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Slanderer posted:If I seem hostile it's just because I predicated the entire OP on "hey, I have a problem with people throwing out these very specific unsubstantiated claims due to some underlying unease about Monsanto" and have gotten multiple replies along the lines of "that's all well and good, but <very specific unsubstantiated claims due to some underlying unease about Monsanto>". I'm hoping to better understand the mindset that engenders this, but I'm actually having surprising difficulty (whether or not it's due to a conflict between holistic and reductionist viewpoints). Mark Lynas has wrote some interesting stuff. He used to be an anti-GMO activist but has switched over to being pro-GMO after becoming more fully aware of the science behind it, so he says a lot of interesting things about both perspectives. I've only been a plant geneticist for a short time; I did my graduate work as a human geneticist. I work with some very good plant geneticists, though, and have managed to absorb some of their thoughts. I'm only going to comment on the science side of things, as the business and social spheres are outside my area. GMOs have had a strong net positive effect on the environment. Roundup ready crops, for example, don't require secondary tilling, which greatly reduces soil erosion. More importantly, massive amounts of additional land would be required for crops to feed the world if we only had organic farming. From Lynas' article at: http://www.marklynas.org/2013/04/time-to-call-out-the-anti-gmo-conspiracy-theory/ "Of course conventional agriculture has well-documented and major environmental failings, not least of which is the massive use of agricultural fertilisers which is destroying river and ocean biology around the world. But the flip side of this is that intensive agriculture’s extremely efficient use of land is conversely of great ecological benefit. For example, if we had tried to produce all of today’s yield using the technologies of 1960 – largely organically in other words – we would have had to cultivate an additional 3 billion hectares, the area of two South Americas." I said that I wouldn't go into the social sphere, but on a personal note I've always thought the idea that everyone should only eat organic was very privileged, as there simply isn't enough food-growing capacity to feed everyone that way. Sure, everyone can be fed by a nice, organic farmer's market, you just have to pick a few billion people that need to die first. The other major complaint I hear a lot of is the idea of GMOs escaping into the wild. I've always thought this was pretty silly as well. GMOs, lacking genetic variation, tend to be highly suitable for a particular environment but don't do well under others. Let them out into the wild and odds are you'll see them die rather than flourish as water, soil quality, and other variables change. Even if they do manage to breed with native plants - then what? They may introduce some genetic variation that wouldn't be introduced otherwise into plant strains, but not one person has articulated to me as to why this would be a bad thing. Genetic variation is good, it allows species to adapt to a wider range of conditions. I think it comes down to some sort of social obsession with "purity" and "unnaturalness". These're human ideas; the plants and environment could care less. Hell, gene transfer has been occuring between organisms via viral vectors for hundreds of millions of years. The only difference now is that we do it ourselves with greater precision towards desirable traits. More importantly, I can't think of a single example as to where GMOs have destroyed a native species or permanently reduced diversity. Agriculture has, but that was more due to land utilization than the introduction of a sudden competing strain or population. Even if you did believe that GMOs crossing or outcompeting native plants is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, you should be able to see the hypocrisy that the same people who advocate this view are the ones who blocked terminator seeds, a direct solution to this issue, from being introduced. While I also said I wouldn't go into the business side of things, I think the future of GMOs will ultimately address this. With the advent of the Gates Foundation and other private foundations dedicated towards philanthropy, GMOs are being taken in a direction that will address many of the complaints about corporate influence. Efforts are being made to drive down the cost of GMO development as well as to make "open-source" GMO seeds freely available to smallholder farmers in developing countries that will directly address their needs. Rather than spend millions of dollars and years on a breeding program, we will someday be able to create plants that are pre-optimized for their soil and climate. Ones that will be freely available without licensing or restriction.
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Jun 27, 2013 18:36
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While this is all stuff that should be researched, there's a lot of things that should be researched but aren't due to lack of manpower and money. Figuring out how GMOs affect the gut microbiome in a medically relevant fashion means first doing human testing on a large number of individuals where we analyze the microbiome before and after consumption of GMOs as well as how this changes over time. Pair this with studies that analyze effects on health (and this part will probably require a very large cohort). Once that's done, you have to identify molecular mechanisms for how the microbiome contributes to these changes and that's likely to be the most time consuming thing of all. All in all, you're looking at a turnaround time of years and tens of millions of dollars. Require that for every GMO that gets developed and you're basically limiting GMO development to major corporations and restricting rapid-climate change response GMO technology, as well as GMO technology customized to smallholder farmers in the third world. Most importantly, you're doing all this for a field where there's no evidence of additional health impact beyond that already attributable to industrial agriculture.
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Jun 30, 2013 23:07
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Slanderer posted:They are not on the right track at all--they don't even have enough actual evidence to know where the gently caress they are (thus the proliferation of provably false memes about GM crops causing cancer, killing bees, driving helpless Indian farmers to insansity and suicide, etc...). You're looking for independent testing? Hey, cool, no worries. Worry about independent testing for drugs too, then. To single out GM crops is part of the problem in that it exceptionalizes them, and makes it seem as if there is some grand scheme to hide the truth. Does the FDA or USDA test non-GM crops for safety, or pesticide contamination? Nope! The more I read this FRINGE's posts the more I get annoyed. It's like a cargo cult debate. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 30, 2013 23:44
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Sogol posted:Yes, one of my failed attempts at writing a response included the unresearched effects of glyphosate on mammalian amino acid production in the microbiota, since interruption of amino acid production is how the 200+ million pounds of glyphosate we currently use kill everything non-GM growing above ground. It is this effect of killing everything non-GM that is touted as the 'efficiency gain' from the GM ag system. The 'labor" savings involved delete the fossil fuel footprint, the chained need to also use increased fertilizer due to industrial ag destroying soil systems, and the need for escalating use of the glyphosate formulations themselves. It is impossible to separate out GMOs from even this small piece of the larger 'supply chain' since at present that is the only advantage. In and of themselves GMOs do not produce higher yields and require more water, also thereby increasing the energy footprint. Are you arguing against GMOs, industrialized agriculture, Monsanto, excessive use of pharmaceuticals, or something else I'm missing? To go through the responses quickly. 1. GMOs are a wonderful and perhaps even essential technology that has not been shown to have a negative effect on the environment or human health. 2. Industrialized agriculture does have a negative effect on the environment, but moving to a purely organic system would require a massive amount of land clearance or letting a billion or more people starve. 3. Monsanto does do a lot of unethical things, but the rage generated by it does not really impede business operations, instead, the ignorance, legislation, and environmental terrorism has impeded university and public research, the exact things needed to move GMOs away from Monsanto to a something benefiting the direct interest of people all over the world. 4. What do pharmaceuticals have to do with this topic at all? Adventure Pigeon fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Jul 1, 2013 |
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Jul 1, 2013 00:03
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Sogol posted:I have views on these things, but I am not currently 'arguing'. I am trying to begin and lay out together a deconstruction that could lead to people having objections. The thing is, it is hard to simply talk about one aspect of the production. When we try to look at the entire thing, rather than picking places that simply justify a way we wish to live, some point of view we might happen to have or some aspect we relate to as intimate to our identity, it becomes very complex very quickly and yes/no arguments are insufficient to either understand it or inform our action. I a, not willing to simply dismiss proponents of GMOs or objectors. Instead, I would like to understand how participation in what systems might condition or reinforce those views, regardless of my on agreement or disagreement. First off, a lot of the inability to separate the bad business practices of Monsanto from GMOs is a lot of the reason why GMOs haven't been made into a public resource. That very action has lead to blanket regulation, public ignorance, and environmental terrorism leading to crippling reductions in public GMO research while not really affecting Monsanto. You need to separate the two topics or you just end up doing harm to the wrong people. The most important thing you could've gleaned from the first couple pages is that lumping all these things together into one big blob to rage against is the exact wrong way to handle the issue. quote:
Biodiversity is an easy issue to solve. Wild diversity can bred back into GMO crops without losing the traits if done carefully. The resources just need to be made available. Adventure Pigeon fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Jul 1, 2013 |
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Jul 1, 2013 00:29
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Sogol posted:Irregardless, you have made an argument that I am too stupid to be able to make choices about what food I choose to eat and that this choice should effectively be taken away from me. Regardless of the reasons for such an argument it is a very extreme argument to make, it seems to me. I'm perfectly fine with you making choices about the food you eat. I think you lack the education in this field to make choices about what food other people eat. quote:
I said industrialized agriculture is necessary to feed the world, not GMO. GMO technology is still relatively nascent, but in time it likely will become necessary to respond to environmental change and plant pathogens emerging from globalization. Explain how monocrops lead to reduction in efficiency over time as well please? Yes, I understand they all require fertilizers, but that doesn't make the gains artificial. Rather, it creates a technological hurdle we will have to overcome when the fertilizers run out or the food supply will drop precipitously. Being able to efficiently convert many forms of energy into food is basically what lead to the green revolution. quote:
Pharma has nothing to do with this topic at all. Many of the companies that got into agriculture were also involved in pharma since the sort of research done is very similar. It's a logical transition to make. quote:As to biodiversity, why would anyone make such resources available? In what context would that make sense? Is that context the functioning context or an idealized one? My lab is trying to get funding right now to do this research. Other labs are as well. It makes sense in the context that maybe, just because we disagree with you, doesn't mean all scientists are assholes who just want to make money while shoving poison foods down the maw of humanity. Just because you're against capitalism doesn't mean the sole motivation of everyone on the other side is capitalism, and until you understand that, you're incapable of appreciating the topic.
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Jul 1, 2013 00:55
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FRINGE posted:Yes. My decade-old account on SA, and a variety of probations including "arguing about Dungeons and Dragons on the internet" is relevant to real-world discussions, as well as the OPs self-stated (and obvious) inability to successfully participate in them because...? Please understand, then, why it's very important to separate opposition from Monsanto to opposition to GMOs. Opposition to GMO research hurts public and academic researchers a lot more than corporate research.
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Jul 1, 2013 01:12
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V. Illych L. posted:Deregulating ecosystem regulation and handing it over to for-profit entities sounds like a recipe for disaster. That's really an accomplishment of the anti GMO crowd. The protesting and fearmongering succeeded in scaring politicians and non-profits. There's very limited funding to create GMOs because they'll end up being unpopular no matter how useful they are. There's still plenty of money in them, though. so for profit entities just keep on keeping on. I'd love to see an "open seed" system where useful GMOs are made freely available, but it's just not happening until people can separate their opinions on the corporations and the science.
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Mar 12, 2014 04:42
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down with slavery posted:Do you think GMO activists with the total political power of Philadelphia's second largest Walmart are the ones responsible for overly complex legislation, or maybe the collection of multibillion dollar corporations that have a huge interest in restricting access to their market? Just a thought I'm not really even talking about regulation. There's no money for research or implementation of GMOs outside the corporate world because GMOs in general are unpopular and politicians avoid things like that. Even large, private non-profits have said they don't want to touch GMOs because they're too controversial. The anti-GMO crowd doesn't have the political power to get rid of corporate GMOs, but they can make them unpopular enough to kill off public GMO research.
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Mar 17, 2014 16:05
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down with slavery posted:
You can't buy irradiated meat, fruit, or vegetables because they're not available due to regulation (most of the European union only allows dried herbs and spices) or because many grocery stores refuse to carry them due to public perception. Edit: People think information from labeling is great, but often refuse to educate themselves on the science behind the label. Anti-GMO activists take advantage of this.
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Mar 17, 2014 18:28
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King of Hamas posted:Hey guys maybe we should be careful about how we affect our sources of food, it's pretty important to eat and these for-profit companies creating genetic mutations in plants to maximize their profit might be holding back negative aspects of this whole process from us for their own enrichment. Why is there such a swell here on taking these GMO companies at their word? Monsanto is objectively an unethical company that has often resorted to dirty and underhanded strategies to achieve it's goals. It's easy to handwave away concerns about GMOs because research on their long-term effects basically don't exist, but that is something that should make you feel less secure, not more secure. The closest analogy to GMOs is probably the fact that viruses often swap bits of DNA between organisms on a regular basis. They've been doing it for billions of years. It's just a random process, but it demonstrates pretty thoroughly that DNA from one organism isn't going to cause massive problems if it's in another, regardless of whether it's our own genome or that of something we eat. Now, obviously, doing something like trying to set up a neurotoxin production pathway in a plant or animal we eat is probably going to cause problems, but adding an additional gene that confers a modest benefit to the 20-30 thousand already present in a given plant is unlikely to cause unforeseen problems that testing whatever chemical it produces wouldn't identify. GMO is a word we made up for the human execution of a natural process.
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Apr 7, 2014 17:25
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Not quite. GMOs allow the addition of novel functions and genes, whereas mutation is likely to only allow you to turn things off. Basically, it can't create what's not there to begin with. In addition, there's an even higher chance of unanticipated or secondary effects than with GMOs, simply because you can't guarantee you're only affecting one gene. In all likelihood, any method that involves radiation or other mutagens is likely to cause a whole lot of mutations, it's just that many of them won't be in genes, won't be functional, or won't be immediately obvious.
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Apr 7, 2014 17:46
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Slanderer posted:Congrats on disproving evolution. I have a PhD in molecular biology so I'd hope I didn't just disprove evolution. I said likely to turn things off. In very rare events, you can get a new function, but it's not as simple as bombard with radiation = plant has tentacles and can metabolize silicates. The problem is for a whole new gene providing a whole new function, you usually need multiple events, such as gene duplication, gradual changes to the "new" gene and associated regulatory regions under selective conditions, and strong enough selective pressure to overcome genetic drift. That's the most simple case. Oftentimes, multiple genes need to undergo this process to develop a totally new function. When you see what appears to be a new function as a result of a mutation screen, it's almost always going to be the result of a repressor gene being knocked out or a gene becoming insensitive to a repressor or a gene being turned on in a place where it shouldn't be. The point is that the function was there before, but not in the form it exists in after the screen. Something that was preventing that function from occurring was knocked out. Here's an example of what it took to develop an entirely novel function in bacteria, and it's likely that many of the genes required were already there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment Edit: I mean the genes responsible for transport into the cell under aerobic conditions. All genes required to metabolize citrate once in the cell were present. Adventure Pigeon fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Apr 7, 2014 |
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Apr 7, 2014 18:59
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Slanderer posted:Perhaps I was being to snarky. But even the experiments with generating additional mutations via gamma radiation produced effective results back in the day. Yes, it still requires additional selection,but not thousands of generations. Every time we select for novel mutant phenotypes we don't know that the change in some protein that helps to increase drought resistance doesn't also make the protein a potent hepatotoxin, for example. It's always possible. It's just really, really unlikely that a protein will gain a truly novel function is extremely rare. It's more feasible in bacteria just because you go through generations so quickly and can work on massive numbers of cells at one time, so mutagenesis + selection is a viable strategy. Once you get much more complex than that, especially in multicellular organisms, the sample sizes are too small, generation time is too long, etc. Every knockout study I can think of off the top of my head in multicellular organisms works based on the idea that by disrupting a protein in some way, a novel phenotype occurs. This does not necessarily mean a truly novel protein function. I think I need to clarify what I mean by a truly novel function. I mean a protein doing something that it was completely unable to do before in any context before the mutation existed. A protein might improve drought resistance because it's more abundant, but the same abundance leads to it becoming a hepatotoxin because it's now produced a thousand fold higher than it was previously. This would be a pretty reasonable way for it to occur, and there are plenty of examples of proteins that aren't hazardous to humans simply because their concentration is too low. What I mean by a genuinely novel function is, say, a protein that previously uptook iron suddenly uptaking cadmium might require a lot of very lucky structural changes to accomplish this. The problem with any mutagen is you can only give an organism so much before you kill it, so you have to balance that with sample size, generation time, etc. It's just not going to happen without massive luck, time, and money investment. I mean, you can try to generate the protein in bacteria then move it back into the plant, but then you're right back to transgenics. Now, getting into more extreme examples, like mutating a crop plant to suddenly produce a potent cocktail of toxins that kill insects but leave humans alone is pretty much impossible without some sort of transgenics. What you can accomplish feasibly with mutation and selection is very different from what you have to use transgenics to accomplish in that respect.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:49
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Slanderer posted:All of this is true (and it's a very good post!), but the last part is still debatable--there's no reason why a "random" mutation (through selective breeding) couldn't make a plant toxic to some insects. Not through an entirely novel protein, obviously, but from modifications to some existing protein and/or related promoters. I haven't looked into it too deeply, but they were able to create a type of peppermint resistant to some pervasive fungus entirely through mutation breeding back in the 50's. What I meant by my final statement wasn't that you can't get resistance to certain things through mutation and selection. The key part of my statement was a potent cocktail of toxins. I should've been clearer. You can speed up evolution by increasing the rate of mutation and applying additional selective pressure, but you don't have a lot of control over what you get at the end of it, and you don't necessarily have the best result. You also can't predict how long it will take or successful it will be. Lets say you have a beetle that's eating your crops, so you start mutating and applying pressure. After a while, your crop species has leaves that are tougher so they can't eat them easily, or the tissue is harder to digest, or maybe they become toxic. So you release them out into the wild and for a while the beetles attack less, but remember the beetles will evolve too, especially if the change is significant enough to produce pressure back against them. The key question to ask about the peppermint is are they still resistant to that pervasive fungus? We're already seeing BT resistance even though that was a very powerful system. There're new emerging pathogens, like the new wheat rust varieties that are even more serious, and mutation might not produce sufficient response in time. Now, there is a very similar approach to mutation that I happen to like a lot, and that's backcrossing to wild species to reintroduce variation. That has the advantage of "pre-screening" your mutations so you don't get things that are horribly negative, and much of what you backcross in might already have undergone selection so you're increasing the likelihood of additional, beneficial phenotypes appearing, maybe even to things you haven't thought of yet. You can't bring these crops to market, though, because farmers want plants that perform exactly the same under the same conditions. Same germination time, similar yield, and similar care requirements. That's why clones and super inbreds are so popular. So you end up having to reintroduce diversity then remove just enough that the plants behave similarly, and we still don't have a great way of doing that. Anyways, back to the original point, if you really want to provide complete resistance to an insect, or as much resistance as you can, you need multiple redundant systems. And even that won't work unless you wipe out the species entirely, and even if you do something else will start attacking your crop that is resistant. If there's food available, something will find a way to eat it. They'll just take longer to do it if you have a lot of reasons for them not to. You can't provide multiple redundant systems through mutation-selection breeding when, in most cases, you won't fully understand what the change you're causing is without additional testing, and if you do try to create multiple systems at once it'll take a very, very long time. There's also a good chance you'll try to do things that aren't even possible to begin with. As an example, I know a lot of people right now who are interested in seeing iron uptake improve in plants. There've been a lot of attempts to generate mutants, but it turns out that iron uptake is very tightly regulated by a lot of systems, and the best they've been able to do after years and years of work is to reduce iron uptake then try to figure out the genes responsible. Mutation selection is doable, but I think it's far from the best way to do it. It's just that genetic engineering is faster, less expensive, less risky, and generally better except for the whole stigma of genetic modification.
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Apr 9, 2014 01:26
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:Got any sources for that? I remember reading somewhere that genetically modifying organisms to cope with changing climatic conditions was extremely difficult to do and that essentially Monsanto wasn't doing it. I'm not sure if Monsanto is doing it, but it wouldn't surprise me. Further, even if they're not, there're plenty of other groups trying to identify traits and genes that'll be useful for responding to it. I'd rather have corporations profit off something than see a major drop in food supply.
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Jul 5, 2014 16:31
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:The wonderful and healthy food choices we have available in the 21st century have allowed our global population to enjoy our lives happily free from diseases like obesity and diabetes. Sure would be nice if we'd all just switch to organic food and abandon oil based farming methods. I mean, sure, a few billion people would have to starve to death or we'd have to clear out an ungodly amount of land to compensate, but every supermarket would be like a farmers' market!
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Jul 5, 2014 16:48
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:That was sarcasm, millions are suffering from obesity thanks to the shift to highly processed foods. What does that have to do with organic versus industrial farming methods or, more specifically, GMOs?
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Jul 5, 2014 17:00
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:I didn't know ancient Mesopotamians were eating cheetos and drinking coca-cola. Beer is as calorie dense as many colas. But more importantly, why would banning industrial farming and GMOs help the obesity epidemic beyond reducing food availability? What would people in countries where food supplies are already limited do?
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Jul 5, 2014 17:15
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:Have intensive agricultural methods solved hunger in the world? No. Millions still suffer from hunger worldwide and obesity is on the rise in both developed and developing countries. So basically, intensive farming hasn't solved world food problems, so we should move to organic, which is estimated to produce about 25-30% less food? http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7397/full/nature11069.html
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Jul 5, 2014 17:34
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You basically bolded the part that said "if everything is perfect, organics only show a small loss in productivity" and ignored the part where it said "things are rarely perfect so on average the loss is about 25-30%". Also, by "particular crop types", they mean fruits. Grains and vegetables both show considerable losses.
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Jul 5, 2014 17:44
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The funny thing in all this is that I actually dislike modern agriculture as well. The heavy use of hydrocarbons, pesticides, mined phosphates, and everything else is bad. Beyond harm to the environment, these resources aren't unlimited. Where I disagree with tight booty shorts is that the solution is to move back to pure organic farming, since that's a fast track to mass starvation. The only long term solution is to develop current cultivars through advanced breeding and GM technologies to where they're require less support. Ultimately, the only way the organic farming will ever be viable is through the use of GMOs, even if that goes against the current definition. Someday, hopefully, people can accept genetic modification is something we've been doing since civilization began, and that genetic modification doesn't destroy the purity of an organism, which is ultimately just a human idea that doesn't exist in nature. Edit: quote:
Ok, maybe there is a sane argument underneath everything after all. Would you agree with the statement that genetic modification of crops is the best and most realistic approach to divesting ourselves from the use of petroleum and other chemicals while avoiding a collapse in food production? Adventure Pigeon fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Jul 5, 2014 |
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Jul 5, 2014 18:10
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:what is pure organic farming and when have I advocated shifting completely to it? Doing that would be catastrophic. Alright, so what are you advocating exactly?
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Jul 5, 2014 19:47
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:Less intensive farming. Less outside inputs in farms worldwide. More small scale environmentally friendly farming. More environmental regulations. Educating the public about food choices and health. Limiting or removing corporation's ability to advertise unhealthy foods. Empowering poor communities by teaching them ecological agriculture methods that are self sufficient and can allow people that are socio-economically disadvantaged to grow and sell their own produce and food. I don't have a problem with most of these, though I do think some are unrealistic. Intensive farming will only begin to disappear when the resources that make it possible become too expensive. For the time being, GMOs, such as Round-Up resistance are already helping reduce the impact of farming (read up on how much the Gulf of Mexico's anaerobic zone has shrunk due to roundup), but soon it will be necessary for them to make up massive amounts of lost productivity. What do you mean by less outside inputs? Globalization of farming is ultimately a direction I hope society takes. Not necessarily in terms of agribusiness, but academic and non-profit initiatives to make seed and breeding stock available to small farmers. As climates change, we find that conditions in one regions may begin to mirror those in another, so plants which have already adapted to the later may be beneficial in the former. I don't have a problem with education or environmental regulation. I'd even agree that there are objectively unhealthy food categories - it's hard to argue for soda. Poor communities in first world countries may benefit from education, but in third world countries what they need is crops better adapted to their needs. Rice is a perfect example of this problem. Right now, creating hybrid rice is extremely difficult due to the fact that their pollen is sticky and their flowers contain both male and female parts. Rice has evolved to self-fertilize, yet hybrid plants produce more food on equivalent resources. The only way to create hybrids is basically to hover a helicopter over a field and force pollen to spread. Obviously, in many parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America this is not possible. Creating lines of rice with entirely female flowers through GMO technology or breeding would be of enormous benefit to farmers without access to helicopters. Another obvious direction for GMOs is climate change response, since the poorest areas of the world are likely to be impacted the worst. A path most people, especially in the west, never think of is moving GMO technology into crops like cassava and sorghum - plants that aren't eaten much in Europe or America, but are extremely vital to food security elsewhere. This means assembling genomes, mapping genes, and most importantly developing financially secure research institutions.
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Jul 5, 2014 21:11
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Nintendo Kid posted:Soda is no more unhealthy than tons of juices and other "natural" foods out there. But whenever actual proposals come around to restrict unhealthy foods, what you end up is people deciding that having a little extra fiber or vitamins (which could be easily added to sodas) magically makes those other things "healthy". Yeah, unfortunately that's a good point.
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Jul 5, 2014 22:18
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peter banana posted:Because the idea that organic farming necessarily makes land less productive is largely a myth. The results can be as varied as farming practices themselves. How do you explain that this study, arguably the most comprehensive, says that there's a considerable loss for organic under conditions where the two are most directly comparable? Also, roundup-ready crops have allowed for a massive reduction in secondary tillage, which has done wonders for the Gulf and other areas that used to see massive amounts of runoff.
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Jul 6, 2014 20:08
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peter banana posted:
Actually, look at figure 3F of the nature paper you cited. It points out that while organic farming yields about 80% of the produce that conventional farming does in developed countries, it yields less than 60% of the amount in developing countries. So while organic advocates love to play up how much better organic farming is in developing regions, the truth isn't quite there. For subsistence farming, anything is good, but if you lack the resources of a developed country, chemical fertilizers and GMOs come a long way. quote:
There are losses everywhere except in fruit. And what exactly do you propose diversifying to? Vegetables perform worse than cereals. Other crops that could serve as grains, such as sorghum and cassava might perform more comparably between organic and conventional because they haven't been bred sufficiently to take advantage of conventional farming techniques. Moving to them is like abandoning the airplane in favor of cars because they compare more favorably to a horse.
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Jul 6, 2014 20:41
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shrike82 posted:Yeah, tight boot shorts and others have been easy punching bags given their dumb views about organic food but Monsanto and the other agri giants are still poo poo so I'm not sure why posters ITT are expending so much effort on defending them. You're missing the point entirely. We're defending GMOs, not Monsanto. Idiots love to tie GMOs to Monsanto, Dow, etc because it's easy to use the "evil corporations" line against a technology when they're too dumb or lazy to understand the science. I, and I imagine a lot of other people in this thread, would love to see increased public funding so GMO technology becomes a resource that isn't tied to a corporation or country and can be used to directly help people, especially in countries experiencing climate change, disease, or other shortages of resources that make conventional and organic farming difficult. Unfortunately, while the opposition to GMOs and Monsanto hasn't hurt Monsanto in the slightest, it has had a devastating effect on government and NGO GMO research funding.
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Jul 6, 2014 21:35
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What you'd probably want for the CCD thing is an insectologist. I have a PhD in genetics and am currently doing plant research, so I feel comfortable commenting about that, but I don't know very much about designing experiments that measure changes in insect behavior in response to a chemical. Edit: Discussing Monsanto (and Dow, and others) poor business practices is fine. I think a more nuanced understanding of corporate evil versus activists being intellectually dishonest would benefit everybody.
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Jul 7, 2014 15:39
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meat sweats posted:Also, it should surprise nobody that the "15 pounds of rice per day" thing was just made up somewhere. http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech-info/topics/goldenrice/how_much.html Yeah, here's a paper supporting those numbers. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2012/07/31/ajcn.111.030775.abstract It's not too unfair to say that lady is letting children die and go blind for her beliefs.
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Jul 8, 2014 17:43
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disheveled posted:I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. You can start with the goals of the golden rice project: This is a good explanation. There's no way for most of these people to be able to afford greens and supplements aren't a solution. This is a sustainable way to solve an enormous problem. Here's another link: http://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/vad/en/ 250,000-500,000 children go blind every year due to vitamin A deficiency. Half die within 12 months of losing their sight. The ones that go blind aren't the only ones that die. Many die because vitamin A deficiency causes problems with the immune system. Problems also occur in adults, especially pregnant women. UNICEF estimates that 1.15 million children per year die of vitamin A deficiency. Other estimates give the number of vitamin A deficiency related deaths at 2.7 million. The original rice was produced around 2000, and an improved variety in 2005. It was ready to go in 2002. That gives a range of 13.8 million to 32.4 million deaths that could've been prevented by golden rice. Now, most people who kill 32.4 million people would be considered mass murders to the degree that any analogy would basically tear right on through Godwin's law, but this is not an internet joke, it's an act perpetuated by shitheel activists who will never risk going hungry, blind, or dying due to vitamin deficiency who wring their hands and moan over the fact that Monsanto might get some good PR or their imagined idea of nature might be defiled. Environmental activists who block golden rice adoption have a lot of blood on their hands. This includes Kumi Naidoo, the director of Greenpeace, Vandana Shiva, and every other activist who extends their mindless fight against GMOs to include golden rice. These are people that gleefully distribute false information to push an agenda that they've become so invested in that they can ignore the millions of people who die every year as a result. There's no grey area here, nor room for discussion. No one who blocks golden rice can call themselves a decent human being; they're murderers with blood on their hands.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:38
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illrepute posted:Then it's clear that golden rice should be distributed on, at the very least, a test basis. I know that it has been tested in the Philippines. Is it ready for wide-scale implementation? It's been ready for twelve years. Just send the seeds out, get them growing, and watch an enormous cause of human suffering disappear. It's the same goddamn rice they grow everywhere, except that it provides vitamin A. Edit: Hell, if they don't like the variety of rice that's golden right now, we can make more. We just pop the genes in and let it go.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:41
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illrepute posted:So then, the main obstacle to implementation is... what, exactly? Have anti-gmo people actually blocked its distribution, or is it just that the prevailing attitude among farmers is influenced by their lobbying? There are a great deal of logistics required for something like this. Certainly it couldn't occur overnight. What anti-gmo people do is delay and gum up these logistics. I believe that, given time, golden rice will be adopted, but in the time that they delay it, millions more will die. The problem is anti-gmo people and organizations do have a great deal of money and influence behind them. They can influence regulators, farmers, and the public at large, especially in third world countries, to mobilize opposition. They exploit a lack of education to move public opinion, and in situations where the public may already be justifiably suspicious about the West, this can be immensely powerful.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:52
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illrepute posted:If the goal is to get farmers in developing countries to get on board with golden rice in the face of this opposition, then it seems like public opinion matters a lot, which is why I was wondering if there have been attempts at polling among Indians (which isn't easy, I imagine, but probably doable) to see what the prevailing attitudes are among the people who will be tasked with cultivating the rice and the people who will be entrusted to buy it over other varieties, and then the people who will be expected to then feed it to their children. It is concerning that there isn't a lot of information on what people in developing countries think about golden rice. If the attitude is negative, actions should be taken to change this specific stance while still remaining cognizant of western business's deservedly bad reputation in the developing world- and look into pursuing alternatives, such as supplements. Education is all well and good. I think anything we can do to get golden rice adopted should be done. I also think that we need to stop the misinformation campaign against golden rice by any means necessary, including shaming the gently caress out of organizations and individuals who perpetuate them. They're responsible for a lot of death and should be treated as such. Supplements are something we can attempt to provide, but gently caress the people who are forcing that. They're not a good solution and the people who are forcing them to be used because GMOs offend their sensibilities are absolute poo poo.
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Jul 9, 2014 00:08
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Obdicut posted:Why would it be acceptable to work with people who are blocking the easier way to solve the problem? And what do you mean by anti-GMO people providing supplements? Are you under the impression anti-GMO activists are in a position to deliver supplements? More importantly, would anti-GMO activists even care? It's a mess they've created, but tell them they need to help fix it, and they'll probably insist they're really only interested in saving the whales.
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Jul 9, 2014 01:41
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It took me a bit to form a calm response to that outpouring of filth. No one here is advocating the abandonment of supplements. It's clear that they are not currently solving the problem as millions are still dying every year and hundreds of thousands are going blind. By integrating golden rice into local food production, another avenue opens to prevent childhood death and blindness due to vitamin A deficiency. There is no reason not to do this beyond the howling of activists drunk on pseudoscience and paranoia trying to push an an agenda that will never cause them any of the suffering it causes millions of others. Regarding your other solutions, the creation of home gardens and "diversification of diets", you sound like any other idiot without a clue about how hard that can be in some parts of the world. Explain to a blind child (here's a free picture of one)  how if they just set up a sustainable local garden here  or maybe here  they wouldn't be having so much trouble. Or maybe tell them that preventing them access to vitamin A fortified rice was an important victory in the battle towards protecting the world's food supply from evil corporate GM plants. edit: Gosh, they could just go to the local farmer's market, too, if they really wanted a healthy, organic, and diverse diet! Adventure Pigeon fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Jul 9, 2014 |
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Jul 9, 2014 03:45
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The bottom line is that you prefer dead children to any ground being given to GM crops. I'm sorry I can't say it in a nicer way than that, but that's what all the crap you've thrown out boils down to. I'm in favor of supplements where they can do good. I'm in favor of crop diversity and local gardens where they can be developed and do good. I'm in favor of deploying golden rice as quickly as possible. The use of all three measures offer ways to solve a reprehensible problem, and together they'll do more good than independently. Your concerns about Monsanto's patent rights in this situation are stupid and insignificant, as Monsanto has made no secret as to how it views the deployment of golden rice from a legal perspective. Your desire to believe in a stupid conspiracy trumps your concern over human life and that's pretty disgusting.
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Jul 9, 2014 04:26
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I should point out that for many journals the editors lack as much expertise as they should have. Further, there's been a tendency to pass a lot of work off to "junior editors" who usually have even less expertise. This results in the journal soliciting the scientists themselves for a list of potential peer reviewers with several conditions meant to reduce the chance of a conflict of interest. Under ideal circumstances and good faith on the part of the researchers, this system ensures the peer reviewers are those best able to understand the performed research. When the authors have an agenda, as it's kinda clear these guys do, it's easy to select sympathetic peer reviewers who will give even bad research a pass. Thus, the follow-up reviews after the research has been published tend to have more credibility, especially in a field like this where only general expertise is really required to understand the research.
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Jul 11, 2014 17:32
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meat sweats posted:This thread hasn't talked much about fundamental attitudes towards science, but this is a good start. In my view (which is basically the mainstream view) good science is composed of four pillars: Full disclosure of conflict of interest would be a tangent to those four. While not as necessary to actual experimental design or publication as the other four, it does show that it's being done in good faith. When there's no disclosure of a critical conflict of interest, it throws everything else into doubt to the degree that the research will suddenly be very dubious even if everything is done properly.
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Jul 11, 2014 19:06
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meat sweats posted:I think the principles above are designed to allow research to speak for itself free of biases and not have to go down the "whose interests are you speaking for" path. All research has to be funded by somebody and people can tar science they don't like all day long by pointing to unrelated crimes of the US or French governments or some corporation. It's particularly unhelpful in the food and drug testing arena, since companies are REQUIRED to conduct and fund their own tests as part of the safety regulation regime. I agree, which is why I said it was tangent to the other four. There has to be some assumption of good faith in most research, though, for practical reasons. There's simply not enough time to reproduce every single experiment. For many, the question of reproducing research isn't really necessary since it's concordant with other data in the field. For many, though, we have to pick and choose what to replicate. Sometimes that's because it's a revolutionary result, but if a major conflict of interest isn't disclosed that makes it an obvious target as well. With regards to loonies who use imagined conflicts of interest or real, stated sources of funding as reasons to doubt research, gently caress 'em, you can't convince them anyways. You can just try to minimize the damage they do.
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Jul 11, 2014 19:29
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