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It's weird how none of the organic nuts get up in arms about Dow Agro or Bayer CropScience, who are arguably doing much more interesting stuff with their products. Even then the thin margins put the biology way behind the more interesting stuff pharmaceutical manufacturing does, and no one in the anti-science crowd seems to complain about 10,000L tanks of cultured rodent cells producing humanized antibodies.
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Jun 27, 2013 04:31
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Flowers For Algeria posted:Except Roundup is not 100% glyphosate, but rather a mix of 40% glyphosate and other agents, including surfactants which are highly toxic. The MSDS for most surfactant/antifoam compounds look scary, but are written for legal reasons and aren't useful for actual risk assessment. Surfactant in ag chemicals is basically a few drops of oily stuff in each barrel to keep other stuff from clumping. You need very little of it, which is good because that poo poo gets expensive when you buy it by the kg. It's like when people went batshit about cleanup crews spraying Corexit (primary ingredients including propylene glycol and other surfactants) on oil spills in the open ocean. The MSDS looks scary, but the actual risk of the detergent likely isn't any greater than the dish soap applied directly to baby birds. quote:Here's a great movie about DDT from 1992, where you see many memes that have returned in the GMO debate. Sadly our current issues are more intractable and the causal relationships aren't quite as easy to communicate. DDT is awesome at killing insects and is pretty harmless to animals that are not birds. Persistence makes it horrible for ag spraying, but there is nothing better for keeping mosquitoes out of houses. norton I fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Jun 28, 2013 |
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Jun 28, 2013 02:58
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Amarkov posted:
The retarded rabbit hole goes even deeper with this one. You'll notice that the labels don't say "rBST free," they say "not from cows treated with rBST." This is done because there are no detectable amounts of rBST in milk from treated cows. To go a step further, rBST has no real bioactivity in humans, even with daily injections. We know this because attempts to use cow, sheep, or pig growth hormone for human treatments doesn't work, and the only source of growth hormone for a long time was glands taken from human cadavers. Now, recombinant HGH is produced in E. coli for the treatment of growth stunted children and pro cyclists. quote:
Better hope your kid doesn't get diabetes. Or CF, or PKU or MPV IV, or any other disease requiring meds made with expression vectors.
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Jul 4, 2013 07:53
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Amarkov posted:The first successful recombinant DNA experiments were performed 41 years ago. Trials for the first commercial transgenic plants began 26 years ago, and approval in Western countries began 19 years ago. The slow pace of crop science is due to economics. The work being done has the result of turning bags of seed into slightly more valuable seed, which doesn't generate much of a margin. This is the opposite of what is seen in biologics manufacturing, where glucose syrup is turned into $5000/dose recombinant enzyme, funding faster paced research organizations.
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Jul 5, 2013 07:13
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Install Windows posted:Labeling them in the same way you have to label dangerous items (the intention is to portray GMO as dangerous). You only have to look at the history of prop 65 to see how terrible useless semi-warning labels can get. We bought my dad a decanter for his birthday, it had a cancer warning label on it.
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Mar 17, 2014 02:54
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NeilPerry posted:I've got another question here, one of the reasons that some animal rights activists seem to argue for GMO's is that the less ridiculous the restrictions are on GMO testing, the less animals are tested on to gauge health effects. I'm wondering now what kind of tests are done on animals and on what kind of scale, and also if the argument holds up. Could anyone shed some light on this? Testing is done, but is generally a waste of time. You're starting with something that is already GRAS. You are either inserting a transgene expressing a molecule that you already have plenty of half-life and safety data for, or you are taking a gene already there and breaking it in a way that allows it to survive your herbicide of choice while still mostly doing its usual job.
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Mar 23, 2014 07:12
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quote:I know it sounds crazy, but there is an alternative way of farming that does not destroy the quality of the soil, but rather improves it, and without using often poisonous chemicals! Everything in nature is toxic, the dose makes the poison.
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Apr 2, 2014 15:02
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:Nope. If car manufacturers find a defect that affects 1% of a certain car model for example, they will recall that vehicle. Right now there's no strong evidence that wild strains will be less fit due to GMO gene transfer, but there's a small risk, and we have to acknowledge it. Wild strains that get herbicide resistance genes will become less fit relative to their competition in an environment lacking that herbicide. This is why concerns about transgenic crops spreading past fields are dumb, because all crop plants are pampered babies that can no longer survive in the wild, and have been for thousands of years. A gene that reduces fitness cannot spread far among wild plants because it reduces fitness To use the car analogy, a Chevy sold to the public with a defective ball joint would not spread far, as it would quickly be eaten by wild Toyotas. norton I fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Apr 5, 2014 |
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Apr 5, 2014 03:22
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:Can you provide sources for this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species
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Apr 5, 2014 04:53
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