"Noo one knows if GMOs are safe", or do they?

• Campylobacter jejuni wrote on 2015-01-10 20:03
  It turns out, they do. There are more than 2000+ studies concerning themselves with the safety of GMOs, and it looks like not one of them found any convincing argument against the safety of GMOs.
  
  Follow the link for the full story.
• Odin wrote on 2015-01-10 23:31
  Tested safe sure, and will absolutely continue to be tested again and again.
  
  But there was a time when everyone thought nuclear power was safe too and tested again and again as safe when properly handled. It wasn't till years later we realized that the testing standards weren't even close to what was actually safe, and that it resulted in a very real risk of long-lived hazards and global consequences. Though it certainly would have helped if we weren't shooting clods of nuclear material into the atmosphere showing off bombs with it, and raising everyone's cancer risk a thousandfold for generations to come.
  
  To me the danger in GMO foods is not so much that they are making genetic alterations, after all nature has been doing this all by itself since before human society was even a thing, its that like all good things this technology will inevitably be used irresponsibly with the very real risk of serious consequences not just for the people exposed to it.
  
  The biggest concern I have with any sort of gene-altering technology is that it will end up being used to create human infants of known genetic properties. While it is true that this could eliminate a lot of common genetic disorders and even improve upon our species as a whole, more likely than not it will be abused for cosmetic purposes or to create 'superhuman' offspring that have abnormal characteristics engineered in. Over time allowing that to breed back into the main gene pool will lead to permanent alterations, and even if such altered people were prohibited from reproducing it would still happen anyway.
• Space Pirate Nithiel wrote on 2015-01-11 00:49
  A couple surveys have been done that showed most people who complain that GMOs are bad don't even know what GMO means, they're just following the hype.
  
  I mean, in reality everything we've eaten for hundreds of years has been genetically modified. When was the last time you ate a white carrot? Hell, broccoli never existed in the wild, it was invented by humans genetically modifying kale.
  
  The main difference is that what took 20 years before takes 2 years now.
• Second wrote on 2015-01-11 06:43
  Isn't the main problem with GMO the legal aspects of it?
  
  Like if wind blows GMO seeds into a farmer's field, GMO seed creators can sue the farmer or something.
  
  
  

  CFS said it had tracked numerous law suits that Monsanto had brought against farmers and found some 142 patent infringement suits against 410 farmers and 56 small businesses in more than 27 states. In total the firm has won more than $23m from its targets, the report said.

  
  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto-sues-farmers-seed-patents
• Campylobacter jejuni wrote on 2015-01-11 15:04

  Quote from Second;1260743:

  Isn't the main problem with GMO the legal aspects of it?
  
  Like if wind blows GMO seeds into a farmer's field, GMO seed creators can sue the farmer or something.
  
  
  
  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto-sues-farmers-seed-patents

  
  No. Basically, it's half truths put forth by anti-GMO activists to make Monsanto appear as the satan. Monsanto sues when the contaminated crop is being reaped, understood to be glyphosate-resistant, saved and then sown again next season.
  
  Monsanto removes so called "volunteer plants" on their own costs if you call them to tell them your field has been "contaminated".
  
  Here are the court documents for the Percy Schmeiser case, which people like to pull up as the archetype of Monsatan's bullying activities. At the end it specifically mentions two famers speaking out at the trial who went through the procedure I explained above, and it's clear the defendant knew all along that his seed was roundup-ready. He thus deliberately used Monsanto seeds without paying for them. He even reaped them separately and put them into an extra truck and had them treated... Doesn't look like an accident, does it?
  
  http://decisions.fct-cf.gc.ca/fc-cf/decisions/en/item/38991/index.do
  
  Most judges are actually not corrupt enough to grant damages for volunteer plants. And Monsanto isn't corrupt enough to demand those either.
  

  Quote from Odin;1260697:

  Tested safe sure, and will absolutely continue to be tested again and again.
  
  But there was a time when everyone thought nuclear power was safe too and tested again and again as safe when properly handled. It wasn't till years later we realized that the testing standards weren't even close to what was actually safe, and that it resulted in a very real risk of long-lived hazards and global consequences. Though it certainly would have helped if we weren't shooting clods of nuclear material into the atmosphere showing off bombs with it, and raising everyone's cancer risk a thousandfold for generations to come.

  
  Nuclear power remains one of the least lethal ways to generate energy even with all the desasters that happened and taking the use of weaponized uranium into account, so that claim is in fact still correct.
  
  http://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/
  
  The only specific though indeed dramatic problem is that it makes cities uninhabitable when it does blow up. But with newer technology that would be close to impossible, as opposed to merely exceedingly unlikely as with old fission technologies.
  
  "Increasing cancer risk thousandfold" seems to me an unsubstantiated claim. The numbers of the last 40 years (!) certainly disagree.
  http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2011/browse_csr.php?sectionSEL=2&pageSEL=sect_02_table.05.html
  Who told you that? They were lying out of their ass. You should slap them.
  
  
  Also, the repercussions of nuclear energy are actually and easily observable. I'm no aware of any observed adverse consequences of establishing GMO crops.
  There are a lot of positive consequences though. Despite lies told by Vandana Shiva (lying is all she ever does really, no exaggeration), there is no positive connection between the purchase of GMO crops and Indian farmer suicides. In fact in some regions of India, the plummeting suicide rate of farmers curiously mirrors the widespread adoption of GMO crops very severely.
  
  Bt rice actually helps increase biodiversity due to less pesticides having to be applied to te environment.
  Bacillus thuringiensis' cry toxins which are being used in "Bt" crops are harmless to humans btw. It only works against insects because it gets denaturised (the molecular structure gets destroyed) in the alkaline gastric juices (ours are acidic and later alcalic juices added to the chyme in the intestines only neutralise the chyme for our body rather than turning it alkaline) and only then becomes soluble by the body to do its work there.
  
  New blight-reistant potato varieties are on their way.
  
  GMOs are agricultural progress and a boon to both the environment and starving and malnourished people.
• Odin wrote on 2015-01-11 16:39

  Quote from Campylobacter jejuni;1260768:

  Nuclear power remains one of the least lethal ways to generate energy even with all the desasters that happened and taking the use of weaponized uranium into account, so that claim is in fact still correct.
  

  
  
  It is that safe now because over time we've learned by experience how to make it stay in a containment and how much contamination is too much. At first we were doing things with it that we thought were safe that by modern standards would be seen as incredibly unsafe.
  
  GMOs simply need more time and field experience to reveal any such issues before hitting the bigtime, and I don't expect there to be any major hidden dangers like there was with nuclear energy.
  
  Once it has been in the field for a few decades, we'll have a good handle on safely applying it and can go mainstream with its adoption. This also allows the Monsanto patents to expire, so that farmers will be able to crossbreed and store their own to reduce the costs of using it.
  
  

  Quote from Campylobacter jejuni;1260768:

  
  http://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/
  
  The only specific though indeed dramatic problem is that it makes cities uninhabitable when it does blow up. But with newer technology that would be close to impossible, as opposed to merely exceedingly unlikely as with old fission technologies.

  
  
  Yes. The current global fleet of nuclear reactors have long since exceeded their intended service life, with many of them built in the 60s and 70s with the intention of being replaced after 20 years by upgraded and far safer designs. But after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, public backlash was so intense that such replacement reactors could not be constructed no matter how much the technology improved.
  
  In fact it wasn't until 2013 that any new reactor sites were given approvals to proceed with construction in the US at least, with approximately 4 units expected to come online by 2020. These new reactors will put to the test everything we've learned from the nuclear disasters that have happened.
  
  

  Quote from Campylobacter jejuni;1260768:

  
  "Increasing cancer risk thousandfold" seems to me an unsubstantiated claim. The numbers of the last 40 years (!) certainly disagree.
  http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2011/browse_csr.php?sectionSEL=2&pageSEL=sect_02_table.05.html
  Who told you that? They were lying out of their ass. You should slap them.

  
  
  I'll slap myself then. That's actually really interesting that the cancer rates have not drastically increased because of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. Just goes to show how big the planet actually is that it has been able to dillute out the dangers we've brought on ourselves.
  
  
  

  Quote from Campylobacter jejuni;1260768:

  
  Also, the repercussions of nuclear energy are actually and easily observable. I'm no aware of any observed adverse consequences of establishing GMO crops.
  There are a lot of positive consequences though. Despite lies told by Vandana Shiva (lying is all she ever does really, no exaggeration), there is no positive connection between the purchase of GMO crops and Indian farmer suicides. In fact in some regions of India, the plummeting suicide rate of farmers curiously mirrors the widespread adoption of GMO crops very severely.
  
  Bt rice actually helps increase biodiversity due to less pesticides having to be applied to te environment.
  Bacillus thuringiensis' cry toxins which are being used in "Bt" crops are harmless to humans btw. It only works against insects because it gets denaturised (the molecular structure gets destroyed) in the alkaline gastric juices (ours are acidic and later alcalic juices added to the chyme in the intestines only neutralise the chyme for our body rather than turning it alkaline) and only then becomes soluble by the body to do its work there.
  
  New blight-reistant potato varieties are on their way.
  
  GMOs are agricultural progress and a boon to both the environment and starving and malnourished people.

  
  
  I wonder if they can do it to bananas too.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease
  
  Grocery store bananas used to be a lot sweeter, being a different varierty entirely. But Panama Disease almost completely wiped out that variety, and growers had to replace it with the type seen on shelves today.
  
  There is a growing amount of fear that a resurgence of Panama Disease will wipe out the well known variety a second time, and possibly lead to bananas in general becoming an endangered species.
  
  If they could make a GMO variation of the banana, it would make an excellent testbed case to prove that the technology is safe and useful. Perhaps we could even return to the much sweeter bananas of the 1950s by making them disease resistant, so that banana flavor actually tastes like grocery store banana. They're so different because the flavor was developed to match the older style.
• Campylobacter jejuni wrote on 2015-01-11 17:07
  Yeah. It's funny how a truly global scale dwarfs numbers that we think are huge. Consider how much CO² we've been putting out since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and still it hasn't contributed to one full °C of average global temperature increase yet.
  
  Pretty sure something like it could be applied to bananas.
  
  I have nothing to ad to the rest you said.
• Odin wrote on 2015-01-12 02:22
  And then there's this variation.
  
  http://www.theguardian.com/science/2001/sep/09/gm.food
  
  They used GMO technology to create a corn which can be turned into a contraceptive-containing personal lubricant.
  
  This is one that I really hope doesn't get out of the confinement of a greenhouse, because if there are any complications attached such as the 'allergy' based mechanism it uses becoming permanent, it could have disastrous consequences.
• Yoorah wrote on 2015-01-12 03:35
  Saying that genetically modified organisms are harmless just because people have been developing breeds through selective breeding and that it's "the same thing" is very misguided. They're fundamentally different things, creating some unique problems. For example, people with allergies to a certain food could become affected by a GMO food which contains a gene from a food to which the person has a known allergy to. Except they wouldn't know that they're affected by the seemingly harmless GMO food.
  
  Overall, most scientists do for the most part agree that most GMO foods are safe to eat. Odin does touch on this point well enough, however. Plus there are other issues to consider, such as the dependence on the Roundup herbicide, which IS toxic to humans. The argument is that it is not toxic enough to cause damage in small doses that people would typically ingest from eating the GMO food, but the chemical has been found elsewhere, increasing total exposure to possibly unsafe levels. There's also the issue of introducing a new organism into an ecosystem, contamination issues, etc.
  
  My biggest issue, however, is that these big companies are spending large sums of money to keep us in the dark on whether the food we buy contains GMO or not. I should have the right to choose whether I want to eat their crap, but I am being denied this right.
  
  Pro-GM labelling campaign hugely outspent in Colorado and Oregon ballot
  

  Biotech and supermarket giants are spending more than $25m (£15.6m) to defeat ballot initiatives in two western states that would require labelling of foods containing genetically modified organisms.
  
  In Colorado, Dupont and Monsanto food companies are outspending supporters of mandatory labelling by 22-1 ahead of the 4 November vote, according to state campaign finance records.
  
  In Oregon, meanwhile, industry is outspending supporters of the ballot measure by about 2-1.

  
  

  Monsanto alone has spent $4.7m to defeat the measure. Other top donors to the campaign to defeat pro-labelling Proposition 105 read like a grocery shopping list. They include: Pepsico, Kraft Foods, General Mills, Hershey Company, Coca-Cola and Kellogg, and Flower Food, according to Colorado state campaign finance records.

  
  All of them shitty companies, unsurprisingly.
  
  To learn more broadly about the issue, check out this page: http://web.mit.edu/demoscience/Monsanto/index.html
• Campylobacter jejuni wrote on 2015-01-12 04:37
  But that is not really how allergies work. You are allergic to substances in food, such as certain acids, not to its DNA. Of course if there was a crop that was modified to express a substance that is a known allergene, that would be problematic. But we have a regulation process, it's not like GMOs can be thrown onto the market willy-nilly. It's actually a bit overblown, the ammount of time it has taken for a GMO to be approved has risen dramatically. I don't have numbers on me, sorry.
  Also, looking for an article on the dangers of transgenic crop breeding, I found this, it makes exemplary mention of a GMO development was halted on when tests showed people reacted to it allergically.
  http://www.thelabrat.com/review/gmcrops.shtml
  
  Glyphosate as applied is not toxic at all to anything but the plants directly targeted. It just isn't.
  http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/dienochlor-glyphosate/glyphosate-ext.html
  
  The reason they don't want mandatory labelling is because that would cost some money (probably not the real concern), and because it's just going to be used to show that food items with GMOs are so dangerous, the government forces them to be labelled!
  
  There is nothing dubious about funding counter-campaigns. Especially when you're countering a campaign of pseudoscientific fear-mongering that has been going on for a few years, I would put a lot of money into that too.
  I don't know why those companies are all shitty. What makes them shitty?
• TLCBonaparte wrote on 2015-01-12 21:49

  Quote from Odin;1260697:

  Tested safe sure, and will absolutely continue to be tested again and again.
  
  But there was a time when everyone thought nuclear power was safe too and tested again and again as safe when properly handled. It wasn't till years later we realized that the testing standards weren't even close to what was actually safe, and that it resulted in a very real risk of long-lived hazards and global consequences. Though it certainly would have helped if we weren't shooting clods of nuclear material into the atmosphere showing off bombs with it, and raising everyone's cancer risk a thousandfold for generations to come.
  
  To me the danger in GMO foods is not so much that they are making genetic alterations, after all nature has been doing this all by itself since before human society was even a thing, its that like all good things this technology will inevitably be used irresponsibly with the very real risk of serious consequences not just for the people exposed to it.
  
  The biggest concern I have with any sort of gene-altering technology is that it will end up being used to create human infants of known genetic properties. While it is true that this could eliminate a lot of common genetic disorders and even improve upon our species as a whole, more likely than not it will be abused for cosmetic purposes or to create 'superhuman' offspring that have abnormal characteristics engineered in. Over time allowing that to breed back into the main gene pool will lead to permanent alterations, and even if such altered people were prohibited from reproducing it would still happen anyway.

  
  
  For the record I am totally ok with my children being half cat super heroes.
• Yoorah wrote on 2015-01-15 02:24

  Quote from Campylobacter jejuni;1260865:

  But that is not really how allergies work. You are allergic to substances in food, such as certain acids, not to its DNA. Of course if there was a crop that was modified to express a substance that is a known allergene, that would be problematic. But we have a regulation process, it's not like GMOs can be thrown onto the market willy-nilly. It's actually a bit overblown, the ammount of time it has taken for a GMO to be approved has risen dramatically. I don't have numbers on me, sorry.
  Also, looking for an article on the dangers of transgenic crop breeding, I found this, it makes exemplary mention of a GMO development was halted on when tests showed people reacted to it allergically.
  http://www.thelabrat.com/review/gmcrops.shtml
  
  Glyphosate as applied is not toxic at all to anything but the plants directly targeted. It just isn't.
  http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/dienochlor-glyphosate/glyphosate-ext.html
  
  The reason they don't want mandatory labelling is because that would cost some money (probably not the real concern), and because it's just going to be used to show that food items with GMOs are so dangerous, the government forces them to be labelled!
  
  There is nothing dubious about funding counter-campaigns. Especially when you're countering a campaign of pseudoscientific fear-mongering that has been going on for a few years, I would put a lot of money into that too.
  I don't know why those companies are all shitty. What makes them shitty?

  
  
  "But that's not really how they work ... wait, that actually is how they work."
  Of course it's not that simple, but the point was to highlight the huge differences between genetic engineering and the oldschool way. There's differences not only in the methods (which is obvious), but also the effects and the concerns. It seems that some people do not realize this.
  
  We also have extremely rigorous processes for approving drugs (ask anyone who works in biochem). Yet, there are many dangerous drugs that have been mistakenly approved and have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US over the years.
  
  All while taking this risk for something that offers no real benefits (except for the biotech firms who peddle these products)--it's completely unnecessary.
  
  And that's poor justification for not allowing labels. If the market doesn't want their product, then their product shouldn't exist. Tricking or forcing the public to buy their crap unknowingly is simply wrong.