GMO and the left (0.00 / 0)

It's hard for me to get worked up about GMO criticism, particularly when it comes from lefty people.  I don't doubt that there are significant problems with GMOs, but I've seen so many shoddy arguments put forward...

I still see people claiming that Bt corn is responsible for killing Monarch butterflies, for example, even though the refutation of that preliminary report was extensive and is now more than a decade old.

There's also the fact (yes, fact) that every vegetable, grain and domesticated animal we eat with regularity is for all purposes a GMO.  A few thousand years ago, almost nothing in the produce department of your grocery store even existed, which is a blink in evolutionary time.

There are certainly problems with GMO.  Some relating to the primitive state of the technology (like modifying things so that we can directly apply huge amounts of insecticides), and many relating to legal/social issues such as terminator seeds, patents, lobbying, and so on.  We haven't yet seen the large growths in productivity that GMOs promise (and they certainly do promise that), and even some evidence that some current utilization of GMOs have resulted in decreased crop yield.  

But I just don't see it on the health side of things.  The "what if"s in this post, even, seem like wild grasps, especially when the health problems they attempt to appropriate are so handily explained by simple over-consumption and malnutrition.

By far the biggest contributor to my skepticism, though, is that of scientists.  I am a layperson, though I've done some study of biology generally.  So when I see a lot of criticism of something, and then a backlash from non-Monsanto-funded scientists, I know which side to choose.  I choose the side that gets it right concerning vaccinations, evolution, climate change and so on.

So, sorry.  But we've been eating GMOs since the first permanent settlements were created by nomadic humans.  Hasn't killed us, yet.

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by: salmontarre @ Fri Jun 05, 2009 at 23:02:03 PM CDT

How quickly can we adapt? (4.00 / 2)

You talk about evolutionary changes in food that have taken place over hundreds, thousands of years. Humans, over the past 50,000 years have adapted when the changes weren't too abrupt. The main problem with genetic engineering of food is that it may create problems later we don't understand now. I guess you'd say that evolution's always been a crap shoot so why care now; evolution is meant to be a crap shoot and we can't change that, so why try?

Natasha's post already answers the question better than I can but when it comes to how important food is to survival, at the very least it'd be good to know why there's so little data on the possible consequences of long term mass consumption of these foods. Doing the research, on its own, can't be that controversial. It would be common sense for the FDA to do it. Why haven't they?

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by: NealB2 @ Fri Jun 05, 2009 at 23:47:19 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Well (4.00 / 1)

I didn't say to not do the research into the health effects of GMO consumption.  All I said is that, on the face of it, it seems unlikely to me to result in anything.  

A lot of people on the left seem to react in a, well, reactionary way to the very concept of GMO, and I don't see why.  Directly manipulating the instructions that determine the yields, resistances, nutritional value and so on of a plant, and even of animals, is a field that obviously has such enormous potential for humanity, that it demands to be explored aggressively.

So by all means, do the research on various manifestations of current GMO crops, but until there is evidence to the contrary, I can think of no scientific reason that genetic modification ought to be any different than the slightly slower process of selective breeding.

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by: salmontarre @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 16:41:20 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

GE and Plant Breeding are very, very different (4.00 / 2)

salmontarre wrote:

"There's also the fact (yes, fact) that every vegetable, grain and domesticated animal we eat with regularity is for all purposes a GMO.  A few thousand years ago, almost nothing in the produce department of your grocery store even existed, which is a blink in evolutionary time."

Sorry, plant breeding and genetic engineering (GE) are not the same thing. When the term "Genetically Engineered" is used to describe a plant, then it is understood that
GE technology was used to engineer the plant not breeding.

Similarly, a conventional bomb could be described as a "weapon of mass destruction", but the term WMD actually refers to nuclear weapons (and much more recently it also refers to biological and chemical weapons).

"There are certainly problems with GMO.  Some relating to the primitive state of the technology (like modifying things so that we can directly apply huge amounts of insecticides), and many relating to legal/social issues such as terminator seeds, patents, lobbying, and so on.  We haven't yet seen the large growths in productivity that GMOs promise (and they certainly do promise that), and even some evidence that some current utilization of  GMOs have resulted in decreased crop yield."

Very true.

"But I just don't see it on the health side of things.  The "what if"s in this post, even, seem like wild grasps, especially when the health problems they attempt to appropriate are so handily explained by simple over-consumption and malnutrition."

Well, as the article pointed out, because of the government decision to view GE as 'substantial equivalence' there has been no testing to see if there are health effects from any of the GE crops.

http://www.biotech-info.net/cr...

Remember, people were smoking cigarettes for decades before scientists discovered the negative health effects of smoking.

Even with conventional breeding, crop plants should be health tested if there has been any real changes in the plant. For example, there was the case of a program to breed celery that was would be more pest resistant (for organic farms). It was effectively bred, was not tested, and was grown for market. This celery had to be quickly taken off the
grocery shelves once grocery store workers started getting rashes on their hands after handling the celery.

There are tons of pest-resistant plants out there, unfortunately most of them are poisonous to humans. After all, from the plants' perspective, anything that eats them is a pest. That is why it is hard to find plants that are both pest-resistant and healthy and tasty for humans to eat. And that is one reason that farming is not that easy.

As for health and GE, there is also the issue of Bio-pharming:

"Bio-pharming is the production of pharmaceutical proteins in genetically engineered plants"

http://www.ext.colostate.edu/p...

"The plan, confirmed yesterday by the California biotechnology company leading the effort, calls for large-scale cultivation in Kansas of rice that produces human immune system proteins in its seeds."

"But critics are assailing the effort, saying gene-altered plants inevitably migrate out of their home plots. In this case, they said, that could result in pharmacologically active proteins showing up in the food of unsuspecting consumers."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

"In an April 11 statement, Jim Hoffmeister, Anheuser-Busch vice president for procurement, logistics and agricultural resources, said, "Anheuser-Busch is concerned that the introduction to Missouri of Ventria Bioscience's pharma rice poses a potential risk to the Missouri commercial rice crop. Given the potential for contamination of commercial rice production in this state, we will not purchase any rice produced or processed in Missouri if Ventria introduces its pharma rice here.""

http://deltafarmpress.com/news...

"So, sorry.  But we've been eating GMOs since the first permanent settlements were created by nomadic humans.  Hasn't killed us, yet."

Again, not true, GM and plant breeding are two very, very different things.

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by: Katie @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 01:49:40 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

. (0.00 / 0)

"Sorry, plant breeding and genetic engineering (GE) are not the same thing. When the term "Genetically Engineered" is used to describe a plant, then it is understood that GE technology was used to engineer the plant not breeding."

So?  That wasn't my argument.  My argument is that, on an evolutionary timescale, selective breeding is nearly equivalent to selective breeding.  GE is simply adding in some new genes to an existing organism.  It allows us to pick and choose new functions that we desire.  

There is only one significant way in which this differs from unnatural selection, and that is that we can use GE to circumvent waiting for fortuitous, novel mutations.  For example, I have no reason to exclude the possibility that, if we spent enough decades doing it, we could breed a tomato that doesn't die to a spring frost.  But with GE, we don't need to spend those decades.  We simply insert the appropriate genes necessary to produce the appropriate protein(s).

In short: Selective breeding is just as wholly unnatural as GE.  Carrots and broccoli are not products of any natural process.  They are a human creation.

"Remember, people were smoking cigarettes for decades before scientists discovered the negative health effects of smoking."

Yes, but my point is that with things such as smoking, there is a clear theory, if you are devoid of any actual statistical data regarding the health of smokers, that would lead you to suspect it may be a serious problem: You are inhaling combusted plant matter, as well as a panoply of synthetic chemicals, into your lungs.

There is no equivalent theoretical framework, that I am aware of, concerning GMOs.  And I think that Natasha's "what if" about obesity was something of a tacit admission that this is true.  It's an absurdly weak argument.  By what process would GMO corn and sugarbeets lead to obesity?

"After all, from the plants' perspective, anything that eats them is a pest. That is why it is hard to find plants that are both pest-resistant and healthy and tasty for humans to eat. And that is one reason that farming is not that easy."

That's not true.  Humans are the single biggest competitive advantage that tasty vegetables and fruits have.

Pests are organisms which hurt reproductive success.

"Even with conventional breeding, crop plants should be health tested if there has been any real changes in the plant."

As I responded to the other response to my OP, I never said otherwise.

On biopharming, I agree, but I think that this is an example of where the lines get fuzzed by GMO critics.  Biopharming may have serious consequences we need to assess before either allowing it to continue with some restrictions, or banning, but this is a completely different issue than GMOs which are designed for nutritional purposes.  The two should not be conflated.

I have serious problems with how companies which are working on GMO are acting.  Their actions have serious implications for agriculture, medicine, poverty, and so on.  I do see these problems not as GMO-related, though, but as problems relating to the interface of corporate entities and government, and the lack of scientific knowledge of pretty much our entire society from top to bottom.  GM is simply another area where corporate interests are displaying their domination of the political arena.

"Again, not true, GM and plant breeding are two very, very different things."

I don't see how.  The difference between corn and the grain they came from is far, far more extensive than the difference between corn and Bt corn.

Breeding, over time, results in genetic engineering on a mass scale.  GM is simply a means of doing it faster. (In theory, anyways.  Nothing we've done with GM even approaches how drastically we've altered the biota through breeding.)

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by: salmontarre @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 17:19:01 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

GE crops don't breed true (4.00 / 1)

salmontarre wrote:

"So? That wasn't my argument.  My argument is that, on an evolutionary timescale, selective breeding is nearly equivalent to selective breeding.  GE is simply adding in some new genes to an existing organism.  It allows us to pick and choose new functions that we desire."

That is how the PR spin describes GE, but there are important differences.

For example, as Ms. Chart's article pointed out:

"Lotter describes the processes used to insert genes into crop DNA, explaining that researchers can neither control nor replicate where in the genome the new gene sequence ends up."

Which is why GE plants do not breed true. when 2 plants are bred together, the resulting
gene sequence placements are consistent. When GE is used to add a gene, it's placement is random. When GE researchers create wonderful new seeds for use in poor countries, then the poor farmers using those seeds are dependent on these same researchers giving them new seeds year after year. Why? Because if the farmer uses the seeds from the first year's crops to plant the next year's crops, they will not have the same characteristics of the first year's crops, and even less so the 3rd year's crops. In other words, the GE crops do not breed true.

salmontarre wrote:

"For example, I have no reason to exclude the possibility that, if we spent enough decades doing it, we could breed a tomato that doesn't die to a spring frost.  But with GE, we don't need to spend those decades.  We simply insert the appropriate genes necessary to produce the appropriate protein(s). In short: Selective breeding is just as wholly unnatural as GE.  Carrots and broccoli are not products of any natural process. They are a human creation."

My issue with GE crops isn't that they are somehow unnatural, after all as you point out, selective breeding is also unnatural.  My problem with GE crops is that the technology is so primitive that the results are crappy, unsafe and keep farmers at the mercy of whichever corporation or university provides the crappy GE seeds.

There is a new technology (at least newer than GE) called "Marker Assisted Selection" or MAS. MAS has much of the power of GE, such as the ability make large changes quickly, but with the added benefit of breeding true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

The reason MAS hasn't taken over from GE yet is that so many billions have already been spent on GE creations (corporation don't want to just walk away) and GE seeds need to be continually replenished, thus providing a steady income stream to these corporations.

salmontarre wrote:

""Even with conventional breeding, crop plants should be health tested if there has been any real changes in the plant." As I responded to the other response to my OP, I never said otherwise."

New crops strains, whether developed through GE, traditional breeding or through MAS breeding all should be health tested. The fact that they are not, and the fact that pharma-crops are being allowed in open-air fields is why more and more people do not trust our food supply.

The only good thing that has come about from this cavalier and cowboyish attitude towards food safely is that more and more people are making a point of buying organic.

Note: the only way to ensure that one is not buying GE plants is to buy organic.

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by: Katie @ Mon Jun 08, 2009 at 03:58:36 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

er no (0.00 / 0)

"Lotter describes the processes used to insert genes into crop DNA, explaining that researchers can neither control nor replicate where in the genome the new gene sequence ends up."

Which is why GE plants do not breed true. when 2 plants are bred together, the resulting
gene sequence placements are consistent. When GE is used to add a gene, it's placement is random. When GE researchers create wonderful new seeds for use in poor countries, then the poor farmers using those seeds are dependent on these same researchers giving them new seeds year after year. Why? Because if the farmer uses the seeds from the first year's crops to plant the next year's crops, they will not have the same characteristics of the first year's crops, and even less so the 3rd year's crops. In other words, the GE crops do not breed true.

The reason that the second years crops don't match the first is that the first years crop is hybrid seed. Hybrid seed is the first generation grown from a cross between two different varaieties.  When you do this, you get greatly increased yield due to a phenomenon called heterosis or hybrid vigor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Unfortunately, this effect only lasts one generation, so to get these great yields, you always have to get seed from the crosses.  This is true whether you are dealing with GM crops or organic crops. It has nothing to do with the GM plants.  And I as I say below, the fact that you can't tell the gene exactly where to insert, or repeat that exact insertion is really irrelevant, because the insertion is just the first step. You do a lot of insertions and find the ones that works for you and then go forward with that one.

FWIW the companies are now spending billions on Marker assisted selection, and combining it with transgenics. At least in the US, they aren't competetive technologies.  

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by: ibaxter @ Tue Jun 09, 2009 at 00:17:02 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

"science" (4.00 / 3)

It bothers me when people use the term "science" to describe the kind of haphazard engineering practice that is associated with GMO product development. I've had the misforune of working with plenty of crappy, poorly trained engineers. The story above seems familiar: hack on it until it appears to work and then try and sell it. I agree that this approach is completely unacceptable for our food crops.

The comment "hasn't killed us yet" is pathetic. There a huge difference between selective breeding and splicing in a gene for a pesticide found in an unrelated species. As Natasha points out, genes do a lot of things and never act alone. I approve of GMO's for research purposes, but we shouldn't be eating them. GMO's should not be patentable because they should never be "products."

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by: Mark Wallace @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 01:42:22 AM CDT

same ol same ol (0.00 / 0)

  This is another example of our failed government. Much like the current recession, this is unrestrained capital run amok, the people be damed! As I understand, it is even illegal to label food as non-G.E. in the U.S., thus the consumer cannot differenciate between food and poison. The community here at open left understand the problem better than any other group that I am aware of, and still we cannot devise a method to make our elected representatives represent the public's known wishes on any monatary issue. The battle between capital and people appeares to be over. Even with democratic majorities we cannot get the peoples wishes passed into law. "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, envinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotisum, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security"....... I hate it, but the old axiom still is valid: Where there is no justice, there is violence!  

Government by organized money is no better than government by organized mob..... FDR

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by: reggiewhitefish @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 09:30:26 AM CDT

oversimplfying the biology (4.00 / 1)

While I certainly am not here to defend many of the practices of BigAg with respect to transgenics and regulatory structures. I found the characterization of the biology involved (this is also true of the Lotter articles) to be overly simplistic to the point of being misleading.

Just to focus on a few points:
1. I think it's a real stretch to say that transgenics are based on a "one gene, one protein" model that has subsequently been found to be completely false. While we are still discovering complexities about what are genes, and how they are regulated, alternative splicing, post translational modifications like phosphorylation and glycosylation, and protein degradation which are major drivers of the complexity which gets you more proteins than genes, have been know about for decades.  These factors can contribute to your transgene not performing as expected, but that doesn't mean that the underlying rationale was mistaken.  This is why you create multiple transgenic events and select the ones that are doing what you want.  

It is possible that inserting a transgene could have effects on other components of the organism that weren't anticipated and may or may not be detected by current methods.  Of course this is true to some degree of any genetic modification, be it a 'naturally' occurring mutation that a breeder spots and uses in their program, or the results of a widely diverse cross the breeder makes.

Which brings me to:
2. The fact that the genetic modification goes in randomly and induces a lot of genome shock is not really a big cause of concern. There are lots of places where an insertion will have no effect, and lots of places where it will have an effect. Thats why you do multiple events and select for the ones that work (and don't disrupt other genes).  Most of the other changes that are induced by the insertion event are cleaned up by back crossing to the parent. Again, this is very similar to conventional plant breeding.

While I certainly think that much more food safety testing could be done, I haven't seen convincing evidence that makes me worry about eating transgenics. Most of the studies cited by Lotter which claim to have shown severely negative consequences of transgenes really are poorly done.

note: given my occupation and aquaintances, I'm sure some would consider me to have conflicts of interest.

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by: ibaxter @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 23:04:16 PM CDT

Oversimplifying (0.00 / 0)

You rather overstate, yourself, biologists' understanding of how all this works together.

We know a lot, but not that much, about the multiple interactions in a biological system. Nutritionists can barely even tell us what's healthy to eat - because they don't know except by observing outcomes.

Blueberries are good for you, as an example. This is well known and uncontroversial. But why? No one really knows the answer to this. If you take vitamin supplements containing all the nutritionally equivalent constituents of the blueberry that have been identified as healthful, you still can't replicate the benefits of a handful of fresh berries.

How can we claim that something absolutely isn't disturbing some property of a complex organism that we don't even understand well enough to measure?

And though you say that scientists understand the one gene, one protein model is overly simple, that there are multiple interactions, again, they don't know what all of them are. The prediction of protein folding configurations is a "conditionally intractable", np complete problem. Genes make proteins, but which ones, and how are they shaped, and what do they do? Anyone who says they know is just making stuff up.

Maybe this frankenfood is fine, though, after all. But I don't want to have to eat it until there's real safety testing done on it.

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by: Natasha Chart @ Tue Jun 09, 2009 at 04:16:54 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

don't really disagree (0.00 / 0)

with what you are saying here. And I'm not sure why you  think that what you wrote disagrees fundamentally with what I wrote. There are several things I will say in response, but I can't necessarily fit them into a coherent structure so I am just going to list them and apologize for the disjointed nature.

1. Let me just say up front that what we don't know about the fundamentals underlying biology is sooooooooo much more than what we do know. Thats what makes it so much fun to study!!!

2. The protein folding problem can really be divided into two questions:
a) how do you take a primary sequence and fold it into a protein from scratch using basic principles.
b) If you can compare a given sequence to those of all the proteins who's structure is known, can you use this knowledge to predict the folded structure of a protein.
These are very different questions and protein folding contests split them out into different categories. There is also a fair amount of cross disdain between the two camps (or at least there was 10 years ago when I was more closely involved in the field), which can be very entertaining at talks.

Anyway, if the question is:
Given a protein, can we predict its structure? maybe
Can we determine it's structure? most likely
Is it possible that if it's expressed in a different organism, could it be misfolded? absolutely
If it's expressed in a different organism, can we determine with a high degree of confidence that it has the same structure? yes
Can we be sure that expressing the protein isn't altering the folding (or some other aspect) of another protein? Absolutely not. BUT this is true of every genetic change you make.  The crosses that breeders do introduce millions of genetic changes, and we have no idea what most of them do (actually, most of them likely do very little, but that still leaves many, many that do something and we don't know what it is).

So its basically impossible to be sure that expressing a gene, or making a cross, or collecting seed from a plant and replanting it, or a change in the the weather during the growth cycle won't make any changes to any component of the plant.  But as you point out, we really don't know much about what changes matter for nutrition. So your left trying to do testing to figure out if the changes you have made have a detrimental impact on the environment or the people eating it.

So that leads to two questions:
Do you test every new line, or just the transgenics?
and
How much testing do you need to do to declare something safe?

For the first, I think you could reasonably state that you should test each line that is radically different from a line that people have been eating for awhile. But that would include a lot of lines that conventional breeders produce as well. One of the key to the green revolution was breeding dwarf plants, which is screwing up with hormone signalling (plant hormones, not animal). This will cause all kinds of changes throughout the plant. If you take those lines bred in Mexico and cross them into African varieties, you are going to get something drastically different.

The second gets much trickier. Clearly we should do basic tests to make sure that foods aren't immediately toxic. By that measure, transgenics clearly pass. [Sidenote: One of the papers Lotter cites looked at transgenic potatoes fed to rats. But the transgenic potatoes were much higher in protein than the controls, so were the effects due to the transgenic or the high protein? We can certainly produce high protein crops through conventional breeding.]

Longer term tests of course take much longer, are more expensive and are harder to control. And if we are concerned with the cross interactions, we need to test each new line/gene/trait in all the different backgrounds it will be put in. We practice monoculture, but it is monoculture on a local scale: the lines in Kansas are different from the lines in Nebraska etc etc.

So when you say that we need to do real safety testing, I wholeheartedly agree that we need to do some basic tests, but I get the impression (I could be wrong) that you are calling for massive, long term tests which just aren't feasible.   And give that I feel fairly comfortable with our knowledge of the main effects of the transgenics, I don't feel that they are necessary either.

But I absolutely agree that we should do basic safety testing  on new foods, I think we just disagree on what constitutes basic safety testing.  I also happen to think that we should be doing basic safety testing on vitamins and nutracuticals, which are basically unregulated as well.

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by: ibaxter @ Tue Jun 09, 2009 at 22:05:08 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

recent article (4.00 / 2)

  There is a new article posted at OpEdNews by Jeffery M. Smith regading a new position paper by the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. This article cites the AAEM position paper calling for immediate moratorium on all genetically modified foods, and is dated May 19, 2009. The AAEM concludes " There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects, There is causation". This is an indepth examination of where we are now due to the release of these products into the food supply prior to testing. The AAEM recomonds the doctors in there orginaziation tell there patients to avoid eating GM foods. I read somewhere that the A.M.A. is working on a paper for publication that reaches the same conclusion. Hopefully, this exposure will inform the public and the market will force an end to these frankenstine products.  

Government by organized money is no better than government by organized mob..... FDR

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by: reggiewhitefish @ Sun Jun 07, 2009 at 10:21:03 AM CDT