The pretense that Nature Biotechnology is all hyped about the risks of GMOs was demolished here long ago (though not as long ago as the editorial you cite, which is from 2000). But thanks for bringing up the journal again, since it provides an opportunity to cite their position on GMO labeling*.
*"Proponents of mandatory labels for genetically modified (GM) food in the United States claim to be motivated by the interests of the consumer. They argue that labeling all foods as “may contain GMO” or “GM-free” would help consumers understand what they eat. GM labels, they say, would also give greater choice, allowing consumers to avoid GM products.
In reality, though, the campaigns to introduce labeling legislation in US state legislatures are not about consumer choice or information. Labels are veiled attempts to stigmatize GM food and its producers, based on an ideological repugnance for genetic engineering. They are designed to scare mainstream consumers away from GM products. Simply put, labeling proponents are GM food opponents. And this is a scheme to purge GM products from the US market."*
Here’s more on abuse of the precautionary principle.
*meantime, the food industry continues to handle GMO labeling quite well on its own without government mandates, as there’s a plethora of products labeled “non-GMO” and “organic” available to consumers. My current favorite is Hellmann’s Organic Mayonnaise. Slather that on your sandwich and it’s got to be healthier for you than the non-organic alternative made from GMO oil, GMO vinegar and GMO eggs (which undoubtedly come from an Entirely New Freaking Species).
Then we must be talking about different things. I’m talking about the move to label GMO products. Pure anti-science hysteria.
Who says that evil lobbyists are going to misuse the information? The main objection is the fact that the anti-science people want to use GMO labeling as a scarlet letter.
Seems to me that you and Steve Novella suffer from delusions about demolitions that have never actually occurred. I recall you claiming that the Nature Biotechnology quote was taken out of context because it wasn’t even about food – though the quote headlines the Royal Society of Canada report titled Elements of Precaution: Recommendations for the Regulation of Food Biotechnology in Canada.
Nice strawman. You apparently missed the part where I said in #176 that “I find myself actually much less concerned about absence of GMO labeling than about the reasons for it.” Because the ability of the industry to control the regulatory agenda does not bode well for the future.
Here … it couldn’t be more clear that the intent is to suppress GMO information lest it be used by the enemy for undesirable purposes, despite the fact that 93% of Americans want that information (Runge et. al, 2015), and everyone in the EU and many other countries is already entitled to it by law:
The point you’re again trying to dodge is that Nature Biotechnology is not anti-GMO, any more than the Royal Society of Canada is. Throwing out a 16-year-old quote that does not pertain to GMO foods (regardless of who cited it out of context) does not advance honest debate.
Perhaps you need more examples of where Nature Biotechnology currently stands on GMOs? Here you go (they actually pertain to GM food).
These days you’d have difficulty finding any respected scientific institution that is motivated by science (rather than ideology) and which still promotes fearfulness of genetic modification technology.
Argumentum ad populum.
A recent university poll found that 82% of Americans surveyed want labeling of GM foods; at the same time 80% wanted labeling of foods containing DNA.
So do we also give in to the stupidity of labeling DNA-containing foods? What will be left for the poor buggers to eat?
Even though the National Academy of Sciences committee report exonerates GM foods from charges that they cause all manner of diseases and pronounces them safe to eat (much to the chagrin of anti-GMOers), it turns out that the NAS (and the large body of scientific work it reviewed) can be safely ignored, because, you know, Corporate Influence.
The group Food & Water Watch has taken time out from its battle against water fluoridation to publish a searing indictment of the NAS, summarized here.* Obviously the NAS cannot be trusted, and it is shocking that anyone here considered them the ultimate authority when it comes to GM foods.
*don’t miss the sidebar article by antivaxer Mark Hyman, “8 Tips For A Successful Detox”.
And I’m not “anti-GMO” either. Your feigned lack of comprehension is tiring and does not advance honest debate. And yes, it does very much matter who allegedly “cited it out of context”, because the folks who cited the quote were the panel of biotechnology experts who authored the Royal Society of Canada report on GM food safety. Every time you say it was used “out of context”, you put yourself in direct opposition to an internationally acclaimed panel of experts. It’s amusing that you think this is an argument that you can win, or that it’s “honest debate”.
First of all, arguing in support of GMOs or biotech in general or whatever is not the same as advocating prudence and the precautionary principle. There are some bad arguments and beliefs about GMOs and there’s nothing wrong with setting the record straight. But this is probably about the hundredth time you’ve tried to dismiss the advocacy of prudence with yet another strawman of “look, these guys affirm that GMOs are safe” which has never been in dispute as a reasonably established fact about today’s GMOs.
But beyond just that, I have to say that on closer inspection I’m seeing a rather extraordinary level of outright editorial advocacy in that journal that sometimes reads more like a trade magazine than a scholarly journal. A lot of it seems due to Andrew Marshall, who’s been chief editor since just around the time that the quote on the precautionary principle was published, and before the advent of what I speculate may be Marshall setting a new editorial direction. They even had an opinion piece claiming that the “GMO” designation shouldn’t exist at all – get rid of the name, and then the unwashed masses won’t be able to criticize it! Apparently, someone’s been reading George Orwell.
There was also a firestorm of protest over the way they handled Irina Ermakova over her research on the potential risks in GM soybeans. Let me be clear here lest you derail this one with another strawman – this is not about how sound her work is, because it may well have deep flaws. It’s about the unprofessional way Marshall handled it, deceptively inviting her to answer questions as an alleged open opportunity to inform readers about her work, and then summoning a whole panel of hired guns to shoot it all down, and never giving her a chance to respond. Doesn’t matter if her research is good, bad, or indifferent – that’s not how science works, that’s how ambush journalism works. Examples of some of the protest letters are here and here. The first one refers to the journal’s solicited panel of hired guns as “scientists who are well known to uncritically reject even the notion that there may be risks associated with GM crops.”
You don’t do yourself or your credibility any favors by dismissing as a joke one of the most insidious socioeconomic problems afflicting the US today, and one which was specifically called out as an issue in the context of GMOs in the RSC report. It’s a huge problem in any controversial issue. You might ask Ralph Nader or Erin Brokovitch if they think corporate influence is a joke.
The world is full of idiots. This is not news.
OK, moving on. You say you want an honest debate. That’s what I’ve been giving you, along with a frank acknowledgement of many points about GMO safety, and all you seem capable of generating is jeering and ridicule.
I came across an article today that may be a good opportunity to clarify my views on these matters. The CBC reported that British Columbia farmed salmon are becoming infected with Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation disease (HSMI) which has been linked to piscine reovirus (PRV). No, I’m not blaming GMOs for this – patience and comprehension is a virtue. I was just interested in finding out more about PRV, and it was instructive.
Where it gets interesting is tracing where PRV may have come from. Unlike the vertical transfer of genetic information from parent to offspring, bacteria and viruses are exceptionally capable of horizontal transfer of genetic material from both like and unlike organisms. This is indeed the genetic process that accelerates antibiotic resistance in bacteria and has created new human diseases that emerge from foreign disease epicenters often characterized by crowded and unsanitary animal farms.
A few years ago a journal article (Palacios et al, 2010) described PRV as a novel reovirus with unique and novel genetic characteristics, and specifically that it combines traits of both the orthoreovirus which affects mammals and birds, and the aquareovirus which affects only fish and shellfish. It is a little like both but not exactly like either, and has affected only farmed salmon, both in Norway and now in Canada. It’s been hypothesized that the use of chicken products added to salmon feed could provide exactly the kind of horizontal DNA transfer mechanism responsible for this dangerously novel mutation.
Opinions may differ on what the take-away should be from this, but it would seem to me extremely foolish that we fall back on the mantra that has been repeatedly asserted in this thread that everything is safe and everything is wonderful. I am becoming more and more convinced that the arguments about GMOs and genetic engineering are somewhat misplaced, and that it does very much come down to responsible caution and prudence in all of our agricultural and food manufacturing activities to guard against unintended consequences, but that special scrutiny should be given to those processes most likely to lead to the most novel genetic variations. As the NAS indicated long ago, that has to put genetic engineering – which by the very definition of what it does is the process of horizontal DNA transfer – at the top of the list with respect to DNA transfer from distantly related species, and riskier than conventional selective breeding even with closely related species, although it’s the former that is the most concerning.
And in the EU, where concern about GMO seems to be significantly higher than in the US, only 41% of adult respondents in a 2005 poll knew that the statement “Ordinary tomatoes do not contain genes, while genetically modified tomatoes do” was false. (Not that the 47% of Americans who identified the statement as false was anything to write home about…)
Well, props (of a sort) to wolfpup for finally mentioning GMO research that might have a bearing on safety and labeling issues. It would’ve helped though if (s)he’d bothered to actually have a look at the research itself, instead of using it solely as a platform to criticize Nature Biotechnology. It’s been weird seeing wolfpup promote and then attack his/her own sources, first the NAS (which went from being the go-to source for warnings about GMO safety to being accused of “handwaving” for equating risks from GM and conventional breeding), and now Nature Biotechnology which has seemingly morphed from an ultra-cautious doubter of GMO safety into an industry apologist.
*"Ermakova acquired notoriety when she publicized the results of her experiments on rats fed with glyphosate-tolerant (aka Roundup Ready) soybeans. She claimed that the fertility of rats was decreased when fed with GM soy, and their offspring was stunted and suffered from low survival rates. These findings were never published in a peer reviewed journal, instead being ‘published’ in the proceedings of a conference in Germany, co-sponsored by Greenpeace and featuring an all-star cast of anti-GMO cranks.[4] Despite this, these findings were widely disseminated by the anti-GMO movement, and remain an oft repeated talking point.
When the experiments were investigated by other GM researchers, the experiment was revealed to contain multiple flaws.[5]
Infant mortality in the control group of rats was very high, suggesting that the rats were treated poorly or had inadequate diets. No useful data can be extracted from feeding trials botched in this way.
Weight of infant rats was over 20% below average for both groups, further suggesting the rats were mistreated or malnourished.
Ermakova used two uncharacterized fractions of soy. In other words, what she fed to the rats might have been two different varieties or mixtures of varieties with completely different nutrient content.
A comment published in Nature Biotechnology highlights the many errors which render her results useless. Moreover, the commenting scientists called her out on her hypocrisy: Ermakova said in an earlier letter that she is not sure about the results, yet she used every venue available to her to publicize this experiment, drawing extremely far-reaching conclusions from it."*
A check of PubMed finds there is still no listed publication from Ermakova on her rat research. The only citations she has are 1) a comment made in Nature Biotechnology, and 2) she’s apparently a secondary author on paper about the “hormonal basis of reconciliation”.
Wowza.
What’s a bad joke is using the corporate shill gambit as an excuse to avoid substantive discussion of an issue and to dismiss a large body of scientific work that contradicts one’s cherished beliefs. If you can cite a single influential study making positive conclusions about GM foods that can be dismissed on the grounds of being a corporate sham, then do so. I suspect that you can’t.
Keep flogging that strawman, baby.
Gotta love the way anti-GMOers speak with horrified fascination about horizontal gene transfer as though it is the satanistic product of biotechnology, rather than a natural process that has been occurring for a very long time in many disparate organisms.
Meantime, the just-released NAS committeee report makes plain their conclusion that genetic modification is not at the top of a list for concern, but is no inherently riskier than conventional plant breeding - thus, the recommendation that we evaluate new agricultural products based on what each has to offer in terms of benefit and risk, not the mechanisms used to create them.
wolfpup, there is spin and then there’s outright misrepresentation. You might want to stick to the former.
Not all horizontal gene transfers are equally possible. Those that are possible as natural processes between existing organisms in natural environments, will tend to have been ‘tested’ over millennia in the real world. Their effects must be survivable by the organisms and environments that have survived them. In short, nature has already happened. We have no such assurances about new transfers that occur only through our efforts at engineering.
The point is that the type of natural gene transfer between species that Jackmannii referenced is not really evidence for the safety or environmental sustainability of engineered transfers.
“Natural” horizontal gene transfer does not equate to “safe”.
For instance, development of microbial virulence has been traced to naturally occurring horizontal gene transfer. Another example: some human cancers may occur due to such transfer from bacteria.
There is nothing intrinsically dangerous about this process occurring in genetic modification. Contrast the limited and controlled gene transfer that occurs in the process of creating a new agricultural strain (followed by pretesting and post-marketing surveillance) with the “natural version” and appropriate conclusions can be drawn about relative safety.
That’s why your reference to natural gene transfer stuck out; you seemed to be suggesting that if we weren’t worried about natural transfers, we shouldn’t worry about engineered ones. Perhaps that’s not what you meant.
Though, the most dramatic dangerous effects, of natural transfers, are likely to have been noticed already, as in your cancer example. Or, to have already evolutionarily reshaped the organisms and ecosysyems involved, so that there’s no disruptive or deleterious effect left for humans to notice.
Nor anything intrinsically safe, obviously.
That’s kind of my point…
Exactly. Natural gene transfers have been happening for far longer than human time scales, GMOs haven’t. No GMOs have been “tested” comparably to natural species. There is no controlled test environment possible, which compares to the vagaries of the real world.
If I had something critical to say about the NAS I would say it. Simple as that. Stop putting words in my mouth. I have and continue to have great respect for the NAS and have no issue with the latest report. My objection was to how your pal Steven Novella was using the “blurred distinction” comment which, not so incidentally, in no way implies equivalent risks but only that there are many different kinds of both conventional and GM breeding and that risks are not strictly delineated by those broad generic categories.
I have more to say about my concurrence with the latest NAS report but I’ll leave that til later to keep this response on point.
As for Nature Biotechnology, I’m just following the evidence. The generally high standards and impact factors of the Nature family of journals is well established but is a separate issue from the possibility of an editor having a political agenda. It doesn’t even prevent the publication of the occasional flaky paper, it just means that they’re relatively rare.
It should be about the quality of her research, period, peer reviewed and objectively assessed. I’m not defending it, but as I expected, you went off on a tangent about it. The problem that a great many observers had with the editor of Nature Biotechnology was the fundamental dishonesty of leading Ermakova into a journalistic ambush under false pretenses. That’s not how science is conducted. This is a tactic more typically associated with tabloids and the less reputable trade journals.
That’s a disingenuous diversion because the biotech industry isn’t like the tobacco industry that could be shown to be blatantly lying about an obviously dangerous product. The central point is the degree to which the biotech industry controls the legislative and regulatory process and its dominating and self-interested presence in the academic and research environment, which does not bode well for the long-term public interest. The New York Times had a piece about that here. The following pretty much sums it up:
If the organic industry is squaring off with the biotech industry, this battle amounts to a small posse of gunslingers versus the entire U.S. military. The biotech industry has spent, literally, hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress, funding political candidates, sponsoring academic research, endowing professorships, funding construction of university buildings and hiring university professors as consultants. This influence campaign also reaches into the federal government, which pressures foreign governments to accept GMOs and even censors government research that goes against the wishes of the biotech industry, according to whistleblowers.
The organics industry has almost negligible influence in these arenas by comparison, especially in academia, and to suggest otherwise (as the Times does with a single, pretty weak example), distorts what’s really happening, especially at our public universities. In 2012, Food & Water Watch examined thousands of research funding records at several large public universities, finding that agriculture departments depend very heavily on pro-GMO industry sponsors like Monsanto and Cargill.
Not only is the influence of the “organic foods industry,” as the Times calls it, infinitesimal by comparison, but a growing sector of organic products are actually owned by giant food processors like General Mills and J.M. Smucker, which frequently align their politics and pocketbooks with the biotech industry, for example in opposition to GMO labels.
One of the academics implicated was Kevin Folta at the University of Florida, a biotech researcher who’s also a “science communicator” with a strong pro-GMO agenda who turns out to have substantial ties to Monsanto. Folta is just one random example but it’s funny, in a sad kind of way, to see who his defenders are.
Oh, look, yet another forceful editorial in Nature Biotechnology in the spirit of a trade journal defending its turf, this one a spirited defense of Kevin Folta in the guise of “standing up for science”! The editorial is unattributed but it has “Andrew Marshall” all over it.
Incidentally, I noticed that your other old pal Jon Entine at the Genetic Literacy Project gave Folta a soapbox on which to try to defend himself, rather humorously completing the trifecta when he tried to deny that he advised Monsanto on their anti-labeling campaign in Colorado. To prove his innocence, he produced copies of emails with Monsanto in which he advised Monsanto on anti-labeling campaign strategies and also discussed hotel accommodations for his trip to Colorado on behalf of Monsanto!
You know, I agree with you in one respect – there’s an analogy here with the climate change debate, and it’s one in which the role of Exxon Mobil as the most aggressive of the pack of oil and coal companies pushing their agendas is exactly paralleled by Monsanto and the pack of agricultural and food companies.
Cite for anything, anywhere, that I have “misrepresented”?
Now I’ll address this ridiculous accusation that I’ve somehow turned against the NAS due to their latest report. The fact is, my position and that of the NAS are fundamentally in agreement. Yours is not.
This can be seen by looking at Table 9-1, The Paarlberg Model of Policy Options and Regimes Towards Genetically Engineered (GE) Crops. The model defines four frameworks on the regulation of GMOs: promotional, permissive, precautionary, and preventive, in increasing order of restrictiveness, originally across a dozen or so metrics that the NAS report simplifies into five, notably including biosafety and food and human health safety and consumer choice. The NAS recommendations and real-life policies tend to span boundaries between related frameworks but it’s a useful way of conceptualizing regulatory regimes.
“Promotional” can be defined as everything you’ve been advocating – most notably treating GMOs exactly the same as conventional foods. “Gung-ho for GMO” might be your fanboi bumper sticker (it even rhymes and you’re welcome to it – no charge). The NAS rejects this view. They very specifically evaluated that framework and rejected it. They write:
The committee also considered an alternative regulatory policy that would let all new plant varieties, regardless of the methods by which they are made, go to market without a premarket regulatory review and approval and allow regulators to respond if food-safety or environmental issues appear later … That would make plant breeders and food manufacturers primarily responsible for the safety of their products, as is the case for conventionally bred plants and foods. One could argue that the food-safety record of GE crops and foods over the last 20 years suggests that they are just as safe as conventionally bred crops and should not be subject to expensive government regulation on food-safety grounds.
That policy option, however, has drawbacks. Although most novel crop varieties are likely to be as safe as those already on the market, some may raise legitimate concerns. As discussed above, it should be possible to distinguish among plants on the basis of their probable risk, taking into account the potential for exposure and harm. Furthermore, the new suite of emerging genetic-engineering technologies discussed in Chapter 7 is dramatically enhancing the ability of scientists to develop potentially effective new plant traits. Future GE crops discussed in Chapter 8 could greatly expand the use of agricultural biotechnology in the development of biofuels, forestry restoration, and industrial bioprocessing and thus potentially lead to new risk-assessment and risk-management issues (NRC, 2015). This policy option thus would have the effect of shifting risk to the public; mitigation measures could be expensive and ineffective, depending on the nature of the post-market problem.
The point that you’re choosing to disregard or distort is that the policy of focusing regulatory requirements on “novel” traits, as the NAS recommends and has sensibly been the case in Canada for years, naturally places the focus on the riskiest biotechnologies without burdening the system with unnecessary scrutiny of low-risk products, whether GMO or not. To imply, as Steven Novella does, that this somehow exonerates all GE products as the exact equivalent in terms of safety as those from conventional breeding is flat-out deception. And with regard to increasingly novel future GE products, it’s dangerous deception.
This is supposed to be a discussion about whether GM food labeling is a good idea, and in your view discussing actual research that bears on the issue is a “tangent” Really?* And muttering darkly about alleged corporate influences (without actually showing evidence of same) is not a tangent?
These are dark waters indeed, Watson.
This much is true, similar to large drug companies taking over supplement firms. I gave an example earlier (Hellman’s Organic Mayonnaise). We need to be wary of bogus health claims for organic/non-GMO foods coming from large traditional producers as well as the niche firms.
This is truly a disgusting smear. Those “substantial ties” involved using university funds derived from a Monsanto grant for travel expenses to give talks related to GMOs. None of Folta’s research was ever funded by Monsanto. What he was guilty of was substantial naiveté for thinking his opponents wouldn’t go haywire over even a piddly connection to that company. He should have stood completely clear of them.
What he’s a “random example” of is the Corporate Shill Gambit, which you and other anti-GMOers (as well as woo-shouters of other sorts) specialize in (since they cannot dispute the science that debunks their claims).
The attempt to smear Jon Entine and the Genetic Literacy Project (which he heads) is especially bizarre, seeing that none of the organization’s budget comes from corporate sources. The same cannot be said of some of its most virulent critics.
*"GLP has been under attack, most recently by Gary Ruskin, co-founder of the US Right to Know…which receives almost 100 percent of its funding from corporate or industry sources; its central funder, the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) represents many organic activists. But OCA also promotes many fringe beliefs that are contrary to consensus science and data including opposing vaccinations and suggesting that Ebola victims should treat their disease with homeopathic products instead of medicine…
Entine says Ruskin is engaged in a “juvenile witch hunt.”
“The irony is that the Genetic Literacy Project receives 97 percent of its funding — the rest via the Internet — from non-partisan foundations with no connection to the debate over GMOs, while Ruskin’s USRTK gets $274,500 from the Organic Consumers Association. Ruskin is a paid arm of one of the most extremist anti-science organizations in the US whose members directly benefit from the scare he can create around independent science.”*
Among those joining in attempts to smear Entine are Natural News (home of some of the looniest, most venomous attacks on science and medicine on the Internet (its leader previously suggested that murdering pro-GMO advocates would be appropriate), The Refusers (an off-the-wall antivax group) and other weird fringe groups.
Anyone who shares their disreputable tactics shares the opprobrium which clings to them.
But rather than distressing you with this “tangent”, I’ll renew my suggestion that you discuss why you think any significant research study validating GM food safety is flawed for any reason, specifically analyzing the research itself (as I have done for multiple bad papers relentlessly promoted by anti-GMOers).
Seriously, wolfpup - when you start sounding indistinguishable from the pack at Natural News, it should be time to reassess your beliefs and what you’ll do to support them.
*Since you brought up the “peer-reviewed” angle - got any explanation for why (according to PubMed) she still hasn’t published her soybean work in any peer-reviewed journal, but has confined herself to yammering about her dubious findings at various public appearances?
What would you think of a climate researcher who accepted funding from Exxon Mobil for travel and speaking engagements and had pleasant first-name email exchanges with their officials? Would you wonder what the hell he was saying, and why Exxon was so willing to pay him to say it? If you wouldn’t, you’re the one that’s naive.
I don’t think I ever “smeared” Entine except to point out that (a) he’s not a scientist, (b) he started the GLP to promote GMOs, and (c) facetiously suggested that he’s a pal of yours.
My beliefs are succinctly summarized in #196. Note that they don’t involve murdering anyone.
The other salient point is the earlier quote stating “The biotech industry has spent, literally, hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress, funding political candidates, sponsoring academic research, endowing professorships, funding construction of university buildings and hiring university professors as consultants.” If this doesn’t concern you, then I’ll say again, you must be truly naive. Or truly on-side with their interests.
Beyond that, there are more ratholes in that post than I could shake a stick at, and I’m not going down any of them.
Possibly because her work is crap and wouldn’t pass peer review. I never said otherwise. But if so, why did Nature Biotechnology seek her out, invite her to provide written answers to questions which they promised to publish, and then shoot her down in a shameful display of ambush journalism? If she’s not publishing this stuff, why not let her languish in obscurity? Did someone see her as a threat to an established dogma? I have never before seen a reputable journal engage in a tactic like this.
A key difference between us is that it is not my habit to condemn sources out of hand. I will point out where anti-GMOers and websites promoting their views go wrong, while also highlighting their grossly inadequate qualifications and lunacy.*
You’d prefer to smear opponents with sleazy tactics like the shill gambit, but avoid critiquing specific statements, articles and research. Either you’re unable to do so, or just find it easier to use these reprehensible tactics against them.
Maybe I’ll be next here to be accused of being a Monsanto shill (if I had a dollar for every time I’ve been targeted online in this way, I could buy everyone participating in this thread a Happy Meal).
When you’ve got anything substantive to criticize about the 2000+ studies validating GMO safety, care to analyze an article by one of the contributors to (for example) the Genetic Literacy Project or Biofortified, or wish to explain why sloppy, debunked research from anti-GMOers like Seralini, Ermakova, Carman and Huber is valid, bring it on.
Hint: when you’re reduced to whining about “ambush journalism”, it’s another subtle indicator that you’ve got nada.
*another major difference is I do not cite editorials and policy statements by organizations and publications out of context, in order to falsely claim that they support my views.
