Archived Monsanto Offered $10M To Prove GMO Safety: Monsanto Never Shows (naturalsociety.com)
submitted ago by qwop
Posted by: qwop
Posting time: 4.9 years ago on
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Archived on: 2/12/2017 1:51:00 AM
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Archived Monsanto Offered $10M To Prove GMO Safety: Monsanto Never Shows (naturalsociety.com)
submitted ago by qwop
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[–] Amateur_Wizard 7 points 2 points 9 points (+9|-7) ago (edited ago)
Ok so this is a complex as hell issue.
GMOs in and of themselves are safe. Dogs are GMO, and everything we eat was already GMO (by selective breeding) before test tubes came along.
HOWEVER.
Anyone who's fucked with a punnett square knows that you cant introduce a genome and have it stable off the bat. So I think the CAPITALIST use of GMO technology is fucking horrible.
They will haphazardly toss together two genomes, breed it for one generation if lucky, then release it to the world where it cannot be withdrawn.
If they don't rush these organisms, and they are bred out over GENERATIONS (6-8) to have all/most of the fuckery worked out, and then release it/feed it to us? I think thats fine.
Patented self terminating glyphosphate seeds? WTF?
[–] klobos 1 point 8 points 9 points (+9|-1) ago
There is a huge difference in selective breeding and changing the DNA structure of a plant so that certain poisons don't effect it. If it was the same, they would cross breed plants.
[–] Amateur_Wizard 1 point 2 points 3 points (+3|-1) ago
theoretically you could just breed that trait.
Take A FUCKLOAD of plants and time, and eventually these plants will grow immune to repeated spraying. Its happened already.
http://takeactiononweeds.com/knowing-your-weeds/resistance/
theoretically you don't need to genetically modify plants at all. Just manipulate their environment so they change themselves to suit your needs. You just have to have a large population to begin with, because 99.9% is going to die.
[–] SuperShak ago
GMO's are very different than artificial selection.
GMO's do not alter genomic DNA. Instead they introduce plasmids into the nucleus that replicate indefinitely. The plasmids themselves have no feedback mechanisms, they're just GO GO GO all the time.
[–] casper ago
Eh, kinda, there's no such thing as a stable genome true; but that's equally true of all genomes - GMO or conventional or wild. Evolution happens.
Wait, what are you talking about? That's not how what most people think of GMOs are made. That's how conventional hybrid cultivars are made.
All new cultivars (again, GMO or conventionals) are seeded or backcrossed for multiple generations (more than 6) before commercialization. The least of the reasons for doing this are to stabilize the new trait. The main reason is simply scale-up of the crop from the first single new seed.
All those patents were abandoned and no such thing was ever commercialized. That's a funny story actually. The tech wasn't invented or patented by Monsanto, but rather the USDA and Delta Pine. It was sold to Monsanto as a potential solution against what was at that time the wholly imaginary problem of cross-pollination of wild crops with GM plant pollen, something the anti-GM crowd was very noisy about back then, and still is today. But did the anti-GM crowd celebrate this cross-pollination preventive tech when they got wind of it? (I R good at puns), no, of course not, instead it somehow morphed into this evil plot to somehow spring a trap on the world where our food is held hostage to artificial shortages or something like that, no one has been able to explain the evil plot to me in precise terms. Anyway, Monsanto basically said, "oh for fucks sake, really?" and peaced out on that technology like Katie Holmes to Tom Cruise.
[–] tomlinas ago
They're patented. Monsanto has never even produced them. It's kind of a straw man to attack them for patenting innovation they've performed in their area of operation, even if you think terminator genes are a bad idea.
Even more than this being a crappy reward, you can't prove a negative. There's no way to prove that GMOs are "safe" any more than you can prove that weaing blue jeans is "safe." What you can prove, and has proven over and over and over and over is a lack of risk. At this point the anti GMO crowd either hates science because they don't understand it, or hates the third world and wants people to starve.
[–] Climhazzard ago
Not every anti-GMO person is against all GMOs. There are many anti-GMO people that see the potential good from such technology, but they think the science is lacking. They are not anti-science, they are pro-science. They want more testing and research to be done so as to better understand the potential consequences (like bees dying off). They believe the technology is ahead of the ethics. It is the lack of science on many things that lead us to be stupid with those things: mercury tonics, lobotomies, etc.