GM - more pushing for frankenfoods

[Martin]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7113199.stm - me hopping mad???? - yes, for many reasons.........
The BBC now seems stuck in the rut of quoting lobby group opinions as if it were fact.........and giving them credence and free publicity!!!!!!!!
"The Foundation for Science and Technology" is yet another self-appointed "body" spouting hogwash.......hardly surprising as it's sponsored by Northern Foods (an oxymoron surely?)
Lord King - you're outed! This slow insidious pluggging of a vile technology doesn't fool us a bit - you want to make obscene amounts of money by removing the right of the population of the world NOT to eat this technocrap - GM contaminates everything within miles, and as such should never, ever be allowed

[Helsbells]

I agree! Down with GM!
No frankenstein foods for me thanks.

[hamster]

Pah. They said feeding ground up bits of sheep to cows was going to be perfectly safe. Look what happened there.

I am highly, highly sceptical about whether GM is safe, but even if it is safe for humans to eat, there are still a hundred good reasons not to grow it.

Call me a luddite, but I firmly believe that anything that makes food production more industrialised and less local and individual is a bad thing. It makes food taste bland, as things are grown to look pretty, not get bashed up during transport and keep longer, instead of to taste of what they're supposed to taste of. I suppose it's possible they could engineer a variety of tomato that actually tastes like a tomato while still being uniform and less susceptible to getting damaged/going off, but why bother when I can grow them myself or buy them from someone down the road...? (Oh, yes, because someone stands to make a lot of money out of it.)

GM may be more weed-resistant for a few cycles, but eventually GM crops will cross-pollinate with the weeds and create superweeds that will require ever stronger weedkillers (purchased, no doubt, from the company that supplied the GM seed) which will pollute our waterways. Far from enabling farmers to be more prosperous, they will end up being more dependent on giant agribusiness firms, as seed-saving will be a prosecutable offence... As will accidental cross-pollination. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Schmeiser

Arguments about it ending world hunger are just a load of tripe. It means big western companies will own third-world farmers.

[/rant]

[Chickenlady]

That is so much crap. There is a very interesting, if slightly terrifying, article in this month's Ecologist on GM food. I didn't realise that there is so much research on the negative health effects of feeding animals on GM food.

[Wombat]

Looks like they are going to allow GM canola here....

[Annpan]

I can only imagine that in 50 years GM will be looked back on in horror. As we now do with thalidimide and aspestos, and yup, who would have thought grinding up the brains of diseased sheep and feeding them to cows would cause a problem

I am all for controlled pollination/ breeding, to give us a better strain of plant or animal. It is just pushing nature in the right direction, and we have done it for millenia.

But when you start splicing DNA in a lab... that where it starts getting really freaky. Taking genes out of fish and putting them in rice, isn't right, how can it be?

[ina]

I can only imagine that in 50 years GM will be looked back on in horror. As we now do with thalidimide and aspestos, and yup, who would have thought grinding up the brains of diseased sheep and feeding them to cows would cause a problem

I remember reading somewhere that Rudolf Steiner warned about that - when - 100 years ago? But nobody listened.

Couldn't believe it when King said that there has been one hugely successful Green Revolution - ergh, I remember doing an essay on that subject at uni, and coming to the conclusion that it may have been a revolution, but it was a long way from successful...

[mrsflibble]

where do we draw the line between GM as we all see it: that is, genetic modification using foreign bodies from other species that would never normally co-exist and it all being done in a lab; and the genetic modification that has gone on for thousands of years to find the best strains of crops for one particular climate?

I'm not saying I'm for GM crops, far from it... but are any of you scared that the line is getting really fuzzy?


anyone ever read The Chrysalids by John Wyndham? if you have, then think of the horses....

[Muddypause]

...the genetic modification that has gone on for thousands of years...

Sorry, but I gotta take you to task on that - that is a piece of mischief put about by the pro-GMers to make it appear that they aren't doing anything unusual.

We have not been genetically modifying anything; we have been genetically selecting - that is, we have developed tomato plants which have a combination of genes selected from the pool of available tomato plant genes. It is only recently that people have been able to develop tomato plants which have jellyfish genes in them. This is something which cannot be done in the potting shed, or in the natural environment, and I wonder if, technically, we should actually be calling them tomato plants at all.

The word 'selection' is important here, because it is something that occurs in nature without any prompting; it is the whole basis of evolution. This is what we are imposing upon with GMOs.

Speaking personally, I'm not sure that eating GM foods will be much of a problem, but I avoid them because it necessitates GM crops being grown. That's the danger - plants (and if we let it happen, animals too) will be available to escape and become assimilated into the environment, and the results will then be uncontrollable, quite possibly undesirable, and maybe catastrophic.

[mrsflibble]

but selecting is in itself a form of modification. Read the chrysalids and when you get to the bit about the horses you may see what I'm getting at.

[ina]

But nature has, as far as I am aware, not been able to modify itself to the extent of mixing plant genes with animal genes...