So this is a thing that people have been talking about more and more in the past ten years or so. In public discourse, "GMO" (Genetically Modified Organism) means "agricultural product whose genes have been altered to produce a desired effect." There are about a million of these desired effects, but most of them have to do with making a given crop hardier and less vulnerable to failure. By and large, geneticists have succeeded at this goal. They've made crops that are resistant to frost or insects or fungal infection or drought, are more nutritious, need less fertilizer, yield higher amounts of usable grain, et cetera. This is widely regarded as a pretty good thing, because it increases the available supply of food. Norman Borlaug, a biologist who developed a very high-yield variety of wheat that was also resistant to drought and disease in the 60s and 70s, has saved more lives than probably any other single human being in history. His invention made it much easier for agriculturally-poor countries to reliably grow food; as a result, Mexico, Pakistan and India became secure in their ability to keep their people fed. Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold medal for his work.
So this is great, right? Lots of fed people, what is there to talk about?
Well, there are a lot of folks who are terrified at the idea of modifying the genes of things that we eat. They point to increasing rates of certain diseases as evidence that GM crops are poisoning those who eat them, and that we should go back to regular ol' wheat. This isn't a particularly useful statement of course, because what is regular ol' wheat? We've been genetically modifying our crops since we started planting crops, just by selecting for traits that we wanted and selecting against traits that we didn't. The maize that's grown and eaten nowadays is almost indistinguishable from the stuff that grew wild in the Americas a thousand years ago. We've selected for these traits and against those so aggressively that this maize can't even reproduce anymore without human intervention, because the kernels are attached too tightly to the cob. The health issues argument also seems spurious. I've done a fair amount of research on this and haven't been able to find any credible evidence that any given disease can be attributed to any given engineered crop. If there is evidence for it, I'd like to see it.
It also seems like the anti-GM people are displaying some pretty heavy first-world privilege when they talk about getting rid of all GM crops in the whole world, because in a lot of places, there's no choice. It's a choice between a variety of wheat designed to be grown there, or no wheat at all. The world unambiguously can't sustain the number of people currently alive growing exclusively non-GM crops. You'll never hear an anti-GM activist straight up say that they're okay with billions of people in agriculturally-precarious countries dying for lack of crops that grow there, but I can't help but think that's the obvious end result if they end up getting their way.
So we have two options here, because fuck nuance:
1. GM crops are the most important scientific advance of the last hundred years and have allowed billions of people to survive and have children who otherwise would've never been born, or
2. GM crops are an apocalypse waiting to happen. Eventually some Frankenstein wheat variety is going to get out into the wild and give everyone AIDS.
There's grey area here, of course. I guess it's possible for an engineered crop to have some flaw in its design that makes it toxic for humans, and a lot of the big companies that do the development of these crops have adopted some really sheisty business practices. But these downsides are far outweighed by the upsides, mainly the one where billions more people aren't starving to death right this very minute.
Clearly my mind is pretty much made up, but I'm interested to see what some other folks have to say about this, especially since there're at least a few biologists on this board. Did I miss any legitimate credible health risks while I was reading up on the subject?
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The companies that control GMO crop tend to do everything they can to force farmers to buy new seeds each year. This is not always going to be great for the long term sustainability of third world farmers. It requires a large capital outlay each year, and many of these crop pretty much require large amounts of fertilizer(not great for wallets or the environment or independence). Neither of these are intrinsic to GMO crops, but they quite frequently are the case.
Open source GMO development would address a lot of these concerns. But, that's not really much of a thing at the moment.
As a consumer, I would like to be able to vote with my dollars and think it would be great for people to be aware of what GMO crops they are consuming.
Maybe it is worth noting that a lot of people are starving because we can't get them food, and that is a social problems genetic technology is unlikely to solve, but climate change is probably going to be putting a lot more pressure on areas that produce large amounts are agriculture.
Though that's a pretty big issue.
But health wise? GMOs are fine.
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However the bio-corps and governments make it really fucking hard to be supportive given the bullshit and lies they peddle.
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My big issues, as was pointed out, are the business / legal, the monoculture, and the hybridization aspects. Companies like Monsanto can go eat a bag of dicks with their business practices...it's not like they wouldn't be making fuck you loads of money otherwise. The monoculture aspect is a double edged sword - higher yields cause people to stop growing locally adapted (often over hundreds or thousands of years) strains. As Shadowfire pointed out, this can cause a crop collapse if a particular virus or disease adapts to that monoculture...but at the same time, non-GMO crops are also vulnerable and GMO can help reduce the impact a lot faster than natural selection.
And of course, there is the hybridization aspect that goes hand in hand with the business / legal part, where farmers are forced to purchase new seeds every year if they can afford it or not.
Modern agriculture in general is pretty bad with water and fertilizer usage, but that's not limited to GMO crops. If anything, GMO crops alleviate some of those problems by improving drought resistance, using natural / excreted pesticides instead of nasty toxic chemicals...and getting away from modern agriculture in general is dooming hundreds of millions of people worldwide to famine.
Yeah. Health-wise, there are no reasonable problems, and most issues along the lines of biodiversity don't seem any more worrisome than what you got before GMO. What concerns me is that basically companies like Monsanto looked at the asinine way the RIAA handles copy protection issues and thought, "This DRM shit is awesome, how can we apply it to corn?"
As for the issues with health, I'm a little worried about how the modifications are going to affect the balance of nutrients in our diets and in our ecosystem. They may be beneficial to people who have low-nutrition diets, but there is such a thing as too many vitamins and minerals. Any of the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K, as I recall) can build up and damage your health, and minerals like Iron can make you quite ill, and some people have to actively avoid iron in their diets, and any food that is fortified with it suddenly becomes a problem. This is, again, possible with non-GM foods, but nature already has killer wild carrots, so we don't really need to be pushing that ever-faster.
There is also an increased danger to our pets, most of which can't take as much toxin exposure as we can.
New Age Bullshit pisses me off so much.
I beg to differ.
The environmental effects of these genes are never tested. They could easily have a detrimental effect on native species. Its equivalent to introducing a foreign species when they get out in the wild.
Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding.
Borlaug's wheat cultivars were not GMOs, unless you're using a dishonestly broad definition of GM. They were efficiently crossbred - but that's not what people generally mean when they talk about genetic modification.
There is a valid argument that crossbreeding is simply a primitive form of GM, but conflating the two concepts does not really make for a good discussion.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
In what meaningful way is introducing a new GM crop into the wild different from traditional aggressive crossbreeding, as far as detrimental effects on native species? Like, if I take a strain of corn, dick around with it in my greenhouse for several iterations, generate a new strain that does X, then start mass producing and harvesting it, does this not adversely affect the environment in a comparable way?
(I'm honestly asking because I don't know.)
Hey, if the Wild wants to engage in IP theft then the Wild can just suffer the consequences.
There wasn't any intentional conflation on my part, I just didn't look to hard into what Borlaug actually did. Thanks for the correction
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Overdosing on other types of vitamins could be a concern, but it seems far less of an issue than the vitamin/mineral deficiencies these crops are developed to treat.
As far as i can tell no. With the quintessential example of the first method going awry being the Africanized honey bee.
Okay. I hope I didn't come across overly dickish.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Well, "meaningful" is one of those words that can trip us up.
But the major difference? when you're crossbreeding, you're selecting for traits that have been grown in the wild and been consumed by humans, or, at the very least, animals. (Usually - it might not always be the case.) When using GM methods, you have the power to introduce traits that haven't necessarily been grown in the wild or consumed by humans. (Usually - again, there might be exceptions.)
Biology is messy and if you go into anything in bio looking for bright white lines from which we can derive airtight principles, you won't find them.
Example: Monsanto Roundup-ready crops express a variant of an enzyme (EPSPS) that comes from a plant-infecting bacterium.The most famous of these crops is NK603, which was the subject of a fraudulent study linking it to tumors. It's likely that even prior to NK603, some human beings have been eating some of that variant enzyme just from eating plants infected by that bacterium... but not in the kinds of quantities that you would be eating it if you relied on NK603 corn as a staple.
Let me be clear: the studies linking NK603 to tumors were false, fabricated by a research team notorious for making shit up. There is no evidence that NK603 or any other Roundup-Ready crop is dangerous. I'm simply using NK603 as an example of the expression of a trait (Roundup-resistant EPSPS) that hadn't been previously expressed in a food crop.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Hm. What I've heard may have been animal-related then. My mistake, though animals are an issue in general too.
It's true that a lack of vitamins is the bigger deal, but solving hunger doesn't negate the toll of the obesity epidemic, so a vitamin boon one place causing an overabundance elsewhere is not a non-issue.
And in terms of these companies making farmers rebuy new seeds, instead of using old ones:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/260671/aib786g_1_.pdf
This is something that has been going on for over half a century and well before any sort of raw genetic manipulation was happening.
Edit: Sorry if I came off snippy, but it's a pretty big personal peeve of mine recently. With companies like DeBeers and basically any textile manufacturer, Monsanto and other GMO producers are ridiculously low on the "evil" scale. Hell with the recent price fixing bullshit, I'd probably rank most of the Silicon Valley tech companies over them.
This particular example was Environmental Protection Agency approved, and had passed all necessary reviews to make it into the wild, and was only caught at the last possible second because some scientist took it upon herself to grump all over it.
We came close to a theoretical apocalypse by tweaking a bacteria to make more useful plant decomposition. It's easy to see why people get a lil' apprehensive about modifying things for actual human consumption.
No...we did not. That's just another internet meme that's wildly spread incorrectly, from a flawed report. The scientist that reported on it apologized for incorrectly attributing papers, at least one nonexistent, and completely making up the fact it was approved for use already.
Ugh...
Textile companies and DeBeers foster extremely dangerous borderline slave like working conditions.
Could you perhaps describe this price fixing that is worse than hundreds of people burning to death, and hundreds of thousands being keep in what can charitably called poverty while working insane hours with no representation?
Feel free to make a new thread if you think it would derail this one too much. Or just provide some linkage.
Take human genetics. We know a lot about the 20,000 genes that make up the human body. We even understand how a misfiring of specific genes can cause genetic diseases, including everyone's nightmare, cancer. We understand that, but we do not know enough to make cancer go away. When we turn off one gene's signals, cancer cells reroute to another signaling pathway. An entire pharmaceutical industry has sprung up around drugs made to silence one gene or another. Yet despite billions of dollars funding some of the brightest minds in existence, we can't figure out how to stop of the most common genetic illnesses.
So, I have some concern that the guys in Monsanto's labs might not have a 100 percent foolproof understanding of the how, what and why behind their modified crops.
I think Mvrck was saying that DeBeers/Textiles are so evil that GMO companies don't even compare, and that the silicon valley price-fixing is arguably worse than anything Monsanto's done (but certainly not worse than Debeers/Textiles).
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Ah, I fail at reading.
I think if I'm reading it right he's got things ranked, from most to least evil, DeBeers + Textile companies > Silicon Valley > Monsanto
That's a fair point as far as it goes, but we need to measure such concerns against the reality of what's plausible. We have a crappy understanding of what goes on at the very smallest scales inside of subatomic particles, but that doesn't mean people were right to be worried that the LHC was going to destroy the world with black holes, or whatever other crazy worries were flying about.
We don't necessarily understand the full scope of what genetic modification entails, but that doesn't mean we should worry about cornzilla rising from the fields like some nightmarish Great Pumpkin and murdering us all. Not 100% understanding GMO doesn't mean much in itself. We don't 100% understand anything.
Basically, I don't think we should really worry too much about a specific downside unless we have a plausible reason to believe that downside is at all likely; otherwise, you paralyze a whole lot of research based on well, you never know what might happen.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't exercise caution. We absolutely should. But not because "we don't 100% know how this works."
That ties into my agreement with others in this thread that I don't trust the company's involved to proceed with caution. I think there's a massive area for them to fuck up between 100 percent safe and Bio-Mold apocalypse, but I agree that we shouldn't push the panic button before there's evidence. But I do wish there was better funding for the academic and government labs testing this stuff, and I wish there was a much longer lag between discovery, initial testing and the bringing to market of these products.
Very bad things are also conceivable. The sorts of things that make entertaining post apocalyptic science fiction, which is mostly what they are.
I think genetic technologies are inevitable and likely to shape society in the coming centuries. I don't think this is a bad thing. But it is every bit as powerful a class of technologies as nuclear energy.
Despite Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the terror of the cold war I also support that.
I get that a lot. There's a lot of overt or implied concerns about purity in many of the objections I get over Facebook (which is my most frequent interaction I have with People Who Are Not Like Me). The other one is We Just Don't Know, And Isn't That Scary? My default is like what Jeffe pointed out: we just don't know so damn much, this is a normal thing. I'm concerned about the things we *do* have some knowledge of.
There are things that keep me up at night. Fear of a world destroying GMO is not one of those things.
This would be correct. Sorry if I wasn't clear, I was posting from my phone earlier.
My understanding is that if a pathogen is so super duper killy it has a very hard time not burning itself out. If a hypothetical organism killed you within a minute of exposure just how many people do you think it would kill total? Like, you're dead and at least the person to find you but I don't think the clown car of bodies keeps going much higher before people stop going near the pile of corpses.
This happens even with slower scales, in part because most deadly pathogens disable your ability to travel and partly because most people just don't move around much.
This is at least partially due to particularly virulent strains of things burning themselves out, though, rather than a hypothetical impossibility.
(I mean yeah this isn't going to happen, but the (well, a) reason cholera doesn't kill so many people in first world nations is because it's in its best interest to cause low-level symptoms. When given the chance it will evolve straight back into a vicious murdermachine.)