Modify What?

I'm sure it's been discussed before and before and before but....

What do you guys think about GMO's? Good or bad? Positive or negative?

I took a class recently where we performed DNA extracts and analysis to find out if a few "common" corn products were modified. Turns out that six of the ten products were... pretty scary.

luvin'

 

So does everyone know what GMO's (Genetically Modified Organisms) are and how they are used?

Since the late 1980's, millions of acres of genetically modified soybeans, canola, potatoes, corn, and cotton have been grown in the US. One of the most popular genes used to engineer these crops is cry1A from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Cry1A encodes the Bt endotoxin, a protein which is toxic only to Lepidopterans (moths and butterflies), some species of which are very destructive agricultural pests in their larval stages.

To make a long story, longer, scientists are inserting genes into the chromosomes of selected plants to give the plant itself right genome to produce a certain "pesticide" or "fertilizer"... the result is a field of genetically modified crops that are resistent to bugs and/or weeds.

luvin'

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I'm not a fan of fucking with nature for the sole purpose of increasing profits. No one knows the impact of biologically engineered crops on human health, and until such research is done, no one should be eating it.

Go organic!

 

I like the general idea, but I wouldn't trust the bastards that are doing it...

 

Sole purpose of making money? I doubt that's the only reason... what about people that are starving? What about people dying of diseases with no access to vaccines?

Think outside the box.

Props on organic... I'm a woofer myself.

luvin'

 

Anything so foriegn and -in (non?)-complete, in my body, is almost certain to cause cancer. One. These "dangerous larvea" are more than likely an imbalance caused by non-organic, high-productivity farming techniques. Organic farming provides JOBS, and is 100% safe with no testing required. If it isn't 100% right, then it IS THAT MUCH wrong. I try to stay away from the stuff myself. If it can be identified in a lab what has been modified and what hasn't, couldn't it also be identified what the particular modification is--what the food substance has become after. A tomatoe is no longer a tomato, and next I'd like to see it proven that this tomato is going to kill me, because I already know that it will, AND IT NEEDS TO BE REMOVED FROM THE MARKET!

 

i want to know why the u.s. hasn't banned it yet. the EU, New Zealand, Australia have all banned the bovine growth hormone from being injected into cows.

we shouldn't be messing with genes. we do not know enough about them.

 

im not particulary a huge fan of it myself, but its a tough subject
on the positive side, these crops are being created to become resistant to different types of weather, disease etc. for example, some plants are being bred with shorter stems but a lot more produce on it, making it resistant to bad weather and overgrowing and providing more food and money for some less economically developed countries. also, new types of breeds are being introduced and researched, such as a new type of wheat which could prove useful to allergy sufferers.
on the other hand, the point that some of you have brought up, about not knowing enough about genes, in my opinion, is very correct. GMO's could corrupt nature and cause devastating long term effects on the environment, which could effect every living being on this planet.

 

I think its a good idea. Im not sure we know what we're doing quite yet, but it has a lot of potential.

 

With regular plant breeding, you're mixing about 50,000 genes of one plant, with 50,000 genes of another plant. With Hybrid plants, you selecting a few specific valuble genes to enfuse with the rest of the genes of another plant.


GM food has the potential to save millions, and I'm glad its being donated to starving populations.


There are at least 42 publications extractable from the PubMed database that describe research reports of feeding studies of GM feed or food products derived from GM crops. The overwhelming majority of publications report that GM feed and food produced no significant differences in the test animals.

The two studies reporting negative results were published in 1998 and 1999 and no confirmation of these effects have since been published. Many studies have been published since 2002 and all have reported no negative impact of feeding GM feed to the test species.

http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech_i...iewed-pubs.html

And heres an article about Patrick Moore, the founder of greenpeace, joining more then 3,000 scientists in supporting agriucultural bio-technology.

http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech_info/pr/moore.html

American agronomist and nobel prize winner Dr. Norman Borlaug, and all agricultural scientists agree that on existing farmlands, its only possible to produce enough food to feed 4 billion people using organic mathods...

I don't see two billion people raising their hands to starve.

We're producing much more food on much less land with this technology, that means less natural habitat has to be destroyed for agriculture.

Less pesticides need to be used on hybrid crops, meaning less damage to the environment.

GM plants can also protect aginst natural allergens.

In collaboration with the CSIRO, the team engineered lupin plants so they produced an allergen from sunflower seeds. The GM plants were fed to specially breed mic, The mice were then exposed to large amounts of the sunfloower seed allergen in the air. Those who had eaten the normal lupins developed asthma, while those on the GM diet remained healthy. Dr Hogan said even thoush the allergen was eaten, the immune system responded and was able to act in the lungs to stop an inflammatory responce to the airborne allergen.

 

Theres enough food right now on the planet to feed the entire world, so if you were naive, you might think, we'll why don't we just give it to them... but thats simply impossible. The price of shipping enough food to make a dent in world hunger would be astronomical... literally hundreds of billions of dollars for one shipment, and theres also the fact that most food of dietary consequence spoils very rapidly, (meat, milk, bread, veggies.) we could probably ship twinkies and pop tarts for an insane amount of money, but that wouldn't really combat hunger at all.

Another problem in delivering the food is one of the major causes for hunger... a lack of infrastructure. Many of the places that need this aid so much, don't even have roads... this makes giving them food grown here impossible.

These poor people have dirt, they have water, they have the sun, but they mostly use innefecient slash and burn croping methods. They don't have the machinery to harvest large amounts of this food, they lack the hybrid strains that produce more food per acre, and they often don't have enough infrastucture, (roads, markets) to distribute this food... so while one village may not have enough food, another village has too much, and some of it rots.

Using only organic croping methods on currently existing farmlands, we could only produce two thirds of the food we are now.

 

So one major step in the allocation of more food for the third world is the introduction of hybrid plant strains, or so called, GM crops, which produce more food per acre, and can thrive in harsh climates.

The US can't ship food produced here to Africa... most food spoils quickly and the shipping costs would be astronomical.

But you can ship seeds and spores, and since hybrid crops can germinate more effeciently, they are ideal for the third world.

the USDA the FDA, the EPA, and the WHO have all approved GM crops sold on the market for human consumption.

The benifits of Bio-tech are limitless, crops can produce 8 times yields, survive harsh climates, survive refrigeration longer, be less suseptable to pesticides. (The US is ruining Columbia's countryside to fight the drug war)

And Hybrid crops can also have more nutrients then regular crops, golden rice for example, is rice infused with Iron, a nutrient not usaully found in rice, making it a very effective to fight anemia, which affects a large part of the world.

http://www.biotech-info.net/GR_tale.html

This story above illustrates the fallacy of the corporations are only seeking to make money on hybrid crops, as Golden Rice was donated for no profit by the Government working together with bio-technnology firms.

 

This is what i think


And some more

 

http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech_info/articles/prakash/prakashart/save-billions.html

 

Commercial hybrid crops in the US are approved by the FDA, the USDA and the EPA. These are the most highly tested crops in existance.

Only commercially approved crops have been donated for hunger relief.

 

So you live in happy world land right? people don't starve because there isn't enough food, with hydroponics at it's current (actually 1999's) technological level enough food could have been produces for the entire human population of the planet in the same space as the state as arkansas, it's not that at all, people don't starve because there isn't enough, they starve because of money, the government pays farmers not to grow, ranchers not to milk and for cotton not to be produced in billions of dollars in subsidies every year, this technologt of genetically modified plants is in no way nessescary (sp) it is just because people are greedy and the government wants food to cost a certain amount (I.E. only certain people can afford it) if people were starving for quantity it'd be a better world but people don't they starve for profit.

 

Like I said earlier, the problem of starvation in the third world isn't that there isn't enough food here, its that the food here can't be moved over there.

The problem with subsidised farming is not that that it produces enough food... its that it produces far too much and artificially deflates the price of commercial crops. This means farmers in Mexico and South America can't make enough money selling there crops and end up destitute.

Thus they try to grow more food, which harms the enviornment and deflates the price even lower.

Its naive to think there are no benifits from GM crops.

For one thing, the problem of subsidised crops mainly effects Asia and South America... where starvation isn't as big a problem.

Malnurishment on the other hand, is.

Vitamin A deficiency effects over a third of the world who can't afford proper nutrition.

Golden Rice, a variety of rice infused with vitamin a, a nutrient not found in rice, has been offered to the third world without a profit to ease this problem.

http://www.biotech-info.net/GR_tale.html

While I certainly agree that farm subsidies are a problem... they do mainly affect south america and Asia, places which have major problems with poverty, not starvation.

In places where there simply isn't enough food, such as Sub Saharan Africa, a lack of infrastructure is the major problem...

These people have dirt, they have water, and they have the sun...

But they don't have advanced farming techniques... they don't have machines to harvest the plants effeciently, and they don't have the hybrid crops which produce more food per acre.

Another problem with food distribution in Sub Saharan Africa is a lack of infrastructure, namely roads and markets....

So while one village will have an abunedence of food that will rot, another 30 miles away will starve.

Certainly hybrid crops which can produce more food per acre are of a benifit there.

Hybrid crops don't need as much pesticides to prevent them from being consumed by plants, they can survive harsher weather, and produce more food per acre.

Hybrid crops are not only nessecary, but benificial.

 

i believe the terms hybrid and geneticly modified are being confusd here almost all the food that we eat has been hybridizd some for thousands of years the art of hybridizing is shown in the simple tomatoe geneticly modified crops on the other hand are crossing speicies the corn that has been spoken of also kills harmless and benifical insects i read an artical about mice that were geneticly modified they are approx. 2% human!!! when we start intermixing speicies it is without the knowlage of what will be the outcome then we are essentialy throwing the whole ecological (logical-ecosystems) out of balance the result could be devestating to the likes we have never known! monsanto has a patten on a corn that will not produce viable seed and is attempting to sell it to third world countries if it is not stoped these counties will be dependant on monsanto for seed talk about greed! if it crosspolinats with enugh other strains what will be the result thier round up ready corn just means they can sell more roundup the soils will become salinated and will grow very little else it may seem that they want to solve world hunger but it is not so! mark my words gain control of the food supply gain control of the masses!

 

ohhh by the way what would the world be like without monarch butterflies whose main scource of food is you got it corn!!

 

Hybrid crops generally refers to something a little more complex then traditional plant pathology.



http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/crops_02.html

GMO are a type of plant hybrid, and I prefer the term.


Hybrid crops have saved billions of lives this century.

http://www.reason.com/0004/fe.rb.billions.shtml

Traditional plant pathology replaces half of the genes in a genetic pot shot... hybrid crops only have a special few genes replaced.

You mean this?

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/genome/genesandbody/hg05b002.html

Mice already have much more then 2% genetic similarity to humans, thats why they are usefull for genetic research.

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/genome/technologies/hg17b012.html

It is a usefull tool for biology, and has nothing to do with GMO. None of these transgenetic mice are ever released in the wild. But they can help us understand the nature of disease better.

Actually, that happens all the time in nature. The effects can be maleficial, benificial, or have no effect at all, But with GMO, we can carefully study the effects.

This shows the coexsistance of hybrid and traditional crops.

http://www.foodproductiondaily.com/news/news.asp?id=3745

Would he be a monster if he was selling them perfectly natural seedless grapes?

BT corn is a seedless crop, but it is also much more resiliant aginst pests, can survive harsher climates, and produce more corn per acre.

The reasons its being attemted to aquire by third world countries is that it is a cheaper, superior crop then they usually have. There are no binding trade negotaiations being hammered out, and if the native populations didn't like BT corn, they could buy something 'organic' later.

See above.

http://www.foodproductiondaily.com/news/news.asp?id=3745

I don't know how to respond to that ludditism...

Gain control of the masses? Isn't that a little overzealous?

Hybrid crops have many ecological, fisical, and humanitarian benifits, and if someone was to try and get 'evil' with their patent, a patent can be overturned by any court if its dubious.