You can’t talk to other posters this way outside The BBQ Pit. Don’t do it again.
Agreed, it is a different issue. I was challenging the specific notion that farmers with some windblown cross-pollination are targeted for lawsuits by Monsanto. This simply is not true, yet it’s a persistent meme nonetheless.
Here is what Schmeiser did, from the article you linked to:
Schmeiser did nothing wrong in having some Monsanto seed blow into his fields. This is beyond his control, as you note, and is not the basis of the suit.
Schmeiser realized that he had some Monsanto plants in his field, sprayed Roundup to kill the ones that were not, and replanted the seeds of the plants that were Roundup-resistant (the Monsanto ones).
Setting damages is up to the court, yes.
No, he didn’t. Schmeiser says this, but there’s nothing in the ruling of the court about destroying his seed, or having to prove that they don’t include Monsanto genes. He’s either lying about this to gain sympathy, or he’s mistaken.
No, mere cross-pollination does not:
The conclusion whose jumping-to may hurt us is the default conclusion that industry motivated for short-term profit will somehow magically concoct an ecosystem better than Mother Nature’s. If we “don’t know yet,” we should proceed with caution.
Of course, mankind has painted itself into a corner with its high population: Increased meddling with ecosystem is the only way to keep food on our tables. We’ve got to find a way to stop the vicious cycle.
We do proceed with caution, check out this report of the Congressional Research Service for some details. The approval process for GMOs is slow, expensive, and thorough, just like drug approval.
The default conclusion is that science is much better at discovering material truth than politics, gut feelings, and other forms of bullshittery are. Deciding before the fact that agribusiness is responsible for colony collapse and prohibiting GEOs isn’t far removed from blaming the local Jews for the Black Plague: substituting emotion for reason in the face of a dilemma best solved by reason.
Don’t irrationally hate the people who are feeding that population, then, unless your solution is to let a few billion starve to death.
Also, concocting an ecosystem better than Mother Nature’s is what mankind has been doing for thousands and thousands of years. None of the crops we grow or the livestock we raise is unmodified from its wild origins, compare this fruit to this one.
This topic is one of my pet peeves. Remediation may be low priority – if only because, as I suggested, we’ve “painted ourselves into a corner” already – but to blithely assume that GM poses no risks is the opposite of the lesson we should have learned from science by now – Surprises do happen!
Did you notice my concern wasn’t food safety, but long-term ecological problems?
AFAICT I expressed no hatred, so assume this is not directed at me. (We may need to agree to disagree about who is more irrational.)
Perhaps, if “better” is defined as supporting a larger human population.
But domestication has caused problems. Many serious human diseases did not affect humans prior to animal domestications. Agriculture has brought harmful changes: deforestation, loss of biodiversity, desertification in some cases. Etc.
To extrapolate from man’s primitive GM of thousands of years ago to assume advanced GM is safe is like saying “We took the last curve at 40 mph and stayed on the road; try the next one at 400 mph.” 
… But PLEASE, don’t respond “Nadder nadder nadder; Go back to the stone age!” My post is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive.
I’m far less worried about GM food than I am about the most recent (and very promising) developments in vaccines, using a synthetic virus to deliver vaccines.
The alarming part is that this synthetic vaccine is far more robust than natural ones (for storage) and won’t need refrigeration. Silly me wonders what safeguards are in place to keep this novelty from spreading to natural viruses, or this virus being repurposed from picking up other “features”.
Scares the bejeezus outta me. But at the same time, it’s so promising for human health. Yikes.
Mine too, it’s a minefield of ignorance, fear, and woo.
Who’s doing that? Where is all this assuming you rail against?
From what, too many people that need to eat, or from GMOs specifically?
Maybe so. Would you accept “antagonism”?
“Better” meant “more suitable for human use” to those engaged in the modification I referred to, yes. People were no fonder of starvation the ancient world than they are now.
TANSTAAFL. Everything with a benefit has a cost. Every human development has problems associated with it.
Again, no assuming is being done. If anything, modern GM is safer than ancient because it’s done through science, in the same way that modern drugs are safer than folk remedies and such.
Wasn’t planning on it.
Global birthrates are dropping; and as prosperity comes to more of the globe, they can be expected to drop further. The vicious cycle you speak of may end in our lifetime.
If you had stated that you’re worried about new crop varieties not being tested thoroughly enough, or monoculture crops being susceptible to a killer plant disease, then I would have sympathy with that.
What I don’t have sympathy for is someone railing against genetically modified crops in particular. Can you explain why you’re worried about GM, and not for example hybridized food crops?
Given that viruses don’t cross breed, I’m not sure how such a thing could even be possible.
Ummm. “natural” viruses already survive without refrigeration. Is there some other novelty that you’re worried about that wasn’t mentioned here?
A-ha! I get to post my first educational statement on the Dope! Some viruses can, in a sense, cross breed. The link acknowledges that the event is rare, but given the huge copy numbers you talk about when discussing viruses, even rare events can become statistically significant. Reassortment is the reason why we get different types of flu strains. In addition to real genetic mixing, you can also get coinfection (described in the first link) where two viruses infecting the same cell exchange proteins, resulting in a novel (though non-heritable) phenotype.
I think viruses may end up curing a great deal of diseases for us, but on this issue I advocate a much higher degree of caution than, say, GMO consumption. One of the desirable qualities in a viral therapy is evasion of immune response (such that more of the patient’s cells can become infected before the virus is cleared). This is exactly the phenotype that you don’t want being transferred to a lytic virus in the wild.
The last time I looked at recent developments in the field was a few years ago, but at the time I saw most of the work was done in Adenovirus, which is a DNA virus and therefore has a much more stable genome than flu. However, there is work being done on retroviral gene therapy, due to its obvious potential. Retroviruses mutate fast and are subject to the gene exchange mechanisms described in the link above.
In short, be excited about the potential for viral therapeutics but don’t be dismissive of the dangers either.
Not familiar with this particular OP, I take it?
In any case, I’m failing to see why this particular Act is supposed to have me quaking in my boots, or is evidence that Monsanto owns the souls of Washington (I know, impossible 'cause they don’t have any).
For one thing, the people who signed the petition and protested at the White House were directly calling on Obama not to sign it, and he chose to do so regardless.
Another issue is that I wanted to point out that this isn’t limited to one political party.
People on this site are already well aware of the corporate interests in the Republican party, I think. In this case, however, Monsanto has “friends” in both political parties.
That may or may not be so, but this law is a poor exemplar of it, as the beneficiaries are the* farmers*, who are protected from having to destroy approved crops they’ve planted, when that approval is later challenged.
The bill was signed on March 26th. Had it not been law, the government would have shut down on March 27th. Having the government close down is a big issue; having this law in place for six months? That’s a small issue. Thinking Obama should have vetoes this bill makes no sense at all. Seriously, get some perspective.
Don’t viruses exchange DNA fragments, though?
The antibiotics problem is the one that makes me wary of the modified virus idea. We keep finding out that these things are more complicated than we thought. And, sometimes, there are reasons that you might not be able to remove your mistakes.
How unlikely is this with GMOs? I don’t know. If we do make a mistake, how easily can we pull back? If farming is as well-regulated as it seems, it would not be too hard.