I Run a GMO Company and Support GMO Labeling
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I really believe any products coming from large scale farms should be labeled with their strain, growing technique, pesticides used, and what farm it came from. I do think labeling GMO's will have the opposite effect as most pro-label people believe. Once people realize most of their food has had GMO's in it for years and to eat all non-GMO will cost them double or triple, they will all simmer down.
However, "GMO" itself is still a murky term. We genetically engineered all sorts of crops before we could easily manipulate DNA at a molecular level. For example, ruby red grapefruit was engineered by planting earlier cultivars around a radioactive pole to induce widespread mutations (and thus new varieties).
Centuries later, they were selectively bred to be orange by Dutch royalists (in support of the royal House of Orange).
I feel like selective breeding is sufficiently similar to warrant comparison. You could easily do both short-term and long-term harm or good with both if you can get people to eat what you breed.
And I do mean that it is harmful to both sides of the debate. I have no clue whether the characterization above is even remotely valid. But most of the rhetoric is so content-free that it does not help me alter my view around GMO, in either direction.
And lastly: US (and many other international) corporations do not have a good track record when it comes to acknowledging and respecting human health. The backlash against GMO is, I feel, at least partly attributable to the tobacco, food and oil industry, and the "sciences" that were complicit.
Like hell you can. Genetic diseases and deformities have been present as long as life itself, and human selective breeding has certainly brought out traits in cultivated plants and animals that would not be present without human intervention into their ecosystem.
http://www.petpugdog.com/pug-breathing-problems http://thesharpeivet.co.uk/services/skin-problems/ http://web-dvm.net/what-has-happened-to-the-german-shepherd-... http://www.lsu.edu/deafness/incidenc.htm http://news.discovery.com/animals/pets/toy-dog-breeding-caus...
There are undoubtedly issues with GMO if it is abused - but the fact that it is capable of sharp distinctions between right and wrong and can be legally controlled is good, and should be embraced. Happy to see GMO companies take steps in this direction. You can't reliably control whether someone breeds dogs to suffer hip dysplasia or constant headaches due to their brain being too large for their skull. Less emotively, you can't reliably control whether apple breeders end up with over-sweet mush that no-one wants or banana breeders end up with infertile crops. We can and (I believe) should control whether or not Monsanto engineers defective crops designed to maximise their profits at the expense of farmers (note: Monsanto has not actually marketed or sold the famous 'sterile' or 'terminator' seeds at time of writing, although they own the patent). We can and should control whether or not a GMO dog is created that suffers from hip dysplasia or injurious brain problems.
In addition, farmers who rotate crops also want terminator seeds because it reduces the number of volunteer plants in subsequent harvests.
Most of the anti terminator stuff I've read betrays a deep lack of understanding about how the underlying technology actually works.
Since in this case you're not adding new functionality, only disabling certain "features".
[Edit] I'm not saying I agree with this definition, only that it's the one being used by the regulator in the US.
You inject genes, not genomes. Injecting genomes is how breeding works, not how genetic engineering works.
> to produce new chemical elements
New elements are exclusively the domain of stars, nuclear physics, and particle accelerators. They have nothing to do with biology. I'll continue on the assumption that you meant "molecules."
> no fucking idea of what they do
It's the other way around: in selective breeding you're trying random genomes until you get literally anything that works. It would take tons of additional study to figure out why it worked, how it worked, and what the side effects are. Contrast to genetic engineering where you start with a very specific biological goal in mind, often the production of a single molecule or small set of molecules whose structure and characteristics have been extensively studied.
Suppose you set out to produce more Bt protein in the plant's leaves so that it's toxic to insects while the competition breeds a plant that seems to be similarly resistant to insects. Which plant is safer? In both cases you have to do a study to find out, but in the case of the GMO you can use ultra high sensitivity studies because you can purify Bt and test its effects on mice and humans. In contrast, the plant produced by breeding would have to have an absurdly huge sample size to achieve the same sensitivity. Historically, plant breeders don't bother.
Both approaches are almost always good enough, but of the two genetic engineering allows for much more precise risk prediction and characterization. That's one of genetic engineering's strong points, not weak points.
I'd prefer explicit pesticide labeling but GMO labeling is a close enough approximation. GMO usually means an extra dollop of roundup.
I can't speak for glyphosate, but for Bt I seem to remember that you need 10x or 100x the concentration if you spray it on account of not being able to distribute it perfectly evenly.
(lead poisoning, fracking, tobacco industry, pharma testing, environmental disasters by oil companies, agent orange and many, many more)
The end result is a huge loss in biodiversity.
I don't care about GMO for its health effects in the food chain. I care about its environmental effects.
You can't blame genetic modification for shitty farmers. That's like blaming NSA surveillance on the Internet.
The shitty farming though is definitely a result of the Roundup Ready product line. It's the recommended and most optimal way to use it.
RoundUp like most pesticides is shipped and stored in a highly concentrated state. The farmer will then tank mix that with a whole lot of water to produce the actual usable pesticide.
The video you posted is highly misleading.
The other ingredients are not nearly as heavily regulated as the pesticide itself. There is some concern that damage to amphibians, aquatic organisms etc. could be a result of the detergents and stickers added to the sprays rather than the spray themselves.
Suppose I told you that I wanted a good-looking dog. There are two ways to get that. On one hand, I could get a great male dog and mate it with a great female dog and produce a good-looking dog for you. On the other hand, I could take any dog and perform plastic surgery to make it into the dog you want. Although the final product may be similar, does anyone believe those two processes are the same? It's absolutely a nonsensical assertion.
To put this in terms of logic, you're arguing that because Process X and Process Y both lead to Outcome Z, Process X and Process Y are equivalent. We know that the general case of this argument is false (e.g. bribing a police officer or not committing crime both keep you out of jail, but they are not the same processes). If you want to argue that this argument holds in the special case of GMOs, you have to argue for it! You cannot just state it and expect us to believe it because it is false in the general case.
I suspect you'd find most GMO critics are fine with the former.
Most worrisome there have been several cases where funding for breeding programs has been cut because the 'new hotness' of genetic engineering pulls in more industry funding.
An example is the 'Arctic' non-browning GMO apple here in Canada. It's a sad stupid story. Non-browning already exists as a potential trait in the natural Malus genome. Selective breeding had already produced apples here and there that had this trait. Despite this federal funding and regulatory approval was extended to the GMO program and cut from traditional breeding. And an existing non-GMO non-browning apple was ordered destroyed from a research centre.
Meanwhile the Arctic apple even after approval for sale has only generated controversy, and now consumers who are suspicious about GMO will be suspicious about _any_ apple that demonstrates non-browning, GMO or not.
Most GMO critics that I have spoken to don't have a clue about how it actually works. "A fish gene in a plant?!?" being the sort of quote they will come out with, not realizing that we share a huge portion of our genomes with fish.
But sure, go on beating up your straw man.
I don't think most of the food consumed globally has GMO in it, even so for countries with significantly smaller GDP than the US. Agree though, give as much transparency as you can, put on as many information as possible and let the customers decide what they want.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think GMO companies default to being good people. Some spend decent chunks of money on lobby work which always has me worried and some are entangled in somewhat questionable science funding but by and large I think there's way too much blind hatred for GMOs in general (or my media perception is quite distorted which could also be true)
The author of the article has it pretty right imo
As a far as the science is concerned there is plenty of fearmongering but again this drives the political debate. As a counter example look at the hype over CRISPR - nobody is up in arms about the possibilities for curing cancer although the chances of things going wrong for early trials in people are probably higher and the outcome rather more ghastly.
And it is not information overload - or at least that should be a non-argument. The idea that the public knows what monosodium-glutamate, or high-fructose corn-syrup, or cholesterol, are all a result of labeling. And on the balance, significantly for the public's good.
Compounding all of this is the crazy complexity of nutrition research which makes it difficult to assess the long term impact of anything we eat on our health.
In short, I tend to eat organic not because I think GMOs are intrinsically bad, but because they raise questions about the pesticides used and the track record of the given ingredient. "GMO" by itself doesn't tell me if something is good or bad.
[1]: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150422-glyphosate...
Yes, there is a lot of pseudoscientific misinformation out there, but the solution to that is to educate people on the facts, not to deceive them into becoming unwitting customers by withholding information.
Though I wonder if the asymmetrical requirements for this type of labelling is overall a good thing. Consumers will instinctively treat it as a warning message. Along similar lines, is it a good thing that medicines are strictly regulated and labelled? Definitely. Is it a good thing that unproven and scientifically highly implausible "cures" get placed on the same shelves, sans warnings? I'm not so sure. We shouldn't be creating market opportunities for lesser technologies aimed at an uniformed public.
Simple, straightforward, and not subject to politics.
People say transparency is good and more info is good. Well to play devil's advocate it seems pretty obvious labeling the race of the people making the product so consumers can choose not to buy products made my a certain race of people would be bad. In other words it seems it's not true that all transparency and information is good.
In this case I tend to believe labelling will mostly be used for ignorance not info
Because the "race" of the person is irrelevant?
Maybe there are political or moral reasons as to why you would choose to not purchase from a certain country (ie human rights), but of course we do have labels for that.
Also, never mind that there are certain instances where concerns against certain countries is merely thinly veiled racism against the people in those countries.
The parent was obviously, as they stated in so many words, playing devils advocate (and so was I in the above, for the record). The subtext is that whether it's GMO or not is equally irrelevant and will only serve a purpose for those with unfounded prejudices (and for those that might be confused into giving such prejudice undue consideration).
The comments from anti-GMO groups are strongly in support of labeling, and the reasons generally come down to "it'll make it easier to ban them".
https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
So at this point my feeling is that labeling is only beneficial if it includes all the information -- more of a history of the ingredients. Do they come from GMOs, cross or mutation breeding?
If the issue were really about giving consumers the right to know, this would be the ideal solution. Otherwise - and I suspect this is the case - labeling appears to be step 1 in an effort to ban GMOs completely. And considering the positive impacts GMOs will have for the human race in the next 20 years, that would be very disappointing indeed.
Exactly. The thinly veiled motivation of most labeling proponents is to use it as a scare tactic.
I've always viewed it as being similar in spirit to putting those "Evolution is just a theory" stickers on high school biology textbooks.
I think the author is overly hopeful that people will educate themselves on what GMO actually means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding
But nobody seems to have an issue with that. No problems for selective breeding with huge mutations from radiation or mutagenic chemicals, but insert some precise, well-studied genes into another organism and people lose their minds.
We keep adding to our information banks about DNA. We had and have more questions than answers about the complexities of DNA. And yet we still want to modify the gene artificially and put the results into production without waiting on more research. This seems like a form of hubris, because we think the knowledge we have is enough.
The opponents of genetic modification give anger and frustration to supporters that they end up putting on side blinders and blissfully ignore all of the very causes of concern. It is a behavior similar to global warming skeptics reacting against climate change alarmists.
Philosophically speaking, there is a concept called the Dunning-Kruger effect: The people with the least doubt in what they are doing perform the worst, whereas the people with the most doubt perform a whole lot better. Doubt is healthy, and foolish pride/arrogance can only lead us to failure.
So let's agree that more research is needed. And let's not bash those who want to side with caution. And let's allow for freedom and respect to label GMO's as GMOs. We reach a healthy society, not a dictating one.
That's not what the Dunning-Kruger paper said. Simplified to a sentence, it could be paraphrased as "We are unqualified to evaluate our own performance". People who perform the worst generally still rate themselves as performing the worst, they just think they are a whole lot closer to everyone else than they actually are.
There are millions of people involved in the food supply chain. At some point, if a GMO food becomes toxic to us, by sheer probability, someone involved in food will raise the alarms.
I think the caution around GMO foods is misplaced. GMO, Organic, or neither, the kid at the grocery store sprays chemicals all over them multiple times a day to keep them fresh. Vegetables and fruits are picked under-ripe and ripened with chemicals. The food is packaged in plastics and shipped along a smokey, polluted freeway. Of all the things to attack about the food supply chain, GMO is the last thing to worry about.
There. Some sympathy. Feeling better? Cool. Because basically none of the concerns and fears that most consumers have are reasonable. Most of them are nothing more unjustified, baseless terror of the fishberries someone said are here to poison them.
How should I - or anyone - react to that? You cannot reason with a person possessed of such terror. I've tried. You cannot educate them. I've tried that too. You can't listen to them, offer sympathy and compassion and understanding, and then try to reason with them. I've tried that too, and it blows up in spectacular fashion.