I dunno, man, there has been a lot, both from within and outside the industry.
See, I’m curious what you’d mean by “truly prove”, because GMOs are pretty solid science.
Statement retracted. I was in a bad and partisan mood because I had been reading posts by Clothy again.
I’m just a big believer in not overstating what is known.
Some people use phrases and words that imply we are in 100% territory, which in my opinion is pretty ridiculous for most things. Shalmanese’s phrase is solidly in that territory of overstating what is known.
I don’t have a good answer for how to quantify the level of confidence, it may be extremely high, but we (scientists and humans) are constantly surprised by new knowledge.
This has me curious though, I’m going to poke around and see if I can come up with anything that might make us more cautious.
Which is a perfect argument from ignorance.
We don’t have the resources t prove anything. We don’t have the resources to prove that there isn’t a man-eating dragon in my garage.
Nonetheless, I am perfectly correct when I say that it is safe to enter my garage. Just because you can’t prove that there isn’t a man-eating dragon in my garage doesn’t oblige me to assume that there might be. In the total absence of any evidence of a dragon, I am perfectly justified in my assumption that there is no dragon, and in my statement that my garage is safe.
Though I don’t necessarily believe GMO foods are unhealthy, I see nothing wrong with being labeled as such. If people choose not to eat GMO foods, it’s a marketing problem not a labeling problem. My main issue with GMO foods is a scientific one. If you make every plant the same, you run the very real risk of a global food crisis,
We already waste half the food we produce. Why is growing even more a selling point? So we can use more energy, more pesticides and throw even more away? SE Asia loses up to 80% of its rice harvest. We need to use more energy and resources and grow even more?
I don’t have an opinion about GMO foods one way or the other. (At least, not here.) I just found his original comment eye-rollingly absurd, no matter how much it was “corrected” later. It indicates the sloppiest possible thinking about the topic, or at least the sloppiest connection between critical thinking and meaningful expression.
Do you also believe that, say, electric cars should be labelled with a warning on the dash saying “The American Cancer Society requires that all passengers be made aware that the air the are breathing has been in proximity to high voltage rechargeable batteries”?
After all, it’s perfectly true. Right? And labelling doesn’t make people think it might be dangerous. Right? And if air in electric cars doesn’t cause cancer, well that’s up to the manufacturers to educate the public on. Right?
And if people won;t drive electric cars because of such a label, well, that’s a marketing problem not a labeling problem.
Of course this is utter nonsense. The mere existence of a special government-mandated label implies that the product is unsafe. If it’s not suspected of being unsafe why have the label.
Now if you are saying that all ingredients should be labelled to the same level, I can get behind that. So that the label has to say " Hydroponic, grafted “Marshall” mandarin oranges treated with heptachlor" alongside “Roundup Ready oranges, untreated”. I am all for that. Anything else is demanding special labelling of GM, which of course implies a safety concern.
Ok, then answer this question:
Is it possible to create a GM food that has negative side-effects but passes testing?
You seem to be taking the position that it’s impossible.
I personally assume it’s very possible to create one and it’s possible it gets past testing.
If you think I’m wrong, please elaborate on why it’s either not possible to create, or why you think testing would always find it.
Blake, just some quick googling found the brazil nut soybean allergy thing (which was caught during testing) so that changes the question because we now have proof that side effects can happen.
The only remaining question is:
Is it possible for a side effect to get past testing?
If you think that’s impossible, please explain why you think that?
To the best of our knowledge based on an extensive (seriously, thousands of studies) body of research, these things are safe. Look, if you apply same standard to your computer, you wouldn’t use your computer. After all, there’s a chance that the CPU could cause it to explode. Unlikely, and by all the testing we’ve done it doesn’t happen, but we don’t know with 100% certainty. Because we never will. But what we can say is that they are safe beyond reasonable doubt. That’s the standard in science. Not 100% certainty.
No, it’s the correct stance based on the evidence. The mainstream, widespread GMO foods have all been tested to the point where it is beyond reasonable doubt that they are safe.
The other issue with labeling is that it would require a massive investment in infrastructure. Our system simply isn’t set up to manage two completely separate, parallel pipelines for what is essentially the same product. We cannot reasonably guarantee that any crop grown on a large scale is completely free of contamination, as the infamous StarLink corn incident demonstrated.
I chose my words carefully.
In everyday life, we use statements like “The drinking water here is safe to drink” or “bananas are safe for babies to eat” all the time without anyone quibbling or equivocating. We all understand exactly what that means and we’re willing to use our common sense definition of the term to move forward without controversy.
Yet, when we talk about GMOs, standards become arbitrarily higher and people expect statements to come laden with all sorts of caveats and careful phrasing because GMOs are the big bugaboo. This, as much as anything else, contributes to people’s unscientific apprehension of GMO.
Maybe 10 years ago, the equivocation or caveats may have been warranted but the science has developed to the point where the evidence is incontrovertible and the statement needs to further defense.
GMO is safe in the same way that you are safe from fan death and your kids are safe from satanic cults. GMO foods, available to consumers are safe to eat. It is a non-issue and you have better things to worry about.
They won’t all be the same. First, it’s impossible to prevent hybridization between most food crops. Second, even GMO strains will differ as they have to be adapted for differing latitutes, elevations and soil conditions.
All I want to know is when can I get a glow-in-the-dark cat.
Which is what happened in the Irish potato famine in the 1800s, when genetically identical plants all were struck down by the same pathogen. Wait, that was with a conventionally bred plant.
Which reinforces the idea that overdependence on one or a few grain or vegetable varieties, however they are bred, increases the risk of insects or diseases wiping out a large percentage of the crop. It’s not a GMO issue per se.
It’s been mentioned that testing has uncovered a potential health problem with a GM crop. Such was also the case with the conventionally bred Lenape potato in the 1960s, which had great disease resistance and made excellent potato chips, but which also made testers sick because of its unintentionally high solanine content.
And let us not forget the Killer Zucchini.
“…in New Zealand, there was an outbreak of food poisoning from a “killer zucchini” that hospitalized a number of people. Environmentalists jumped all over the story until it was determined that the culprit was “organic” zucchini. Plants are chemical factories that produce a multitude of toxins that protect them. An outbreak of aphid infestation had minimal impact on conventionally grown zucchini. The more vulnerable “organic” zucchini was genetically inferior because of inbreeding. They expressed dangerously high levels of the toxin curcubitan. Had this been a transgenic plant, we would be hearing about it ad nauseam, but being that it was “organic,” it was quickly consigned to an Orwellian memory hole.”
I’m sure you did, but even within a topic thread you should take care to make sure that such a sweeping statement has context.
Given the current testing methods, if a new change introduces a new protein, what test tells us human’s won’t have a problem with it?
Are the rat/chicken feed tests for 90 days enough to be sure a human won’t have a reaction to that protein?
I don’t think you actually understand this topic.
“the science has developed to the point where the evidence is incontrovertible”
This statement is completely wrong.
Every single change requires new testing because there is no science (yet) that allows us to model all of these interactions and chemical pathways.
Why do you think they test every single new change? Because currently it’s the only way to see the effects of that change, and testing is inherently not exhaustive.
I think the problem here is to make it sound like if the testing is outside the science or that there was not enough done in the past for the experts to be confident. Testing is an integral part of science BTW, the science is there when testing is done.
Organizations that do keep an eye on the issue report that the current efforts from industry at preventing issues and problems like the allergens are very good, but they also check and are flexible enough to intervene.
There will be always risks regarding new technology, but one wishes many others would had been investigated at the levels GMOs have been subjected already.
By this standard, it is dangerous to introduce, for example, new conventionally bred varieties of supersweet corn for table use, since the proteins generated by newly acquired genes have not been safety tested in humans.
I’m all for safety testing, especially if “new” proteins are considerably different from what’s occurred before in a food. But you’d think that if clinically significant changes in digestability or allergenicity were the consequence of genetic modification techniques in food production, we’d have seen some hint of it in the last 20 years.