Wow, you’re dismissing the book because you don’t like the recommendations of other books generated by Amazon’s algorithms on the same page?
I guess you don’t watch YouTube videos either if you don’t like the other videos YouTube suggests along with it. Twitter must also be a problem for you because it automatically suggests other people you might want to follow.
Do you refuse to read newspaper articles if you don’t like the ads alongside them?
That has to be the most utterly ridiculous reason for dismissing a book I’ve ever come across!
Yes of course, but “GMO” is commonly used to describe varieties produced through specific molecular techniques that target one or a few genes, as opposed to
“conventional” cross-breeding which is far more of a crapshoot and not demonstrably safer.
A good example of a non-sterile GMO crop is golden rice, seed of which is being made available to farmers to save and replant as they wish, without paying licensing fees.
As for “GMO Myths and Truths” - I haven’t read it, but I wouldn’t be too quick to embrace a book gushed over by such luminaries as Jane Goodall (who has called genetic modification “a monstrous crime against plants”) and Don Huber (who for years has been warning of a horrific pathogen allegedly spawned by glyphosate and glyphosate-resistant crops, causing widespread human disease and plant death. Except nobody but Don has ever been able to find this mystery pathogen and he has refused to provide samples to other researchers).
As for it being a “scientific book with a large number of references to peer-reviewed published scientific papers”, I’m reminded of “Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies”, which boasts of 400 studies supposedly showing how terrible vaccines are, but which are largely misinterpreted, irrelevant or outright bad science - while the author* admits he entirely left out the vast body of science supporting the safety and efficacy of vaccination.
who elsewhere claims to have communicated with extraterrestrials, going Jeffrey Smith* one better.
**Smith is a long-time prominent anti-GMOer whose “scientific” credentials include attending Maharishi University and the ability to levitate.
I cannot give a cite either but I heard the same claim that Broomstick stated.
It seems to me that essentially everything we eat (except for wild-caught fish) has been genetically modified over the past 10 millennia. The only difference is that the GMOs, so-called, have been modified by people who know what traits they are looking for rather than selecting random mutations. Also the GMOs have been studied for safety and the random ones not. However, one plausible objection is that often the chosen trait is resistance to certain poisons used to destroy weeds. It is those poisons that should concern us.
If you’re asking about the first sentence, there’s a Wikipedia article about the case that anyone who bothered to Google the name has found already. If you’re asking about the second sentence, then shame on you for asking for someone to prove a negative.
I’ve never heard of a single case where Monsanto or another agribiotech company sued a farmer over inadvertently growing a patented GM crop through “contamination”.*
“There is no documented instance of Monsanto or any other biotech seed company suing a farmer for unknowingly reusing patented seeds. Likewise, there have been no lawsuits over instances where GMO seeds blew onto a farm and germinated. However, Monsanto says it has filed 147 suits against farmers since 1997 (an average of eight per year, while Monsanto has licensing agreements with 325,000 US farmers) who have knowingly violated patent rights by saving seeds for replanting, despite being prohibited from doing so. Monsanto says only nine of those cases have gone to trial, with the company collecting more than $23 million from its targets.”
Besides the Schmeiser case, there was an Indiana soybean farmer who bought up soybeans at a grain elevator (most of which were likely to be GM) and planted them, raising a glyphosate-resistant crop without paying a fee to Monsanto. That case went all the way to the Supreme Court which found in favor of the company (Elena Kagan wrote the unanimous opinion).
You don’t have to be a fan of Monsanto (now a Bayer subsidiary) or any large corporation to recognize that some of its products are valuable. Unfortunately Monsanto has become a convenient bogeyman for anti-GMOers in much the same way that antivaxers try to demonize vaccines by associating them with Big Pharma.
*I’ve also never heard of a GM farmer suing an organically farming neighbor because pollen from the organic variety “contaminated” his GM crop and lessened its productivity/value. :dubious:
This Scientific American piece from 2013 presents a much more balanced (and accurate, I would argue) view than the GMO Myths and Truths book posted above. It even quotes David Schubert (one of the kvelling reviewers mentioned above) in a more balanced way.
A conclusion that satisfies the science as well as the fear (reasonable fear, that is):
Make a ball of dough with flour and water, knead it well, and let it rest a while. Then, put the dough ball under running water and wash the starch away. You’ll be left with a big ball of gluten, to eat to your heart’s content. Vegans call it mock duck.
I recall “gene-splicing”, an early bio-engineering technique - Recombinant DNA (rDNA), which has produced fluorescent GloFish as pets. Has anyone yet spliced eucalyptus genes into a canine genome for dogs that repel fleas?
Could some or many humans be badly affected by GMO foods? Sure - but that, and allergies, aren’t the only problems. Washing e.coli from harvested crops and culling diseased food animals can help.
Could inadequately tested GMOs wreak havoc on Earth’s biosphere or at least homo sapiens’ realm? Sure. Yet another path to extinction, YAPE! Asteroids, nukes, evolving diseases, nanoplastics, human-caused climate change, and now GMOs. We’re doomed.
USDA and assorted nations set various standards for organic certification. I recall controversies over USDA standards as too lax. Perhaps that is merely realism, that crops and creatures cannot be raised totally cleanly, just as “pure” foods may legally contain up to n% insect parts or droppings.
As mentioned, if you want GMO foods, buy cheap, uncertified stuff.
I’ll note that pesticides prevent many crops from being devoured by, y’know, PESTS. Cheap chemically-treated and GMO foods allow arrogant “organic” consumers to feel elevated, purified, better than the riff-raff surviving on pennies. My Quaker great-grandpa ate organic by trapping squirrels and picking wild fruits and berries. (Home-brewed his moonshine, too.) I see no commercial organic squirrel-pot pie marketed. Hey, there’s a product niche! I should start a GoFundMe campaign.
I posted a variant of this in another thread about GMOs and Monsanto. Basically, you can still be anti-GMO and anti-Monsanto even if there’s nothing inherently “bad” about genetically modified food crops or Roundup. Here’s the various important bits as I see them.
Genetically modified foods are generally safe for consumption, the same as selective breeds and hybrids.
GMOs are not the same thing as selective breeding and hybridization. It is either impossible or would take centuries to develop these type of crops via traditional means. GMO refers to using bacteria or specialized laboratory tools and other vectors to inject genes directly into the DNA of the plants to be modified. Genes from incompatible or even completely different species and kingdoms can be used in this way that is impossible with selective breeding.
Roundup is generally safe when used on food crops, with the possible exception of industrial-scale exposure.
The success of both genetically modified foods, whether Roundup-ready or for improved yields or other pest/herbicide resistance, increases monocultures as they become the “go-to” crops.
Monocultures lead to greater risk of widespread crop failure due to unexpected new pests and diseases, including those developing resistance to the herbicide/pesticide they were engineered against in the first place.
The patent system and licensing allows for external control of food crops by those providing the seeds rather than those growing it.
So overall the health and safety concerns seem to be mostly moot. That does not mean one has to support GMO crops and/or Monsanto because you can still oppose having one company be the gatekeeper, so to speak, of some of our most important foods. A very quick look suggests that Monsanto controls 80-90% of the GMO corn and soybean supply in the US, which is about 1/3 of all corn and soybeans grown. I’m surprised that the amount of GMO corn and soybeans aren’t higher, but within that group Monsanto is pretty close to a monopoly. At the same time, you don’t have to support the increase in monoculture that these crops encourage. Similarly, you may not support patenting genes or living organisms at all. It is kind of getting into the weeds of intellectual property rights, and our IP laws in the US are really going crazy (more so for copyright than patents, but they’re both far out of whack from their original intent).
I think this is the overall root of much of the resistance to GMOs in Europe. It’s not so much that they think they’re unsafe or even unhealthy per sé, but they don’t want to lose control of their own food production to a big corporation, and a foreign one at that. The benefits of GMO crops accrue mainly to the seed and herbicide suppliers, and less so to the farmers and the rest of the people. There might also be concerns about contamination of heirloom crops which are much more important than they are in the US (France is one of the most vociferous opponents to GMOs, which isn’t surprising as they don’t even like foreign words contaminating their language). I can certainly see skepticism in trusting a company like Monsanto trying to peddle their wares overseas, especially to cultures whose identities revolve around their foods. It’s also fair to say that it’s just too soon to know all the potential problems of GMOs, so a more conservative “wait and see” attitude is preferred over diving in head-first, future be damned. It’s not so much “anti science” as it’s “anti big foreign corporation factory farm profiteering.”
Some company produced tomato plants that would not be killed by roundup , I guess Monsanto. I assume they still sell those. Maybe it was not hard because roundup does not kill poison ivy so that may have been how they got the genes. You have to get special roundup to kill poison ivy.
It’s an easy “monopoly” to break - just come up with a crop variety that outperforms Monsanto’s - or is close enough in productivity so that cheaper seed is worthwhile.
There’s nothing stopping farmers from planting conventional bred grain crops or heirloom varieties*. Many jumped on the GM bandwagon because it made economic sense for them.
The idea that agrobiotech companies that developed GM crops are preventing farmers from saving their own seed and replanting it is farcical. Conventionally bred hybrids typically do not come true from seed, with subsequent generations performing more poorly than their parents, so farmers weren’t saving seed in pre-GMO days. It should also be noted that GM varieties were not the first to be patented - that was and is commonplace with conventional hybrids. Corporate control! :eek:
I agree that monoculture is a problem in modern agriculture, along with pesticide resistance, the latter having occurred with numerous chemicals (although some seem to think it’s unique to glyphosate). Such longstanding problems may have been exacerbated to some extent by dependence on genetically engineered crops, but they’re nothing new.
Meantime there’s great news from the Philippines, which is the first country with a vitamin A deficiency problem to approve genetically modified golden rice. This article notes that childhood deaths could be reduced by one-third. Bangladesh could be next to save lives and prevent blindness through cultivation of golden rice. And yes, the golden rice project was explicitly set up to allow farmers to save seed for replanting.
This hasn’t stopped Greenpeace, a bitter opponent of genetic modification technology from trying to get the Philippines approval overturned. Apparently dead kids are a small price to pay when you’re determined to eliminate GMOs.
*moaning about potential “contamination” of heirloom crops by GM crops seems silly to me if one accepts there are no health consequences. It’s not going to make a difference when a tiny bit of your Bloody Butcher corn harvest contains a gene for glyphosate resistance, if you’re not spraying glyphosate. And as I noted earlier, “contamination” runs both ways. If I’m growing a few rows of modern supersweet corn and some ears are wind-pollinated by my neighbor’s heirloom Golden Bantam corn, am I supposed to get upset and take him to court? Or make sure my crop is located far enough away to stay “pure”?
Long before transgenically altered crops, commonly referred to as GMOs, we were already genetically modifying crops not simply through selective breeding, but also through “mutation breeding”. Exposing plants and seeds to chemical agents and radiation sources in order to produce more random mutations has been around since the early 20th century, and is still being used. Look up “mutation breeding” or “atomic gardening”. We have no idea what all the results of the mutation(s) will be, and far less testing, if any, is done on mutation bred crops than with transgenic GMO crops. Canada seems to be one of the few countries that considers mutated crops and transgenic crops to both be GMOs. I find it rather illogical that few people seem to be afraid of eating food produced through untested random mutations, while GMO crops, with precise, limited, and planned genetic alterations are the boogeyman.
of intellectual property rights, and our IP laws in the US are really going crazy (more so for copyright than patents, but they’re both far out of whack from their original intent).