GM Wheat found in Oregon 10 years after abandoned by Monsanto

As a biologist, the "All GM is bad!" stuff drives me crazy. But you do yourself no favours by ignoring legitimate concerns.

Case in point: Monsanto. Their notorious Roundup-ready plants have been GM'd to be resistant to herbicides that will kill off all other plants.

I would cheerfully eat a plant that had just been GM'd to have such resistance. But I would be rather more concerned about it after it was used as designed: repeatedly sprayed with massive doses of toxic substances.

Even if they're completely correct about all traces of that gunk being gone by the time their plant winds up on my plate, you still get the herbicides and/or the breakdown products washed into the water table; you still get farmers skipping crop rotation and fallow seasons in favour of just growing the same crop over and over and fixing the perceived problems by dumping yet more fertiliser and yet more herbicides onto them.

And you still wind up encouraging the evolution of herbicide-resistant weeds requiring yet-more GM and yet-more poisons. You still get yet-more need for yet-more poisons of questionable safety being dumped into the food chain.

I've no problem with eating a plant that's had its genes tinkered with. But I'm totally against Roundup-ready crops and the like. And that's a perfectly rational, informed position to hold.

The problem with GM isn't that we've been "modifying" them. As you say, we've been doing that since the dawn of civilization (probably earlier).

The problem with GM is speed.

Those thousands of years acted as a wonderful buffer to see what works, what doesn't. What creates healthier humans and what has the potential to wipe out whole villages with a single mutation. It also provided us with ample time to adjust our digestive tracks to the new types of food we were ingesting.

Dogs didn't become poodles in a thousand years. They became work dogs and watch dogs first and many hundreds of such generations of selection of traits. And we've seen the detriments of speedy breeding already. Dogs with breathing problems, hip and other bone problems. Dogs that can barely lift their own heads, have glaucoma, diabetes and other preventable misery.

The difference between those thousands of years of breeding dogs and today? A few decades of speed.

As a non-biologist, the comparison with cross-breeding does not seem reasonable to me.

With cross-breeding, I can get characteristic A from some corn, characteristic B from some other corn, and end up with corn with A+B. And also maybe over time taller, or larger.

With GM, I can do a much larger range of things taking genes from fish and putting them in corn (for example), which we currently poorly understand. The kinds of things we would like to do (make plants which grow fast and are hard to kill) seem like exactly the kinds of things that might lead to serious issues (we make a plant which we lose control of, grows fast, and is hard to kill).

You sound well meaning and I believe it to be the case. However, I also believe you probably have a subconscious bias resulting from over exposure to one side of this question.

The difference between GM and natural modification of genetics subsequent to the (however you measure it, extremely recent) advent of agriculture can be summarized as one of scale (individual sites are far larger), totality (homogeneity of genes, frequently near-absolute destruction of other plants within the zone of growth), and mindset (commerciality: view toward maximum and permanent human-centric functional yields, with all of the technology and complexity that brings to being - machinery, energy consumption, chemical fertilization, potentially pesticides though these are often claimed to be used less with GM, and a clear and solely profit-taking motive for the GM supplier).

Many people who maintain a conservative view towards GM (many don't "actively oppose" it, they simply don't buy it or support it where possible) do so recognizing that homogeneity is unnatural, dependence upon an external source for seeds eviscerates the fundamental security of farming, the integrity of the farmers relationships to their land, and large multinational companies are generally profit taking soulless beasts with a history of shafting anyone and everyone possible.

I would invite people who are still on the fence on this issue to consider this single document which shocked me of late - it is a collection of 'heritage' potatoes from New Zealand, ie. those brought with European settlers only 200 years ago. Try reading this document, then try to find even four different potatoes available in your area via modern industrial agriculture! http://www.koanga.org.nz/media/wysiwyg/Potato-Trial-2013-sml...

I used to be terrified by GM foods because the big companies that make them intentionally contaminate farmers fields, then sue them, and the farmers lose everything. The only reason I'm not terrified anymore is my "gentleman farmer" great uncle died, so I have no direct family in the line of fire.

Imagine growing what amounts to an overgrown garden, some dude takes a sample, detects "contamination" containing their "intellectual property" and next thing you know, you're bankrupt and homeless. I could probably survive that, but for my elderly uncle that would have been a death sentence. Killing someone to make a relatively small amount of money seems inhumane, but its the American way.

GM = horrifically evil in practice. In theory I agree 100% there is nothing wrong with it as a technology. However as a business its a disaster. I'm not willing to kill my uncle so some monsanto exec can get 61 Ferraris with his bonus instead of 60 this year.

I feel terrible for the poor farmer who owns the field the contamination was detected on. Its like, euthanasia time for legal reasons for that poor guy, his life is basically over now.

GM isn't bad per se. However Monsanto's business practice + GM is evil. Pure evil (much in a way software is ok, but Microsoft brand of lock software is absolutely evil).

If there was an OSS licence on all GM food I might consider it, non-horrible.

The problem is one of scope. With GM, traits are introduced in plants that stem from different kind if life, often bacteria that would never naturally be accessible using selective breeding. Plants that are resistant to herbicides for example. This is on one side a blessing - you can just spray roundup on your fields and the crop lives while the rest dies. On the other side, no one can predict the effect these changes will have on the ecosystem.

I'm not very much concerned that GM food in itself is dangerous to consume. I'm far less certain that growing gene manipulated crops is as safe as it's made to be. What happens if two gene modified plants inter-breed? We've had enough accidents with "naturally" [1] selected plants and ruined a couple of ecosystems. We don't have that many ecosystems left.

Add to that the whole economical dimension: Gene modified plants prevent farmers from creating their own seeds for limited gain. The ones profiting big time are monsanto and friends.

[1] as in "not gene modified"

You don't have to look as far as the genetic modifications themselves.

1) Monsanto ran test plots. The presumed protocol was for them to remain isolated and to be destroyed upon completion of the testing, so that the test lines did not enter the ecosystem. This has not occurred. Either they lied, or they were negligent.

2) Monsanto scientists trotted out estimates of the usable lifespan of Roundup. Many years prior to this, we have pervasive problems of Roundup resistant "superweeds" that can be worse than the original weed problems Roundup was supposed to solve. The scientists lied, or were incompetent. (I'm sorry, but when you use your scientific... predictions to justify widespread ecological modification, mistakes immediately rise to the level of incompetence. Also, there have been reports that, internally, Monsanto scientists were worried about and predicting these results. However -- contrary to the spirit of science -- this information was not shared publicly. Granted, it may not have consisted entirely of measured results. But it consisted of deep concerns for the impact and repercussions of the "experiment" -- the unfettered application of previous work and results -- being conducted in the public sphere.)

3) Monsanto seems intent upon cornering the marketplaces of seedstock for ever more species of crop plant. Such activity has the distinct air, in my opinion at least, of monopolization.

4) Monsanto has U.S. Federal legislation passed that exempts it from liability and from State law.

I don't need to get at far as looking at the direct fallout of the genetic modifications upon downstream consumption, before I start to become quite opposed to Monsanto.

Now, as for the modifications themselves. I'm still uncertain about the consumption of the modified genes, themselves. But there has been increasing evidence that the Roundup herbicide -- the other half of this commercial cocktail -- is not as benign to human health as originally argued. For some years, I've been reading that components of Roundup are more active with respect to human health and more enduring in the environment than originally expected.

And most recently, interesting discussion has evolved about the effect of Roundup upon microflora in the human gut.

Of course, one might easily imagine or expect corresponding effects upon other animal species.

Monsanto, unlike open science, seems to be acting to keep all this quiet, to the extent they can. What we have, in significant part, as the resulting action of this company, is not scientific exploration but rather commercial exploitation that appears to stand significantly in the way of the former.

Some countries carefully restrict imports of certain plants, animals and foodstuffs to avoid upsetting their ecosystem. This essentially boils down to the restriction of import of genes. Are you opposed to this? Can't genetic modification essentially amount to the same thing?

(I'm happy with genetic modifications in general, but I think that it's prudent to be cautious because of potential upsets to the ecosystem.)

Quite so. I highly doubt the people of Japan are better off thanks to their country suspending wheat shipments from Oregon...

Because it destroys the natural heterogeny of the wild gene pool, depriving us of hardier crops and enslaving us to a corporation whose sole purpose for being is profit-taking, with a short term frame of reference and the minimum of environmental or social concern?

That GM wheat is someones intellectual property and there's extensive case law of farmers having their lives destroyed by being declared the equivalent of "software pirates". Its almost an exact analogy right down to small businesses being shaken down for protection money. This is not theoretical or sci fi but established case law and precedent.

Right now there could be an Ag website with a bunch of wheat farmers trying to figure out why anyone cares about a bunch of SCO source code discovered to be contaminating the linux kernel source.

The nightmare scenario isn't even one farmer having his life and livelihood destroyed, but everyone nearby especially downwind is probably shaking in their boots, or should be.

Also using plague language, we have discovered the first patient, but we have not isolated patient zero yet. This may (or may not) be a much bigger contamination.

If you are a farmer the sue happy Monsanto, or the fact that foreign nations stopped wheat imports means the concerned step is filled in quite nicely. For the general populace GM fear maybe.

Because they are patented property?

Evolution says that GM wheat in the wild will be weeded out in the process of natural selection, because GM wheat are made to grow big and resists certain pesticide, which is costly uses of its resources in a wild environment. Instead of growing big and juicy, maybe it needs to compete against other plants.

In other words, GM wheats and plants varieties need humans to proliferate.

But it's safe already! The only thing that's different is that you can spray it with RoundUp and it won't die. What's the problem?