Moderator Note
We’re getting a bit off-topic here. Those who wish to have a more general discussion of GMOs should probably start a new thread. I recommend IMHO since a lot of opinions are being discussed.
For this thread, let’s focus on what is and isn’t possible with selective breeding vs. GMOs.
It has long struck me as odd that objections to ‘GMO’ foods mostly center on the controlled addition of known traits from other organisms, but I haven’t seen much fuss made over the randomly created strains of food crops from irradiated seeds. Does it involve humanity’s sometimes illogical risk-assessment impulses? We fear that giant corporations might deliberately select traits for food crops with nefarious intent, but we don’t fear the irradiation of seeds for random changes to crops’ traits because no one is consciously choosing the traits?
Anyway, if you want to experiment with irradiated seeds yourself, you can even buy them online!
Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds? Also, it OK to just use Gamma Rays to see the effect?
Sure. Just don’t make them angry.
Little children, Mandrake. Little children. They’re exposing little children to irradiated seeds and the hellish progeny thereof. I cannot stand idly by while this monstrous Commie plot unfolds against our nation …
With apologies to Stanly Kubrick and Sterling Hayden.
There are several natural causes for genetically modified/mutated organisms that have nothing to do with selective breeding. There may be others I have not heard of, but a few examples are:
The point to make for the OP is that yes, random causes - genetic errors, random or cosmic rays causing changes in genes, “swapping” with other sources like viruses, cross-pollination with close relatives - all these can change the genetic makeup of a plant (or animal). Then Mother Nature will determine if the change is viable, and perhaps even beneficial enough to propagate and dominate the species.
By using chemical means to insert whole segments of very foreign or engineered genetic changes, one can produce a significantly different organism that has not been through the process of genetic selection of each inddividual trait to weed out the problems.
Triticale or whatever may be very different from einkorn but each intermediate step has proven itself both in nature and in the market. We don’t know, for example, if goats that make spider silk or luminescent pets are a good idea, or if they ould be dangerous - but at the extreme, Planet of the Apes is very far-fetched but a good example of unintended consequence. Plants that produce insecticides may be acceptable if you don’t care if monarch butterflies live or dies. and so on…
Would it be OK to breed cats with real tiger stripes (very pretty) if it turned out that a double genetic dose of thse turned them into double-sized cats with a vicous killer streak? How many feral cats are out there? (Killer-bee cats with yellow stripes?)
My examples are silly, but the problem with completely new chimeras is we have no idea the consequences. One small change at a time - like Mother Nature, radiation, or selective breeding does - at least gives us an opportunity to see the incremental result.
Genetic engineering modification can make changes that those other processes will (almost) never produce.
These are important points. Nature (or humans using radiation or chemicals i.e. colchicine to create new mutations randomly) are examples of non-GMO jumps of genetic change that are unpredictable, and we can’t count on Nature benignly sorting things out over generations. Put another way: it’s possible to genetically modifiy organisms in a controlled fashion via gene insertion/modification that Nature can’t emulate.
Further, standard plant breeding has resulted in health hazards for which I know of no counterpart with genetically modified crops.
“Every form of plant breeding has unknown outcomes. Conventional breeding of wheat will result in a plant with about 3,000 alien genes. The breeder does not know where the vast majority of “alien” genes are or what they might express. This has been done safely for thousands of years. Sometimes the products of conventional breeding have to be withdrawn because of excessive production of toxins. Recent examples include potatoes, celery and squash.”
“…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.”
“For the last 70 years, we have been engaged in forms of mutation breeding either by using toxic, carcinogenic chemicals such as ethyl methane sulphonate or nitrogen mustard, or by radiation. This is truly “mutant” grub. Colchicine allowed for a variety of species crosses to add in resistant genes to grains to reduce the need for pesticides.”
http://uh.edu/~trdegreg/genetic_engineering_not_significantly.htm
This is a telling example of how people with vested interests make it more, not less, difficult to understand agricultural issues, such as those around GMOs.
20 years ago, 14 people in New Zealand got diarrhea from eating zucchini that tasted like cat pee. The media decided to call it “killer zucchini,” which was half right, since it was, indeed, zucchini. The fact that we don’t much talk about a dozen plus cases of runny poo from 20 years ago is apparently an “Orwellian memory hole,” to people who–I’m confused–want us to be more alarmist in our coverage of agricultural issues?
I certainly don’t advocate alarmism around GMOs. But the solution to such alarmism isn’t to raise nonsense issues about other aspects of agriculture.
That cite you offered is alarmist garbage, written by a guy who proclaims his affiliation with the greenscamming organization the American Council on Science and Health. Take his opinion-piece with a huge grain of salt.
The other point to ponder is that yes, we have not created a GMO armageddon… yet. We hold up as examples other instances of invasive species or crop management that have had unfortunate results. Ausrtalia can list a number of introduced plants and animals that the environment was not prepared for - rabbits, feral cats, poisonous toads, and even cattle have affected the environment. Zebra mussels, starlings, kuzdu, Asian carp, etc. have cause problems in North America.
Similarly, there have been plenty of cases where a disease jumps a barrier and attacks to cause major disaster. Most original grapevines were wiped out in Europe a century ago. The Potato Famine was a side effect of potato monoculture, the European crop was based on the small number of potatoes originally brought across from America - monoculture is bad.
This is something I don’t see mentioned enough. When a crop is modified, they don’t modify the hundreds of thousands of varied speciemens found in a typical field - they modify a few in the lab and then grow a ommercial quantity from those. Thus, a certain portion of the genetic pakage of the rops that result is close to identical across the entire population, which could make the GMO more susceptible to a virus or bacteria that targets that trait. With normal or even selective breeding, evolution has thousands of generations to evolve the variety to provide additional defenses and less susceptible variations.
There’s a certain irony in referring to that U. of Houston professor’s article as “alarmist garbage”, when one considers the diarrheal output of anti-GMO scaremongers.
I don’t see any refutation of the facts he cited. Unlike GMO crops, there have been instances where conventional bred vegetables have inadvertently caused illness. In addition to New Zealand, it’s happened in England.
But perhaps the Royal Horticultural Society has evil motives in acknowledging that such things have been known to happen, albeit rarely, when cross-breeding occurs in a “natural” fashion.
Sometimes it feels like we’ve been transported back in time to pre-2016 days, before the National Academies comprehensive review concluded in favor of GMO safety, like the huge body of scientific study that preceded it.
But why trust those guys? Betcha one of them owns stock in something-or-other.
Yes, the crops are safe to eat. Just because they are gentically modified, does not mean that eating something GMO will cause you to turn into a giant broccoli. As I’ve said, the problem is we are creating a whole new, subtly different potentially invasive species. What effect it might have - only time will tell. The more things we change, and the deeper the changes, the higher the risk of something turning adverse. Even greater risk if there is no control over who is allowed to do what.
We’re panicking today over AI that could end up being a convincing chatbot verision of your crazy paranoid Uncle Dave at the dinner table, complete with photoshopped fake news. We should be equally cautious over our world-wide food supply.
Numerous non-genetically modified plants have shown invasive behavior by being transported to new habitats where they’ve thrived. I don’t know of any GM plants that have proven invasive in the 40 years since the first such plant was introduced.
It’s also worth noting that many GMO crops inherently can’t become invasive and grow out of control. They’re engineered with what are called “terminator genes”, that ensure that the next generation’s seeds are sterile. Of course, the companies like Monsanto don’t include these genes for ecological reasons; they do it so farmers will have to keep on buying seed from them every year, rather than reserving a bit from each harvest to replant. But the effect is the same.
To my knowledge, “terminator gene” technology has never been commercialized.
It’s weird that anti-GMOers argue that GMO crops have terminator genes to make them sterile and screw over farmers, but simultaneously claim that GM varieties “contaminate” non-GM crops in adjacent fields.* Seems like a contradiction there.
*Oddly, you don’t hear of conventional crops “contaminating” GM crops, which could make them less valuable in terms of lower disease or herbicide resistance.
I’ll try not to get as far outside of FQ realm as that, but if you’re comfortable setting the bar for material you believe as “no worse than anti-GMO propaganda,” that itself says something.
Look again. Without “killer zucchini,” there’s no story there; and the zucchini weren’t killer. Other than the central fact of his kvetching, I suppose nothing else was refuted; but the central fact is false.
“Killer zucchini” was a fanciful term the media apparently dreamed up, but the fact remains: conventionally bred vegetables have (rarely) resulted in toxin content high enough to sicken people and even put them in the hospital. The same can’t be said for GM vegetables.
Attacking sources when one can’t be bothered to address or can’t refute the facts they present, is a long-standing problem on this board.
Yes: your source used fanciful terms, and doesn’t belong in FQ, in my opinion. The fact that other things he said weren’t wrong is a bit beside the point. A less inflammatory source surely could have been found for the correct claim that people have gotten sick from conventionally bred vegetables.
I presented a second source verifying illness from conventionally bred vegetables (Food Safety News, which cited the Royal Horticultural Society).
For some reason you are ignoring it.
Uh, because that one isn’t a bad cite, and because I agree with its less inflammatory and misleading claims?