Anti-GMO's for Profit

[thesummerqueen]

I'm putting this in "skepticism" instead of botany because it's a good example of why you should take a few minutes and figure out where the information is being sourced from.

The arguments for and against GMO's are more complicated than this, but the fact is, in the face of hunger crises and global warming, I need scientific arguments to convince me that organic is the way to go, and thus far no one's put out anything I've seen that makes me think organic does it better than GMO.

When you read something that's against (or for!) GMO's, you should always be skeptical of the source and make sure it's backed up by good testing and not one particular person or organization with a political or ideological or profitable motive.

http://skepticink.com/smilodonsretreat/2...nd-profit/

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

The Skeptics with a K podcast just covered a story about an anti-GM group conducting bad tests, misleading, and acting unscientifically: http://www.merseysideskeptics.org.uk/201...isode-082/

[thesummerqueen]

It's probably the same study I posted on here about earlier. It was a spectacularly bad experiment.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

It's probably the same study I posted on here about earlier. It was a spectacularly bad experiment.

No, it's a different one. This one was a study that had 70 percent of rats developing tumors when on a diet of GMO corn. Problem is the breed of rat they used is already prone to tumors when overfed (30 percent of the control group had tumors!). The control group was too small also. There's a bunch of other problems with the test discussed in the episode.

The blog you linked to actually covered it in another post: http://skepticink.com/smilodonsretreat/2...cer-study/

[thesummerqueen]

Yes, that's the study I linked from that post in an earlier thread of mine. It's been making the rounds in several skeptic and science blogs.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

Oh, I thought you were talking about the link in your OP in this thread. Yeah, it's hilarious.

[cratehorus]

I'm putting this in "skepticism" instead of botany because it's a good example of why you should take a few minutes and figure out where the information is being sourced from.

The arguments for and against GMO's are more complicated than this, but the fact is, in the face of hunger crises

the hunger crisis will not be solved by adding more food to the world, when the top 20% consumes 86% of the world's resources.

http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/mini...poor_e.htm


but since you're a botanist, what's your opinion on monstanto, and they're "round up ready" GMO's? Common sense would say a plant that can grow healthy and ripe....... in a puddle of toxic poison............ just doesn't seem right

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

...
but since you're a botanist, what's your opinion on monstanto, and they're "round up ready" GMO's? Common sense would say a plant that can grow healthy and ripe....... in a puddle of toxic poison............ just doesn't seem right

"Common sense" doesn't have that great of a track record in the history of science.

[thesummerqueen]

I don't like a lot of Monsanto's practices, nor the heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers. I'm in agreement with you about resource distribution, which I think contributes to much more of the problem than weather conditions. Plants can adapt to weather and so can humans - humans can't adapt to greed.

Also, not a botanist - budding horticulturalist.

As for plants growing their own toxins or responding to chemicals, that's what they do. They're a bag of chemicals all around; no 'common sense' needed. Some are good for humans and some aren't. The argument becomes "will this end up harming humans" up the food chain, and thus far no good science has emerged saying it does.

Plants are far more complicated than the anti-GMO crowd generally let on. Some absorb poisons and filter them out. Some hold on to them. Some are poisonous unless you cook them a certain way. Some are poisonous only a portion of the year. Some are only poisonous in certain areas of the plant itself. Some are only poisonous over time of consumption. If there is a chemical that's genetically engineered into a plant, the question again is not whether the plant can handle it and grow healthy and ripe, but whether or not the "poison" will linger for human consumption. The closest we've seen is a study an organic site threw up that in the end said that some of the chemicals were found...in a pregnant woman...in tiny amounts...and she already had a compromised immune system, but the levels were far below what would have harmed her. But to mislead people, all the site said was "SEE?@!!?!jr THEY'RE LINGERING IN HUMAN SYSTEMS!!"

---

Also, you have to take into account the chemical used - if the chemical is something that breaks down easily, it's probably not as big a worry as say...hmm, is it arsenic they're finding in rice?

[cratehorus]

A budding horticulturalist? is that a fancy way of saying you grow marijuana?

anyways, I looked up the arsenic in rice thing, and it doesn't seem as dangerous, as pesticide resistant GMO's from monsanto. I haven't heard about it before but the first thing I found, actually says your city's water supply might have more arsenic than this rice

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-...brown-rice

"Make sure your local water supply does not have high levels of arsenic," says John Duxbury of Cornell University, who studies arsenic and rice. "If you do have high levels, washing can make it worse.

Monsanto however has seen alot of criticism

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/24...83578.html

“The regulation of pesticides has been significantly skewed towards the manufacturers interests where state-of-the-art testing is not done and adverse findings are typically distorted or denied,” said Jeffrey Smith, of the Institute for Responsible Technology. “The regulators tend to use the company data rather than independent sources, and the company data we have found to be inappropriately rigged to force the conclusion of safety.”

“We have documented time and time again scientists who have been fired, stripped of responsibilities, denied funding, threatened, gagged and transferred as a result of the pressure put on them by the biotech industry,” he added.

Such suppression has sometimes grown violent, Smith noted. Last August, when Carrasco and his team of researchers went to give a talk in La Leonesa they were intercepted by a mob of about a hundred people. The attack landed two people in the hospital and left Carrasco and a colleague cowering inside a locked car. Witnesses said the angry crowd had ties to powerful economic interests behind the local agro-industry and that police made little effort to interfere with the beating, according to the human rights group Amnesty International.