humans are natural, can something we engineer or produce be unnatural?
you could possibly call it evolution.

im for and against gmo labelling. on one hand its nice to know whats in your food.
on the other hand, gmos cannot be considered all bad in a blanket statement.
if you labelled gmo foods, ignorant people would just avoid all of them with the assumption that its just terrible for their health or ethically wrong.
this will hurt businesses who use certain genetically modified ingredients that may or may not be harmful at all.

I would also argue it is a "1st world problem" about banning GMO (not to mention selfish).. if you are a farmer farming where there is severe drought due to climate change no matter it is near Sahara Africa (eg Ethiopia) or Afghanistan. They would all want GMO seeds which are more drought resilient.

I think it shows how disconnected we are from our food supply. Honestly all the low hanging fruits in farming (fertilizing, water etc) have been tapped out. Yes to understand GMO in detail requires you to take 3 and 4th year genetics because all the simpler methods of improving farming had already been used! In order to feed the world with the current existing farming infrastructure we have, we have to move to GMO and vertical farming.

We should be freaking grateful we have plenty of food and have the choice to pick whether we want to eat GMO or not.

I see where you are coming from, but I am not sure I fully agree...

People will still buy it much like people still buy a pop and a bag of chips. We all know this stuff isn't healthy or "bad" for you, but people still eat it.

People still eat at McDonalds, still buy beef from some factory in South America, and still consume fried chicken, chips, pop, candy, etc...when there are alternatives to all.

Will non-gmo foods be more expensive? most likely.

If organic bananas are suppose to be "better", why do people still buy non-organic bananas....because either they don't care or because they are $.50 cheaper.

I am very much in favour of labeling as i I think it is our right to know what we are eating. If we are buying products from companies to consume, we should be aware of what it is we are consuming. You wouldn't feel comfortable eating a mystery bag of food blindfolded, would you? I think it is similar.

If these companies that utilize GMOs start to notice a financial hit, maybe they need to evolve as well. Take a look at what Galen Weston Jr. is doing for Real Canadian Superstore's President's Choice lines. Its amazing! He has taken essentially a "no name" brand at a grocer that sells products at a budget level and has begun a transition away from cheap shit food to quality organic non-additive locally grown foods at a consumer friendly price. On a logistics level it is a fucking mess having to do this, but he sees the long-term benefit and where the trend is moving.

Agreed.

It's like going back to early nuclear technology, without reactors around these people would be still plowing fields with steers and using candles for light

The people who GMO food are going to help are the people who..uhhh....Don't have food?..
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I'm not against GMO.

or playing god (we are gods).

I am against some of the ethics practiced by some of the companies that control GMOs.

sadly these companies control like 99% of GMOs.

Like nuclear power, GMOs are a powerful tool or weapon. The people who control this stuff should be regulated heavily.

Studying to play God? j/k lol. Wouldn't your study be more geared towards the pursuit of knowledge, as opposed to playing god. I mean, when you were doing your research, did you ever feel like you were playing god, or more like you were trying to learn something. Same with the LHC, I think it's more geared towards the pursuit of knowledge, instead of having the power to create, take or give life.

IMO, selective breeding has a higher probability of happening in nature, compared to copying and pasting genes into different species. I mean, there was a dog study within the same species that allowed the fastest to breed, and since the fastest would breed, it would evolve the dog into a totally different animal. However, the dog was domesticated.

It could also be said that the strongest male deer, walrus, whatever animal competes for breeding rights would be able to pass on selective genes by the same pressures of dominance. This happens in nature.

Can you say that copying and pasting genes from different class of animals (mammals, reptiles, or birds) would happen like that? Maybe it doesn't matter if genetic modification is natural or not, for all we know, we could be accelerating evolution.

OK, not by speed but by tameness.
About 12 minutes in.



Another, well known study.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Konstantinovich_Belyaev

About the copy and pasting thing, I've copy and pasted material into different revisions of reports, only to proof read it later and having the report make no sense unless revision is done. This doesn't happen with ATGC constructs? I suppose it's like comparing apples to oranges, the report writing and genetics metaphor.

Honestly all the philosophical tangents you want to go off on.. the results are the same.. worms / creatures in the lab get destroyed for our knowledge.. then in our modern (Western and Asian) universities.. the IP is then licensed via the IP department of the universities to the highest bidder or benefactor.. Like it or not that's how modern universities operate especially at these tight budget times and most people are just not that interested or want to spend time to learn about it.

Some people ask whether "garage" type research is possible. I would say it is highly unlikely, not so much of lack of will and brain power, but money. The machines required for genetic research are highly precise and very repetitive and is just out of the price range of most "backyard innovator". A microscope I used was a quarter of a mill, that needs a few thousand to calibrate every 50 hours. You can do some of the science at the backyard garage.. but not even at the same magnitude of speed at a properly equipped lab unless you have the backing of likes of Nathan Myhrvold. Since we are a automotive forum, I will use a car analogy, in the past to improve yield, we used fertilizers, selective breeding to gain a great deal of advantage in yield, so think of then as the time of the 70s muscle car era, "no replacement for displacement".. GMO is the tweaking of the degree of cam and changing the mapping of the engine.. unless you know the ASIC of the ECU of how to reprogram it or desolder it to understand it.. you can't improve it.. even if you can improve it, the gain is very very minimal. You just can't use a set of socket and minimal knowledge of science to do that kind of work.

One fun fact about DNA is even between different classes of animals we still share a great deal of genetic material... because on the basic level all creatures goes through mitosis, generate power through mitochondria etc etc.. the basics are the same. If you want to really differentiate you should concentrate your argument on the proteonomic level rather than straight DNA... Not to mention, things plants and fish, they also experience simliar evolutions pressures and have simliar adaptations like bioluminescence etc. Like it or not plants and animals are not as dissimilar as you think especially on the DNA level, the difference comes with how the DNA is expressed.

To totally, and completely derail this stupid thread...seriously?

No. Seriously.

I so love it when people start whipping out their mod dicks.

I don't quite get your analogy. Not to mention with DNA there are quite a good deal of error correction built in during the replication process. You can make gibberish, but the replication process can self correct (to a degree).. or the organism just doesn't live. As I say splicing DNA saves time because you know the trait you want exist at that location, you just cut that portion and put it in the target DNA and hope for the best. Usually you go through a few thousand tries before you get the splice to work correctly.

I would say if you want an easy to understand analogy: DNA splice is more like a .reg file in Windows, the creature is the Windows registry and the replication process is the parser. You can import a reg file about Photoshop, but if Photoshop is not installed on the machine, Windows will do weird things. DNA itself is not a report, it doesn't have any meaning.

^ That was pretty much what I was trying to say. Since there was a lot of talk about cutting out a ATGC piece of DNA and pasting it into another sample of DNA, wouldn't you come out with something that doesn't really make sense. In other words, not live.

So my next question is, how well do we know how these genetics work? It sounds like we're taking a shotgun approach and trying thousands of different combinations to get desired results. I guess if we REALLY knew how our genes worked, gene therapy would be a success.

Does anyone else think of Cloud Atlas when we're talking about this stuff? I mean getting genetics down to the point where we can create clone slaves and recycle themselves to each other in the name of efficiency. Even though that was a movie and this is real life, Just a thought.

I have ADD.

As with everything, there are probability of things go wrong. I would say "spoilage" of a lab experience is about 30%. Considering IVF procedure is about 20% it is not that bad. Remember these things are VERY SMALL. That's why I said it is very repetitive and detailed work.

We mechanism of how DNA works is well understood. The issue is there are a lot of possibilities not on the DNA level but on the transcription and protein level. It is the interaction of combination of the millions of active sites that require some major computing power.

Honestly for people who really want to do something about GMO, dedicate yourself 3 years to go to take genetics at a university and get some wet lab experience.. Instead of blowing smoke on a forum.

RS Justice League to the rescue! :troll:

There is the issue of insect resistance to the Cry toxin produced by bacillus thuringiensis.

This diminishes the utility of Bt for the organic farmer.

Hmm, using a computer you can simulate what may or may not work, or rather, that trying to simulate the interactions on a computer is so intense that it's not feasible?

:fuckthatshit:

If I were to go back to university for three years, it would be to learn how to modify the shit out of these organisms to suite my needs. Will these genetics courses give me the skills to operate these machines that can modify genetic material? I'm serious about wanting to learn how to modify plants to produce higher yield of crop with a high resistance to environmental pressures, but that's not for awhile later when I get some other things in order.

I'm playing devils advocate. Didn't mean to hit a nerve. Blowing smoke is all I can do for now about the subject.

Given the limited amount of arable land, the rapid growth in population, the soaring cost of fuel and cost of production, it's naive to believe that organic food will be sustainable in the long run.

100 years from now, a 3 course meal will be a luxury. Our daily nutritional needs and hunger for food will come in the form of a pill.

I really don't agree with this and I think this attitude is a result of fear mongering.

Western nations are fearful of losing options, not basic nutritional needs.

good. fuck food.

I remain hopeful that it will not turn out that way, but signs point in that direction.

It is not not feasible but just a waste of computing power.

You don't have to take those courses to just use those machines, you just can just read the manuals. Taking those courses might give you the chance to interact with the scientists who might give you access to those machines. Unless you are very brillant, no lab will give you a $50k DNA chip to just to try on your first time out.

Also lot of the mutagenic materials are restricted, so if you want to modify the DNA and grow the organism yourself, you need to get a license from the gov. (it is less restrictive in the US). As I have said, unless you have backing from the likes of Nathan Myhrvold, you are not going to go far.

lucilletwo comments on GMO Truthers need to be kicked out of the Progressive movement

This was on the front page of reddit.

Actually, it sounds a lot like the anti-Smart-Meter debate, as a lot of the fear in both cases comes from a distortion of the terminology. The anti-Meter side likes to use terms like "electromagnetic radiation", because well, everyone knows radiation is bad for you, and "electromagnetic" is just a big scary word that makes it that much worse. For a lot of people, I expect the term "genetically modified" conjures images of a mad scientist hunkered away in his lab plotting the overthrow of humanity with his mind-control grains.

And this sounds a lot like the recent anti-nuclear-power hysteria that's been flitting around since Fukushima. Nuclear power and research, similarly, are neither good nor bad in and of themselves, but of course, incidents like this trigger fear, which some people are more than happy to fuel with mis-/dis-information, including equating the safe, peaceful use of nuclear power directly to the abuse of nuclear weapons.

In the end, with ALL these topics, a lot of it comes down to laziness of people not wanting to bother REALLY researching things for themselves, but instead going in with pre-conceived fears, and then merely finding whatever they can that supports those fears.

Within the typical process for these things...heard a lot about smart meters 6 months later after the bugs were worked out of the system?

or count how many SSIDs and signal bars are there when you walk around places where there are signs for "i wearz tin foil hatz, no smart meters!".

Again to understand the mechanics and impact of GMO, the best way is still to take genetic courses at 3rd and 4th year level. You will realise it is not as easy as it looks.. also remember DNA is freaking small. You usually not sure you have really splice to the correct target area until you start the transcription process.

Well we know I won't be doing this. I just think that until we know more about this on humanity and the environment we should have labeling and do further long term studies.


We have the right to know what’s in the food we’re eating and feeding to our families. we deserve an
informed choice.

THE ETHICS OF EXPERIMENTATION
Genetically engineered foods have not been adequately tested; it’s unethical to be putting an experimental technology into the food we feed our families.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not require safety assessments of GMO foods and does not review all GMO products hitting the market. FDA guidelines are entirely voluntary and the patent holders themselves determine whether their products “warrant analytical or toxicological tests.”
According to the National Academy of Sciences, GMOs may carry new toxins and allergens. There has been only one human feeding study and it found things the biotech industry said would not and could not happen. Government regulatory agencies are not even tracking GMO foods for problems. We have a moral obligation to resolve safety issues surrounding GMOs for our children and for the generations to come.

UNITED STATES & CANADA LAG BEHIND THE REST OF THE WORLD
Nearly 50 countries require labels on GMOs, and many of these also have severe restrictions or bans against GMO food production or sale. We deserve the same level of protection and information as citizens in other nations around the world.
Countries with mandatory labeling include Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, Russia and all of the countries in the European Union. Some of the countries with severe restrictions or bans against GMO food production or sale are Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Ireland, the Philippines, Australia, Peru and Japan.
The U.S. and Canada are two of the only developed nations in the world without GMO labeling.
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I have never seen a GMO label in China, or Japan (or Hong Kong although that's not listed). Do you know what this label looks like?