Avoiding GMOs isn’t just anti-science. It’s immoral. (2017)
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GMO's are all about the money. We can grow all the food and other crops we need without them. Whatever the glowing promises, in practice genetic modifications are used to lock-in farmers to corporate control and profits.
Check out "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A for a scientifically-grounded real-world example of a profitable farm (in North Dakota) using no GMOs or other artificial inputs.
Look up some examples of what wild corn looked like several hundred years ago, versus how it looked at the start of the 20th century. This was all accomplished using natural processes and evolutionary pressure. Our biosphere has been a petri dish for thousands of years already. The farmers aren't scientists wearing lab coats but they have been modifying our plants' DNA, slowly and surely over thousands of years by propagating accidental mutations.
The problem is that today we are reaching a point where our ecosystem is changing far faster than plants can adjust using 100% natural processes. Temperatures are rising faster than they have in millions of years, and the last time we saw such a dramatic rise in temperature it was accompanied by mass extinctions.
At this rate if we still want to have food in 50 years we absolutely need to do some lab driven genetic modification to add more drought and heat tolerance (among other traits) to our crops. Otherwise we are looking at a future with at best greatly reduced food variety for the vast majority of the population, and at worst outright starvation for large portions of our population.
Your comment is focusing on the worst possible application of GMO, but forgetting about the tremendously good applications of GMO. The solution to the problem is simple: you outlaw the negative applications, and you encourage the positive applications. If we don't get started on this soon then we are looking at a dark future where only the richest can afford to eat like we do today.
1.) That's different than gene splicing in important ways. Personally, I don't like the argument that selection is no better than gene splicing. I don't want to get into the metaphysics of evolution, but i believe chopping and splicing DNA is fundamentally different than human-aided-natural selection.
Even then, I'm not personally against genetic engineering applications, once we have done enough research to know what we're doing. We're constantly discovering new things about how ecosystems work (like the mycelium "wood-wide web" interconnections) so I find it irrational when folks insist that there no possibility of harm to introducing gene-spliced organisms. How can we know? Give it a few hundred years.
My point is that rushing to applications is driven mostly by greed. Monsanto sells the poison and the engineered crops to withstand the poison, so you can add more poison (and Monsanto profits) and you have to buy their now-patented crops, you can't legally keep the seeds and grow your own (and again Monsanto profits.) The GMOs are just a tool to lock in the profits. And we all get to live with the effects of all that poison.
Meahwhile, folks like Gabe Brown are growing plenty of food, turning a profit year after year, without any of that.
2.) The result of agriculture is arguably population growth, resulting (eventually) in our modern anthropomorphic climate change, which might just kill us all (or most of us.) So the jury is out, eh? I mean if the Earth goes the way of Venus then, yeah, agriculture will have turned out to be a bad idea. As in, "we never should have climbed down from the trees in the first place." Not to be a downer, I'm just saying.
> At this rate if we still want to have food in 50 years we absolutely need to do some lab driven genetic modification to add more drought and heat tolerance (among other traits) to our crops. Otherwise we are looking at a future with at best greatly reduced food variety for the vast majority of the population, and at worst outright starvation for large portions of our population.
I know of one geneticist who is breeding (not splicing) tomatoes in such a way as to come up with a super mother tomato plant, where every seed in every tomato on every plant will be a different variety. The idea is you grow a wad of these seeds in your locale and then develop your own "land race" tomato variety adapted to your local conditions. He's doing this in his backyard, no "lab driven genetic modification" needed.
Now that's something in the grey area between pure natural selection and "mad scientist tinkering with God's handiwork", eh? Maybe he will cause some sort of massive natural disaster, some monster (like the Bradford pear[1]), but it's not in the same league as Monsanto's poison-tolerating beans.
> Your comment is focusing on the worst possible application of GMO, but forgetting about the tremendously good applications of GMO.
Like what?
> The solution to the problem is simple: you outlaw the negative applications, and you encourage the positive applications.
That's no solution at all if you can't predict the negative side effects of the applications, eh? The law has no oracle. Everyone involved thought the Bradford pear was a good thing.
> If we don't get started on this soon then we are looking at a dark future where only the richest can afford to eat like we do today.
FWIW, I'm into ecological/regenerative agriculture, and as long as people have access to land and seeds we can eat well. Even the effects of climate change can be mitigated. We don't need GMOs.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/how-we-tur...
Have you read the Sacred Cow or watch the doc yet? Great stuff! I’m glad this information is slowly starting to spill into the mainstream.
I think that compared to all the risks humans have ever taken, GMOs are ranked on low-risk side of the spectrum. People have been engineering crops for more than 5,000 years, the only difference is that we can do it now much faster and much more precise.
GMOs have the potential to improve health and reduce food cost significantly. We have to distinguish between the technology and the way the corporations are making use of it
It's also funny to note that there was a widespread disinformation campaign (that I personally fell for) paid by Monsanto to spread these kind of talking points. ie equating being anti-gmo with being anti-science. They directly targeted websites like reddit and hackernews with their misinformation.
To put it lightly, this article has aged horribly.
The other issue people have with specific implementations is that big ag uses either sterility of the crop (eliminating #1) or the license agreements to prevent seed saving, effectively creating DRM for our food crops. This changes crop seeds from assets you buy once to a subscription model you’re forced to pay over and over for each season.
Finally, the actual execution of many GM changes is simply to make the plants resistant to specific heribicides, fungicides and pesticides. This allows farmers to bathe their fields in these chemicals which of course go on and leach into the environment. Not to mention killing plants, animals and insects in greater and greater quantities, which of course may also harm the bees and other pollinators.
I think #1 can be managed and avoided and in general (potentially through sterility) I’m ok with GM as a technology. However what I’m not ok with is the specific approaches big ag have been using.
2. While GMO by itself is not dangerous a lot of the things that are done with it are. Roundup is very evil stuff, and GMO made it possible.
3. Another problem is also the business model behind a lot of commercial GMO crops, where the farmer essentially signs away all their rights.
2 and 3 are good reasons to be opposed to a lot of GMO.
https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/PrecautionaryPrinciple.ht...
When it's in the fields, it at least seems to be a carcinogen
USA has a serious anti-intellectualism problem (and to be honest a religion problem as well) and this is manifesting as bizarre pushbacks against some of the least harmful of modern inventions.
It's especially ironic because you don't often see these same folks pushing back against car ownership, or micro plastic accumulation from modern consumerism. Instead they advocate against GMO's, vaccines, and sometimes even birth control and abortion... all things that arguably have made the world a far better place.
I hope at some point we can move our country beyond arguing over left vs right politics and start realizing that we have deep national problems stemming from religion and our for profit higher education system. The former for actively promoting ancient morals, ideas, and belief systems, and the latter for putting modern morals, ideas, and belief systems behind a paywall that is out of reach of many Americans.
> Genetic use restriction technology (GURT), also known as terminator technology or suicide seeds, is the name given to proposed methods for restricting the use of genetically modified plants by activating (or deactivating) some genes only in response to certain stimuli, especially to cause second generation seeds to be infertile. The development and application of GURTs is primarily an attempt by private sector agricultural breeders to increase the extent of protection on their innovations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_techno...
First, biodiversity among crops is essential for food security and ecosystem protection. When you have hectares of crops with the same genetic makeup, not only does that make the system fragile (as another reply hinted at), but it also affects the other species that depend on that crop. Perhaps this is also a complaint against monocropping, which are generally GMO operations. But more genetic diversity strengthens resilience of the crop and the system that supports and coexists among it. Spontaneity in complex systems is good because it protects from colossal crop wipe-outs. It's also the fundamental difference between hybridization and GMO, so don't ever let some jackass from Monsanto say they are merely extending farming practices of genetic modification as old as farming itself.
Second, GMOs are often created to work in tandem with pesticides. So while the genetically modified strawberry might not damage my body, that shit on it will, and that doesn't always come off with a quick rinse in the sink. Pesticide (and herbicide, fungicide, etc.) use also doesn't stop with the target species making a meal out of the crop. It kills anything like it. Case in point is the dramatic decline in pollinators and insects hence bird species[1]. Again, futzing with nature's mechanics is folly because ecosystems rely on vastly complex networks of biomes that are themselves built on complex biodiversities. The truth is that while scientists can analyze insect and bird populations, understanding the complex interplay between many species in biomes is nebulous at best and generally outright opaque. The time it takes for scientists to say "with confidence" that X-->Y-->Z takes years, and even then we're talking about 3 variables and ignoring knock-on effects.
It is high time we learn our lessons and start trying to figure out how to work with nature rather than beat it back. I am always fascinated that HN draws such a brilliant crowd yet many people around here seem convinced that technology's inexorable advances are all we need to solve our problems.
[1]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/pesticides-have-le...
I do agree that some GMO fearmongering is overblown. I’m just responding to the claim that ingested proteins can’t be absorbed or have any impact. The gut does break things down but not absolutely 100%. A little does make it into the bloodstream.
Prions via GMO plants are unlikely but foreign or altered proteins causing mysterious and really hard to isolate food allergies in fractions of the population is plausible. These could go undiagnosed for a very long time since GMOs are not labeled or tracked the way drugs or food additives are.
Most of the credible objections to GMOs revolve around their use in tandem with overuse of herbicides and pesticides (e.g. round up ready crops), the potential to impact pollinators, and gene patents and IP lock-in.