They can be both.
There is a spectrum of methods of changes and some of those methods can definitely be called special, in that they are new to humans and their side effects are not fully understood.
As for “nothing unsafe” - are you saying that the foods that were created that ended up being unsafe and therefore didn’t make it to market are “not unsafe”?
Furthermore, there isn’t enough study on new changes before they go to market to know that there are no long term effects.
Farin, one of the reasons I object to statements like the one you made is because scientists don’t even fully understand the inner workings of a cell and DNA etc. meaning the implications of changes may not be spotted.
A perfect example is something I read about earlier in the year which related to genes they didn’t understand and RNA - turns out there appears to be a network of communication/activation not previously recognized via genes that result in RNA instead of proteins, and that RNA appears to communicate with other genes.
Without fully understanding all the interactions in the cell, it would be pretty difficult to fully understand the implications of a change.
I think this is silly. The government also labels produce with their country of origin and no one thinks that an orange from Brazil is less healthy or more dangerous than an orange labeled from the USA. I think consumers ought to know if their plant has been purposely spliced with fish, reptile, human, or any other non-plant species. To keep consumers in the dark because you fear they might not buy your product is wrong and unethical.
I see nothing wrong with pork and find it quite tasty. It is nutritious, lean, a complete protein, and non-allergenic like some fruits, vegetables, and nuts. But people who practice Judaism or Islam do not eat it. Should we get rid of those labels? What about Halal meat where a priest says an imaginary prayer over the meat to an imaginary God, should we get rid of Halal labels as well? After all, it keeping those labels implies there is something wrong with meat that’s not Halal. It also implies that pork is not nutritious, safe, and tasty (especially bacon).
I don’t see how the status quo’s woo is any less reasonable than the requesting that genetically altered food have a label to indicate it is indeed a GMO. And, frankly, let’s not kid ourselves here. If the Bible were written today - Jesus, God, Martin Luther - would’ve outlawed that genetic engineering shit right in Leviticus in a verse that’d probably read something like “Thou shant eat of a plant that hath been spliced or combined with fish, foul, any animal with cloven hooves. It is unclean. So sayeth the Lord.”
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There is no logical classification by which you can put ‘non GM plants’ one one side, say they have been tested through time, and put GM foods on the other. If a plant with a novel gene is a new product, then it shouldn’t matter if the gene arises through mutation, hybridization, or genetic engineering.
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Sure you can. Throughout the rich human history of agriculture, you can’t find one example where humans have previously inserted fish genes into the chromosomes of plants. You can’t. The reason you can’t is because the technology to do so has only been available since the 1970’s.
The method to introduce genetic changes does nothing permanent to the plant except alter genes. The method itself is not going to leave anything in the GMO that makes it to your table.
If you mean “the changes themselves” and not the method used to get there, this is part of the extensive testing that GMOs undergo.
The actual safety of these changes was minimally challenged. For instance the soybean that was introduced with a brazil nut protein was tested and found to react in people with that allergy. Further research on this soy was abandoned and the project scrapped. The soy wasn’t “unsafe.” The company just didn’t want any potential liability down the road.
What long term effects are you envisioning? Because after around 30 years of rising GMO exposure, we haven’t managed to isolate any long term effects to date.
Unfortunately, there is no way to know “long term” problems without, of course, long term exposure – which you can’t do in a lab setting effectively. We see this same phenomenon with drugs. But those are a separate type of engineering.
Once again, the evidence points to the safety of GMOs even in the long term front. Sure, more research will be done and has to be done, but I do think it is not fair to claim that there isn’t enough study.
That’s not really true. You make a gene change and watch what it does over multiple life cycles of the plant. You take some of the plants and grind them down and look for possible toxins.
This gap in knowledge (how RNA and DNA interact specifically) is small. We already know that RNA and DNA interoperate. We understand what comes out of those interoperations fairly well. But, we are still discovering the hows of this interoperation. One thing that will not happen: You won’t get RNA to magic up something complex that the DNA doesn’t say to create protein-wise. The most it will do is insert what amounts to a “Reading error” (in either mitosis or protein creation) and modify the resultant protein in some fashion – which is almost always mutated into uselessness.
Look at it this way: Every time you stick a slab of meat on a fire, it comes out cooked. Even if you don’t understand what the cooking does you know that you go from raw to good eatin’s. Do we have to wait to eat that meat until we understand what the fire does, specifically?
For the million years or so of human and human-lineage history, the answer’s been “No.” I see no evidence that we should change this to “Yes” just because we went from a wood fire to a natural gas fire.
The ‘we need to do more studies’ is a tactic of cranks trying to stall until they get the results they want. (Or time to fake/cherry pick the results they want). See the anti-vaccine crowd for examples of this.
I understand your point and for now will assume it is true unless I investigate and find any questions by scientists surrounding this.
Having said that, I ask you “which method”? As of last year I saw 6 new methods they were trying to figure out how to handle.
1 - Which method?
2 - I thought I read some studies that did find material either in water or blood, but I need to go back and check to be sure.
Understood, but “extensive” is still relatively limited.
All of them fit this pattern?
I’ll have to do some checking to see if I can find data.
It’s pretty tough to isolate causes when things are severe, less severe issues could go unrealized for a long time.
My guess would be either be a susceptibility to some cancer or some impact on a fetus.
The goal of gene modification is to, 100% of the time, alter a genome in the exact way you wish with minimal interference. (e.g. insert a gene for glowing in the dark)
The multiple methods are many takes on ways to do this and more are developed all the time.
I’d be interested in finding those as well. Please share if you find something.
Perhaps you’ve addressed this, but what additional study would you want to see?
I haven’t heard of anything concrete, only “A is true and C is true, therefore speculation B could be true.” Such as last year, the “toxic chemicals” thing that was on the news which said that traces of the Cry1ab toxin could be found in people that ate GMO corn and that when this toxin was introduced in a lab setting to petri-dished cells, it caused the cells to die. Therefore, this protein could be causing cell death in people.
Assuming this is 100% true (it’s not), what testing would you undertake that would allow this to come to light? Would you like to increase animal testing?
What “less severe” issues, then? Mild allergies? What percentage of the population has to suffer from these issues before it’s considered “pull the product from the shelves” worthy? What parameters would we setup and tests would we follow through on?
But there is no way to test for cancerousness of any product without applying/feeding the product to a lot of people. Should we cage India or China and start the trials on them for our benefit?
As for the impact on a fetus, there is no above-board way to test that. That will only ever come via trial and error on the populace as a whole.
I think that if we did find some such allergy within GMOs, it would be reasonable to mandate labeling them, much like peanuts. However, here’s the thing - we haven’t. And according to the definition of “safe” we would use when applied to just about anything else, fallible or not, GMOs are demonstrated to be safe. Hell, there’s been more research into the safety of GMO food than into the safety of non-GMO food.
Farin, thanks for your responses, it’s refreshing to be able to have a nice calm discussion/exploration of the facts, logic and our opinions.
It sounds like you are saying something along the lines of:
Regardless of the method of modification to the dna, it always simply results in a change to a gene and through multiple generations of that crop, no side effects of the method itself remain other than the dna modification.
If so, I understand the argument and it seems valid. I was previously thinking about the first generation and forgot that, of course, these things go through multiple generations.
Having said that, the part of me that loves a challenge is going to investigate the various methods to figure out if there is some hole in that view.
I will check later, no time right now.
Regarding these questions of policy, my answer is:
I don’t know what my opinion is because I haven’t invested enough time in understanding the issues.
My involvement in this thread was related to blanket statements about GM foods being “safe”.
I disagree with the wording for the following reasons:
1 - Each new modification is a new event that requires testing - past history doesn’t necessarily tell us everything we need to know about new changes
2 - Testing is controlled by the companies creating the products and it is their responsibility to make sure the product is “safe”. Given the pressure to produce profits there is an inherent push towards the lower end of the scale regarding testing that is only partially countered by govt regulations.
3 - Long term testing of specific products is not required.
But, just to throw something out there regarding long term tests:
For products that are introducing things like anti-freeze (depending on the amount), it would seem logical to at least perform long term studies on animals prior to hitting the market.
Well, yes, I can see how you might object to “remnants” of methods to modify genes if they are doing so to the food on your plate right before you stick it in your mouth. In fact, I’d suggest you leave your surroundings quickly if that were happening. 
Get out, it’s coming from inside your house.
Though, once they have the gene modification they are looking for, they are grown and regrown. Even in the cases where they modify the seeds directly and those seeds are then planted I can’t see how, for instance, an ear of corn would be somehow contaminated by the method that was applied to the seed.
That’s part of the testing. The ultimate goal, of course, is money. If you modify a plant and the gene doesn’t “take” and the property you are trying to engineer doesn’t show up like you’d expect, you find that out through growing those seeds you tried to modify.
While it’s always getting better (the various “methods” available to you) it’s still not a guarantee that the modification you attempt to make make will A) actually get inserted into the cell B) at the right place and C) get fully expressed as wished.
Have fun? :dubious:
Most of the issues I’ve seen are distortions, exaggerations, and half-truths.
Each modification goes through about the same amount of testing. I don’t know the exact length of time, but I believe it’s somewhere in the 3-5 years range where they not only grow it multiple times to maturity, but check things like allergies and such.
There is. And I doubt many are opposed to regulations that provide protection without being draconian.
As I said, long term testing is hard to impossible.
That depends on the version of the antifreeze protein. Most of them are harmless and in such low concentrations that it wouldn’t both you. There are a few (like what was released in tomatoes briefly in the 90’s – but note that the FDA approved them despite studies showing it was bad for the test rats and over the objections of their advisory scientists) that are harmful, but most of them haven’t interacted harmfully with mammals.
Better, they discovered actual plant versions (As opposed to the fish-sourced ones used in tomatoes) in 2009 or 2010 that seem to be descended from antiviral and/or antifungal proteins. They are likely far safer to us, but they are still being tested (or were as of the middle of last year).
The discussion so far has seemed to be mostly sidetracked into areas that don’t matter. The key question with GMOs is how they are different from plants developed through older techniques.
So far, I haven’t heard any argument that GMO is substantially different. The technique is more precise and faster than older techniques, but that’s it.
Would you rather eat a plant developed by splicing a gene that we understand from one species, into the genome of another species, or would you prefer to eat a plant developed by exposing seeds to radiation or mutagenic chemicals and selecting the random changes that those produce, for desirable traits?
The gene splicing way seems less objectionable to me.
Some additional thoughts on the long term issue logic:
1 - We know that what we eat can alter gene expression.
2 - We also know that some gene expression or over-expression has been linked to various diseases.
3 - We also know that scientists are just now starting to understand much of these relationships in a very complex system, much more study is required.
So it’s entirely reasonable to conclude that introducing new proteins into our diet can have negative side effects in ways we don’t even fully understand yet.
1, yes. For two and three I have to question your understanding of the digestive system. These genes aren’t being inserted into humans for expression, and the proteins that are in the flesh are generally cut up by either acid or the bacteria in the gut.
In most cases proteins are rendered inert, biologically, by the digestive process. Through general diet (And not forcing them to drink a powder-and-water concoction full of your protein), it’s highly improbable that you would supply enough of the protein to survive the digestion and make it into the blood to also get to a target tissue in enough quantity to cause something akin to a gene expression disorder.
For a simple mental experiment, I ask: If you drink a cup of (your own) blood, do you add blood cells back to your body? No. All of the parts and pieces are broken down and their components are used by your body as building blocks for body functions.
There is no such thing as “anti-freeze” in any GM crop, nor has there ever been.
What you are referring to is introducing a gene for freeze tolerance into a normally frost-tender plant (i.e. a tomato).
Stating that “anti-freeze” has been introduced in such a plant is not only inaccurate, it is a loaded word meant to suggest toxicity. This sort of wordplay has been a staple of the antivax movement, which claims that “antifreeze” is present as a “toxin” in vaccines (in reality, there is no ethylene glycol or diethylene glycol (what is typically marketed as antifreeze for vehicles) in vaccines. There could be a minute amount of polyethylene glycol (PEG is a component of a detergent used to make cell membranes more permeable during the vaccine production process, which could occur in trace amounts in the finished product).
If you don’t link being compared to pseudoscience promoters, it would be advisable to stop employing their tactics.
Is any of this different for GMO crops versus crops developed by older techniques? I have yet to hear anything you’re saying that would support opposition to GMO specifically and not also apply to everything we’ve been doing with crops for the past 100 years.
Yeah, there is that comparison, and I feel as if we are endlessly discussing with Xeno telling us that Achilles will never get the turtle.
Taken to an extreme that paradox suggests that all movement is impossible, and so is this bizarre effort of in theory accepting that no danger has been found and that regardless the research and investigation done some can declare GMO dangerous because… we will never be absolutely sure that it is safe. But that is like Zeno showing that something finite can be divided an infinite number of times. It is nice to know but in practical terms (namely the evidence found) it is not a good reason to stop working and deploying GMOs.
So yeah, in theory Achilles will never get the turtle, but in practice Achilles will have GMO turtle soup by the end of the day. And he will more likely die of an arrow in this tendon rather than by the GM turtle.
#1 - Gene expression is altered by what we consume (epigenetics). I assume you aren’t saying this doesn’t happen?
Gene expression is altered by our bodies in response to what we consume, yes. It makes our omnivorous bodies more effective to express different types of enzymes in relation to diet.
Also, note that epigenetics is a complex dance between external stimuli (what we eat, what we see), internal stimuli (what our assessment of the external stimuli is - e.g. fear), proteins already produced (tired vs not tired), and genes themselves. How your body reacts to eating steak at 6 am is different to how your body reacts to eating steak at 6 pm.
Back to consumption: Few proteins survive the digestive process long enough to enter our blood. In addition, those that do enter our blood don’t have enough quantity to vastly alter expression of our body’s personal set of genes. Also note that gene expression tends to be analog and not digital: it takes a buildup of proteins and not just a single protein to flip most epigenetic switches.