Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong.
slate.com
slate.com
He has not presented evidence that GMO's are safe. He has two main arguments:
1. Trial and error crossbreeding affects entire genes. 2. Viruses sometimes spread genes from one organism to another.
First, trial and error crossbreeding isn't likely to produce anything catastrophic. We've been interbreeding plants for milennia. Current techniques may be more risky, but generally speaking it should be hard for plants to produce a horrid mutation based on natural interbreeding mechanisms.
Second, just becauses cross species gene transfers do occur doesn't mean that it's safe when we do it. If such transfers have occurred in nature for a long, long time, then it's safe to say that nature has created pathways that are safe. Our pathways are new.
I'm making a Talebian argument here. Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.
It means nothing to say that GMOs haven't caused harm yet. All it would take would be ONE catastrophic GMO plant to cause large amounts of damage. By definition, we won't be able to foresee this until it happens.
HN is a very tech positive community, and also a community that's very aware of the complexity of large system, and their fragility when meddled with. When considering GMOs, many forget complexity due to a pro-technology attitude.
One of the big concerns is micronutrients in Asia. We don't need GMOd crops for vitamin and mineral supplementation.
due to GMOs...
Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US?
A huge multinational wants to include "TERMINATOR GENES" in their crops to make sure the cropped seed cannot grow; environmentalists freak out at the name and oppose that; the multinational doesn't include that gene but now inspect the fields of people on the route of seed delivery and if they find any gene-manipulated crop (which is probable from wind-blown seed) they sue the farmer into oblivion.
This is already a risk because industrial agriculture is optimized for monocrops.
GMO risks present an additional risk over already problematic agricultural practices.
Cannot happen. If inter-plant gene transfer was that simple, it would already be an agricultural practice.
A weed-killer resistant species becoming a weed is something to consider though.
> Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US?
No. A vulnerable crop would not have a chance to become 80% of the crop share before dying out.
80% is sci-fi hyperbole. But it's easy to see that monoculture could still be as much of a problem with GMO as without it.
Dutch Elm disease managed to kill 40% of Elm trees in Europe during the first big outbreak, and at least 66% in the UK during the second outbreak. (Maybe 25 million trees out of maybe 30 million trees in the UK).
Irish potato famine was caused by potato blight.
About half the world's crop of bananas is destroyed each year because of disease caused by monoculture growing.
Hundreds of thousands of farmers taken advantage of by a monopolistic GMO company and ruins the lives of countless families sounds like a real-life disaster scenario to me.
http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2012/11/why-are-in...
Basically if you a corn farmer, have people around you start planting Monsanto Corn, you have two options: change to Monsanto or switch professions.
How do you prepare fields for cropping if all the weeds are resistant to herbicides? Use stronger herbicides? How is this not an environmental disaster?
What happens when altering the gene of a wheat plant to make it resistant to rust ends up adding a cumulative poison (e.g. a protein or prion associated with the rust resistance) causing the body to leech calcium from bones? Over 30 years we figure the gene was safe, then comes a 100 year long epidemic of brittle bones due to the rust gene being forgotten and no un modified wheat being available to breed clean strains from.
Or leaving the food chain entirely: what about living in a world where you are not allowed to grow food plants in your own backyard and collect the seeds yourself to provide for next year's crop?
Why do we have to increase the food supply to feed an ever-expanding population?
I've never understood this argument. It basically amounts to "yes, there are advantages to GMOs, but we haven't found any disadvantages yet, therefore they are unsafe!"
This is basically the equivalent of early seafarers being afraid of uncharted waters and writing on their maps "here be dragons".
edit: I should also point out that the complexity of a system does not necessarily mean that messing with it will cause problems. If anything, that same complexity may include many fail-safe mechanisms to prevent problems when the system is messed with.
And with cellphones ... that's already happened. Yet you still have one in your pocket.
> Does it cause problems when you eat these types of bananas for 20 or 30 years?
Bananas didn't evolve with "being good for you 20 or 30 years from now" ethos. That doesn't help the spread of their seeds. They just needed to taste sweet, so you would eat them now and spit out their seed somewhere else.
Is there even a plant out there that has harmful side-effects two decades after you eat it? If we make one, that would be one hell of an achievement.
If the battery explodes you will know about it. Each explosion will be an independent, isolated event. They will not all blow up at once. A better analogy would appeal to concerns over EM radiation from cell phones. In that case, it turned out to be harmless - at least in terms of cancer risk. And that single, highly-controllable factor took years to validate for safety.
>Is there even a plant out there that has harmful side-effects two decades after you eat it?
Gluten sensitivity can take years to show up, and months to get better after you've cut it out of your diet. For years doctors dismissed patients who claimed to be suffering from wheat allergies. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I understood the post to mean the cumulative effects of eating that plant.
One cigarette is not going to do much, but smoking 40 a day for 30 years is probably going to cause a few problems.
Also, when the food at your local grocery store is completely replaced with GMO foods, you don't really end up with a choice in the matter. On the other hand, you still have a choice to get a cellphone or not (even in today's world).
| Bananas didn't evolve with "being good for you 20 or
| 30 years from now" ethos. That doesn't help the spread
| of their seeds. They just needed to taste sweet, so you
| would eat them now and spit out their seed somewhere else.
| Is there even a plant out there that has harmful side-effects
| two decades after you eat it? If we make one, that would be one
| hell of an achievement.
Not necessarily true. Suppose there is a nation-state A. Further suppose a rival nation-state B captured vital trade routes and started charging trades exorbitant sums of fees, and the long-term well-being of nation-state A depends on its seafarers being able to find alternative trade routes to their trading partners. Note that this is exactly how it went down in history. Only those seafarers who were bold enough to take risks were rewarded.
Personally, I want pretty good evidence that something is safe before putting it in my body. If the mere lack of evidence that it's unsafe is sufficient for you, well, that's your choice.
What would be evidence for you that something is safe enough to put into your body?
In any discussion of risk it is important to remember the value to be obtained. I might take a drug with known dangerous side effects on the chance it would cure a disease from which I suffered. But to me, the only possible benefit of eating a GMO food is that it would be somewhat cheaper than something else I could eat. For some people, that might be a good enough reason. For me, it's not.
You've got the wrong thing after "therefore". The argument you're trying to paraphrase would probably advocate the Precautionary Principle instead:
"... if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action."
Anti-GMO Activists: There is more to be gained from assuming that GMOs are unsafe than that they are safe, and that a rational society should live as if they are unsafe.
Sounds like the same logic to me.
I'll respond as if you are earnest students of reason, seeking to see the difference.
Fortunately, the main difference is very simple: Pascal was wagering to gain something that cannot be shown to exist (an afterlife). The Precautionary Principle is counseling us to guard something known to exist (the environment in which we live) that is demonstrably essential to our own existence.
Had Pascal been arguing as an atheist about why not to play Russian Roulette with his one and only life, the two arguments might be similar enough to legitimately confuse.
There is a large body of testable evidence of organisms that are unsafe for human consumption. We cannot prove whether or not any changes introduced by humans via genetic engineering, whether intended or not (such as random mutations) will result in an unsafe product. The worst case being that we create a strain of organism that is superior to those we currently have, displacing all others in the environment and being unsafe for human or animal consumption, and if it is a staple crop one that leads to more starvation not less.
As far as feeding an increasing population, the simple answer is not to have the increase. Even then our current agriculture system is heavily based on fossil fuels. Increasing cost of production and distribution if not outright decline in fossil fuel output is much more likely to lead to starvation.
Q. What do you call someone who supports nuclear power, shale gas fracking and GM crops?
A. An environmentalist.
There are uncountable ways in which we all "mess with" Nature on a daily basis, both individually and as a society. Why single out this one?
Past plant varieties were more likely to be safe from hidden vulnerabilities due to the process that created them. Even so, some plants were wiped out by a single surprise event, such as during the Irish potato famine.
If, as I argue, GMO crops present more hidden risks, then we are increasing the odds of a catastrophic failure of a staple crop.
Growth in the food supply tends to produce a growth in population. This new population is dependent on food supply staying at least at it's current level. If a staple crop fails, then the consequences will be dire. There is little slack in the system.
There will be unpleasant surprises along the way but science, like life itself, offers no guarantees. Meanwhile I haven't seen any potato famines lately.
Natural plants have been tested over time so that we can be somewhat sure they don't have that many unknown weaknesses.
That's the Precautionary Principle, which as someone else pointed out is basically a rephrasing of Pascal's Wager with all of its gaping logical holes.
For instance, while he appeals to science and reason here, not all the organic-enviro-antiGMO complex holds its positions for reasons of science. There's a substantial number of people for whom it is part of superstitious and para-religious reasoning behind peoples' objections. (In other news, Whole Foods sells homeopathic remedies.) Even beyond the superstitious, there are a lot of anti-GMO advocates whose primary form of investment is emotional, not intellectual. (Actually, you could probably say that about most political positions...)
It's easy enough to treat the guy as a heretic in that sort of environment.
What about the (widespread) practice of mutation breeding? [1] Blasting seeds with X-rays and gamma rays in an attempt to generate new cultivars is a genetic wrecking ball compared to performing genetic engineering.
Conventional breeding has given us plenty of Oopses. The modern kiwifruit, whose progenitor (the smaller and less tasty Chinese gooseberry) may have been safely snacked upon by many folks who would today suffer a lethal allergic reaction after eating a kiwi. In the 1980s, a mutant variety of zucchini began producing enough cucurbitacin toxin to hospitalize a number of people. [2]
> If such transfers have occurred in nature for a long, long time, then it's safe to say that nature has created pathways that are safe. Our pathways are new.
We're still playing by nature's fundamental biological rules, and nature has had hundreds of millions of years to develop resiliency inside that same framework. One example: bacterial mechanisms to mitigate the damage from undesirable horizontal gene transfers by recognizing and deactivating to foreign genetic material: [3]
> I'm making a Talebian argument here. Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.
I think "incremental" is a bit of an understatement if we can, for example, feed tens of millions of humans in parts of the world where conventional crops cannot (yet?) provide reliable and sufficient nutrition, a critical step in reducing poverty.
Having said all this, I think crop monoculture is a serious problem, but I think it's an issue that needs to be solved through sound policy, not just through science.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding
[2] http://books.google.ca/books?id=Jcq1wTe_93UC&lpg=PP1&...
You can argue about many benefits, but genetic engineered crops is hardly a solution to poverty and malnutrition.
If GMOs[1] can enable the growth of more productive and nutritious food crops, it follows that they can enable more efficient agriculture. Lower inputs of resources (including time) and higher output (meaning, hopefully, less hunger and lower food prices) would seem to translate to the higher availability of resources to allocate to other ventures.
If communities are freed from the pressure of scraping together their next meal, doesn't that fundamentally change their health and economic prospects?
[1] Or any specialized cultivar, for that matter.
Productivity only matters for large monocultures, like soy, corn, sugar cane, where the costs are fixed and profit comes from the output - exactly the people who do not produce to feed poor people.
Poor people depend on subsistence polycultures, which don't require high productivity because they don't profit off it. On the other hand, these engineered seeds incur higher initial costs they can't afford.
People starve not because agriculture is not productive enough, but because they can't produce themselves, for a variety of reasons: the government can't ensure they keep their land (they sell for lumber/mining/monocultures, or have their land stolen outright), food production is not local (thus too expensive), lack infrastructure (most of the times, water) or simply lack knowledge on better ways to irrigate, fertilize and handle the soil. GMOs don't solve any of those problems, they just reduce even further the amount of people who can produce themselves.
Highly nutritive crops is another BS. People just need access to a large variety of food (polyculture) to maintain health, not an engineered corn, rich in iron and full of pesticide, that costs three times as much to produce.
That said, the fact that it's potentially problematic doesn't make GMOs safe. It just means they're both potentially unsafe. I don't know enough to say.
By incremental gains, I meant that GMO crops will at best add some percentage growth to total food production. This will be partly a wash, as increased food tends to increase birth/survival rates. Our food boom has helped create the population boom.
So on balance, GMOs will provide a benefit, but it is unlikely to be a kind of 'end hunger forever benefit'.
Meanwhile, the system accumulates hidden risk. Once food supplies are created, we become dependent on their persistence. If anything unforeseen and catastrophic happened that lopped a percentage off world food production, we would be ill placed to bear the shock.
Impoverished populations tend to have a high birthrate, which frequently begets more poverty. I'd like to think we can work to reduce overpopulation through reducing poverty (which includes improving food security) instead of simply relying on Malthus to sort everything out. Call me an optimist.
> Meanwhile, the system accumulates hidden risk. Once food supplies are created, we become dependent on their persistence. If anything unforeseen and catastrophic happened that lopped a percentage off world food production, we would be ill placed to bear the shock.
Again, this seems like a policy problem. Having a robust selection of lower-input/higher-output cultivars would help shield us from the failure of single crops.
The problem is that in some parts of the world people are too poor to farm. GMO seed - produced by a company who will lock in farmers to that seed and prevent them from growing on from the crop - is not going to help that.
Kenya has barriers to free trade, which makes its food too expensive for many people to buy. (http://medilinkz.org/east-africa/kenya/37195-kenya-urban-poo...)
Some regions waste too much food, maybe as much as 33% (http://spam.irinnews.org/Report/96485/In-Brief-Southeast-Asi...)
Some more information about food insecurity (http://www.irinnews.org/In-depth/77872/72/A-global-food-cris...) - GMO isn't going to do much against war, HIV, natural disaster, etc.
Better weather forecasting (and education) may help - (http://medilinkz.org/africa/38139-climate-data-has-helped-af...)
This used to be a slide show, but they've broken it. :-/ (http://irinnews.org/Photo/Default.aspx?id=43)
Here's one image, but it's worth noodling through the others. (http://irinnews.org/Photo/Details/201202241150420779/HIV-AID...)
(http://irinnews.org/Photo/Result.aspx?id=43&CountryID=LS)
I'm not anti GMO; I'm just very cautious about allowing huge industry the opportunity to exploit starving children to make massive profits. We heard how agro-chemicals were going to feed the world. They don't. Now I'm hearing how GMOs are going to feed the world. Well, fix the other stuff and maybe I'd be more sympathetic to letting them sell their seed.
> The problem is that in some parts of the world people are too poor to farm. GMO seed - produced by a company who will lock in farmers to that seed and prevent them from growing on from the crop - is not going to help that.
Not every GMO is a product of pure corporate interest. There are non-profit projects with massive potential (the BioCassava Plus, for example[1][2]).
I agree that the ethical track record of many agricorps is appalling, and I think we need more funding of GMO science that keeps valuable IP in public and charitable hands.
> We heard how agro-chemicals were going to feed the world. They don't.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. It's estimated that a third of humanity is sustained by the Haber-Bosch process [3]; should we count that technology as a failure because hunger still exists?
[1] http://tyglobalist.org/in-the-magazine/features/genetically-...
Nature is messing with nature all the time through pure randomness, the penultimate chaos monkey. Nothing has collapsed.
I think it's worth emphasizing that GMOs aren't a category, from a safety point of view. There can't be any evidence that all GMOs that will ever be produced will be safe, any more than there could be evidence that all drugs that will ever be synthesized will be safe. We have to look at them individually. I don't think the public has digested this point yet.
EDITED to add: It's also worth keeping in mind that in some cases, the primary danger may not be from the plant itself, but from pesticides to which it has been engineered to be resistant. I'm speaking, of course, of glyphosate, which I understand is being applied in growing quantities as the weeds it is intended to kill evolve their own resistance.
this is an argument against literally any kind of technology. electricity, medicine, computers, steam engines, light bulbs, animal husbandry, farming, ...
Why is the more error prone process, in which we are ignorant of the mechanism, presumed safer?
If we invented a machine which randomly bred plants, sampled their DNA, and tested for the modification of a single gene, or infected plants with naturally occuring bacteria or virii and waited for an inter-species transfer, would you find this less scary than a process which uses a petri dish and a pipette?
There's a continuous gradient between the way people bred, modified, and selected plants thousands of years ago up until today. Our precision and our knowledge has gotten a lot better.
The only reason at all to trust maize, or other human domestic modifications, is simply because they've been around for a long long time and so you can infer safer because if there was something dangerous, it would have shown up already.
Or, are we simply ignoring dangers that have already existed but become desensitized to them, like gluten issues, or lactose intolerance. Our diet has changed radically since the invention of agriculture, and in a way, much of man's early experiments at domestication of plants, our first "GMO" so to speak, may have had unforseen circumstances.
But we brush it all off, yet people are hypersensitive to any minute theoretical issue that could happen with GMO, real or imagined.
This boils down a lot I think to human emotion, and our notions of disgust with respect to food. We like what is common and fear the unknown.
The IR8 was certainly higher yield when fed properly, but under-performed without that industrial support. That industrial support costs money: so the farmer has to produce more rice to pay for the materials required to produce more rice, in what is essentially a net loss situation.
What price to you put on the sound of frogs singing in the rice field? What value is there in being able to drink or swim in the water downstream without fear of poisoning?
I don't think putting herbicide resistance genes into plant species that don't already have them is a very good idea, because it is a short term solution (selective pressure on weeds will eventually create the same thing anyway), has other environmental costs (the evidence last time I checked is that while glyphosate breaks down quickly, if it gets into waterways in the short period before it has broken down, it can cause considerable damage), and even without any form of gene transfer can end up as a weed (the definition of a weed is a plant growing somewhere where it is unwanted - GMO corn in a GMO soy field is a weed).
Even worse applications can be imagined - for example, imagine a cultivar of corn with genes for a drug, where the corn is toxic because of high levels of the drug - would you want that growing in the next field over from where the corn you are going to eat grows?
I think that it is right for reasonable precautionary measures to be in place whenever substantial genetic engineering of plants is going on, whether it is through transgenic methods, through mutagenically exposed plants, or even through selective breeding combined with sequencing, because there are still high risks.
It is the extreme positions of absolute prohibition or absolute acceptance of all GMOs which are irrational.
Does anyone really think that if we didn't make a stink about GMO that they wouldn't have gone full steam ahead?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technol... wherein we learn that Monsanto acquired the company that did the initial R&D.
DRM for computers is bad because the only way for it to work is to ban computers as we know them and replace them with something fundamentally broken. There really isn't a plant equivalent.
We can live without the latest DRM'd TV shows. We can't live without food.
what do intellectual property laws have to do with being pro or con GMOs?
Along the line of the argument, "John Smith, leading health care reform advocate, admits health care reform is unnecessary." And "Renowned atheist, on deathbed, admits atheism was a mistake." At least with the atheist guy I had heard of him.
So it is an 'appeal to authority' argument, but it's not even an authority who many people have heard of, and fewer still have ever thought of as an authority on the topic, and in fact who it looks like the side he is now aligned did not consider to be an authority until he said he now agreed with them.
Also the article's suggestion that this guy created GMO criticism and without him no one would have asked questions about GMO safety is absurd. Lots of people have reasonably been asking those questions. It's absolutely not something that one person created out of nothing and became the undisputed world leader as if he is some kind of pope. The article reads a lot like propaganda trying to create a straw man leader and then watch as the straw man commits suicide.
Another problem is the conflating of criticism with attacks/vilification, and the ad-hominem use of claiming critics are anti-science: "To vilify GMOs is to be as anti-science as climate-change deniers". This is the opposite of reality. It is very science oriented to ask about risks and be as interested in long term safety trials as we are with pharmaceuticals.
(To be clear, I am not getting to pros or cons of the argument, just noting this article makes a poor argument.)
The headline was written by a poor winner, but that doesn't make the content less interesting.
These kings in Africa you mention generically with no specifics, perhaps they read journals? Even if it is established these scores of kings each met with this fellow personally, went elephant or cheetah hunting together and had some laughs, it indicates little about the motivations of these supposed and possibly fictional kings in passing their dictates, edicts and proclamations.
Vazquez et al. Intragastric and Intraperitoneal Administration of Cry1Ac protoxin from Bacillus thuringiensis induces systemic and mucosal antibody responses in mice. Life Sci. 64, no. 21 (1999): 1897–1912.
Vazquez et al. Characterization of the mucosal and systemic immune response induced by Cry1Ac protein from Bacillus thuringiensis HD 73 in mice. Brazilian J. of Med. and Biol. Research 33 (2000): 147–155.
Vazquez et al. Bacillus thuringiensis Cry1Ac protoxin is a potent systemic and mucosal adjuvant. Scandanavian J. of Immunology 49 (1999): 578–584.
Burns, J.M. 13-week dietary subchronic comparison study with MON 863 corn in rats preceded by a 1-week baseline food consumption determination with PMI certified rodent diet #5002. (Monsanto Co. report, Dec 17, 2002).
Assessment of additional scientific information concerning StarLink corn (FIFRA scientific advisory panel report, No. 2001–09, Jul 2001).
Seralini, G., Cellier, D., & Spiroux de Vendomois, J. New analysis of a rat feeding study with a genetically modified maize reveals signs of hepatorenal toxicity. J. archives of Env. Contam. and Toxicology (Springer, New York).
Malatesta, M. et al. Ultrastructural morphometrical and immunocytochemical analyses of hepatocyte nuclei from mice fed on genetically modified soybean. Cell Struct. Funct. 27 (2002): 173–180.
Vecchio, L. et al. Ultrastructural analysis of testes from mice fed on genetically modified soybean. Eur. J. of Histochem. 48, no. 4 (Oct–Dec 2004):449–454.
Oliveri et al. Temporary depression of transcription in mouse pre-implantion embryos from mice fed on genetically modified soybean. (48th Symposium of the Society for Histochemistry, Lake Maggiore, Italy, Sept 7–10, 2006).
Ermakova, I. Genetically modified soy leads to the decrease of weight and high mortality of rat pups of the first generation. Preliminary studies. Ecosinform 1 (2006): 4–9.
Yes, much ink has been spilled about the dangers of GM soy and soy in general. The issue that the article suggests is that people not only form opinions on food based off of no evidence, but even go so far as to expound their influence in matters that are not trivial. It's easy for Americans to pass up food, but a kid who is starving in Africa and eating Cow dung isn't given this option, and starving these children based on belief and no science is just morally wrong.
I'm looking up some of those articles as well. The one point of interest, for those who are only looking at the titles and seeing "danger," this is from the abstract from Burns, J.M.:
The results of the 13-week subchronic feeding study show that rats fed diets containing corn event MON 863 grain responded similarly to rats fed diets containing the nontransgenic control LH82 x A634 grain and diets containing grain from reference control nontransgenic commercial corn varieties. There were no test article-related changes based on the evaluation of survival, clinical signs, body weights, body weight changes, food consumption, clinical pathology, organ weights, and macroscopic and microscopic pathology.
So, thank you for showing some balance in your suggested readings. This stuff is really complicated and I hope people like you lead the charge in the future of all of the world's food choices. Unfortunately, I don't think this will happen and we'll be fed BS by make-believers and lawyers.
http://www.ofc.org.uk/files/ofc/papers/mark-lynas-lecture-ox...
Here's the video:
http://www.ofc.org.uk/videos/2013/mark-lynas-changing-perspe...
I'm not saying that's an easy separation to make, but science and technology will continue to move forward. If it brings about our end, so be it. You can say the same about a lot of different technologies. It just happens to be the dangerous phase we are in (transitioning from a Type 0 to a Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale).
I'll post my comment separately once I've looked at it.
"What you don’t have the right to do is to stand in the way of others who hope and strive for ways of doing things differently, and hopefully better. Farmers who understand the pressures of a growing population and a warming world. Who understand that yields per hectare are the most important environmental metric. And who understand that technology never stops developing, and that even the fridge and the humble potato were new and scary once."
http://www.ofc.org.uk/files/ofc/papers/mark-lynas-lecture-ox...