The Great GMO Discussion

GMOs have been highly debated and I know many of you have very strong opinions on the subject. Currently I am on the fence and I just wanted to state why and maybe start some friendly conversation about it.

The bad:
Large corporations doing unethical things and methodically snuffing out the little guy.
GMO crops being heavily sprayed with chemicals.
Messing with millions of years of evolution. Impossible to know the outcome.

The eh:
GMOs themselves aren't necessarily bad. Just because the DNA is changed, doesn't mean it's automatically poisonous.
DNA is altered unintentionally all the time. That's how we evolved. I don't believe GMOs with turn us into lizard creatures.
Many of the genes introduced into GMOs cause them to produce or be resistant to things that don't affect us (Bt for example).

The good:
Allows food producers to make enough food (even if it's low quality) to bring the cost of food down and feed more people.


Basically my stance on GMOs right now is that I would avoid commercially produced GMO products due to the amount of chemicals they contain. I also don't want to support the large corporations because of their unethical practices.  
I wouldn't be concerned if I somehow obtained GMO seeds. The way I see it, if I plant them, along with non-GMO seeds, the best traits will eventually survive and any poor traits will eventually disappear (creating landrace).  Genetic diversity is genetic diversity and survival of the fittest still applies regardless if the genes were created in a lab.
And I'm not running a commercial operation so I'm not worried that they will come try to shut me down because I'm violating their patents.

I know I didn't source any scientific articles here (I planned on it but I can't access them where I'm at) but I just want to throw in for credibility purposes that I do have a degree in Biology and have a good understanding of how genetics work so I'm not entirely speaking out of my rear. I will try to provide sources when I get the time...

So what is your stance and why? Remember, be nice

For me, GMO belong in a lab, possibly strictly for medical purposes.  They don't belong in our food supply or out in the landscape.  I don't need to support this position with "reasons" this is an esthetic position.  I think GMO in food and the landscape are icky, wrong, and bad.

Also some of the stuff in this article:  https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/ad0e3a20-1983-3ce2-aea1-67408584fe51/ss_are-you-anti-science-if-you.html?nhp=1

Miranda Converse wrote:
The good:
Allows food producers to make enough food (even if it's low quality) to bring the cost of food down and feed more people.

Or not:  

http://www.ewg.org/agmag/2015/03/claims-gmo-yield-increases-don-t-hold

http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/genetic-engineering/failure-to-yield.html#.V5t50iMrJZg

Almost all insulin is made from GMOs, which is nice to have around if you don't like type 1 diabetic kids dying.  

Some of the older GMO products have been in use for over two decades now, so the "not enough testing" argument against these products is starting to lose some credibility in my opinion. I'm still rather skeptical about the new GMO products.

Firstly I could think of a couple of good uses of this technique - Dates and bananas need help , rice that grows in brackish water would be useful . but it's not going to happen
Secondly it has so far been used mainly  to make profits for Monsanto et al
And because of the second reason any debate will become polluted by trolls thus causing the whole technique to be rejected by many peope who can spot what's going on and have rightfully lost trust .

David

David Livingston wrote:Firstly I could think of a couple of good uses of this technique - Dates and bananas need help , rice that grows in brackish water would be useful . but it's not going to happen

Looks like it might be happening with conventional plant breeding:

http://blogs.wsj.com/indonesiarealtime/2013/04/16/baby-rice-plant-may-be-breakthrough-in-salty-farming/
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Worlds-most-salt-resistant-rice-discovered/articleshow/19596574.cms

Most significant breakthroughs in plant genetics may come through conventional plant breeding techniques and not GM.  For one thing GM is an expensive technology compared to conventional methods.  A lot of people here on permies are working on breeding plants with conventional methods.  I submit that next to none are using GM technology.

http://civileats.com/2014/10/10/plant-breeding-vs-gmos-conventional-methods-lead-the-way-in-responding-to-climate-change/


Cost of developing one new GMO:  $136 million

https://gmoanswers.com/ask/how-much-time-does-it-take-and-how-much-does-it-cost-successfully-develop-hybrid-one-or-more

I have seen these stories about salt tolerant rice for many years it's a bit like the nuclear fusion of plant breeding , it's always a generation away .
I accept what you say i feel it's the potential for the good of mankind wasted of the alter of coporate greed that upsets me .
Who the f@@@ needs transgenic salmon grown in the dersert for instance!

David

David Livingston wrote: it's the potential for the good of mankind wasted of the alter of coporate greed that upsets me .  

Yes, it seems any potential good of this technology is lost because the purpose is not to produce more food, or more adaptable plants, but to sell chemicals and patented seeds.

http://www.gmwatch.org/articles/non-gm-successes

John Wolfram wrote:
Some of the older GMO products have been in use for over two decades now, so the "not enough testing" argument against these products is starting to lose some credibility in my opinion. I'm still rather skeptical about the new GMO products.

I actually wanted to develop this idea further. Since there are people whose reason sincerely is that there has not been enough testing, I would like to ask them in particular: how much testing would be enough? Where is that threshold that would bring you around to saying. "Okay, now I'm convinced"?

Healthy skepticism is a good thing. But there is a difference between healthy skepticism and close-mindedness. You can find a lot of skeptics who have been convinced of something because it met their criteria; but first, they had to know what their criteria were.

I expect that those criteria, that threshold, will be different for different people here. I am curious about what some of those criteria and thresholds are.

Jason Hernandez wrote:
Since there are people whose reason sincerely is that there has not been enough testing, I would like to ask them in particular: how much testing would be enough? Where is that threshold that would bring you around to saying. "Okay, now I'm convinced"?

Healthy skepticism is a good thing. But there is a difference between healthy skepticism and close-mindedness. You can find a lot of skeptics who have been convinced of something because it met their criteria; but first, they had to know what their criteria were.

I expect that those criteria, that threshold, will be different for different people here. I am curious about what some of those criteria and thresholds are.

I would say at least a few hundred years. A human can live a century. Three hundred years would just examine the effects over three long lifetimes. Nature is patient. Patience is a virtue. I think we need to be careful about making radically new things and declaring them safe after a few years. Messing with DNA is playing with fire, and I feel we are in our infancy or childhood when it comes to understanding it fully. You can't always undo what has been done, especially when you don't notice the effects for many years.

CRISPR is an excellent example of genetic modification being in its infancy. It was touted as this enormous game-changer, and in some ways it probably is (and not necessarily for the worse, either). But only now are we seeing knock-on effects of its use in a lab setting, where an intentional change, successfully accomplished, has two or more unintended consequences that render the end-product pointless, or scary.

I think it's useful to look at the whole system, what is being attempted, and for what end goal. I will examine, for a moment, my take on Monsanto's glyphosate-resistant crops.

So their goal is to bring to market crops that can be sprayed such that they will survive and nothing else will. Setting aside the obviously non-permacultural sterile petri dish food production model, which is abhorrent, we're talking about food so devoid of nutrition that American pancreatic cancer patients are often told by their doctors that eating food from outside their industrialised food system is the best thing for them. So they aren't even producing food anymore, which means they're occupying, sterilising, and denuding valuable food production land to grow what? Feedstock for crop-based petroleum alternatives?

So we're talking about the industrialised production of biomass for energy, or poison garbage food. Strike one.

Their product is designed to work with current exploitative soil-depleting monocrop systems, which we know are bad. Strike two.

And their poisons aren't even 100% effective, meaning that within a generation of it's first use, there were target weed species adapting to it, developing a tolerance. Roundup-Ready weeds. Strike three.

But we know this. That's the low-hanging fruit of the conversation. It serves to illustrate the point, though.

But what if we were able to CRISPR us up some giant, juicy grapes modified with, I don't know, the DNA of extreme cold-tolerant flora from the arctic circle that produced ethanol to keep from freezing, and maybe also with nitrogen fixation in subterranean and air roots? Imagine a barrier, hedgerow, and vining plant that fixed nitrogen into the soil for the benefit of what it grew with and grew clusters of globules that, when exposed to frost conditions, produced an excess of ethanol? As much as I admire the strides being taken by those spearheading the mass-commercialisation of the electric car and decentralised solar power production and storage, a carbon-neutral ethanol grape that you could squish into a home distiller for your tractor, car, and generator fuel might just render those ideas irrelevant.

Let's not forget that the appropriate application of genetic modification could result in the creation of the aforementioned literal solar power plant.

-CK

The most interesting GMO project I've seen is trying to restore the American Chestnut using transgenics. There are also programs that are modifying the native chestnut by breeding to more resistant Chinese chestnut and then breeding back to American over generations. Which is better? They're both modifying the genome. I'll be interested to see how both projects play out over time.

Jason Hernandez wrote:

John Wolfram wrote:
Some of the older GMO products have been in use for over two decades now, so the "not enough testing" argument against these products is starting to lose some credibility in my opinion. I'm still rather skeptical about the new GMO products.

I actually wanted to develop this idea further. Since there are people whose reason sincerely is that there has not been enough testing, I would like to ask them in particular: how much testing would be enough? Where is that threshold that would bring you around to saying. "Okay, now I'm convinced"?

Healthy skepticism is a good thing. But there is a difference between healthy skepticism and close-mindedness. You can find a lot of skeptics who have been convinced of something because it met their criteria; but first, they had to know what their criteria were.

I expect that those criteria, that threshold, will be different for different people here. I am curious about what some of those criteria and thresholds are.

To me, I would like to see 7 or 8 generation long feeding studies before I would start to consider the data useful.

The most interesting part of the debate for me is the attempt to label pretty much any breeding program as GMO. This is done by both sides of the debate for different reasons, but mostly by the pro-GMO camp as a method of diluting the meaning of the term.

Especially when talking with young people they have been taught that crossbreeding is GMO, that grafting is GMO, that forced mutation is GMO.

To me, splicing a cod fish gene into a tomato is GMO, the other methodologies, more or less, are possible in a natural genomic system. Once the term is dilute enough, it's easy to label an anti-GMO stance as anti-scientific or reactionary; in short: Crazy. I will posit that there are large corporate interests in educating consumers that GMO equals nothing more than selective breeding.