. You live in the first world. You may not be wealthy, but you are at no risk of starvation or malnutrition. Your food supply is not going to be wiped out by a virus. You have the luxury of paying more for more environmentally damaging and unnecessary foods labeled "organic". The consequences of anti-GMO sentiment has been that life saving technology, like Golden Rice, virus-resistant cassava, etc are being held up and destroyed while millions of children go blind or starve. Meanwhile, accumulating scientific evidence, including the consensus of many European scientific agencies, shows the safety and benefits of GMOs. I find Europe's approach to GMOs to be retrograde, unscientific, and ultimately damaging. Consider the fact that Europe take nearly a blanket approach to GMOs, imposing severe restrictions on all GMOs and treating them all as if they were the same rather than assessing the risk each individually as they pharmaceuticals.

Edited March 16, 2014 by chadn737

[Ophiolite]

The Irish famine and the surfeit of "Golden delicious" apples and cavendish bananas show that monocultures are nothing new. They come from farming practices. GMO does nothing to stop them, but it's not a cause per se.

An outright ban on GMO would still leave us with monocultures.

I didn't say it was a cause. I clearly stated that GMOs encourage monocultures. I am concerned by monocultures in general. GMOs, through this encouragement, add to that concern. Do you agree that they encourage, or tend to encourage monocultures? If you, and chad, feel they do not encourage moncultures then - in absence thus far of appropriate citations from either side - we are left with statements of opinion.

 

In expressing a concern I am implicitly stating that, based upon my reading of such data as I have considered, my opinion is that there is a risk. This risk is presently unquantified.

 

 

All food supplies are controlled by big business. Seed and pesticide companies are using GMO technology but, if that technology were banned they would continue to do much the same sort of business.

One of the attractions of GMOs, that I recgonise and would like to see us benefit from, is that they can be a game changer in some situations. That, in my view, enhances the control that GM corporations can exercise over their customers.

 

Chad, I am sorry my argument seems to you vague. Let me be more direct. There is abundant evidence that a substantial number of corporations do not focus on the long term objectives, but respond to short term shareholder pressure. (This is so well established that it should not require citations to justify.) It is self evident to me that this is potentially dangerous when it relates to our food supply. If it is not self evident to you I am at a loss as to what to say.

 

Moreover, my intention in posting was to present a counterpoint to the remarks in support of GMOs and to indicate that, in my view, it is possible to have rational concerns about GMOs and not be a crank, or nutcase. It was not my wish to argue against GMOs. I do not have the time to muster comprehensive arguments. Indeed, my whole position is that we have uncertainties. It falls, rather to the pro-GMO camp to assuage those uncertainties. So far nothing said here has done so.

 

As a species, we are seldom, if ever, aware of the full consequences of our actions. Why pick on GMO?

I am not picking on GMO. GMOs are the subject of this thread so that is what I am discussing. It would be inappropriate to introduce other things where I feel we should be exercising caution because of uncertain consequences.

 

CharonY, I wholly agree with you that many of our agricultural practices are questionable. I have not singled out GMOs. That has been done by the OP and I am simply staying on topic. And the topic of GMOs continues to concern me.

[John Cuthber]

I will just reiterate the point that , if GMOs all vanished tomorrow, or had never been invented, we would still have monocultures, just as we did when the potato famine struck.

So, while GMO certainly don't (as currently used) promote diversity, they don't discourage it except indirectly.

 

Agribusiness wants consistent production and that means monoculture.

It doesn't matter if the seed suppliers use GM or not.

 

Essentially the problem with

"I clearly stated that GMOs encourage monocultures."

is that we had monocultures anyway, before the GMO arrived.

 

That's not an issue of matters of opinion, it's a matter of cause and effect.

GMO can't cause something that happened before they were invented.

 

How can you "encourage" something that's almost universal anyway?

 

You say "In expressing a concern I am implicitly stating that, based upon my reading of such data as I have considered, my opinion is that there is a risk. This risk is presently unquantified."

And I'm asking through what means would the hypothetical restriction of elimination of GMO alter that risk?

 

(Though I disagree that the risk is unquantified, there is a lot of data about it. you can make reasonable assessments of risk in this case, just as you can with all the other things we do in the absence of complete knowledge- in that regard, you are "picking on " GMO)

[chadn737]

I didn't say it was a cause. I clearly stated that GMOs encourage monocultures. I am concerned by monocultures in general. GMOs, through this encouragement, add to that concern. Do you agree that they encourage, or tend to encourage monocultures? If you, and chad, feel they do not encourage moncultures then - in absence thus far of appropriate citations from either side - we are left with statements of opinion.

 

In expressing a concern I am implicitly stating that, based upon my reading of such data as I have considered, my opinion is that there is a risk. This risk is presently unquantified.

 

Define for me what you consider a monoculture. This is surprisingly hard to define and probably does not mean what you think it does.

 

Nearly all organic farms grow their crops in rotation, planting only one crop in a field at a time, but changing it each year. These farmers are not considered "monocultures". This is exactly what the majority of commercial farmers of crops like corn and soybeans do. Most GMO crops are annuals (corn, soybeans, cotton, canola, etc) and typically planted in rotation, thus breaking the year after year planting of the same crop in the same field. This is standard practice throughout the corn belt. In my opinion this is not a monoculture. In contrast, many non-GMO fruit vegetable crops are grown continuously without rotation in the same field, thus constituting a true monoculture.

 

When corn prices began peaking a few years ago, driving many Midwest farmers to abandon the traditional corn/soybean rotation for some of their fields for a short-term period of a couple of years......this was entirely driven by basic supply/demand. The increased use of ethanol, mandated in part by federal regulations, greatly reduced corn supplies, driving up the price. It had nothing to do with GMOs.

 

Current agricultural practices in the US have been shaped more by the destructive government policies that were imposed earlier in the last century by FDR to control production and today that shape the economics of farming than anything. Federal regulations have historically restricted what farmers could plant to the point of discouraging the planting of more diverse crops. Farmers have even been taken to court for planting crops they were not "allowed" to plant.

 

Whether or not GMOs encourage or discourage crop rotations is not strait-forward. Consider the usage of Roundup Ready crops. Glyphosate has very low carry-over compared to other herbicides and its use makes it possible to actually plant more diverse crop rotations. Predictions point to effects in both directions. In truth, GMOs have little impact on the actual choice to rotate or not since cropping practices are driven first and foremost by market prices.

 

The true determinants of modern farming are the companies and consumers at the end of the pipeline, not seed companies like Monsanto. Just consider the economic worth of the companies. Monsanto is worth almost $20 billion in total assets and had ~$11 billion in revenue last year. It must compete with other companies like Pioneer for the business of farmers. In contrast, Cargill, which buys and processes agricultural commodities is the largest privately owned US company and is bigger than companies like Ford Motor Company. Its revenue last year was ~$137 billion. It could buy Monsanto 6 times. Since Cargill buys commodities, if it decided tomorrow to not buy GMOs, farmers would stop planting GMOs immediately en masse and Monsanto and Pioneer would suddenly be pushing their non-GMO varieties (yes they exist).

 

The entire GMO debate is confounded by misperceptions of what truly drives agriculture, farming practices, and who has the power.

 

One of the attractions of GMOs, that I recgonise and would like to see us benefit from, is that they can be a game changer in some situations. That, in my view, enhances the control that GM corporations can exercise over their customers.

 

 

Except that farmers have the option to simply not plant these crops. Farmers are the consumers of the seed and drive what seeds are produced. That farmers gain economic advantages from GMOs is the reason they buy them. Monsanto can't force you to plant roundup ready crops. My father refused to plant roundup ready corn because he wants to be able to kill off volunteer corn in soybeans the next year in the rotation. And at the end of the day, it is the end user (Cargill, consumers) and federal policies that drive the economics of farming.

 

Chad, I am sorry my argument seems to you vague. Let me be more direct. There is abundant evidence that a substantial number of corporations do not focus on the long term objectives, but respond to short term shareholder pressure. (This is so well established that it should not require citations to justify.) It is self evident to me that this is potentially dangerous when it relates to our food supply. If it is not self evident to you I am at a loss as to what to say.

 

 

This is as true for the small farmer as it is the corporation. Farmers are businessmen and their choices are what drives the market for seed. Furthermore, seed companies have to have a long term vision as well. The typical GMO takes around 13 years and $136 million to from conception to market. ~$35 million is spent in meeting regulatory costs alone, as does much of the time in development. Plant breeding is restricted by basic biology. Pioneer has been continuously developing their maize lines for 80 years. At best you can get two generations of maize in a year by planting in regions like Hawaii. Developing a RIL population for trait mapping typically takes ~8 generations (4 years). If you want to introduce a new trait into a line by conventional breeding, this could take as many generations of backcrossing, if not more. Scaling this then to the point where new hybrids are available for market takes a few more years. This sort of investment into development does not lend itself very easily to a very short-term view.

Edited March 16, 2014 by chadn737

[overtone]

Just exactly what has been "untested" here?

I can google sheds full of testing results.

No, you can't - not relevant ones, anyway. The most obvious reason is that there hasn't been enough time to get "test results" for some of the blatant known hazards (the consequences of the engineered increased mobility of phylogenetically alien code, for example, would take at least a generation to check out given a full force and lavishly funded effort - which is not yet available). The more subtle reason is that we do not yet have enough expertise in the field to support confidence in our hazard recognition. The unanticipated event of human metabolism releasing chewed up pieces of both the code for glysphosate resistance and expression created chemical complexes in consumed food, directly into the intestinal flora, provides an illustrative example, but one would hope that among reasonable people none is needed - the potential is simply and blatantly obvious. It's a brand new field, and the most complex arena of science that has ever existed.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, accumulating scientific evidence, including the consensus of many European scientific agencies, shows the safety and benefits of GMOs.

That is simply and obviously not possible. It's not only wrong, but nonsensical. No one can come to a consensus on the "safety and benefits of GMOs" - what would you say to someone who claimed a scientifically based consensus on the safety and benefits of newly discovered and as yet undescribed phyla of Martian arthropods?

 

 

 

Since Cargill buys commodities, if it decided tomorrow to not buy GMOs, farmers would stop planting GMOs immediately en masse and Monsanto and Pioneer would suddenly be pushing their non-GMO varieties (yes they exist).

 

The entire GMO debate is confounded by misperceptions of what truly drives agriculture, farming practices, and who has the power.

Your contention that Cargill, rather than Monsanto, is the more dangerous corporation - even if true, which is a judgment call - hardly supports your claim of "misperception" among those who regard closed and secretive corporate dominance of the field as a source of extreme risk.

 

 

 

Except that farmers have the option to simply not plant these crops

Some - a shrinking minority - do, some don't. Not realistically. Third world farmers who wish to modernize their practices, for example, do not in fact have access even to the research and breeding and improved seeds and so forth that the GMO adopters enjoy, let alone the financing, marketing, and political protection they would need.

 

The destruction of Bt pesticides at the hands of GMO promulgators is merely one quick and easy and non-political example of what farmers face outside the realm of Cargill, Pioneer, and Monsanto approved practices. Is Monsanto going to pay for their share of that damage? (No).

 

 

 

So, while GMO certainly don't (as currently used) promote diversity, they don't discourage it except indirectly.

Development of GMOs is expensive, and so most landraces and varieties of any given crop are left unmodified - and since GM research has taken over, improvements or beneficial investigations of anything not GM modified are becoming increasingly rare in the modern research world. Additionally, large blocks of common code are being widely distributed throughout the entire narrow band of genetic varieties commercially promoted and made available. Added to that, the better and more promising varieties of crops targeted for GM development are being strategically bought up by the major GMO developers, who then take them off the market - forcing the farmer who wants the best seeds etc to use the GM product or do without. And so forth.

 

The results are theoretically all but inevitable, and as it plays out visible in the real world: a drastic narrowing of genetic bandwidth and the establishment of genetic bottlenecks in the actual fields and farms of, say, the Great Plains of North America. This is a direct, even conscious (it's good for the corporate bottom line) consequence of the conversion of North American agriculture to GMOs. There is nothing indirect about it - it's cause and effect, deliberate cause and planned effect.

 

Another example, a genuinely worrisome one: The loss of genetic diversity in rubber trees first created by the international dispersal of a small selection from the landraces of the Amazon forest is being even more radically narrowed by genetic manipulation and cloning of a small selection of that small selection - this has created a world wide (centered in SE Asia and neighborhood) rubber plantation of a single genetic strain that happens to be unusually vulnerable to a highly contagious, incurable, and rapidly lethal fungus disease endemic to that source forest. Cross your fingers that fungus never gets loose.

 

And since I promised myself to restrict the degree to which I brought in questions of integrity and the like, one such example from the GMO promoters above will have to stand for the half dozen posted in this thread:

 

Current agricultural practices in the US have been shaped more by the destructive government policies that were imposed earlier in the last century by FDR to control production and today that shape the economics of farming than anything. Federal regulations have historically restricted what farmers could plant to the point of discouraging the planting of more diverse crops. Farmers have even been taken to court for planting crops they were not "allowed" to plant.

The link is to an example of quantity restriction, and has nothing to do with crop diversity ("monoculture") then or ever. Neither do the economic agricultural policies of FDR have much if anything to do with the issues here - the Federal and State establishment of the great land grant universities and their research programs into crop breeding and improvement, which were for public benefit initially and dramatically (and increased, not decreased, agricultural genetic diversity at first) are far more relevant if government practices are a topic here. The quote there is ugly - Fox News quality political ranting and obscure innuendo without basis in science or honest reasoning.

 

And it is completely typical of GMO promoters in general. They dress up as scientific, but they argue like Megan Kelly.

 

 

 

If you want to introduce a new trait into a line by conventional breeding, this could take as many generations of backcrossing, if not more.

The lack of effort put into speeding up conventional breeding by judicious use of these fantastic engineering techniques is an interesting - if depressing - topic. The profit potential is comparatively too low, apparently, and the research dominated by that concern. That kind of employment of these techniques likely would be of enormous benefit, at much smaller risk - to the public, however. Not a priority.

Edited March 17, 2014 by overtone

[chadn737]

The lack of effort put into speeding up conventional breeding by judicious use of these fantastic engineering techniques is an interesting - if depressing - topic. The profit potential is comparatively too low, apparently, and the research dominated by that concern. That kind of employment of these techniques likely would be of enormous benefit, at much smaller risk - to the public, however. Not a priority.

 

 

This is a false statement and ignores the realities of plant genetics and the advancements over the years....it is notable that ignoring the realities of transgenics and plant breeding you simply jump to the conclusion that seed companies are not doing this and aren't because of profit motive.

 

First off, Plant Transformation is being used to speed up plant breeding and improve basic traits, such as drought resistance. 2013 saw the first release and use of transgenic plants engineered to have increased drought resistance. Specifically towards the goal of speeding up conventional breeding, Pioneer is already using a transgenic technology/method for generating doubled haploids within only two generations compared to the traditional seven. This is based on the use of a transgenic CenH₃ protein, the method being first developed by the late great Simon Chan (I remember when he presented this method at an Arabidopsis conference several years ago). The way this method works, the resulting plants are not themselves transgenic, as the transgene is lost during the doubled haploid process, but it relies on a transgenic. Another transgenic technology, that is used to improve conventional breeding is Pioneer's Seed Production Technology Process. The details of this are not shown on the site (I am familiar with it from a conference two years ago), but it relies on a transgenic approach to prevent pollen shed in female plants....the transgene then being lost in the seed sold to farmers. These technologies have been in use for a couple of years now, having taken years of development. However, you don't hear about them because the transgenes are not carried on into the marketed seed, they are only used in the breeding and seed production end.

 

Secondly, there are basic technological difficulties in developing transgenics. Most agronomically important traits are quantitive traits, having multiple genes control them. The more genes or the bigger the DNA you try to insert into a plant, the more difficult it becomes. There are all kinds of technological and biological barriers. Stacking genes, although increasingly common, is difficult and only recently has it become more feasible. This has slowed the use of this technology in introducing more complex traits. However, the development of artificial chromosomes in crops like maize that are capable of carrying stacked traits with directed insertion could change this (the man who developed this technology was one of my PhD committee members, it truly is an amazing technology).

 

Thirdly, conventional breeding itself has long been restricted until recently. The maize genome was only sequenced and published in 2009, the soybean genome in 2010.....other crops have only been published this last year and some are still unpublished. If you have ever done any sort of gene mapping, particularly as it was done prior to next-gen sequencing and prior to having a sequenced genome....its extremely laborious and difficult. Entire PhDs have been made on mapping quantitive trait loci (QTLs) down to regions that still contain multiple genes. Only recently has it become feasible to even map these traits to specific variants en masse. Transgenics requires one to know what sort of genes you are inserting....its just not feasible to develop a marketable crop with a 1 mega base insertion with many genes. So the ability to even do this has previously been limited by our ability to identify the responsible genes/gene variants in the first place.

 

That's whats so misleading about the claim you have just made. It completely ignores the technical and biological realities and it ignores the fact that it is already being done. Just because you haven't heard about it, doesn't mean the technology has not been used to improve conventional breeding.

 

Rest of my reply to come....

Edited March 17, 2014 by chadn737

[iNow]

As others have already noted, we had an issue with monocultures well before GMO tech was even available to us so that seems to be a moot point. However, even if it were not moot, the logic of the argument doesn't hold water. With greater understanding and use of GMO crops we simultaneously gain the ability to BETTER deal with monocultures since we can do so with much greater intention, planning, control and velocity (as opposed to just leaving it to nature and hoping for the best after a few generations have finally passed).

 

Also, just to reiterate a point, concerns about health risks strike me as misplaced as NO evidence has arisen that such concerns are warranted.

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/16/gm-crops-world-food-famine-starvation

We have a great deal to gain from growing GM crops. They offer humanity a way to improve food productivity without having to make further inroads into our planet’s wild places to create more fields for farmers. The position was summed up by Sir Mark Wolpert, the government chief scientist last week, when debating the CST’s report. "The challenge is to get more from existing land in a sustainable way or face the alternative, which is that people will go unfed, or we’ll have to bring more wilderness land into cultivation." From that perspective, the case for GM crops is unanswerable.

 

Not everyone will agree, of course. Green opponents to GM crops claim they pose a risk to health, though no research has ever produced any credible evidence to back this point. Thirty years ago, it could be argued that we should proceed cautiously because of potential health dangers. That argument is no longer acceptable.

[chadn737]

No, you can't - not relevant ones, anyway. The most obvious reason is that there hasn't been enough time to get "test results" for some of the blatant known hazards (the consequences of the engineered increased mobility of phylogenetically alien code, for example, would take at least a generation to check out given a full force and lavishly funded effort - which is not yet available). The more subtle reason is that we do not yet have enough expertise in the field to support confidence in our hazard recognition. The unanticipated event of human metabolism releasing chewed up pieces of both the code for glysphosate resistance and expression created chemical complexes in consumed food, directly into the intestinal flora, provides an illustrative example, but one would hope that among reasonable people none is needed - the potential is simply and blatantly obvious. It's a brand new field, and the most complex arena of science that has ever existed.

 

1) Not enough time? 30 years of research is not enough time? Since when? The consequences have been under study for 30 years. We have 1800 papers addressing all aspects, many from completely independent groups. Your continued assertion that we can't or don't know, that this technology is too new is unfounded and is nothing more than "fear" language. Its the sort of headline grabbing claims that are used to induce fear into people so that they ignore the facts. How about we stop making unsupported claims and start looking at the actual research?

 

2) I challenge you to support this claim:

 

"The unanticipated event of human metabolism releasing chewed up pieces of both the code for glysphosate resistance and expression created chemical complexes in consumed food, directly into the intestinal flora, provides an illustrative example, but one would hope that among reasonable people none is needed - the potential is simply and blatantly obvious."

 

First off, its not obvious. The "code' for glyphosate resistance amounts to a different variant of the 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase gene which is already found in all plants. If you eat organic GMO-free food my friend, you are eating the EPSP protein. So no, the potential is not "simply and blatantly obvious". Furthermore, there has been extensive study on the effects of this the glyphosate resistance....its safe. I gladly eat it.

 

So either provide some actual evidence that there is a danger due to glyphosate resistance or retract your statement. I am challenging you to provide support and I will insist upon it.

 

That is simply and obviously not possible. It's not only wrong, but nonsensical. No one can come to a consensus on the "safety and benefits of GMOs" - what would you say to someone who claimed a scientifically based consensus on the safety and benefits of newly discovered and as yet undescribed phyla of Martian arthropods?

 

This is an unsupported assertion and nothing more. We can come to a consensus on the safety and benefits of GMOs. Thats why so many scientific groups and organizations have done exactly that. This technology has been around for 30 years and studied so extensively that we have nearly 1800 papers and studies alone on the safety of the technology. If you want to assert that we don't or can't know anything then you must address how we have such a vast body of evidence and research on the subject. Otherwise you are just making an argument from repetition.

 

Your contention that Cargill, rather than Monsanto, is the more dangerous corporation - even if true, which is a judgment call - hardly supports your claim of "misperception" among those who regard closed and secretive corporate dominance of the field as a source of extreme risk.

 

 

1) I didn't say either one was dangerous, I merely pointed out where the real market dynamics are that drive agriculture.

 

2) Unsupported claims that Monsanto is closed or secretive are exactly that....unsupported. Such claims have no place in science forums which should be driven by evidence, not unsupported accusations.

 

Some - a shrinking minority - do, some don't. Not realistically. Third world farmers who wish to modernize their practices, for example, do not in fact have access even to the research and breeding and improved seeds and so forth that the GMO adopters enjoy, let alone the financing, marketing, and political protection they would need.

The destruction of Bt pesticides at the hands of GMO promulgators is merely one quick and easy and non-political example of what farmers face outside the realm of Cargill, Pioneer, and Monsanto approved practices. Is Monsanto going to pay for their share of that damage? (No).

 

 

1) Are you arguing that third world farmers who have little access to GMOs don't have the option to plant non-GMOs? Because you wrote this in reply to this comment by me: "Except that farmers have the option to simply not plant these crops [GMOs]."

 

If third world farmers do not have access to the research and breeding, then they don't have access to GMOs and are already planting non-GMO crops. So obviously they have access to non-GMOs.

 

If you are arguing that third world farmers don't have the option to plant GMOs...well that actually is the result of anti-GMO organizations and foreign governments. Non-profit organizations and Academics have developed a life saving crop called Golden Rice, which will be made freely available to farmers in third world nations suffering from vitamin A deficiency. The reason this crop is being blocked and held up is because of all the environmentalist and anti-GMO groups that go around ripping up test plots and forcing governments to oppose the dissemination of Golden Rice. Furthermore, GMOs are made available to many third world farmers. For instance BT cotton is grown and made available in Southeast Asia, most notably India. As I mentioned earlier, groups like VIRCA are developing transgenic Cassava resistant to viral infection.

 

If you are simply arguing that third world farmers don't have access to better breeding...that's true, but it has nothing to do with GMOs and is a completely different topic. Furthermore, seed companies are partnering with public organizations and charities to make higher-yielding varieties available in places like Africa.

 

The implication that farmers do not have options is false. As for first world farmers, there are non-GMO options available from the same companies that market GMOs. Pioneer has an entire line of GMO free soybean varieties. And that was my real point. These farmers have the option to buy non-GMO seeds and if farmers decided to plant non-GMOs because it was advantageous, then the seed companies would focus on those. Nobody is forcing farmers to plant these varieties, they do so because of the advantages they give farmers.

 

So which one of these are you arguing? Either way, its wrong.

 

2) What do you mean by "the destruction of Bt pesticides at the hands of GMO promulgators"? What is this statement referring to? Link a source or some sort of new story to clarify whatever it means. Otherwise its just nonsense as is the vague accusation directed at Monsanto. What exactly is Monsanto supposed to be paying damage for? Otherwise, you should retract this statement.

 

Development of GMOs is expensive, and so most landraces and varieties of any given crop are left unmodified - and since GM research has taken over, improvements or beneficial investigations of anything not GM modified are becoming increasingly rare in the modern research world. Additionally, large blocks of common code are being widely distributed throughout the entire narrow band of genetic varieties commercially promoted and made available. Added to that, the better and more promising varieties of crops targeted for GM development are being strategically bought up by the major GMO developers, who then take them off the market - forcing the farmer who wants the best seeds etc to use the GM product or do without. And so forth.

 

There are a lot of false statements in this one paragraph, so lets go through them one by one.

 

1) Most landraces are not grown period, regardless if they are GMOs or not. That is because most landraces lack optimal agronomic traits and yield-potential. As I have already pointed out, crops like maize were already heading for a genetic bottleneck 25+ years before the first GMO maize. GMOs are not the primary cause for these GMOs not being planted.

 

2) Companies like Pioneer are actually improving landraces and other varieties and so expanding the genetic base. I already proved this in my first reply to you: "The largest corn hybrid company, Pioneer, has assembled one of the largest collections of maize varieties in the world, which they are using to improve and diversify the lines they market."

 

3) That research and effort are not being put into non-GMO improvements is simply false and completely ignores what the seed industry actually does. First, just see point number 2 above. The larges corn hybrid company is working on a vast collection of maize varieties which they use for interbreeding and improving elite lines. This is conventional breeding and research into non-GMO improvements. Pioneer spends a vast amount of time and research on conventional breeding and trait mapping. Most agronomically important traits are QTLs, as such its not so simple to breed these into new lines. The aforementioned use of CenH₃ lines to speed up the creation of new isogenic lines, is a major advancement in this area. Actually read up on Pioneer's technologies and research areas, much of it is related to non-GMO research and development. For instance the use of marker-assisted selection is used in conventional breeding. Even Monsanto is heavily invested into non-GMO research and conventional breeding, particularly through the seed companies that it owns. They too are also using diverse germplasms to widen the genetic base of the varieties they develop. Monsanto has been doing this especially in vegetable crops.

 

4) As for the claim that "large blocks of common code are being widely distributed throughout the entire narrow band of genetic varieties commercially promoted and made available"....again false. See points 2 and 3. The major seed companies are doing the exact opposite, seeking out a wider genetic base.

 

5) Finally, the claim that varieties are being "bought up by the major GMO developers, who then take them off the market - forcing the farmer who wants the best seeds etc to use the GM product or do without"....is nothing more than false propaganda that has long been promoted by anti-GMO activists. Can you name for me a single variety that has been bought up and made unavailable? Landraces and publicly developed varieties are available to everyone. Companies cannot patent the non-GMO public lines or take them off the market. In fact, anyone can get access to these lines because they are public and many are kept in stock at Universities and the USDA. The only varieties that are not publicly available are those that were developed privately by the companies themselves. Pioneer's parental lines have been in continuous development for 80 years and have never been publicly available...even before GMOs. Furthermore, these same companies offer GMO-free varieties and sell them commercially. See the link earlier in this thread to the certified non-GMO soybean lines that Pioneer sales. Secondly, this claim contradicts the others. If these companies are buying up these varieties and using them, then they are actually widening the genetic base....so your arguments contradict.

 

So lets summarize. All the claims you have just made are false and easily shown false by simply looking at the research that the companies are doing and by looking at the products they offer.

 

The results are theoretically all but inevitable, and as it plays out visible in the real world: a drastic narrowing of genetic bandwidth and the establishment of genetic bottlenecks in the actual fields and farms of, say, the Great Plains of North America. This is a direct, even conscious (it's good for the corporate bottom line) consequence of the conversion of North American agriculture to GMOs. There is nothing indirect about it - it's cause and effect, deliberate cause and planned effect.

 

 

1) As I demonstrated earlier (with actual evidence and support), the reduction of genetic diversity occurred before the introduction of GMOs.

 

2) As I demonstrate earlier (with actual evidence and support) the seed companies have invested heavily into widening the genetic base through the use of extensive collections of different germplasms.

 

Another example, a genuinely worrisome one: The loss of genetic diversity in rubber trees first created by the international dispersal of a small selection from the landraces of the Amazon forest is being even more radically narrowed by genetic manipulation and cloning of a small selection of that small selection - this has created a world wide (centered in SE Asia and neighborhood) rubber plantation of a single genetic strain that happens to be unusually vulnerable to a highly contagious, incurable, and rapidly lethal fungus disease endemic to that source forest. Cross your fingers that fungus never gets loose.

 

 

That is indeed worrisome, but the fact that a narrow genetic base was established long before the generation of GMO varieties demonstrates that the cause of this was not GMOs. For some reason you and other GMO opponents conflate any narrowing of the genetic base with being caused by GMOs even when its not. This is the fallacy of "guilt by association".

 

Secondly, can you provide actual sources that there is a narrowing of the genetic base of rubber trees due to GMOs? I want you to support this claim, because right now it is unfounded. In the case of maize and soybeans, the biotech and seed companies have worked to increase the genetic base of both their GMO and non-GMO products, contrary to the continued claim that GMOs are narrowing the base.

 

The link is to an example of quantity restriction, and has nothing to do with crop diversity ("monoculture") then or ever. Neither do the economic agricultural policies of FDR have much if anything to do with the issues here - the Federal and State establishment of the great land grant universities and their research programs into crop breeding and improvement, which were for public benefit initially and dramatically (and increased, not decreased, agricultural genetic diversity at first) are far more relevant if government practices are a topic here. The quote there is ugly - Fox News quality political ranting and obscure innuendo without basis in science or honest reasoning.

And it is completely typical of GMO promoters in general. They dress up as scientific, but they argue like Megan Kelly.

 

First off, lets dispense with the ridiculous hyperbole and irrelevant attacks about Fox News or Megan Kelly. Its irrelevant. Its also nothing more than poisoning the well....a variant of the ad hominem fallacy. Again this is a science forum is it not? Our discussion should be driven by evidence and fact, not political ideology. Leave the leftist rhetoric out of this.

Restricting what farmers can or cannot plant directly affects what is planted on the farm and hence the crop diversity present. This farmer was taken to court for planting wheat, when he was not allowed too. These sorts of restrictions, which persisted for decades were instituted during the New Deal under FDR. That's just a fact.

The federal government has driven the increase of "monocultures" through subsidies and crop insurance. Federal Crop Insurance is not available for every crop in every county/state. This is a critical component of agriculture. I have seen farms lose money because of crop loss and not having insurance. That is why farmers use it. If you grow an unapproved crop, you take on the full risk. Farmers are businessmen trying to make a living. They will minimize risk and so National policies like federal crop insurance are huge drivers of what crops are planted where.

The Land Grant Universities are wonderful institutions, I have been at three different ones the last 11 years...but you overstate their influence. These Universities were first founded back in the 1800s. While they have helped farmers improve their practices, they have little to no influence on the market or the profit incentives available to farmers. That is why federal programs like federal crop insurance, subsidies, etc have had a far larger effect. You are looking in the wrong direction for the decrease in the types and diversity of crops planted, this has entirely been driven by market forces. A few years ago when farmers increased the number of corn-on-corn acreage, this was driven entirely by high corn demand due to increased ethanol usage because of federal mandates.

Edited March 17, 2014 by chadn737

[John Cuthber]

No, you can't - not relevant ones, anyway. The most obvious reason is that there hasn't been enough time to get "test results" for some of the blatant known hazards (the consequences of the engineered increased mobility of phylogenetically alien code, for example, would take at least a generation to check out given a full force and lavishly funded effort - which is not yet available). The more subtle reason is that we do not yet have enough expertise in the field to support confidence in our hazard recognition. The unanticipated event of human metabolism releasing chewed up pieces of both the code for glysphosate resistance and expression created chemical complexes in consumed food, directly into the intestinal flora, provides an illustrative example, but one would hope that among reasonable people none is needed - the potential is simply and blatantly obvious. It's a brand new field, and the most complex arena of science that has ever existed.

 

OK, to be consistent, please show me the results of testing the effects of not using GMO technology over the next 100 years.

Looking at previous data won't help for a number of reasons, notably population growth, climate change and pesticide resistance.

 

What you are saying is that the data indicating GMO's safety is incomplete- which is always true for just about everything we ever do.

 

But you have not looked at the other side of the equation.

Is it safe not to use this technology?

[overtone]

1) Not enough time? 30 years of research is not enough time? Since when?

Well, since 1845 - when one of the consequences of betting one's food supply on a narrow bandwidth of genetics and its specialty production tech for thirty or forty years of wonderful benefit and no evidence of problems (not a single research study, even of modern quality, could have demonstrated the slightest harm to anyone in Ireland from planting and eating potatoes for the first thirty or forty years of that boom) came to visit the 8 million people of Ireland. After which event there were about 4 million people in Ireland.

 

Or we could count the decades of supposed (and claimed) research that gave a clean bill of health to trans fats, between the introduction of industrially hydrogenated vegetable oils into the entire American diet, and the recognition by anyone except a couple of publicly mocked maverick researchers and health food nuts that they were in fact quite dramatically lethal - say, 1910-15 until 1990 - 95? About fifty years of that span would be actual research time.

 

GMO safety in general would be of course far more complex and expensive to research - much wider variety of GMOs than vegetable oils, much wider and more complex arena of potential consequences.

 

 

 

The consequences have been under study for 30 years

No, "the consequences" of "GMOs" have not been under study for thirty years. Only one or two specific modifications of specific plants have even existed that long, let alone propagated into a variety of environments and dominated the supermarket shelves pregnant women shop from and been been available to be carefully followed for the extraordinarily wide and varied known potentials of consequences medical, economic, ecological, and political.

 

One or two GMOs have been evaluated, for only short terms ( usually, as in the latest and most thorough 2012 study available for feeding large omnivores glyphosate resistant maize across a reproductive event, a few months or less - not even a full reproductive cycle), for a couple of known hazards (usually a couple of preselected direct and immediate medical harms to a consuming organism itself, although the honeybee crash sponsored a flurry of research into that specific matter - which is when we found out that it had not been done already, prior to the claims of safety).

 

Let's repeat that, because it may slip by: insecticides and other potentially poisonous chemical expressions were engineered into food crops and planted over hundreds of square miles of landscape, without first thoroughly checking into their effects on honeybees in realistic cropping situations. The people who did that are still in control of the entire field of genetically engineered crops.

 

That is: No studies of even some of the more obvious hazard potentials have been undertaken for the span of even that too-short length of time on just those couple of GMOs. Add to that the explosion of variety in GMOs recently, the long (multigenerational in large mammals) time scale of some of the more severe or serious hazards, and the almost certain existence of unknown and unpredicted hazards (as well as benefits), and we get an idea of just how clueless one has to be to claim that the safety of "the GMOs" has been researched for thirty years.

 

Add to that the fact that 3/4 of North American agriculture was converted to various GMOs long before those thirty too-short years available for inadequate study were up, and we get a sudden picture of how dangerous such cluelessness can be. If we consider that the primary beneficiary of that conversion has been a half dozen agribusiness corporations, and "dangerous" seems to let the clueless off a bit too easily.

 

There is no excuse for an educated person making such claims. They are far more than merely mistaken.

 

 

First off, its not obvious. The "code' for glyphosate resistance amounts to a different variant of the 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase gene which is already found in all plants. If you eat organic GMO-free food my friend, you are eating the EPSP protein. So no, the potential is not "simply and blatantly obvious". Furthermore, there has been extensive study on the effects of this the glyphosate resistance....its safe. I gladly eat it.

 

So either provide some actual evidence that there is a danger due to glyphosate resistance or retract your statement. I am challenging you to provide support and I will insist upon

You can't demand to be taken seriously if you continue to assert that the only thing Monsanto did to its soybeans is provide a harmless variant of a protein already found in all plants. I'm through with the 50 second Wiki-link corrections of your nonsense - if you really don't know what was involved in engendering glyphosate resistance in soybeans, and the results of the workings of that mechanism and its associated farming practices in real life, Google is your friend.

 

And if you are actually educated in the field, so you know something about the genetic complex involved and its many parts and pieces Monsanto shotgunned into various places at various orientations known and unknown, and you know about its various effects and roles both intended and unexpected throughout the plant, then there is another issue here that I would prefer to avoid in the personal sense.

 

It's likely that Monsanto's glyphosate resistance genetic complex as shotgunned into otherwise unmodified soybeans is the most thoroughly tested of all GMs, and one of the simplest to check out itself - so the discovery that something like the possible effects of pieces of sequestered herbicide complex released by digestion into human intestinal flora was overlooked, or that the frequency of volunteer spread into unmodified plants in the landscape, including weeds, is much greater than corporate estimation asserted, is a severe warning.

 

It's likely that the Bt expression genetic complex as variously introduced into maize or cotton is the second best researched GM - so the discovery that nobody knew whether honeybees were affected by it in combination with the other factors in the field, or whether the antibiotic resistance genes used as markers were hazardous in environments - such as third world countries generally or antibiotic infused meat consumers - in which human intestinal flora was frequently challenged by low doses of antibiotics, is a severe warning.

 

Combine that with the timeline of promulgation - essentially complete conversion of the entire US soybean crop before the inadequate research that was being done even had time to weigh in - and the picture is one of heedless, careless, irresponsible, greed-motivated corporation executives with no more interest in the public welfare than the introducers of tetraethyl lead into gasoline.

 

Monsanto is borderline evil, maybe - but corporations has no integrity in the first place. Money is their only blood. That 's why you don't entrust fundemantal scientific breakthroughs in brand new and potentially life-changing fields to their sole oversight and development - especially, you don't let them employ or support all the major researchers in the field.

 

 

 

This is an unsupported assertion and nothing more. We can come to a consensus on the safety and benefits of GMOs. Thats why so many scientific groups and organizations have done exactly that.

You do realize that your link provides all the support I could possibly wish for for my assertion, right?

 

For starters, we see a selection of papers rather than an argument and review of all published stuff - dubious (in a corporate dominated field like this, you have to be careful about selective publication even, let alone "selection" from the published). Second, it covers ten years - more reasonable than the foolishess of claiming 30 years, at the same time obviously far too short a time for any "consensus" in this field to be an informed one.

 

Second, I have been through randomly selected (scrolled to by tapping) sections of this long list of mostly irrelevancies, and even in brief glances have found several studies such as the one I referred to above, the one-gestational (six to nine month total, one litter of piglets evaluated for a couple of months) event feeding study of glyphosate resistant crops to some pigs published - get this - in 2012. Glyphosate resistant crops were put on the market in the human food supply of North America in the 1990s, and we see that in 2012 a nine month feeding study of pig gestation and birth is publishable as relevant scientific research. That is very strong evidence for my claim that the safety of even the very best known and most thoroughly studied GMOs is nowhere near investigated, let alone established.

 

Third, how to put it - well, here's the money quote:

 

The scientific research so far has not detected any significant hazards directly connected with the use of GE crops; however, debate is still intense.

I appreciate that those guys want to cover ass, considering; I also appreciate that English is maybe not their native language, so that when they write "hazards" they really meant "harms" or "damages" or the like,

 

(the hazard of, say, potential herbicide resistance transfer, needs no research to "detect", and in fact the authors document in the body of the article many cases of gene flow, outbreeding into the landscape, ecological effects beyond the field boundaries, etc, that reveal the presence of hazard and risk they claim no evidence of, but we can assume they meant that in all those "detected" events no harm above a certain threshold was "detected")

 

and I can see that they are careful to word things so as to not actually assert falsehood or nonsense - such as the existence of a scientific consensus that GMOs are safe - but instead clearly inform the careful reader that what they are reporting is a lack of "detected" evidence of direct, serious harm from the isolated GM aspect of any commercialized GM crop in the past ten years.

 

But I also see that the apparent intent of such articles is to produce exactly what we see here - a misreading of reassurance into what is as much a revelation of huge gaps in our knowledge as it is a compendium of what little we know so far. And that sets my teeth on edge.

 

To point to the obvious - in 1993 one could have as easily compiled such a list, as long and as full of irrelevancy and as misleading in its cursory effect, covering fifty years rather than a mere ten, tangentially relevant to the safety of industrially hydrogenated vegetable oil. The research hadn't been done, the right questions hadn't been asked, there were large gaps in our knowledge. There is no safety in such vacuums, no reassurance in the failure to detect what has not been properly sought, no support in an inability to recognize the unknown in the new.

 

And industrially hydrogenated vegetable oil does not exponentially reproduce itself, does not spread itself around and corrupt all our regular vegetable oil. When we found it to be harmful, all we had to do was stop making it.

 

 

 

1) Are you arguing that third world farmers who have little access to GMOs don't have the option to plant non-GMOs?

WTF? Where does this troll shit come from?

 

Ignoring the long litany of misreadings and irrelevancies, the following:

 

 

 

2) What do you mean by "the destruction of Bt pesticides at the hands of GMO promulgators"? What is this statement referring to? Link a source or some sort of new story to clarify whatever it means

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n6/full/nbt.2597.html The irresponsible landscape scale distribution of Bt pesticide by GM, like that kind of misuse of any other valuable and effective antibiotic, normally destroys the effectiveness of the antibiotic. The expectation, from ordinary Darwinian theory, is that it will destroy the various Bts, the most useful ones first and possibly all of them generally. DDT was once a godsend - one of the least harmful and most effective pesticides ever discovered. Now it's all but worthless, and was so infused into the environment it can hardly be used for what it can still do. Likewise penicillin.

 

 

4) As for the claim that "large blocks of common code are being widely distributed throughout the entire narrow band of genetic varieties commercially promoted and made available"....again false. See points 2 and 3. The major seed companies are doing the exact opposite, seeking out a wider genetic base.

The common code referred to is the engineered stuff, the herbicide resistance complexes etc. With some peripheral (but possibly significant for safety etc) modifications to fit it to a given plant, this stuff is moved en masse whenever possible, taken off the shelf and plugged into the latest GMO - a block of code found in, say, Bt expressing plants all over the planet, and normally in easily accessible organelles in the leaf. We could, say, get a retrovirus that spreads from cotton to corn to rice like that. It's not likely, but it's a vulnerability - even a kind of vulnerability - that was not there before.

 

 

As far as the rest of the stuff about the increasing of genetic diversity by seed companies - increasing the genetic diversity of their seed banks and sources is a very good thing, something US big ag sort of learned back when this corporate takeover of agriculture was just gettting rolling, maybe in the corn blight event back in the late 70s. It does not increase the genetic diversity of the planted crops, which has been reduced in the US and other industrial ag regions as GMOs have been adopted.

 

(A couple of roots of this go back to the conversion of agriculture to hybrids, which ended up patented and controlled by corporations, rather than the straight breeding that a farmer can simply replant without paying. And that goes back to the land grant universities losing track of their mission, and partnering with corporations. One of the great lost potentials of genetic engineering is the ability to radically speed up straight breeding - having everybody on the hook to big agribusiness is not a law of the universe. )

 

A couple of casual rubber tree links. What the Chinese are up to is not public information, but their conversion of tropical forest landscape to clonal monocultures (not yet the further narrowing via their GMs, which are recent) is satellite verifiable, and that is going to pinch soon - even the local weather has been changed. They're going to have to do something.

http://rubberboard.org.in/news.asp?id=407

http://www.dailymirror.lk/business/features/25393-transgenic-rubber-tolerant-to-drought-environment-stress.html

Edited March 18, 2014 by overtone

[John Cuthber]

Well, since 1845 - when one of the consequences of betting one's food supply on a narrow bandwidth of genetics and its specialty production tech for thirty or forty years of wonderful benefit and no evidence of problems (not a single research study, even of modern quality, could have demonstrated the slightest harm to anyone in Ireland from planting and eating potatoes for the first thirty or forty years of that boom) came to visit the 8 million people of Ireland. After which event there were about 4 million people in Ireland.

 

Or we could count the decades of supposed (and claimed) research that gave a clean bill of health to trans fats, between the introduction of industrially hydrogenated vegetable oils into the entire American diet, and the recognition by anyone except a couple of publicly mocked maverick researchers and health food nuts that they were in fact quite dramatically lethal - say, 1910-15 until 1990 - 95? About fifty years of that span would be actual research time.

 

 

OK,

The spuds boom in Ireland was a gamble, and they knew it.

They knew the importance of crop rotation but chose not to heed it for a quick result.

Much of the death and suffering was due to politics, rather than crop failure.

 

"anyone except a couple of publicly mocked maverick researchers and health food nuts that they were in fact quite dramatically lethal"

They were widespread.

I certainly ate them.

I'm not dead.

You seem to have exaggerated their lethality.

[overtone]

 

The spuds boom in Ireland was a gamble, and they knew it.

Did they? Take a look at the people right here, with all the benefits of hindsight and progress, who don't recognize the scope of the gambles involved in the current deployments of GMOs.

 

 

They knew the importance of crop rotation but chose not to heed it for a quick result.

Similar choices are being made today - we know the importance of avoiding the evolutionary acquisition of resistance to valuable pesticides, for example, but we are planting huge monocuiltural expanses of Bt-expressing crops all over the landscape, failing to oversee and enforce the establishment of pest refuges or the rotation of auxiliary pesticides, etc.

 

 

Much of the death and suffering was due to politics, rather than crop failure.

It's very likely that whatever problems we have with GMOs will be almost entirely due to politics, in that sense - the failure to well govern the rollout of this new technology into the landscape, like the failure to prepare for and handle serious problems with this new crop in Ireland, is largely political. We have less excuse, of course.

[chadn737]

Well, since 1845 - when one of the consequences of betting one's food supply on a narrow bandwidth of genetics and its specialty production tech for thirty or forty years of wonderful benefit and no evidence of problems (not a single research study, even of modern quality, could have demonstrated the slightest harm to anyone in Ireland from planting and eating potatoes for the first thirty or forty years of that boom) came to visit the 8 million people of Ireland. After which event there were about 4 million people in Ireland.

 

Or we could count the decades of supposed (and claimed) research that gave a clean bill of health to trans fats, between the introduction of industrially hydrogenated vegetable oils into the entire American diet, and the recognition by anyone except a couple of publicly mocked maverick researchers and health food nuts that they were in fact quite dramatically lethal - say, 1910-15 until 1990 - 95? About fifty years of that span would be actual research time.

 

GMO safety in general would be of course far more complex and expensive to research - much wider variety of GMOs than vegetable oils, much wider and more complex arena of potential consequences.

 

This is more fear mongering and a classic example of guilt by association. You are making an appeal to ignorance, continually claiming that it must be dangerous because we don't know. However, we have an extensive body of research, but despite that, you just assert that we don't. I'm not going to argue about trans-fats, potato famines, or anything that does not have relevance to the science behind GMOs themselves.

 

No, "the consequences" of "GMOs" have not been under study for thirty years. Only one or two specific modifications of specific plants have even existed that long, let alone propagated into a variety of environments and dominated the supermarket shelves pregnant women shop from and been been available to be carefully followed for the extraordinarily wide and varied known potentials of consequences medical, economic, ecological, and political.

 

 

 

The use of language like "supermarket shelves pregnant women shop from" says nothing about the actual safety or lack thereof or the the science of the matter. The use of such language is only to induce scary images in the minds of readers. This is fear mongering tactics meant to appeal to people's emotions rather than rational thought.

 

One or two GMOs have been evaluated, for only short terms ( usually, as in the latest and most thorough 2012 study available for feeding large omnivores glyphosate resistant maize across a reproductive event, a few months or less - not even a full reproductive cycle), for a couple of known hazards (usually a couple of preselected direct and immediate medical harms to a consuming organism itself, although the honeybee crash sponsored a flurry of research into that specific matter - which is when we found out that it had not been done already, prior to the claims of safety).

 

 

This sentence is nearly incomprehensible with lots of separate issues mashed together into one sentence. Also, if you are going to reference something, please provide the actual source. I don't know why it is that I have to always ask you for sources, in a scientific discussion, it should be standard practice. What is the 2012 study you are referring too?

 

The claim that these have been studied for only short term periods is false. There have been multiple such studies, some lasting up to two years and others across multiple generations. For instance there was two year study on feeding Bt corn to lactating Dairy Cows. There was three year study in mice that spread across three generations....from conception to death. Consider the study done in quail that spanned 10 generations....hows that for long term?

 

 

Let's repeat that, because it may slip by: insecticides and other potentially poisonous chemical expressions were engineered into food crops and planted over hundreds of square miles of landscape, without first thoroughly checking into their effects on honeybees in realistic cropping situations. The people who did that are still in control of the entire field of genetically engineered crops.

That is: No studies of even some of the more obvious hazard potentials have been undertaken for the span of even that too-short length of time on just those couple of GMOs. Add to that the explosion of variety in GMOs recently, the long (multigenerational in large mammals) time scale of some of the more severe or serious hazards, and the almost certain existence of unknown and unpredicted hazards (as well as benefits), and we get an idea of just how clueless one has to be to claim that the safety of "the GMOs" has been researched for thirty years.

Add to that the fact that 3/4 of North American agriculture was converted to various GMOs long before those thirty too-short years available for inadequate study were up, and we get a sudden picture of how dangerous such cluelessness can be. If we consider that the primary beneficiary of that conversion has been a half dozen agribusiness corporations, and "dangerous" seems to let the clueless off a bit too easily.

There is no excuse for an educated person making such claims. They are far more than merely mistaken.

 

More fear mongering. Scary language and vague allusions unsupported by scientific fact. As I pointed out above, long term studies and multigenerational studies have been conducted and are being conducted. Add to that the continued anti-corporatism that ultimately has nothing to do with the actual science. Can you not separate your politics from the science?

 

 

You can't demand to be taken seriously if you continue to assert that the only thing Monsanto did to its soybeans is provide a harmless variant of a protein already found in all plants. I'm through with the 50 second Wiki-link corrections of your nonsense - if you really don't know what was involved in engendering glyphosate resistance in soybeans, and the results of the workings of that mechanism and its associated farming practices in real life, Google is your friend.

And if you are actually educated in the field, so you know something about the genetic complex involved and its many parts and pieces Monsanto shotgunned into various places at various orientations known and unknown, and you know about its various effects and roles both intended and unexpected throughout the plant, then there is another issue here that I would prefer to avoid in the personal sense.

 

1) The EPSPS protein is found in all plants. Given a basic understanding of biochemistry and how digestion works, one simply would not expect that a different variant of the protein to be necessarily toxic. But we also don't have to rely on that, because there have been numerous studies and trials of the glyphosate resistant crops showing no toxicity or ill-effect. I linked you to several studies, including long-term multigenerational ones above. Some of these were conducted for glyphosate resistance, some for Bt.

 

2) The use of the word "shotgunned".....classic fear mongering language. You could use the actual terms, like "biolistic transformation", but the "shotgunned" invokes images of violence into the minds of readers. Big scary language meant to appeal to emotion so that people overlook fact. It has no place in a scientific discussion.

 

3) Those educated in the field know that there are several methods to know exactly how many copies of a gene are inserted and where. One way is to simply follow the inheritance of the trait over multiple generations and back/outcrosses. If there are multiple independent copies, then the inheritance will differ than if there is a single copy. The most powerful way to detect copy number is by Southern Blot. Different copies will show up as different bands. Another approach is to use Fluorescent in situ hybridization. This approach can not only show you copy number, but the exact location of every copy. There are PCR based methods of cloning transgenes and determining their location. Such methods were used by Monsanto from the start to develop their first transgenics.

 

4) You are making ad hominem attacks on my character.

 

It's likely that Monsanto's glyphosate resistance genetic complex as shotgunned into otherwise unmodified soybeans is the most thoroughly tested of all GMs, and one of the simplest to check out itself - so the discovery that something like the possible effects of pieces of sequestered herbicide complex released by digestion into human intestinal flora was overlooked, or that the frequency of volunteer spread into unmodified plants in the landscape, including weeds, is much greater than corporate estimation asserted, is a severe warning.

 

 

1) It really makes it difficult for me to comprehend what you are saying when you mash a bunch of different things together into one giant run-on sentence.

 

2) "Shotgunned"....again using scary language to appeal to emotion rather than fact. Classic fear mongering.

 

3) What is a "sequestered herbicide complex"....this term makes no sense. In the case of glyphosate resistance, the EPSPS protein is not the herbicide. It merely is a resistant form of the EPSPS protein (the native form being susceptible). How this becomes "sequestered", a "herbicide", or a "complex" (its a single protein, not a complex) makes no sense.

 

4) What "possible effects" on the "human intestinal flora"? Glyphosate resistant soybeans and maize have been used in numerous studies with no toxicity or ill-effect. See my previous links above for examples of some of these studies. You are again using an argument from ignorance to imply possible effects despite all the studies to the contrary.

 

5) The development of herbicide resistance is not a health concern or risk.

 

 

 

It's likely that the Bt expression genetic complex as variously introduced into maize or cotton is the second best researched GM - so the discovery that nobody knew whether honeybees were affected by it in combination with the other factors in the field, or whether the antibiotic resistance genes used as markers were hazardous in environments - such as third world countries generally or antibiotic infused meat consumers - in which human intestinal flora was frequently challenged by low doses of antibiotics, is a severe warning.

 

1) It really makes it difficult for me to comprehend what you are saying when you mash a bunch of different things together into one giant run-on sentence.

 

2) Studies were done on the possible effects of Bt on honeybees back when the technology was first being introduced, so the claim that it has not is false.

 

3) The risk of antibiotic resistance marker genes has been assessed numerous times since the very first GMOs were being introduced. This is yet another false claim.

 

Combine that with the timeline of promulgation - essentially complete conversion of the entire US soybean crop before the inadequate research that was being done even had time to weigh in - and the picture is one of heedless, careless, irresponsible, greed-motivated corporation executives with no more interest in the public welfare than the introducers of tetraethyl lead into gasoline.

Monsanto is borderline evil, maybe - but corporations has no integrity in the first place. Money is their only blood. That 's why you don't entrust fundemantal scientific breakthroughs in brand new and potentially life-changing fields to their sole oversight and development - especially, you don't let them employ or support all the major researchers in the field.

 

 

1) An attempt at guilt by association (tetraethyl lead) and more fear mongering.

 

2) The rest of this is nothing more than classic anti-corporatism and completely ignores scientific fact. Your view of the subject matter and rejection of scientific fact seem to be driven first and foremost by politics and anti-corporatism, not science. Lets discuss the science rationally.

 

 

 

You do realize that your link provides all the support I could possibly wish for for my assertion, right?

 

Actually it doesn't, but even so, I'm open and honest about the science. Thats why I provide sources for all my claims, so that everyone can investigate it for themselves and come to a rational conclusion. You should do the same and be open with the sources you use rather than dodging every time i ask for them.

 

For starters, we see a selection of papers rather than an argument and review of all published stuff - dubious (in a corporate dominated field like this, you have to be careful about selective publication even, let alone "selection" from the published). Second, it covers ten years - more reasonable than the foolishess of claiming 30 years, at the same time obviously far too short a time for any "consensus" in this field to be an informed one.

 

 

1) You are poisoning the well with language like "dubious (in a corporate dominated field like this, you have to be careful about selective publication even, let alone "selection" from the published)".

 

2) You are merely dismissing evidence out of hand because it contradicts you. This is a vast body of research, sufficient for scientific consensus and there is a scientific consensus as the authors point out.

 

Second, I have been through randomly selected (scrolled to by tapping) sections of this long list of mostly irrelevancies, and even in brief glances have found several studies such as the one I referred to above, the one-gestational (six to nine month total, one litter of piglets evaluated for a couple of months) event feeding study of glyphosate resistant crops to some pigs published - get this - in 2012. Glyphosate resistant crops were put on the market in the human food supply of North America in the 1990s, and we see that in 2012 a nine month feeding study of pig gestation and birth is publishable as relevant scientific research. That is very strong evidence for my claim that the safety of even the very best known and most thoroughly studied GMOs is nowhere near investigated, let alone established.

 

 

1) How does one determine irrelevancy through random selection and brief glances? You've admitted your own ignorance of most of the papers listed, yet from this you are able to conclude there has not been enough research? Absurd.

 

2) Safety studies were conducted in the 1990s.

 

3) The argument that because more recent research is publishable is not evidence of your claim. Especially in fields regarding product effectiveness and safety, validating studies continue to be publishable. This is even more true as new GMOs are developed and have to be evaluated. Furthermore, these new studies continue to support the safety of these products.

 

 

Third, how to put it - well, here's the money quote:

The scientific research so far has not detected any significant hazards directly connected with the use of GE crops; however, debate is still intense.

I appreciate that those guys want to cover ass, considering; I also appreciate that English is maybe not their native language, so that when they write "hazards" they really meant "harms" or "damages" or the like,

 

1) This is what is called quote mining. Its the fallacy where one selectively quotes people out of context. The research, as they state, has not shown any hazards. Furthermore, the fact that there is intense debate does not mean that the research overwhelmingly favors the safety of GMOs, but rather points to the fact that this subject engenders a lot of debate outside of science. Lets look at the actual context of that quote:

 

The technology to produce genetically engineered (GE) plants is celebrating its 30th anniversary and one of the major achievements has been the development of GE crops. The safety of GE crops is crucial for their adoption and has been the object of intense research work often ignored in the public debate. We have reviewed the scientific literature on GE crop safety during the last 10 years, built a classified and manageable list of scientific papers, and analyzed the distribution and composition of the published literature. We selected original research papers, reviews, relevant opinions and reports addressing all the major issues that emerged in the debate on GE crops, trying to catch the scientific consensus that has matured since GE plants became widely cultivated worldwide. The scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazards directly connected with the use of GE crops; however, the debate is still intense. An improvement in the efficacy of scientific communication could have a significant impact on the future of agricultural GE. Our collection of scientific records is available to researchers, communicators and teachers at all levels to help create an informed, balanced public perception on the important issue of GE use in agriculture.

As we can clearly see from the context from which you took that quote, the authors are referring to the public debate of GMOs and how the scientific research has been ignored. They state that the purpose of this paper was to provide a collection of records and resources for people of all levels with the goal of improving scientific communication. They even state within this context that there is a scientific consensus: "trying to catch the scientific consensus that has matured since GE plants became widely cultivated worldwide."

Thats the nice thing about actually posting your sources, its very easy to go back to the original source and show when its being misused and misrepresented. That you quote mined this paper is now evident and on record for all to see.

2) I'm not sure if you are making a thinly veiled ad hominem on the authors or just trying to insert your interpretation into their very well written paper.

 

 

(the hazard of, say, potential herbicide resistance transfer, needs no research to "detect", and in fact the authors document in the body of the article many cases of gene flow, outbreeding into the landscape, ecological effects beyond the field boundaries, etc, that reveal the presence of hazard and risk they claim no evidence of, but we can assume they meant that in all those "detected" events no harm above a certain threshold was "detected")

 

1) No research to detect? Thats nonsense. Lets say you spray roundup, but being a cheap ass you spray less than the recommended rate and then it rains for the next 5 days. No weeds are killed. Is that because of resistance or the fact that you sprayed too little and at the wrong time? Yeah...you need research to confirm actual herbicide resistance.

 

2) Herbicide resistance is not a hazard in the sense that it does not effect human health. A roundup resistant weed poses no health risk to humans or animals. Herbicide resistance develops naturally (evolution) and is a risk of any herbicide usage. However, if you don't use herbicides, then its irrelevant. The hazard of herbicide resistance is to the effectiveness of the herbicide itself. Tell me, what are the ecological consequences beyond the fact that a farmer can no longer use that herbicide?

 

and I can see that they are careful to word things so as to not actually assert falsehood or nonsense - such as the existence of a scientific consensus that GMOs are safe - but instead clearly inform the careful reader that what they are reporting is a lack of "detected" evidence of direct, serious harm from the isolated GM aspect of any commercialized GM crop in the past ten years.

But I also see that the apparent intent of such articles is to produce exactly what we see here - a misreading of reassurance into what is as much a revelation of huge gaps in our knowledge as it is a compendium of what little we know so far. And that sets my teeth on edge.

 

 

Having your views challenged by actual evidence probably does set your teeth on edge. In response you merely deny the vast body of evidence just presented to you and try to read your views into the paper, despite what they actually say. It reminds me a lot of how creationists and global-warming deniers continually claim that there is a lack of evidence, no scientific consensus, and quote mine statements.

 

 

 

To point to the obvious - in 1993 one could have as easily compiled such a list, as long and as full of irrelevancy and as misleading in its cursory effect, covering fifty years rather than a mere ten, tangentially relevant to the safety of industrially hydrogenated vegetable oil. The research hadn't been done, the right questions hadn't been asked, there were large gaps in our knowledge. There is no safety in such vacuums, no reassurance in the failure to detect what has not been properly sought, no support in an inability to recognize the unknown in the new.

And industrially hydrogenated vegetable oil does not exponentially reproduce itself, does not spread itself around and corrupt all our regular vegetable oil. When we found it to be harmful, all we had to do was stop making it.

 

This is nothing more than guilt by association and more arguments from ignorance.

 

 

http://www.nature.co...l/nbt.2597.html The irresponsible landscape scale distribution of Bt pesticide by GM, like that kind of misuse of any other valuable and effective antibiotic, normally destroys the effectiveness of the antibiotic. The expectation, from ordinary Darwinian theory, is that it will destroy the various Bts, the most useful ones first and possibly all of them generally. DDT was once a godsend - one of the least harmful and most effective pesticides ever discovered. Now it's all but worthless, and was so infused into the environment it can hardly be used for what it can still do. Likewise penicillin.

 

 

1) There certainly has been misuse of Bt and this has led to the development of resistance. However, that is not an argument against the technology itself, but its misuse.

 

2) I remember when the Bt corn was first released and when my family first started using it on their farm. Farmers were obligated under contract to plant 5-10% of their acreage to non-Bt varieties to create a refuge. The use of refuges was to help prevent the development of resistance. It was the seed companies that pushed the use of refuges and made it obligatory. However, many farmers did not plant the refuges or did so incorrectly. They did so deliberately because they wanted the full benefits of Bt. The paper you cite supports this:

 

Although regulations in the United States and elsewhere mandate refuges of non-Bt host plants for some Bt crops, farmer compliance is not uniformly high

 

The paper you cite actually spends a great deal of time examining the theory behind methods of delaying resistance, including the use of refuges.

 

The refuge strategy has been the primary approach used worldwide to delay pest resistance to Bt crops and has been mandated in the United States, Australia and elsewhere^{8, 16, 23}. Despite implementation of some resistance management practices for conventional insecticides, the mandates for the refuge strategy are part of an unprecedented proactive effort to slow resistance to Bt crops that recognizes both their value and the strong threat of resistance.

 

The seed companies have also taken other means of preventing resistance, including pyramiding different Bt proteins into one plant. This is a strategy similar to triple drug therapy for HIV.

 

First-generation Bt crops each produce a single Bt toxin, but many second-generation Bt crops, named pyramids, produce two or more distinct Bt toxins that are active against the same pest^{21, 47}.

 

The funny thing is that it is the biotech companies that stand to lose the most resistance and they are very familiar with how evolution works. That is why they have spent great deals and much time into developing ways to responsibly use Bt crops and prevent resistance. As much as I love farmers, its really them that have misused the technology.

 

The common code referred to is the engineered stuff, the herbicide resistance complexes etc. With some peripheral (but possibly significant for safety etc) modifications to fit it to a given plant, this stuff is moved en masse whenever possible, taken off the shelf and plugged into the latest GMO - a block of code found in, say, Bt expressing plants all over the planet, and normally in easily accessible organelles in the leaf. We could, say, get a retrovirus that spreads from cotton to corn to rice like that. It's not likely, but it's a vulnerability - even a kind of vulnerability - that was not there before.

 

 

1) This is why it pays to use correct terminology. "common code" is vague and given the context in which it was written, I could only assume you were referring to the plant genome itself, not the transgene. I would strongly encourage you to learn the proper terminology and use it. It makes communication so much easier.

 

2) This image of transgenes being "moved en masse whenever possible, taken off the shelf and plugged into the latest GMO" is yet another example of fear mongering. You are trying to paint a picture that is very inaccurate and also somewhat disturbing to readers in order to appeal to emotion rather than fact. In truth there is nothing routine about it. Do you have any real idea what is involved in genetic engineering? I would hope that anybody taking the time to actually write on the matter would bother to understand how it is done first, but that does not seem to be the case.

 

3) What do you mean by "easily accessible organelles in the leaf"? This makes no sense to me. Bt is localized in the cytoplasm of cells, while organelles are specialized subunits of cells...not leaves. I definitely have no idea what you are trying to imply by "easily accessible" other than it seems to be yet more fear language.

 

4) What are you talking about when you say "get a retrovirus that spreads from cotton to corn to rice like that. It's not likely, but it's a vulnerability - even a kind of vulnerability"? What does this have to do with Bt being in "easily accessible organelles in the leaf." What is the connection here? You seem to be jumping from one thing to the next without any connection and certainly lacking clarity. Its senseless.

 

As far as the rest of the stuff about the increasing of genetic diversity by seed companies - increasing the genetic diversity of their seed banks and sources is a very good thing, something US big ag sort of learned back when this corporate takeover of agriculture was just gettting rolling, maybe in the corn blight event back in the late 70s. It does not increase the genetic diversity of the planted crops, which has been reduced in the US and other industrial ag regions as GMOs have been adopted.

 

 

1) The entire purpose of increasing these seed collections is to integrate them into breeding programs to increase the genetic diversity of the seeds sold.

 

2) The decline of genetic diversity, southern corn blight in the 70s.....all of this happened prior to GMOs.

 

3) Provide me with actual evidence, I want actual research papers that show the decline in genetic diversity is the result of the introduction of GMOs. You are merely making an unsupported assertion. In contrast, I have shown several times now in this thread that these declines occurred before the use of GMOs and were driven primarily by factors such as conventional breeding.

 

(A couple of roots of this go back to the conversion of agriculture to hybrids, which ended up patented and controlled by corporations, rather than the straight breeding that a farmer can simply replant without paying. And that goes back to the land grant universities losing track of their mission, and partnering with corporations. One of the great lost potentials of genetic engineering is the ability to radically speed up straight breeding - having everybody on the hook to big agribusiness is not a law of the universe. )

 

 

1) Nothing prevents farmers from planting their own seed. It is not difficult to obtain public lines and varieties and the farmers are free to plant these to their hearts content, propagate the seed, etc. A farmer if he so chose, could even produce his own hybrid seed by crossing public inbred lines like the maize lines B73 and Mo17. Farmers choose to buy their seed every year because its very laborious and expensive to produce high quality seed let alone hybrids. It requires expertise and often specialized equipment to clean and sort the seed for optimal results.

 

2) Many of the companies have spent billions and decades developing their lines. Pioneer's founder lines have been in continuous development for 80 years. What a farmer can produce from such lines and their hybrids far exceeds whatever they could obtain from growing their own seed, so farmers choose to buy their seed.

 

3) As I pointed out to you earlier, genetic engineering is being used to speed up breeding. Did you just ignore that post entirely? For instance, the use of transgenic CenH₃ to create doubled haploid lines. Not only that, but the CenH₃ technology is available to academic researchers. We have several lines ourself.

 

 

A couple of casual rubber tree links. What the Chinese are up to is not public information, but their conversion of tropical forest landscape to clonal monocultures (not yet the further narrowing via their GMs, which are recent) is satellite verifiable, and that is going to pinch soon - even the local weather has been changed. They're going to have to do something.

http://rubberboard.o...news.asp?id=407

http://www.dailymirr...ent-stress.html

 

1) "not yet the further narrowing via their GMs"

 

In other words....not caused by the use of transgenics.

 

2) Both links refer to a transgenic rubber tree that is still in development and not used in the field. So logically, the lack of genetic diversity in rubber tree monocultures is not due to the use of this transgenic plant when it isn't even available commercially yet.

 

You have failed to demonstrate the GMOs are the cause of reduced genetic diversity.

Edited March 18, 2014 by chadn737

[John Cuthber]

Did they? ...

 

 

Similar choices are being made today ...

 

 

It's very likely that whatever problems we have with GMOs will be almost entirely due to politics, in that sense...

Yes. People have understood the importance of crop rotation for about 6000 years.

By whom?

For example, here's the evidence of people explicitly planning to suppress resistance among weeds.

http://archive.agric.wa.gov.au/objtwr/imported_assets/content/pw/e-weed_1_1april2011.pdf

 

What? Oppression by the government of the country next door on religious grounds?

Edited March 18, 2014 by John Cuthber

[Ringer]

I'm pretty sure we've had this discussion about the 'lack' of research of GMOs. Do I need to post another wall citations? Most anti-GMO talk is just special pleading that GMO is different and should be studied more extensively than any other food product. We have as much (more IIRC) research on GMO foods as we do on most other things we eat. I don't see the push against vitamins (which have been shown to be less than honest about what's even in them), of every new genotype livestock may have (or sometimes if the livestock is what's actually listed on the package), of every combination of soda combination to make sure no combination is too harmful, etc. Why is it GMO that needs all the tests, but it's the only one?

[chadn737]

I'm pretty sure we've had this discussion about the 'lack' of research of GMOs. Do I need to post another wall citations? Most anti-GMO talk is just special pleading that GMO is different and should be studied more extensively than any other food product. We have as much (more IIRC) research on GMO foods as we do on most other things we eat. I don't see the push against vitamins (which have been shown to be less than honest about what's even in them), of every new genotype livestock may have (or sometimes if the livestock is what's actually listed on the package), of every combination of soda combination to make sure no combination is too harmful, etc. Why is it GMO that needs all the tests, but it's the only one?

 

 

Follow the money. Who gains the most from a population in fear of GMOs?