GM FOOD

[The Yosemite Bear]

I really can't comment too much my mom the uber hippie is a botonist and a geneticist. That's right she makes gentically modified food. Which means that I obsolutly hate the squash tomato varients I had to endure during childhood, and I love Arhiman/Rye grain hybrid especially in cerial (nice to find one commerically avaialable now too.)

On the other hand I still think her combining catnip with wintergreen and making an herb that was 25x more addictive to felines was just abuse of knowledge....

[The Yosemite Bear]

My mom's position on the issue is also that the EU stance is "silly" given that there are no unmodified crops anymore and there haven't been for centuries. Before we even knew it we were cross polenating, limb splicing and otherwise changing plants, we have throug sucessive inbreeding and interbreeding programs tremendously alted the gentics of all livestock and domesticated animals.

[Hamel]

My mom's position on the issue is also that the EU stance is "silly" given that there are no unmodified crops anymore and there haven't been for centuries. Before we even knew it we were cross polenating, limb splicing and otherwise changing plants, we have throug sucessive inbreeding and interbreeding programs tremendously alted the gentics of all livestock and domesticated animals.

Cross pollination and interbreeding are not even remotely close to the processes Monsanto and other GM crop companies employ.

[Dahak]

umm I have buddy boy, you do realize that a shitload of all our breeding has changed both veggies and meats by a HUGE amount from where they started in their natural vectors right? Look at Non-gm tomatoes and compare to heirloum (sp?) tomatoes, huge difference.

THe point is that selective breeding and modern GM techniques arent really all that different and there has been no increases in risk of anything bad happening associated with GM in compared to typical selective breeding, so in reality if you want to label what GM changes are dont, you gotta do it for all the other just as potentially harmful/harmless changes done through selective breeding.

Breeding is not GMing.
That's on a totally different level.
And if the USA agrocoprs don't like it, so let them sue.

[Hamel]

Let's take a look at Monsanto's poor track record, shall we?
60k bags of seed recalled due to wrong/bad gene (enough for 700k+ acres of land!)
Green Lacewings, a beneficial insect, fatally vulnerable to one type of Monsanto bt corn.
To anyone who thinks crossbreeds are the same as GM:

I am putting to you twelve reasons why transgenic DNA is different from natural DNA, and is more likely to spread by horizontal gene transfer and recombination, both by design and otherwise. I hope you will refute these point by point.

*All artificial constructs tend to be unstable, so much so that this is a topic in a standard text-book on genetic engineering [7]. Transgenic DNA is more likely to break and join up again, ie, to recombine. Transgenic DNA typically contains DNA from widely different sources, mainly bacteria and viruses and other genetic parasites that cause diseases and spread antibiotic resistance, and hence, has the potential to recombine homologously with all those agents, ie, due to similarities in DNA base-sequence. Homology enhances horizontal gene transfer 10 million to 100 million-fold [8]. Transgenic DNA is designed to cross species barriers and to invade genomes. They are flanked by recombination sequences, such as the left and right borders of T-DNA or the terminal repeats of viral vectors, which enable them to jump into genomes. By the same token, they could jump out again. Enzymes catalysing jumping in also catalyse jumping out. Certain ‘receptive hotspots’ have now been identified in both the plant [9] and the human genome [10]. These may also be ‘recombination hotspots’, prone to breaking and rejoining. That would mean inserted transgenes are more likely to be lost, to recombine, or to invade other genomes. There are mechanisms in the cell that actively seek out, inactivate or eliminate foreign DNA from the genome [11]. Cell and embryo culture methods are well-known to induce unpredictable, uncontrollable (somaclonal) variations that persist in the plants generated. There is now evidence that the transformation process for making transgenic plants induces further genetic instability [12-14] leading to chromosomal rearrangements, genome scrambling, in other words.

Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soya, commercially grown for years, was finally analysed by molecular methods. Not only is the gene order of the insert found to be scrambled, the plant genome at the site of insertion is also scrambled, and there is a 534 bp fragment of unknown origin in there as well [15]. All very different from the original data provided by Monsanto.

Dangers of bt crops:

Bt crops are genetically engi-neered to produce insecticidal pro-teins
derived from genes of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). While
Bt is a natural insec-ticide used safely and occasionally as a spray by
conventional organic farmers, genetically engineering Bt genes into
plants so that the toxins are expressed in relatively high levels in a
large proportion of the plants throughout most of their growing period
is another matter. Abundant evidence of harmful effects on the
environment has already emerged.

Bt crops impact negatively on non-target endangered species such as the
monarch butterfly, the black swallowtail and other lepidopteran species.
Beneficial species such as lacewings that prey on cornborer were also
harmed when fed on an artificial diet containing Bt toxin or on corn
borers or other lepidopteran larvae that had fed on Bt corn.

Research conducted in China show that while Bt cotton is effec-tive in
controlling the primary pest cotton when first planted, there are
adverse impacts on parasitic natural enemies. Furthermore, populations
of secondary pests in-creased in Bt cotton fields after the target
(bollworm) had been con-trolled, some of which then re-placed bollworm
as primary pests and damaged cotton growth.

Bt toxin is released in root exu-dates from Bt corn. It accumulates and
persists in soil and retains insecticidal, immunological and other
biological activities, with potentially large impacts on soil ecology
and fertility.

and...

Bt toxins may be actual and potential allergens for human beings. Some
field workers are exposed to Bt spray experienced allergic skin
sensitization and induction of lgE and lgG anti-bodies to the spray. A
team of scientists have cautioned against releasing Cry-containing
plants and plant products for human use. These scientists demonstra-ted
that recombinant Cry1Ac protoxin from Bt is a potent sys-temic and
mucosal immunogen, as potent as cholera toxin.

A Bt strain that caused severe human necrosis (tissue death) killed mice
within eight hours from clinical toxic-shock syndrome. Both Bt protein
and Bt potato harmed mice in feeding experiments, damaging their ileum
(part of the small intestine). Both the groups of mice fed Bt potatoes
of potatoes piked with Bt toxin revealed common features such as the
abnormal appearance of mitochondria, with signs of degeneration and
disrupted short microvilli (microscopic projections on the cell surface)
at the surface lining gut.