Have you ever heard of any cruciferous vegetable being poisonous? At all?
I mean, the only thing I can think of quickly is that erucic acid in rapeseed, but that’s well known and might not even be poisonous.
The whole family of plants is known for being mostly edible. Whatever toxins might show up in the plants are well known and easily tested for.
I mean think about it. We all always love to talk about how veggies lower cancer rates because of various chemicals in them. But then we talk about GM plants, and, OK, MAYBE the genes we change also cause some biochemical changes in the plants, causing them to produce different amounts of some of their other chemicals. But so what? Maybe those are the cancer-fighting chemicals. Maybe they’re meaningless chemicals. Why in one case do we say the plant is good, then in another, when the chemicals may be slightly different, but still ultimately from the plant’s biomachinery, should we be worried that they’re suddenly bad. Doesn’t that seem extremely unlikely to you?
Frankly, I don’t see why it should go beyond testing for the usual alkaloids, raphides, glucosides etc. The GM plants were WAY overtested
A comment for you below, but lets address this. The reason Israel is a desert garden today is because Jewish agronomists started experimenting with hardy plant breeds and point distribution irrigation from the late 1880s.
Australia is mostly vast desert so people have been breeding hardy drought-resistant grasses and seeds for way more than one hundred years.
It is a Euro/US centric worldview to believe that you have the only important plant research. Quite wrong.
The point is there are many varieties of useful crops which could flourish in Africa without GM seed. However I’m getting the impression that in some nations GM is the God Particle of Food and anyone who urges caution is a heretic.
Steady on guys no personal attacks please. Do not assume that the arguments presented are my personal point of view. Its my raison d’etre to challenge assumptions.
I don’t see where kalettes have been tested for safety whatsoever. Which was my (and the author’s) point - we have a new interspecific combination here, no idea what new chemicals have been created or of the hybrid’s potential impact on soil organisms and other environmental parameters - the same concerns which are expressed about GM plants. Yet the foodies who are eager to try kalettes and the usual GM critics aren’t at all concerned about this new vegetable, because it’s supposedly “natural” (it’s anything but).
The plant scientist(s) manually transferred genes (in pollen) from a non-parent plant that was from a different species, meeting the definition of horizontal gene transfer.
“The acquisition by an organism of genetic information by transfer, for example via the agency of a virus, from an organism that is not its parent and is typically a member of a different species.”
There was no viral gene transfer.
This cultivar was produced from a series of gamete pairings between two parent plants. Nobody (except you, apparently) cares if the gametes were placed in close proximity by tweezers, a bee, or the wind. Plant sex is plant sex.
Kale and Brussels sprouts are the same species, Brassica oleracea.
Kalettes are not GMOs.* They were not developed using horizontal gene transfer.* The author of the article you linked to either is an idiot who doesn’t understand middle-school biology or is being deliberately disingenuous.
*And if they were, I’d still gobble them up if they taste good.
This is not a statement that has any meaning for gmo. The herbicide impact is not the same thing as the gmo, the roundup can and is used besides roundup ready plants. To mix impact of roundup with gmo is not honest. you mix and match points in a way that is not coherent.
rationality is needed, not disguised arguments
It is not a ‘desert garden’ it is a arid lands garden. The desert remains the desert beyond the irrigation. But yes it is many decades of work in using the old methods.
Who is you? I am not european nor american.
and therefore please list how you are overcoming with these many varieties the soil salinity and the composition of say the sahel soils, they are so many you say. I will not ask about other regions, just the sahel
it is my impression rather that there is a great and irrational pick and choose argument against gmo and some people have disguised their true position.
Where in that definition does it say that horizontal transfer requires a viral agent? Such a vector was cited as an example but certainly not a requirement.*
Conceded.
I don’t think you actually read the article or you wouldn’t have been so badly bamboozled (whooshed?) by it or my posts.
No one said kalettes are GMOs. The whole freaking point is that this new vegetable was artificially created, appearing radically different from either parent (as contrasted with GM versions of corn, soybeans etc.). Kalettes (to a rational mind) pose the same “risks” attributed to GM crops by anti-GMOers - unknown effects of genetic combinations and unknown impacts on the environment. Yet there is no outcry from anti-GMOers about kalettes.
Do you begin to see the point here?
In the approximately 20 years since GM foods starting appearing, there have been no documented negative health effects. It is not outside the realm of possibility that an allergy or other problem might eventually be seen despite regulatory review and/or specific safety testing. What we do know is that new conventionally bred hybrids of common vegetables have (if rarely) been linked to unforeseen health problems. One example is hybrid celery found to be high in psoralens, causing dermatitis in food handlers and farm workers. Another is the Lenape potato, which was withdrawn decades ago after it was discovered to have a much higher solanine content than other potatoes, making people who ate it nauseous.
*you may be assessed an italics fee as a result of this post.
No, it’s not a requirement. There are several other ways it can occur. Do you know what they are? Do any of them occur here? No, they don’t.
Yes. The whole freaking point is that kalettes are not the products of horizontal gene transfer, but of vertical gene transfer, just like you and I are, as was everything we ate until ~20 years ago. They are as artificial as an IVF baby. There is nothing artificial about combining gametes of the same species. Planning it out doesn’t make it artificial. Their looks are irrelevant. Their genes come from their parents, not from a completely different kingdom of life.
Not that it matters. I’m all for painting anti-GMOers as idiots, but if you want to do so by posting factually incorrect information, please stop helping. Unless your purpose is to make folks who support GMOs look bad. In which case, by all means proceed with business as usual.
I think you’re talking about copyrights instead of patents, but you can’t resell the software to other people, can you? And if the copyright holder says that when you buy it, you may use it on one and only one computer, is it OK for you to install it on all your machines? What if you’re a giant corporation like Monsanto, is it OK to buy just one copy of Windows or Office and bootleg it throughout your corporation? Should Microsoft be able to sue Monsanto in this case?
By the way, many people are opposed to software patents, but I think that’s more a result of handing out patents too easily. Patents should be granted for innovations that wouldn’t be obvious to every experienced developer out there. You shouldn’t be able to patent something just because you did it first.
Isn’t that to deal with phosphorus pollution, rather than scarcity? :reads further: Oh, I see what you mean. Well, that’s pretty cool, actually.
Sorry to freak out and be overly alarmist upthread. Hopefully the phosphate situation really is less dire than I have been told.
My moral instincts are highly conservationist, a bit like what mr. jp calls a “purity” foundation, and as society abandons purity arguments in favor of other moral arguments, it’s easy to imagine entire peoples doing incredibly reckless thingstoxic, destructive, and unsustainablebecause they think in their sophistication that they are justified in sneering at “purity.”
But recklessness with biology did give us rabbit and kudzu infestations. Science should be avoiding those situations, not creating more of them.
And the fact is, IP law has been strengthening since about 1980, and so have international treaty régimes. I genuinely believe that the dystopia I describe is (though still avoidable) possible, even likely, and the present neoliberal treaty régime is our Achaean Horse.
you seem to be missing the point that any changes in the plant would be from the plant’s already-existing biochemistry. Whatever chemicals show up in greater or less numbers WE ALREADY EAT when we eat the vegetables. All the mistakes with traditional breeding involved allergens or toxins that already existed in the plant. So there is very little reason to believe that there would be new chemicals in the plants that at low and long term exposure cause cancer eventually. It is very unlikely that the genetically manipulated plants create any new chemicals that the plant wasn’t already capable of creating before and often does (depending on breed, growing conditions, etc.)
I remember some years ago reading an obscure statement, by a consumer seed company executive, to the effect that he himself had no problem with GM seed, but his firm would continue to be GM-free because many customers won’t buy except from exclusively non-GMO vendors. It seems to me that the public stance – such as bragging on the catalog cover that you are GMO-fee – is much more significant than a rare hard-to-interpret qualification like your raison d’etre statement above.
When a plant breeder starts a new project, he or she knows that induced mutation techniques will produce a more marketable product than GMO. This can trump scientific considerations, explaining why GMO seed is only available for a few crops, not going much beyond the initial round-up ready group.
The reason GMO isn’t available for most crops is because opinion leaders are against it. While I don’t think Straight Dope is extremely influential, this board is surely an attempt to give people an opportunity to lead opinion. Arguing that a certain POV is holding back the advance of science out isn’t a personal attack.
If that baby looked like a cross between a Neanderthal and modern Homo sapiens, then yes.
Sorry you can’t accept it, but kalettes are the outcome of a highly artificial process with potential “unforeseen consequences”, similar to the development of other brassica forms.
This may come as a shock to you, but genes transferred between such “different kingdoms” has been going on for a very long time and is an essential part of evolution. The difference when it occurs as a result of genetic modification technology is that it is planned.
It’s primarily set up as damages for breach of contract, I believe.
A patent lasts 20 years, but Monsanto is always working on new strains, so when its current patent expires, it will start selling something else that is patented.
Nope. That is not true of patent law. A patent holder can choose when to act and when not to act. It’s not like trademark law at all.
It’s not a claim of possession of stolen property. It’s a claim of patent infringement. They don’t need to prove that you possess something of theirs. All they need to show is that you practiced what is taught in the patent, which is using their patent in a way that is not permitted by the license.
Saving and planting the seeds the next season is what is prohibited. That’s all they have to prove you did. They don’t need serial numbers or camera footage or anything. All they have to show is that you have crops with the DNA that their patent covers.
They don’t own the physical crops. They own the DNA sequence that is in them. And infringement isn’t possession of the crops. It’s the act of saving and planting seeds. So they don’t have to do any collection or anything like that.
You made a statement about the impact of the roundup impact on soil biotas and insects (" We don’t know how insects and soil biota are affected.") but roundup ready is used without GMO so it is not an objection that is correct, it is either ignorant from dubious sources or not honest.
in fact the chemical component long predates the gmo usage, it is used since 1970, and there is long study of impacts. If the opposition is to this, it is an opposition to the chemical usages generally, and should have nothing to do with GMO.
How is that possible in a honest public discussion if there are no such seeds being commercialised? I do not think your pretended disinterest is a real position.
It is hard to believe the pretension to disinterested comment that the person makes.