It was a bad idea because they called it The Terminator Gene. If they had called it Seedless Wheat, we’d all be eating it today.
Are you familiar with laws forbidding the cutting of roses? That’s one specific example.
I don’t know – and I don’t even really give a shit – whether that’s an “IP” rule or not. It is a rule, enforced as law, and it prevents the propogation of plants.
There were proposals, early on in the GMO debate, for crop plants to be protected, both in this way and by genetic expiration codes.
These were bad ideas, and have by and large not been implemented.
Your pedantry is not helpful here. Please stop.
This is often a distinction without difference. Say you have two seeds with the exact same genetic material; one was created accidentally by cross-breeding many seeds and the other explicitly created via modern GMO technology. Why should one be labeled differently from the other, especially if the modern one was tested more extensively than the first?
There isn’t any possibility of “seedlessness” migrating to other plants. There is a possibility of a “suicide gene” doing so.
The emotoin. Even the bacteria to the plant transfer it is not unknown in nature.
It is even more relevant to note that contrary to the assertion the active chemical of the herbicide - the glyphosate - has not been found to be carcenogenic by the European - that is “fake news claim”
of course since the product has existed since the 1970s it is not novel…
Correct there is no such wheat in commercial usage at all. It is the soybean, the corn…
So virtually no correct facts at all.
but I am sure the minds will not be changed by their errors being noted.
By definition, there is no such possibility, since any such individual wouldn’t reproduce and the gene couldn’t spread. That was the whole goal of creating the sterility sequence in the first place.
Absolutely there’s a difference between the current methods of modifying crops and the old methods. But the thing is, the difference goes the other way from what the anti-GMO crowd says. The old method is riskier and more poorly studied. So if you’re going to take a side based on safety, logically it should be in favor of the modern methods.
As for the argument about not trusting the big agribusinesses, that gets back to what I said before about asking for what you actually want. I don’t trust Monsanto with gene-splicing, but then, I don’t trust them with cross-breeding, either. If there were labeling for Monsanto-free food, I’d be willing to pay extra for it. Maybe also for Archer Daniels Midlands. But there are plenty of other companies I do trust with gene-splicing, just like there are plenty I trust with cross-breeding.
Or the radiological bombardment, it is a I am sure nice and pure and should be loved. It is only in use since the 1920s…
or the chemical induced mutagenics since the
none of this is labelled.
yeah, but are they?
See, that’s the point many I have talked to are making. These companies aren’t doing genetic modifications to make better tasting or more nutritious food. They’re trying to making farming easier and more profitable. Many, including myself do not trust these companies to have the consumers best interest at heart. Just because what they’ve done in the past seems to be nothing more than crop husbandry sped up, doesn’t mean that it will always be. CRISPR and other technologies are making it theoretically possible to create types of plants and animals that are impossible by other means. And nobody is certain of the long term implications to health and environment. Labeling is just the start of the vigilance I believe is required in this field. Regulation and oversight by disinterested parties should be considered as well.
mc
and labeling doesn’t have to occur at point of sale. we have this great information dispensing mechanism at our disposal (interwebs!) Maybe just requiring complete transparency from companies or a govt run database is a better approach
That’s an example of what? Of genetically modified organisms? Of terminator gene technology? Of “copyright” law?
Why don’t you care? Isn’t this site about fighting ignorance? Doesn’t it matter if the specific problem you’re complaining about has anything to do with the cause that you’re identifying?
What hasn’t been implemented? It is very common for plant varieties to be protected, under the Patent Act and under the Plant Patent Act of 1930 and the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970.
So plant variety protection has not only been implemented, but the implementation happened nearly 90 years ago.
And genetically modified organisms have been protected under the Patent Act since at least 1972, when the Supreme Court ruled in Diamond v. Chakrabarty that Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty could claim patent protection for an oil-spill-eating bacteria that he created through genetic engineering.
So what exactly is the bad idea that hasn’t been implemented?
No, I don’t think so. My pedantry, as you call it, is trying to get you to clarify exactly what problem you’re identifying and what you think the source of that problem is.
So far you’ve jumbled up genetic modification of plants, terminator genes, “copyrights,” and failed proposals to do something or other that is still not clear to me, because some of the things you seem to be identifying as rejected proposals don’t seem in fact to have been rejected because they are part of current science, commerce, and law.
And you very much should care about the distinctions because if you’re criticizing something, you should be able to identify what it is you’re criticizing. If you can’t identify the source of the problem, how can you advocate against it?
If the problem is the idea of a terminator gene, then “copyrighted crops” or any kind of intellectual property law isn’t the source of that problem, and at least in part because some of the things you seem to be describing don’t actually exist.
That does not make sense. If Farmer John is growing the commercial version next to Farmer Lou who is growing the heritage crop, the commercial crop will still produce pollen that will almost certainly find its way from John’s field to Lou’s. The terminator gene will get mixed into the heritage crop, eventually causing a successive planting to fail. You may make a plant sterile, but that will not stop it from going through the reproductive cycle.
Which may be largely moot. If AgriCorp holds a patent on that crop, Farmer Lou is legally prohibited from growing it as a heritage crop from saved seeds (this is a WTO rule that crosses all borders and is not subject to any kind of democratic review).
This is incorrect. The plants weren’t sterile, but had a sterility factor that could be triggered.
The concern was that the sterility factor could migrate, and that it could be triggered wrongly.
THis is a distortion fiction made by people who do not understand the Trade related IP rules. and who mix the idea of the contracts of seed buying and usage incoherently into the discussion.
no you are incorrect in your correction. the primary thing meant by the ‘terminator gene’ is a genetic modification that leads to the effective second generation sterility of seeds. It is inherent there is no triggering. you are confused, possibly with an alternative approach of the chemical turn on the desirable trait with a post growth chemical enactor.
no that it could migrate and create by transference in a potential polination sterilities.
there is no ‘triggering’ for the sterility
Yes. So why should they be labeled differently?
The science is conclusive: GMO food is just as safe as “natural” food and is a great boon. The arguments against GMO are similar in substance to global warming skeptics.
“Literally” has a couple of meanings. Whichever you prefer, your sentence is uncontroversially, insultingly, and obviously wrong. I’ll dispense with the rest of your post unless and until you care to fix this error.
To be fair, objecting to patenting living things predates GMOs, I believe. It is possible that many people object to GMOs for different reasons, and for some of those reasons to be scientifically inaccurate while others are not.
If the methodology is different, it’s theoretically possible for there to be a significant difference in results. There are two routes I might take from home to work. Last year I tried the second route, compared to the old route I’d been taking for years. Google Maps shows that they take the same amount of time, but until I drove them both multiple times and found that they really were similar, I allowed the possibility that one route would have some unforeseen trickiness to it (e.g., worse traffic at the exact time I was going to work). Turns out, there’s a distinction without a difference between these routes, but I only was reassured about that after extensive testing.
Again: THE SCIENCE IS IN AT THIS POINT. In the mid-nineties, it was not.
Now? Yes. A quarter century ago? No: at that point, one method had been tested for ten thousand years, and the second method had been tested for less than a decade.
I see your point, so let me try to answer it from my perspective. Take a look at this chart, which is from a National Academy of Sciences report on GMOs. The scale at the bottom is the relative likelihood of unintended consequences in a GM product according to the method of genetic modification.
If you take a technique like somatic hybridization as the approximate mid-point of the risk continuum, some interesting conclusions emerge. One observation is that at least one genetic engineering biotechnology – agrobacterium-mediated DNA transfer from closely related species – is well within the same extremely low-risk spectrum as conventional techniques like selective and cross breeding. Another observation is that mutation breeding through chemical mutagenesis or ionizing radiation – a technique that is considered “conventional” and not GE – is the highest of all on the risk scale, simply because the resulting modifications are uncontrolled and random. So one might question what it is about GE – genetic engineering – that is thought to pose risks.
And I would suggest that first of all the term we should be using is “potential risks”, because it’s pretty well established that the GMOs presently in the food supply are as safe as anything else, and in some cases perhaps safer, though I can’t speak to the environmental impacts of GM crops. But the crucial point from that chart is that risk is seen to increase with the introduction of DNA from more distantly related species, and biotechnology is exceptionally powerful at doing this in ways that could never occur in nature, and getting more sophisticated all the time. Indeed the likelihood of unintended consequences starts to become non-trivial at around the level of somatic hybridization, whose advantage over conventional genetic hybridization is touted to be precisely the ability to force hybridization beyond the natural compatibility limits of conventional cross-breeding. It does this by forcing the fusion of cells that may be well outside the original taxonomic family. Boilistic and agrobacterium DNA transfers from distantly related species are assessed to have even higher potential for unintended consequences, and who knows what advanced techniques will yet be developed that overcome even more natural barriers.
The power of biotechnology becomes worrisome given the track records of big agribusinesses and the food industry, and the degree to which their PR machines and lobbyists control public perceptions and public policy. It may be fashionable for the organic granola crowd to hate Monsanto, for instance, but that doesn’t change the fact of their aggressive and well-funded PR and lobbying which is on a par with what we used to associate with the worst of the tobacco companies, and with Exxon Mobil on climate change denial back in the days of Lee Raymond. I concur with government advisory reports and scientific studies that urge prudent caution as we move forward with biotechnology, and in particular, responsible oversight and regulation of these businesses with a view to transparency and full disclosure. A starting point would be the recommendations in this document [PDF] from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, recommending among other things a mandatory pre-market approval process at the FDA and science-based assessment and regulation of the environmental impacts of GE crops and the prevention of pesticide resistance in pests and weeds.
Possibly. I did some Googling and found quotes such as this:
To me, that sounds like triggered sterility.
In any case…all I really had to say on the matter was in my first post. The well was poisoned, early on, by companies such as Monsanto making this kind of thing known. It led many of us to have early worries about GMO foods. I’m none too happy having to rely upon a promise by a major chemicals corporation…
If there are 2 automobiles that are exactly the same and one is made in detroit and one is made in mexico, why should they be labeled differently? It’s so the consumer has the info. And there are many more than just safety concerns in this issue (as others have pointed out.) Why shouldn’t they be labeled differently?
mc
Like sevenwood noted, Roundup costs more per pound than wheat, spraying it on a wheat crop to increase weight is ridiculous. In the reportedly rare cases Roundup is sprayed on wheat as a dessicant to speed up harvest, the whole point is to kill the wheat plant - which makes the conflation of “roundup-ready” and “spraying Roundup on wheat” pretty bogus. If it was Roundup ready wheat, it wouldn’t be killed by spraying it with Roundup, so they wouldn’t be doing that anyway.
The labeling issue sounds logical, but the whole point is to create a Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt cloud over GMO. To be rational and thorough, every risk associated with the food should be printed on the package. In a font size proportional to the annual deaths per year - so big font for pesticides and bacteria contamination risks, smaller for allergy or other risks, and apparently 0 size font for GMO so far. I’d guess most foods would probably have “choking hazard” as the largest warning though.