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The great Genetically Modified Debate

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Vindictus said:
Ironically, GMOs designed for mass yields tend to fare worse in difficult conditions they were not optimized for than traditional crops, so that's not actually guaranteed.

Sure, if you were to create a more rugged, durable GMO, that would be good... but the rugged and durable traits might make it lower output, and because GMOs are, broadly speaking, something that is primarily developed by agricultural corporations who want to maximize output now, not create a crop that will resist worsening conditions later... Well.
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This might make it more interesting to use GMO crops in contained environments like greenhouses or vertical farms.

As a counterpoint to this logic. I have heard about efforts to make certain crops more resistant to some environmental changes.
Article:
With further research, scientists might try to breed or genetically engineer new crop varieties that preserve much of their nutritional value in the face of rising carbon dioxide. But this could prove challenging, Dr. Ziska said, given that all of the tested rice lines in their study showed significant declines in vitamin B.

I have also heard about making more salt resistant crops, to make them grow-able in more areas.
 
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Eliar said:
Well, the moment food companies are moving to patent GMO foods and more critically their seeds then capitalism has everything to do with Genetically Modified Foods and Organisms in general?

From building more resistant/better/more adaptable crops to gathering the power to profit and exclusively disperse those crops the issue is both horrifying and extremely serious?

In the very heart of the argument, if politicos and journalists can be bribed enough to allow and support such practices, then fuck GMOs. Yes I know the fault is on the people not the product but one leads to the other.

To expand a bit, climate change may see the rise of GMOs as the only viable source of food. Food that has left the hands of the farmers and quietly slid in the hands of megacorps. It may sound as conspiracy theory but allowing patents on food and seeds is in my opinion wrong in all levels.
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You can't have it both ways, either the source of the issue is capitalism or it's not. If it's capitalism then blaming GMOs will do nothing to actually address the problem. And if it's not capitalism then my point stands and a gigantic rant about capitalism is not relevant to the thread.

Fundamentally anti-GMO rhetoric does absolutely nothing to stop companies from abusing their power, do you think that associating criticisms of corporate malfeasance to harmful pseudoscience is possibly a good idea?

If companies patenting food and seeds is as harmful as you say then that's a serious problem, but it's not a problem with GMOs. I for one am not unsympathetic to anti-capitalist arguments but I sure as hell am not sympathetic to carrying water for pseudoscientific hacks, and if you try to do both then myself and quite a few others will have no time for your cause. Which is counterproductive to say the least, alienating rational pro-science people is a very high cost for very low gain.
 
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Eliar said:
In the very heart of the argument, if politicos and journalists can be bribed enough to allow and support such practices, then fuck GMOs. Yes I know the fault is on the people not the product but one leads to the other.
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Fourthspartan56 said:
You can't have it both ways, either it's capitalism or it's not. If it's capitalism then blaming GMOs will do nothing to actually help the problem.
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I believe that the core premise of this discussion is wrong.
which will inevitably lead to a false dichotomy.

if politicos and journalists can be bribed enough to allow and support such practices, then fuck GMOs.
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The core assumption here is that corruption of politicians and journalists is a special feature of capitalism.

Fourthspartan56 said:
You can't have it both ways, either it's capitalism or it's not.
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Markets can be regulated for consumer safety. And there is a whole spectrum to subsidies and incentives that countries can create to favour one strategy over another.
An example of this is how Phenoxy herbicide has become forbidden by international law in 2001. the chemicals in this herbicide are thought to maybe cause most things for which roundup is blamed, but science is hard with complicated systems.

On a side note I want to ask a question.
Phenoxy herbicide has been around for been around for +/- 30 years causing things for which roundup is now blamed.
I wonder if the current lack of trust has a connection to that case? I have not been around long enough to hear any coorperations defend about this stuff.

Article:
Dioxins are well established carcinogens in animal studies, although the precise mechanistic role is not clear. Dioxins are not mutagenic or genotoxic.[citation needed] The United States Environmental Protection Agency has categorised dioxin, and the mixture of substances associated with sources of dioxin toxicity as a "likely human carcinogen".[27] The International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified TCDD as a human carcinogen (class 1) on the basis of clear animal carcinogenicity and limited human data, but was not able to classify other dioxins.[28] It is thought that the presence of dioxin can accelerate the formation of tumours and adversely affect the normal mechanisms for inhibiting tumour growth, without actually instigating the carcinogenic event.[13]
As with all toxic endpoints of dioxin, a clear dose-response relationship is very difficult to establish. After accidental or high occupational exposures there is evidence on human carcinogenicity.[29][30] There is much controversy especially on cancer risk at low population levels of dioxins.[12][29][31] Among fishermen with high dioxin concentrations in their bodies, cancer deaths were decreased rather than increased.[32] Some researchers have also proposed that dioxin induces cancer progression through a very different mitochondrial pathway.[33]
 
Eliar said:
Well, the moment food companies are moving to patent GMO foods and more critically their seeds then capitalism has everything to do with Genetically Modified Foods and Organisms in general?

From building more resistant/better/more adaptable crops to gathering the power to profit and exclusively disperse those crops the issue is both horrifying and extremely serious?

In the very heart of the argument, if politicos and journalists can be bribed enough to allow and support such practices, then fuck GMOs. Yes I know the fault is on the people not the product but one leads to the other.

To expand a bit, climate change may see the rise of GMOs as the only viable source of food. Food that has left the hands of the farmers and quietly slid in the hands of megacorps. It may sound as conspiracy theory but allowing patents on food and seeds is in my opinion wrong in all levels.
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Buying your seeds from some company has been the norm for longer than any of the people reading this have been alive. There's been a lot of argle-bargling about how evil it is that you have to buy GMO seeds, but there is zero meaningful difference between that and the established best practices of modern agriculture.
 
Eliar said:
Well, the moment food companies are moving to patent GMO foods and more critically their seeds then capitalism has everything to do with Genetically Modified Foods and Organisms in general?

From building more resistant/better/more adaptable crops to gathering the power to profit and exclusively disperse those crops the issue is both horrifying and extremely serious?

In the very heart of the argument, if politicos and journalists can be bribed enough to allow and support such practices, then fuck GMOs. Yes I know the fault is on the people not the product but one leads to the other.

To expand a bit, climate change may see the rise of GMOs as the only viable source of food. Food that has left the hands of the farmers and quietly slid in the hands of megacorps. It may sound as conspiracy theory but allowing patents on food and seeds is in my opinion wrong in all levels.
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People have been patenting plant cultivars since 1930 in the US. If you live in America every crop you have ever eaten was likely patented by someone or other.
 
WallFlower said:
I believe that the core premise of this discussion is wrong.
which will inevitably lead to a false dichotomy.



The core assumption here is that corruption of politicians and journalists is a special feature of capitalism.



Markets can be regulated for consumer safety. And there is a whole spectrum to subsidies and incentives that countries can create to favour one strategy over another.
An example of this is how Phenoxy herbicide has become forbidden by international law in 2001. the chemicals in this herbicide are thought to maybe cause most things for which roundup is blamed, but science is hard with complicated systems.

On a side note I want to ask a question.
Phenoxy herbicide has been around for been around for +/- 30 years causing things for which roundup is now blamed.
I wonder if the current lack of trust has a connection to that case? I have not been around long enough to hear any coorperations defend about this stuff.

Article:
Dioxins are well established carcinogens in animal studies, although the precise mechanistic role is not clear. Dioxins are not mutagenic or genotoxic.[citation needed] The United States Environmental Protection Agency has categorised dioxin, and the mixture of substances associated with sources of dioxin toxicity as a "likely human carcinogen".[27] The International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified TCDD as a human carcinogen (class 1) on the basis of clear animal carcinogenicity and limited human data, but was not able to classify other dioxins.[28] It is thought that the presence of dioxin can accelerate the formation of tumours and adversely affect the normal mechanisms for inhibiting tumour growth, without actually instigating the carcinogenic event.[13]
As with all toxic endpoints of dioxin, a clear dose-response relationship is very difficult to establish. After accidental or high occupational exposures there is evidence on human carcinogenicity.[29][30] There is much controversy especially on cancer risk at low population levels of dioxins.[12][29][31] Among fishermen with high dioxin concentrations in their bodies, cancer deaths were decreased rather than increased.[32] Some researchers have also proposed that dioxin induces cancer progression through a very different mitochondrial pathway.[33]
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I think the general skepticism about companies promising super special that their specific product doesn't cause cancer got burned out as something the public will trust when the tobacco industry tried that with cigarettes.
 
So how about that prime editing?
Article:
Liu, his postdoc Andrew Anzalone, and co-workers tested variations of their prime editors on several human and mouse cells, performing more than 175 different edits. As a proof of principle, they created and then corrected the mutations that cause sickle cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease, DNA aberrations that previous genome-editing systems either could not fix or only did so inefficiently. The edits occurred in a high percentage of cells and caused relatively few off-target changes. In its paper, the team claims the technology "in principle can correct about 89% of known pathogenic human genetic variants."
A step forward, or a step further into danger? Seems safer than CRISPR at least.
 
Hotdog Vendor said:
So how about that prime editing?
Article:
Liu, his postdoc Andrew Anzalone, and co-workers tested variations of their prime editors on several human and mouse cells, performing more than 175 different edits. As a proof of principle, they created and then corrected the mutations that cause sickle cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease, DNA aberrations that previous genome-editing systems either could not fix or only did so inefficiently. The edits occurred in a high percentage of cells and caused relatively few off-target changes. In its paper, the team claims the technology "in principle can correct about 89% of known pathogenic human genetic variants."
A step forward, or a step further into danger? Seems safer than CRISPR at least.
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Per the article "prime editing" is still CRISPR. It's just a refinement of the existing process just like "base editing", which was another CRISPR improvement the same researcher developed.
 
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