patrick.net

121212 says

right, ask Monsanto and expect an answer. Did anyone of those farmers discuss Roundup? GM Alfalfa?

Pesticides?

They are qualified, your not listening.

Completely different issue. GM does not add chemicals to the food. The reason we don't need labels every time reactionaries get hysterical for no reason, is that it confuses people. Consumers aren't going to know what's bad for them unless it is scientifically determined what IS bad for them. Just because some people find "new" things to be "scary" is not a reason to start banning or labeling things. Where's the science?

When a farmer grafts 2 trees together, he is changing the genetics of that product. We've been doing that probably for thousands of years. Do you believe that requires a special label?

Homeboy says

Completely different issue. GM does not add chemicals to the food. T

Excuse me? Monsanto GM engineers the seed to work specifically with Roundup. What are you talking about?

We are not talking grafting and such.

121212 says

When a farmer grafts 2 trees together, he is changing the genetics of that product. We've been doing that probably for thousands of years. Do you believe that requires a special label?

You don't understand. 1st the farmer has no control over the seeds. 2) the crop is Gm to work with Roundup 3) the farmer is not allowed to re-use seeds 4) nobody knows wtf Monsanto is doing!

The farmers are not involved, you know the people we trusted with our food for 100's and 1000's of years.

Why do you think you have all these allergy issues? Pesticides designed to be used with GM crop.

CaptainShuddup says

Can you spot the fake?

I guess not. So 121212 you wouldn't know the difference if the industry said they stopped with GM Salmon but did it anyway.

We have no idea if all this GM crop/food will mutate your chromosomes.

There is obviously something happening with allergies, our bodies are changing.

The pesticides are a contributing factor.

Zlxr says

Would you be so quick to accept GMO foods if you knew that the bacterium they are using to inject new DNA into plants - could also pollute our soil and cause disease in humans.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/agrobacteriumAndMorgellons.php

Think again about the whole implication of altering the ratios of bacterium in our environment and how they can change and what the implications are to us if all diseases change and we have no immunity.

There should be labeling! this industry does not want us knowing what they are doing!

121212 says

We have no idea if all this GM crop/food will mutate your chromosomes.

Probably. Then again so will sunlight, shall we ban that as well?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutagen

121212 says

There is obviously something happening with allergies

A likely answer to the first is soap:
http://www.everydayhealth.com/allergies/cleaning-and-allergies.aspx

This horrible agent of death is also credited with the outbreaks of polio that terrorized much of the US and Europe in the first half of the last century:
http://healthypursuits.hubpages.com/hub/Polio-Virus-and-Its-Odd-History

121212 says

our bodies are changing.

Sure, its called aging.

121212 says

The pesticides are a contributing factor.

Perhaps. I have no problem dialing back the use of farming synthetic chemicals provided the food can be provided as cheaply, reliably and yes, safely as with them

Zlxr says

Would you be so quick to accept GMO foods if you knew that the bacterium they are using to inject new DNA into plants - could also pollute our soil and cause disease in humans.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/agrobacteriumAndMorgellons.php

Think again about the whole implication of altering the ratios of bacterium in our environment and how they can change and what the implications are to us if all diseases change and we have no immunity.

I read your article. It claims an incredibly rare disease has now been shown to be caused by infection with naturally occurring Agrobacterium. The report extrapolates the possibility that GMO plants insufficiently cleansed of Agrobacterium used as gene vector may infect other organisms with unknown consequences.

Sure, it could happen. Will it? Probably not.

The last part of your argument sounds like some of the arguments against the use of antibiotics. Does the use of antibiotics breed superbugs? Yes, that has been proven. Should we ban antibiotics? No!

New Renter says

We have no idea if all this GM crop/food will mutate your chromosomes.

Probably. Then again so will sunlight, shall we ban that as well?

You think your so smart!

Your clueless, just how they want you!

New Renter says

our bodies are changing.

Sure, its called aging.

No its not. It about increases in allergies.

New Renter says

The last part of your argument sounds like some of the arguments against the use of antibiotics.

You have no idea that all the animals you eat are fed antibiotics and you consume this!!

You spent a while making a real bullshit argument that sinks under it's own weight.

Try again.

121212 says

We have no idea if all this GM crop/food will mutate your chromosomes.

There is obviously something happening with allergies, our bodies are changing.

The pesticides are a contributing factor.

Actually, we scientists DO know that it will not mutate your chromosomes. (funny comment on your part though) It's folks like you who don't. I guess I can't blame you for being worried, but you're very wrong and don't realize that GMO is much better for the environment than most of the farming we've got going on right now. I guess if I didn't have the scientific background I'd freak out about people "messing with my food" too, but this is unfortunate. You do realize how much nitrogen washes down the Mississippi river each year and what damage is being done to the life in the rivers and Gulf of Mexico? You do realize that "organic" food has actually killed people but GMO hasn't? You do know what "organic" means - in scientific terms rather than marketing terms? You do realize we've been engineering GMO food for the past 10K years and if you don't run out and hunt for wild mushrooms or something like that you've been eating it your entire lifetime? Nope, I didn't think so. Carry on...

just_passing_through says

Actually, we scientists DO know that it will not mutate your chromosomes.

Amazing how all these new allergies are affecting more and more people.

That has nothing to do with pesticides for GMO crops right.

It has nothing to do with everything in the food chain being fed corn!!! right!

Also try posting some evidence?

The majority of all farmers are raising concerns and you come along with a few sentences and except us to take your word for it?

Well, I'm unfortunately not a pesticide expert but pesticides do not equal GMO. I don't like them. Many GMO strains are being developed to reduce or eliminate pesticides all together. Others for salt or drought tolerance or to more efficiently extract nutrients from the soil. Among other things...

Well, actually, there was a bunch of crap about GMO a little over a decade ago. Bezerkely pot bangers were writing about Monarch butterfly deaths due to 'Bt' corn after some scientist force fed some larva corn, which they don't eat, and which generally only blows about 10 yards from corn fields due to large waxy pollen grains. Furthermore at the time they didn't engineer the promoters well enough to produce enough Bt inside the plant to kill weevils. We've been using Bt for almost 100 years to kill them by growing it like we make beer and SPRAYING it everywhere. It's a naturally occurring compound found from bacteria in the soil everywhere! It won't hurt us or our pets but simply crystallizes in the guts (exploding them) of a limited number of bugs. The scientist later came out and shamefully admitted the 'feed corn to monarch larva' a flawed experimental deign. Apologized for the misinformation the bezerks ran with and oh, we had a bumper crop of Monarch butterflies that year.

I've never read a paper relating GMO to allergies that wasn't crapulent. There was one from a French group this year with serious deficiencies.

Feeding animals corn, is also NOT equal to GMO despite the fact that much of that corn is GMO.

Anti-GMO company 'organic' juice drinks kill people:
http://www.marlerclark.com/case_news/detail/suits-against-odwalla-mount-in-e-coli-case

They have anti-GMO slogans on the bottles, it's amusing that it's sold at a few of the biotech companies I've worked at.

Simple fact is nobody knows what is causing more allergies, more autism etc... It could be multifactorial but it's not simply due to 'GMO'.

I really don't care to prove to you that GMO 'food' (plants) is safe. Go take a molecular biology class if you want to know what you are talking about. I do have a hard time with the animals though. If they are 'engineered' incorrectly they might not feel so well. For now I only support plants in most cases because of that.

Redux: GMO is not antibiotics, is not pesticides, is not feeding animals things like corn which they don't naturally eat, is not injecting animals with antibiotics - which I'm also against.

It is simply GMO, something we've done for 10k years, and something we've gotten much better with in the past 100.

121212 says

Excuse me? Monsanto GM engineers the seed to work specifically with Roundup. What are you talking about?

We are not talking grafting and such.

Excuse yourself. Roundup is a chemical weed killer. GM is a method of changing the genetic makeup of a living thing. As I said, two separate issues. If you want to regulate chemical agents, then do so, but don't just give a blanket opinion that all GM is bad just because it frightens and confuses you.

You still don't seem to understand. GM changes the genetics. So does grafting. It's just a different way of doing it.

121212 says

There is obviously something happening with allergies, our bodies are changing.

Bullshit.

10 year old girls are sprouting double D's 'cause of the hormones in the Tyson chicken. Yesssss!!!!!

Pretty much all food has been selectively bread for thousands of years. Why is it all of a sudden bad now? Don't you know that there would be severe food shortages without it? What's your solution if GM foods didn't exist? Doesn't it come under the subheading of necessary evil?

Here is the USDA follow up regarding the Bt corn:

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/btcorn/

"What prompted this research?

A small, preliminary study done at Cornell University, and reported as a note in Nature in June 1999, indicated that monarch butterflies under laboratory conditions might be harmed by eating pollen from Bt corn plants. That experiment used a small number of caterpillars and gave them no choice about avoiding eating leaves that had been treated with a thick layer of Bt corn pollen. It did not attempt to duplicate real world environmental conditions."

It's really unfortunate so many people are afraid of GM. I see it as our only way of producing environmentally friendly food now and in the future. Misinformation about it is quite destructive.

"Since Bt corn was introduced, use of pesticides recommended for European corn borer control decreased from 6 million to slightly over 4 million acre treatments in 1999, a drop of about one-third, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. "

121212 says

Why do you think you have all these allergy issues?

Because too many people don't go outdoors much, use hand sanitizers, and antibiotics every time they get a cold. I'm sure that the food supply isn't helping, but I don't think it's the sole cause.

just_passing_through says

You do know what "organic" means - in scientific terms rather than marketing terms?

Molecules containing sp3 hybridized carbon if you're an organic chemist. "Contains carbon" for anyone else.

Homeboy says

GM changes the genetics. So does grafting. It's just a different way of doing it.

Actually grafting does not "change the genetics" any more than a transplant heart changes the genetics of the recipient.

Dammit... Someone is wrong on the internet again and here I sit sucked into it on PatNet again haha....

Zlxr: Most of what you write is fear-mongering and I'm not going to waste a lot of time on it. I think the only credible argument I've ever heard about GM vs. other methods are what it does to the small farmer's in other countries in particular. That would be another long winded debate but a worthy one!

I don't work for a GM company and never have. I used to do cancer research as a bench scientist but moved to bioinformatics over a decade ago. I develop tech to decode genomes (mostly humans - more money in that) and so indirectly a small number of those sorts of companies would be one of my customers. So I do understand a lot about genetics and I could go back and forth debating this with you but there is soooo much junk science out there I'd be fighting I don't want to. Also, heck, I really don't blame people for being afraid of GM. I would be too if I didn't understand it.

Maybe another angle would help. Did you know a decade ago it cost ~3billon bucks to sequence a human genome and now it's less than 5K and soon to be sub-1K? The technology is advancing faster than Moore's Law and compute power is now the major bottle neck. Within a decade (technically anyway) it will be routine for you to get your genome(s) sequenced when you visit the doc. Nuclear, Mitochondrial, Disease cells (cancer), things that live in and on you. One of the fields of study up and coming is meta-genomics. Things in the environment, on your skin, in your gut. I'd wager to say that 70 years from now we'll have most of the planet sequenced (proteomes, genomes, epigenics, geneomes, more) and will have some term coined such as the geo-genomic report similar to the weather report showing conditions on the globe. That technology will be used by our future cyborg leaders. They'll be able to sniff out our location anywhere on the planet by sampling the wind, water etc., in real time and zero in on us with their global intelligence. None of us will be able to hide outside of the people-zoo.

The last 3 sentences are only partially tongue-in-cheek. The point is that the tech is moving so fast that the general public won't be able to understand it. Like anything, some will use it for bad but there is so much good it will bring. Also, there is no stopping it. Humans do this sort of thing, it's in our nature. Privacy (stronger ones than were passed a few years ago) are a must but an over-reaction will just put the US further behind other countries and prevent saving lives. All the hoopla about GMO agriculture is just causing more environmental damage than what big-AG is doing now and we can't feed everyone by 'organic' methods which is just marketing speak for 'food grown in poop'.

New Renter says

Molecules containing sp3 hybridized carbon if you're an organic chemist. "Contains carbon" for anyone else.

A+

zzyzzx says

121212 says

Why do you think you have all these allergy issues?

Because too many people don't go outdoors much, use hand sanitizers, and antibiotics every time they get a cold. I'm sure that the food supply isn't helping, but I don't think it's the sole cause.

That's one reason. Not enough pets is another. If you have a kid you should get a dog, and a cat, and a hamster/chicken/snake/whatever. The more kinds of animals you have around the less likely your children are to develop allergies.

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=195228

Even better ship that kid off to a farm.

just_passing_through says

New Renter says

Molecules containing sp3 hybridized carbon if you're an organic chemist. "Contains carbon" for anyone else.

A+

Thanks, I guess that Ph.D. in chemistry finally paid off :)

just_passing_through says

One of the fields of study up and coming is meta-genomics. Things in the environment, on your skin, in your gut. I'd wager to say that 70 years from now we'll have most of the planet sequenced (proteomes, genomes, epigenics, geneomes, more)

I attended a few seminars on exactly that subject - sequencing the flora of the human gut to better understand the interaction of ourselves to our tenants. From what I saw I think this will be a real leap forward in our understanding of medicine.

BTW, a LOT of fish is mislabeled so as to artificially increase it's value. Also, as far as I can tell, the quality of seafood has decreased so much over the past 30 years as to make most of it inedible. Now that they are scraping the bottom of the oceans the taste is really terrible and I won't eat seafood any more and haven't eaten much in decades (shrimp and canned tuna seems to still taste OK, but everything else sucks).

just_passing_through says

That technology will be used by our future cyborg leaders. They'll be able to sniff out our location anywhere on the planet by sampling the wind, water etc., in real time and zero in on us with their global intelligence. None of us will be able to hide outside of the people-zoo.

Not so tongue in cheek. A company I worked for makes a very crude version of exactly what you are describing.

New Renter says

I attended a few seminars on exactly that subject - sequencing the flora of the human gut to better understand the interaction of ourselves to our tenants. From what I saw I think this will be a real leap forward in our understanding of medicine.

I had a recent email exchange with a comical UCSF scientist I used to work with. When it's better understood one might form a company that delivers gut-flora pills in order to mimic the famous. He said, "Today I want to feel like Brad Pit, on the inside!"

New Renter says

Not so tongue in cheek. A company I worked for makes a very crude version of exactly what you are describing.

Interesting... The though of the possibility came to me recently while working on an app for human identification, FBI tech etc. Not surprising... Scary.

just_passing_through says

They'll be able to sniff out our location anywhere on the planet by sampling the wind, water etc., in real time and zero in on us with their global intelligence.

A feral cat that I used to feed could do that. Specifically this one:

zzyzzx says

A feral cat that I used to feed could do that

Could be one of those alien beings Dmitry Medvedev mentioned and discussed on another PatNet thread?

If not it's a cool looking cat.

New Renter says

Actually grafting does not "change the genetics" any more than a transplant heart changes the genetics of the recipient.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27377/title/Grafts-guide-gene-exchange/

When two plants are grafted together, they share much more than water and minerals: They also swap genetic material, according to a linkurl:study;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/324/5927/649 published in tomorrow's (May 1) issue of __Science__. These findings muddy the distinction between naturally-occurring gene transfer in plants and the human-mediated mechanisms we generally refer to as genetic engineering.

Zlxr says

How do you know and why do you think this is better than just cross pollinating the corn and being able to save seeds for the next year instead of having to buy new seeds from Monsanto?????

How do you know it's worse?

Zlxr says

OK - just passing

Good questions. It depends on the legal contract I suppose. I'm not against patenting GMs for the time required to recoup (very expensive) business costs and to generate profits. Maybe a model similar to drugs where eventually they expire and generics become available.

However, your scenario suggests monoculture which is a bad idea. You'd want a certain amount of 'variable' plants also growing in any region in order to confront the unexpected. I'm pretty sure that is how it's done.

GM's and patenting and monoculture is exactly what Monsanto is doing? This is what you are sticking up for.

Zlxr says

Then you should know that if they would sequence the genomes for the weeds and the pests - they would know how to eradicate them without chemicals and having to alter the plants they are trying to grow.

No. They'd be able to use either or both better. Like designer drugs in medicine which are also on the horizon.

Zlxr says

GM's and patenting and monoculture is exactly what Monsanto is doing? This is what you are sticking up for.

I think they plant something like 10% regular hybrids within a mono-culture field or some such to get the best of both.

I'm sticking up for GM and what it isn't despite the frankenfood nuts claims otherwise. Yes, I also support patents you're damn straight.

Homeboy says

New Renter says

Actually grafting does not "change the genetics" any more than a transplant heart changes the genetics of the recipient.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27377/title/Grafts-guide-gene-exchange/

When two plants are grafted together, they share much more than water and minerals: They also swap genetic material, according to a linkurl:study;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/324/5927/649 published in tomorrow's (May 1) issue of __Science__. These findings muddy the distinction between naturally-occurring gene transfer in plants and the human-mediated mechanisms we generally refer to as genetic engineering.

Interesting stuff. Makes one wonder about that heart transplant.

Homeboy says

When a farmer grafts 2 trees together, he is changing the genetics of that product.

I think what you fail to understand is that what we are calling GMO is an organism that could not in any way develop "naturally" that is under natural circumstances. Much of the so called genetic manipulation prior to the relatively recent labortory insertion of genetic material from other species has been by selection and controlled selection. These varieties could theoretically occour in nature, by accident, it is just that they have been selected in situations where man has controlled their genetic makeup through selective breeding. There are people that object to the process of hybridization, there are people that will object to anything. The big natural food movement is a bit less organic now and more directed toward heirloom varieties

The actual process of gene insertion in a true GMO used to (not sure of latest technology) involve actually shooting (with a gun like tool) the material gene(s) into the plant. Thus we get BT corn which has a bacillus genetically inserted that provides built in protection against certain insects. BTW this has dramatically lessened the amount of insecticide applied to the corn crop. There are other ways of controlling those insects without pesticides or BT corn but they involve crop rotation which many farmers do not want to be locked into. The difference in the old technology and new is that it is simply not possible for these GMO's to develop in nature and thus we are involved in a gigantic experiment covering vast areas of the earth with plants (maybe fish now) that have been created in a lab.

Using the original example of grafting it is possible when it was first noticed or attempted that people might have objected to that practice also. Since grafting has been used for hundreds if not thousands of years it has proven to be a benign practice, let us hope that laboratory genetic modification proves likewise as benign. In the mean time label label label.