Peer-reviewed, of course. Looking up such topics produces a plethora of information and I am not sure how to winnow it.
Thanks,
Rob
Harmful to the animals who consume it? Harmful to the humans who consume it? Hamrful to the humans who consume the animals who consume it? Harmful to an ecosystem if the genes “escape” into the wild? Harmful to the environment as a whole?
You’ll have to be a lot more specific. A new strain of anthrax developed in a weapons lab somewhere to be more antibiotic-resistant? Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s harmful. Wheat that has some genes transplanted from rye to make it a bit more weather-resistant? Probably not.
Specifically, I am referring to so-called franken-foods, either crops or livestock.
Thanks,
Rob
“GMO” is too vague. There are a zillion different genetic modifications which can be made. Wouldn’t each one have to be studied individually? I cannot imagine any study which might demonstrate that ALL are dangerous or that ALL are safe.
There is a growing body of evidence that GM toxins are encouraging resistance in the wild:
and (more worryingly) that GM organisms are spreading in the wild:
http://newswire.uark.edu/article.aspx?id=14453
This still isn’t enough. If you’re talking about beta-carotene rice, hell no. If you’re talking about engineering pesticides into plants, then yeah, some of them seem to be.
Thinking that genetic modification causes some inherent safety issue is a personal pet peeve of mine, as it depends entirely on the specific modification.
In general, there is no evidence that GMO foods are hamful.
The dangers are several:
Big agricultural companies own the genes, and have the right to sue if you are found planting with seed that has their patent genes. If there’s a profit motive to sell patented seeds, “public domain” seeds become less available until proprietary is all you can find.
Big Agro does not create variety. If a Monsato creates a particlar strain of corn or wheat with a particular gene, odds are that single instance will be used to create the master seed stock. The result is a “monoculture”, the plant equivalent billions of heavily inbred siblings. If one is susceptible to a disease or pest, the whole state, midwest, or world will also be infected; destroying the crop possibly worldwide.
Genetics for plants is an unpredictable situation, like an equation in a million separate variables. Monkeying with one or more without understanding the consequences might have serious repercussions. Inserting a resistance to pesticide in a crop, for example - if that gene manages to get into other plants… not as likely as messing with bacteria, which should be definitely forbidden except in extreme lab situations.
The odds of problems are millions to one; but as we’ve seen with zebra mussels, with rabbits in Australia, asian carp - do we really want to put something alien into our environment? Who will clean things up if Monsanto has an oops?
What if it’s just something stupid, like the beta-carotene gets into the wild; and now you cannot have rice without an overdose of beta-carotene, and everyone turns orange? 
There’s nothing GMO about zebra mussels, rabbits or Asian carp.
There is, however, something alien about many other things we put into our environment every moment of every day: vehicles, disposable diapers, runoff from paper mills, etc. Oddly, I hear very few people advocating that we get rid of cars, and I’ve never heard “Franken-” tacked onto diapers or paper mills.
Go out to your nearest strip mall. Do you think that’s not alien to the environment?
The difference is strip malls don’t breed. The current plethora of strip malls in America wasn’t the result a single breeding pair of strip malls that was introduced in the 1800s.
Cite?
The thing is that plants and animals are always swapping DNA with other plants and animals. The differences with GMO is they are trying to control the genetic material being added. The “natural” plants and animals have DNA material added without controls.
Subject to correction from md2000 who was the one who originally made those comparisons, I think that s/he knows that. I think the point s/he was making was just the general observation that a slight tweak to an ecosystem can sometimes result in major knock-on effects.
No, unwittingly introducing catastrophically invasive species is not the same thing as genetically modifying agricultural organisms with biotechnology, but I think that what md2000 was trying to say is that both can have unintended and undesirable consequences.
Well, they’re long-established technologies that are now pretty thoroughly integrated into our economy and lifestyle. So even most people who are well aware of their environmental downsides don’t consider it rational to advocate prohibiting them.
Engineering transgenic commercial products in the form of introducing recombinant DNA directly into the genome of a different organism, on the other hand, is still pretty experimental in terms of its larger environmental effects. So you can see why some people would consider it cause for concern, even if they’re already resigned to accepting some environmental damage from established technologies like cars and paper mills.
The Human Genome Project has a convenient and, AFAICT, reasonably even-handed one page summary of pros and cons of transgenic food products.
Here is a list of things that as far as I know have not been established to be entirely without risk:
Birkenstocks
Vegan diet
Raw food diet
Tofu
Bicycles
Electric cars
Solar panels
Smug, self righteousness
Raves
Tattoos
Knit hats in the summer
You have ignored the risks inherent in polysyllabicism. As far as I can tell, the more syllables something has the more dangerous it is. Or maybe it’s just that the more dangerous you want something to sound the more syllables you use to describe it.
Flying
Driving
Crossing the street
(All, I suppose, entirely foreign to our “natural” environment. In that context, I guess maybe include: Climbing trees, swimming, chasing bears with spears, squatting over the wrong “bush” in the woods…)
I have no idea what point I was making, I just made myself giggle and now I’m pressing submit
Neither of which are *harmful *of course. So I can’t quite see the relevance to this thread.
All food crops are alien to the environment.
Are you proposing to outlaw agriculture on the grounds that it is dangerous?
Or perhaps you are a moderate Luddite who only wants to ban the growing of exotic food cultivars. People in North America can grow teosinte or dune daisies to their hearts content, but no maize or sunflower, and certainly no alien species such as wheat or potatoes.
This argument against introducing alien species always makes me giggle. *All *our food comes from alien species.
Anyway, to address the question, yes there have been a few papers on negative effects of GMOs.
The worst human affect that I have seen established was that a a few people suffered minor allergies due to GM foods.
The worst environmental effect that I have seen is that some non-target insects have been harmed from eating crop trash within a GM field.
The sheer inanity of these most severe problems is itself telling. This is a technology that is over 30 years old, and it has not caused a single injury requiring medical treatment or has any adverse environmental impacts outside of the fields specifcially set aside for it. Think about that for a second: in 30 years nobody has as much as cut themselves or stained a muscle due to this technology nor has a single mouse been killed or a single chemical spill occurred. That record means this is probably the single safest technological advancement in human history.
Contrast that safety record to just normal farming. How many people die every *week *due to food poisoning or allergic reactions caused by non-GM crops? Hundreds, with hundreds of thousands more hospitalised? How many people die from pesticide poisoning every week? Dozens, with thousands more suffering permanant health damage?
In contrast to other mundane technology, genetic engineering is almost unbelievably safe. I really can’t think of a single other human technology that hasn’t resulted in a single serious injury or any dispersed environmental damage in 3 decades. It’s almost inconceivable that any technology could be that safe.
Part of the known “harms” may be economic disparities: Things like terminator seeds generally benefit the big corporations more than poor farmers and Roundup-ready crops can increase reliance on imported pesticides at the expense of sacrificing farmers’ future self-determination. IMO, the business side of things is scarier than the science/health side of things. It can be argued that the farmers themselves chose short-term gain over long-term self-sustainability, but I don’t think it’s exactly noble to encourage this behavior.
Insofar as GMO crops encourage/enable modern industrial farming practices (heavy fertilizers, pesticides, monocrops, almost completely externalized inputs), they decrease biodiversity and could potentially harm the environment through habitat loss, runoff pollution, decreased resistance to disease, and increased reliance on fossil fuels. But blaming GMOs specifically for that would be just as unfair as, say, blaming mechanized machinery. They’re all part of a complex, potentially problematic system with no single culprit.
That said, it’s also worth taking into accounts the lives potentially saved (or the births made possible) thanks to increased yields from GMOs. The end result has generally been more usable crops grown in more areas. Whether those crops ultimately end up being a benefit to humanity (versus, say, being fed to livestock which then get made into less-healthy meat products), I don’t know, and I guess ultimately these things boil down to cost-benefit analyses dependent on the specifics.
Oh, and Kimstu’s link has a good list 