This is what you said, and what I was responding to:
The clear statement you’re making is “everything we eat has been genetically modified in some way, and always has been”. Even cooking is a form of genetic modification, you say. And since everything we eat is always in the class “genetically modified”, therefore everything in the class “genetically modified” is as safe as anything we’ve always eaten.
That is complete bullshit.
I refer you to the previously cited report from the US National Academy of Sciences, which states as follows:
Hazards associated with genetic modifications, specifically genetic engineering, do not fit into a simple dichotomy of genetic engineering versus nongenetic engineering breeding. Not only are many mechanisms common to both genetic engineering as a technique of genetic modification and conventional breeding, but also these techniques slightly overlap each other. Unintentional compositional changes in plants and animals are likely with all conventional and biotechnological breeding methods. The committee assessed the relative likelihood of compositional changes occurring from both genetic engineering and nongenetic engineering modification techniques and generated a continuum to express the potential for unintended compositional changes that reside in the specific products of the modification, regardless of whether the modification was intentional or not (Figure ES-1).
I’ve hyperlinked the figure so you can click on it. The relative risks are clearly indicated. If it’s your contention that a bioballistic gene gun injecting distantly related foreign transgenes into a food crop is exactly the equivalent of baking a potato, then you may want to seriously rethink that position.
No “upset” is involved. I find it misleading to cite the statement in suggesting the NAS has grave concerns about GMO safety, which has not been the case. And to repeat for those willfully not paying attention, citing only the NAS out of “expediency” (apparently defined here as "I don’t want to listen to anyone else) smacks of deception as well.
Please review previous posts for use of the shill gambit, hyperventilations on the malevolent role of industry (while ignoring non-industry validation of GMO safety) etc. etc.
So why give only anti-GMOers a pass on their nonsense?
To get a better idea of the top guns deployed by anti-GMOers to support their warnings of harm from GM foods, consider the case of Jeffrey Smith.
Smith is touted as one of the world’s “foremost experts” in genetic modification technology, though it is a bit hard to understand how he got to be one, based on his academic background (degree from Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa) and experience (ballroom dance instructor and practitioner of “yogic flying”):
Smith has written two books on alleged GMO dangers, including “Genetic Roulette” which is comprehensively dissected here.
But nobody is suggesting that the NAS has “grave concerns about GMO safety”. FFS, Jackmannii, you can’t keep acknowledging on the one hand that the statements in the NAS report are “reasonable”, and then complaining on the other hand that wolfpup is unreasonable for accurately describing what the NAS report says.
[QUOTE=Jackmannii]
Please review previous posts for use of the shill gambit, hyperventilations on the malevolent role of industry (while ignoring non-industry validation of GMO safety) etc. etc.
[/quote]
Where? Please give an instance of exact wording in a previous post that you think is objectionably anti-science.
Because at present, my best guess is that the board software is somehow applying a filter so you think you’re reading wolfpup’s posts but what you’re actually seeing is some anti-GMO glurge from Natural News.
[QUOTE=Jackmannii]
So why give only anti-GMOers a pass on their nonsense?
[/QUOTE]
Nobody here is giving anybody a pass on any nonsense. You, on the other hand, seem determined to go on dismissing wolfpup’s general attitude and approach as woo and crackpottery while being unable to rebut any specific statement he’s actually making.
What is to “rebut”? All we’ve seen is the pseudoscientific equivalent of Judy Tenuta saying “It could happen”.
I am still waiting for someone, anyone, to answer the OP’s question - “Has any harm been proven to be caused by GMO foods” with a specific example that they think constitutes harm.
But who here is defending or espousing the arguments of Jeffrey Smith?
Oh, that’s right, nobody. You’re just bringing him up as a pretext to lump people like Jeffrey Smith and wolfpup together as “anti-GMOers” who all deserve to be equally castigated for stupid and dishonest things that Jeffrey Smith says.
Wild fish and other seafood-species stocks have been modified in a way by humans; they’ve been subjected to decades or even thousands of years of selective fishing pressure… and those are the purely self-sustaining stocks.
I’m not sure if it’s still a common practice, but your wild-caught pacific salmon was likely bred, hatched, and released from an Alaskan hatchery in a process known as salmon ranching. It really is hard to not have an impact on our food species genetics, even when we try.
We’ve been over this stuff numerous times to beyond the point of boredom. Put whatever gloss on it you like; the reality is quite different.
He is widely quoted and praised in the anti-GMO movement - he is a leading face of the movement. So his shoddy arguments (some of which have been echoed here) are quite relevant.
As actual anti-GMO science doesn’t seem to be coming our way, here’s one more tactical diversion employed by anti-GMOers that is a favorite of wooists in general - “we need more research!”
Now who could argue with that? Of course more research on biotech crops’ efficacy and safety is both desirable and necessary. Just as more research needs to be published on vaccine safety and efficacy, climate change, water fluoridation etc.
However, what the deniers/pseudoskeptics are really protesting is that they do not like and will not accept the overwhelming science that runs counter to their beliefs (it is all somehow faulty or tainted by “bias” or industry connections (even when it clearly isn’t). By urging more research, they hope someone by whatever means will reach a conclusion they can cling to. Antivaxers have their “vaxed/non-vaxed” holy grail study, ethics and design problems notwithstanding. Perhaps anti-GMOers will similarly demand a decades-long prospective study comparing health outcomes among groups of people eating otherwise identical GM-containing and non-GM diets.
Even if someone could come up with the funding and ways to overcome the huge technical obstacles to such a trial and found no significant health differences, you can be sure that anti-GMOers would trot out shill arguments and various objections as to why the study was fatally flawed. It’s how these folks work. No science is acceptable if it runs counter to their beliefs.
(Emphasis added.) Okay, Jackmannii, now this is funny.
Not content with justifiably criticizing the idiotic and disingenuous arguments of anti-science “anti-GMOers”, not content with diverting a thread about actual GMO science to a litany of complaints about anti-GMOers’ dishonest tactics, not content with trying to broadbrush away all factual distinctions between actual anti-science anti-GMOers and rational pro-science advocates like wolfpup…
…you’re resorting to angry fulminations against hypothetical stupid and dishonest anti-science tactics that even actual stupid and dishonest anti-science anti-GMOers aren’t so far engaging in.
It has finally dawned on me that this level of obsessive antagonism is a plea for emotional support rather than rational engagement with complexity. Okay, you got it.
Yes, Jackmannii, it is indeed terrible and completely indefensible that actual anti-science anti-GMOers such as Jeffrey Smith and Natural News make stupid and dishonest unscientific claims about GMOs. Yes, it would be equally terrible and indefensible if such anti-GMOers were to demand that approval of GMOs should be dependent on the outcome of massively impractical large-scale longitudinal studies attempting to tightly control and compare the effects of GMO-including versus GMO-free diets on large numbers of subjects over the course of decades. We all promise you that if such studies are demanded in the future as a prerequisite for any approval of GMOs, we will not support such unreasonable demands.
Hope that helps.
Kimstu, thank you for once again providing a balanced perspective on this discussion and on what I was saying. Let me provide a quote here and see if Jackmannii wants to guess what “wooist anti-science crackpot” organization it came from:
“The risks in biotechnology are undeniable, and they stem from the unknowable in science and commerce. It is prudent to recognize and address those risks, not compound them by overly optimistic or foolhardy behaviour.”
They came from the editorial board of the journal Nature Biotechnology, part of the prestigious family of Nature journals. Now cue Jackmannii to claim that this is what he was saying all along, when it clearly has been the opposite.
Indeed it’s difficult to understand why quoting the positions of reputable scientific sources simply calling for reasonable prudence should elicit such a torrent of invectives from Jackmannii like “shill gambit”, “hyperventilations”, “pseudoscience”, “wooists”, “anti-science”, and the constant comparisons with anti-vaxers. This seems to me to be so intractably one-sided a position that it undermines its own credibility, because such fierce dogmatism raises fears that genuine risks will be overlooked or not acknowledged. Certainly no rational or balanced argument is going to attack the US National Academy of Sciences itself through some sort of innuendo that it hasn’t whitewashed the GMO issue with sufficient zeal. Yet that is exactly what we’ve just seen, to wit:
That is not what I meant by “expediency” and both that claim and the attempt to cast aspersions on the NAS are absolutely absurd. My previous cite about climate change showed an example of what an incontrovertible scientific consensus looks like, a simple definitive joint statement by the national science academies of the 34 leading nations of the world. The national academies are the relevant authorities because they are constituted for the explicit purpose of providing independent, authoritative public policy guidance on matters of science. Expediency here meant that it was impractical for me to research the individual position papers of all 34 national institutions, if such papers even existed, and since the US National Academy of Sciences is among the most prominent of them and of impeccable scientific standing, it seemed like a good choice.
But for the record, I took the time to look at another one. Moving closer to home, I looked at a study that was done by the Royal Society of Canada, the equivalent of the US National Academy of Sciences. The report was called Elements of Precaution: Recommendations for the Regulation of Food Biotechnology in Canada prepared for the federal government (jointly for Health Canada, the Canada Food Inspection Agency, and Environment Canada). Suffice it to say that in contrast to the 7 recommendation made by the NAS report as prerequisites for ensuring GMO food safety, the Royal Society consensus report makes no fewer than 53 such recommendations.
Among them is the recommendation to “reject the use of ‘substantial equivalence’ as a decision threshold to exempt new GM products from rigorous safety assessments on the basis of superficial similarities because such a regulatory procedure is not a precautionary assignment of the burden of proof.” There is a whole series of recommendations concerning rigorous testing and regulation and a call for independent external peer reviews untainted by industry, including one specific recommendation “… that the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Commission (CBAC) undertake a review of the problems related to the increasing domination of the public research agenda by private, commercial interests, and make recommendations for public policies that promote and protect fully independent research on the health and environmental risks of agricultural biotechnology.” (I guess that last one would be the Royal Society of Canada engaging in what Jackmannii calls the “shill gambit”!)
Kimstu, I think the problem is with statements like this:
In a thread asking for proof of GMO harm the above statement has no place and is misleading. That GMO is supported by companies that wolfpup deems to be discreditable has no bearing on GMO. Those companies likewise support that people should eat their vegetables and we’re not questioning that advice. The only purpose of the statement is to try to lend support for “GMO bad” without having any actual evidence.
If one has evidence, bring it on. Don’t bother with baseless sinister insinuations.
I was interested in exactly where that quote comes from, so I plugged it into a Google search box.
The only links to come up were anti-GMO websites, including this one from the “National Health Federation”, which reprints it as part of Jeffrey Smith’s testimony before a Vermont legislative committee. You know, that Jeffrey Smith who Kimstu told us was irrelevant to the discussion and who I shouldn’t have mentioned earlier.
The National Health Federation is an alt med lobbying group based in California which boasts of its anti-water fluoridation and pro-dietary supplement efforts (including helping to pass DSHEA, the federal legislation which prevents effective FDA oversight of the supplement industry).
Apart from anti-GMO sources like this (which also include blogs like prophet666doom) I don’t get links to any original paper or editorial by Nature Biotechnology, so context is still lacking.
One would get the impression from wolfpup that Nature Biotechnology is quite worried about negative impact from GM foods. Readers might be interested in this editorial from the journal dealing with public suspicions about genetically modified foods.
*"…a key aim in overcoming negative perceptions about GM products should be to focus on crops addressing consumer needs as well as producer needs, which cannot be produced via other means.
In the Philippines, beta carotene–enriched Golden Rice is currently being prepared for regulatory submission. Golden Rice can provide a useful adjunct to diets in areas like the Philippines, where lack of vitamin A frequently causes blindness, simply because alternative vitamin A supplements are a never-ending expense for families. In contrast, the benefits of Bt brinjal for Filipino consumers are equivocal (p. 777).*
In the 1990s, pioneering efforts led to the creation of two disease-resistant varieties of GM papaya in Hawaii, where the non-GM crop was almost wiped out by ringspot virus. Today, these comprise ~80% of the harvest. If genetic modification had not been available, papaya fruit would likely have disappeared from Hawaii, and consumers would have been affected.
A recent story in The New York Times (July 27, 2013) outlined a similar scenario unfolding in the orange groves of Florida, where the harvest is being threatened by citrus greening disease. Genetic modification is currently the only feasible route to create resistance. Until recently, growers had rejected GM oranges for fear of a consumer backlash. But reluctance has dwindled as they have been confronted with the possibility of having no oranges left to grow. Presumably, if OJ becomes a rarer and more expensive commodity in supermarkets, consumer attitudes to GM oranges may change, too.
Public perception of GM food will not become more positive overnight. But as more products meet unmet needs, small victories may be won. In the end, necessity may turn out to be the mother of acceptance."*
I feel it’s important to point out that there’s a big difference between asking “Are GMO foods unhealthy to eat?” vs. asking “Are GMO foods bad for the environment?”. When people started asking for Dolphin-safe tuna, it wasn’t because we thought it would have more vitamins in it. Similarly, a logical person could say “There’s no proof that GMOs are unhealthy to eat” and still think that GMO farming is a bad idea because of the long-term effect that it could have on the environment. For example, if you are concerned that giving patents on GMO crops to huge companies like Monsanto will decrease biological diversity, making our food supply more vulnerable to unforeseen pests or diseases, then you might oppose GMO on that basis. FWIW, this is the point of view taken by Bill Nye (the Science Guy) and I agree with him. And yes I’m aware that this same criticism also applies to non-GMO crops. Any system which decreases biodiversity carries this danger with it.
Also, there’s a world of difference between asking “Has harm been proven?” vs. asking “Is there a significant risk of harm in the future?”. Suppose I see an 8-year-old girl playing with a box of matches, right next to a haystack leaned up against a barn, and I tell her to stop. If she replies “I haven’t caused any harm”, that answer won’t satisfy me.
But that’s completely cherry-picking two sentences, out of hundreds, to give the false impression that wolfpup is trying to insinuate unspecified harms caused by GMOs.
Which is directly contradicted by the sentences immediately following the ones you quoted above:
Moreover, he’s stated over and over again that he fully recognizes that there’s no scientific evidence for any such harms:
I am honestly shocked that a position like “There is no known evidence for any harms caused by GMO foods, but we should continue to scrutinize their future development carefully because they provide powerful financial incentives for influential and unscrupulous interests to misrepresent their safety” is apparently too nuanced for some posters in a GQ SDMB thread to understand.
This is seriously starting to look like some kind of witch hunt. wolfpup has committed the thoughtcrime of taking seriously specific questions about estimates of the relative and/or potential risks of GMOs and potential industry incentives to misrepresent such risks. So, even though he is quite honest about acknowledging that no actual evidence of GMO harms or suppression of unfavorable data exists, he must be punished by being indiscriminately lumped together with anti-science liars and deniers of the most disreputable sort.
If you read the OP a little further than just the question, there is also a comment about “woo and panic” and “not a lot of real science” and a question about the difference between simple selective breeding and GM. So it seemed to me that the OP was asking about more than just the simple question that is the thread title. I’ve tried to address those things. My apologies if I’ve taken the subject beyond what the OP was asking.
With regard to the statement being “misleading”, I would point you to one of the recommendations in the above-cited Royal Society of Canada report on the regulation of food biotechnology in Canada (emphasis mine):
The Panel recommends that the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Commission (CBAC) undertake a review of the problems related to the increasing domination of the public research agenda by private, commercial interests, and make recommendations for public policies that promote and protect fully independent research on the health and environmental risks of agricultural biotechnology.
Is that “misleading”, too? There is a very valid concern about the undue influence of commercial interests over public policy and public safety, and nowhere more so than in the US.
Again, you may have missed a previous comment, most notably this one:
“The risks in biotechnology are undeniable, and they stem from the unknowable in science and commerce. It is prudent to recognize and address those risks, not compound them by overly optimistic or foolhardy behaviour.”
– the editorial board of Nature Biotechnology
Both the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada support this position and have identified and rated specific risk factors and between them made 60 specific recommendations to assure the safety of GM foods. This chart from the NAS is one such risk factor assessment.
Has either question actually been answered in this thread? I see a lot of hostile language going back and forth, but the actual concrete factual answers seem lacking.
Wow, and this comes from someone accusing me of dishonest tactics because I cite concerns about the indisputable strong commercial incentives to promote GMO! What are you suggesting? That I made the quote up? That it’s discredited by the fact that biased advocacy groups are using it? Or what?
Much of the Nature and affiliated journal content is behind a firewall so you wouldn’t find it with Google or be able to access it without an account. But that particular quote is at the head of Chapter 1 of the previously cited and linked Royal Society of Canada report prepared for the federal government on the regulation of food biotechnology. Want context? Read the report. The authors seem to feel that the quote sets the theme for everything that follows.
And by the way, thank you for accusing me of only citing the US National Academy of Sciences, which didn’t whitewash the GMO issue sufficiently for your satisfaction. Looking a bit further, it turns out that other national bodies have taken even stronger positions on the precautionary principle and the need for stringent regulation. Gee, maybe the reason the EU has GMO labeling requirements and stronger food regulations in general isn’t actually because everyone in Europe is an anti-science dimwit!
Okay, Jackmannii, now this is funny.