
Genetically Engineered Wheat Found in Unplanted Washington Field - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-08/genetically-engineered-wheat-found-in-unplanted-washington-field
======
lelf
There is a good documentary about that
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_According_to_Monsant...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_According_to_Monsanto)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJiIuQyStr4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJiIuQyStr4)

The fuzz is absolutely warranted.

 _Added_ : Monsanto licenses you seeds, you are not even allowed to grow them
_once_ (i. e. you are not allowed to use next-generation seeds). And GM plants
might be more adapted, and start displace the “natural” ones. And they are all
owned by Monsanto.

~~~
nmca
Good sci-fi on this topic: "The wind-up girl".

~~~
TehCorwiz
That is an amazing and disturbing story. Seconding the recommendation!

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rmason
If I was to guess someone who grew a sample field for Monsanto was careless
and didn't completely clean out his wagon. It either got mixed with regular
wheat at a seed plant or at the grain elevator where it was later used for
seed.

~~~
devoply
What about animal vectors like birds?

~~~
rmason
Not impossible but doubtful. Every single time I know of that an investigation
has been done it's traced to human carelessness.

I'm unable to find a link online but around fifteen years ago a farmer
accidentally let a very small amount of some experimental GMO soybeans he was
growing for a seed company as a test get into a truck headed to the local
elevator.

Routine government testing resulted in a very large bin of soybeans getting
purchased and destroyed. The financial hit caused the seed company to go
bankrupt.

~~~
peacelilly
Human carelessness like allowing this crap in the first place?

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anfilt
What's the big deal? It's a plant. Plants spread seed and grow?

I don't understand why GE food works people up?

~~~
cheerlessbog
Would it bother you if someone generically engineered wild animals as they
pleased and released them to procreate? Could you imagine any possible
negative consequences?

Having said that I would purchase GE bananas and tomatoes that had a longer
shelf life.

~~~
Nicksil
> Having said that I would purchase GE bananas and tomatoes

you already do

~~~
cheerlessbog
It doesn't seem to be working for me...

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jonplackett
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dMjQ3hA9mEA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dMjQ3hA9mEA)

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CodiePetersen
Ok, it's clear that I'm going to get a shit load of downvotes for what I am
about to say but the level of ignorance on GE technology and the contracts
around patented seeds here on HN is horrendous. I just keep seeing anti-GMO
sound bytes that have no basis in reality so here it is.

Farmers don't get sued for natural contamination. Do you really think Monsanto
goes around looking for single plants in millions and millions of acres all
around the world just so they can try to make a flimsy case before a judge.
Monsanto sues people who have significant portions of their seed in their
grain stores without a license, because the only way to get that much is by
purchasing it from some other farmer who is growing and selling it or by
growing it and storing seed for later, which is directly contrary to the
license and contract they signed and agreed to. If you can prove farmer John
down the road sold it to you and you thought it was natural, then you sue him
for your losses on an unlicensed product.

No one said GMO had 0% chance of spreading. What was said was that it was easy
to contain because food crops don't thrive in the wild and have very high
nutritional needs. So please stop spreading the "they said that it could never
escape..." boogeyman sci-fi horror line. No one invested in the development of
GMOs has said that to my knowledge and if they have, yes they are idiots or
lying, but no it's not a big deal if some are in the wild, because they will
die quickly.

Monsanto, along with the other agritech companies, don't field study crops
they just whipped up in a lab last night. In the lab they go through several
sequencing and single plant trials, not to mention the genes are tested before
they even enter the target plant species, THEN they produce enough seeds or
plantlings to test in a field. Any significant potential health problems are
screened out before it even gets to the field, so no this test case is not a
danger to the public. Also the article literally says they have to get permits
for new trial plants, so steps are already taken to ensure the plants are a
deadly threat to nature or humans.

Lastly, you may not like the whole "not even allowed to regrow them once"
stipulation in the farmer contracts, but clearly farmers don't mind it because
they line up to buy the stuff. As a farmer, you are either one that grows
seed, one that grows product, or in some cases you grow both. They are
separate business a lot of the time though. Monsanto's licensing and contract
is to stop farmers thinking they can just become a competitor with Monsanto by
spending a season farming seed crops and reselling to other farmers. Monsanto
and others value come from the fact farmers can increase profits from using
their product, if another farmer can grow and resell their product, they have
no more business. The fact is, most farmers are fine with the contract and
abide by it.

------
tambourine_man
Life finds a way.

— Dr Malcolm, Jurassic Park

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lqet
How high is the possibility that this is the result of a random mutation?

~~~
iaw
So low as to be impossible.

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daodedickinson
It's still life, why wouldn't it do this?

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perlgeek
We find unplanted weeds all the time, it's just a fact of life that plants
spread.

Unless they pose any danger to anyone (which would surprise me), I don't see
why all of this fuzz is being made.

~~~
sametmax
Because we have very little feedback on the long term effect of new bio techs.
Because they have the potential to have a cascading effect on human healt and
the entire ecosystem. Because the people selling them have no incentive to
make sure they are safe on the long run since corporations almost never pay
anything for their mistakes, and when they do it's a small percent of what
they gained from them. Because the only decent thing we got out of them was
the assurance, and a lie, that they can contain it.

It took 80 years from finding out asbestos killed people to banning it.
Cigarets were sold as healthy, then opponents were fought to the bones. The
pharmaceutical companies are making sure the US is becomming addict to opioid
and prepare to sell people drugs to get out of addiction as well. Because we
are talking about a country that had a president that lied about WMD to get to
invade another country, and another one that govern using tweets, and they are
in charge of keeping things in check. Because humans already have to face war,
global warming and heavy pollution thanks to their careless nature.

It's not about morality. It's not about conviction. It's just not wanting to
jump without a parachute. Powerful techs, all of them, be it AI, nanobots or
GMO, should be under amazing scrutiny and people using them in a constant
state of audit for the next 50 years.

That this is even questionable is beyond me.

~~~
daeken
Literally everything you're talking about applies to selective breeding of
crops as much as it does transgenic crops (what people typically mean by GMO).
It applies even more so to irradiated seeds, which - strangely - no one seems
to mind or want labels on.

Randomly changing millions of base pairs: good. Precisely cutting a gene from
one crop and putting it in another: bad. Baffling.

~~~
sametmax
One is using a self-safe system that has been tuned for balance for 1000000 of
years and have a proven track record and no agenda. The second one is made by
a few smart people for only 20 years for money.

The second one has to prove to be safe. It's funny that all of HN hold boing
so responsible for demonstrating things are safe when it affect only a few
hundred people. But we have to be taking the word of people playing with new
high tech toys for their own benefit that have the potential to affect the
entire humanity because... ?

~~~
daeken
How do you figure it's self-safe? That implies that selectively bred crops
can't be harmful, but that's nonsensical. Many selectively bred crops carry
higher than natural carcinogen quantities, for instance (potatoes). And that's
ignoring plants that are straight-up deadly.

And which category does seed irradiation fall into? If exposing seeds to high
radiation in order to randomly mutate them is an acceptable "non-GMO"
mechanism, clearly something is wrong.

~~~
sametmax
Because it worked for a lot longer than 20 years. In 100 years, without GMO
problems, we can label them safe too.

Plus evolution doesn't have an agenda that would make it creates things like
the terminator gene. We are in a very peculiar situation.

I'm open to see how it plays out, as long as we don't arrogantly pretend we
know for sure everything will be ok. Because we heard this one before, and it
was always stated by people that wanted to sound trustworthy or smart, never
the ones that wanted to make sure we are all happy.

Besides, how asking for severe and regular audits is even a bad thing ? If one
is against that, I trust their judgment even less.

~~~
daeken
Seed irradiation hasn't yet been in use for 100 years -- the first commercial
crop to use it was ~80 years ago -- but we consider it safe, despite that it
consists of forcing completely random changes to occur. Why? Because we don't
talk about the safety of the process; we talk about the safety of the result.

There's no way we can ever say "GMOs are safe" because it's like saying "crops
grown during the 14th week of the year are safe". It's a technique, not a
product.

~~~
sametmax
Food irradiation in general is yet another issue, that deserves a different
threat.

~~~
joshyeager
The parent isn’t talking about food irradiation, they’re talking about atomic
gardening:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening)

------
Creationer
Ironic that so much caution is given to the harmless genetically modified
plant, when the real danger is with the Roundup chemical itself.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
I think one concern is horizontal gene transfer, from one species of plant to
another. We may end up with a weed that is resistant to roundup.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer)

[https://academic.oup.com/jxb/article/58/1/1/515544](https://academic.oup.com/jxb/article/58/1/1/515544)

~~~
abainbridge
I don't understand why that is a reasonable concern but I'm not an expert so
would like to learn if there is a reason.

My logic is that Monsanto got the gene that gives the wheat its resistance to
RoundUp (aka glyphosate) from Agrobacterium (see 1) which is perfectly capable
of horizontal gene transfer into plants itself, without Monsanto helping (see
2). Also, there are plenty of weed species that are already glyphosate
resistant (see 3). I suspect that a greater problem is that widespread and
frequent use of glyphosate will increase the prevalence of resistance in
weeds.

1
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready#Genetic_engineer...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready#Genetic_engineering)

2
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrobacterium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrobacterium)

3
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29024306](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29024306)

~~~
CodiePetersen
Your understanding is close, they sourced bacteria from puddles that had
glyphosate resistant bacteria, then they modify agrobacterium that are
specific to whatever crop they are trying to modify. Every cell in a plant has
to be able to fend off disease because there is no central immune system. So
agrobacterium inject their DNA into plant DNA so the cells think they are not
a threat. So, if you have an altered agrobacterium, then those altered genes
are passed on as well. BUT, to grow a whole new plant, you have to cut the
infected cells out, grow a callus, then grow an actual plant from the callus
before it can even produce seeds. Very few plants can grow from clones like
that in the wild AND you need to have enough cells that have the same
modification for any significant chance of growing a modified plant. So the
odds of a single aphid injecting agrobacterium in a cell, then that cell
somehow falling off, growing in a medium that can support callus development,
then also somehow developing roots in an auxin rich environment, all before
the seasons kill it off so it can spread seeds are very slim indeed.

Being that all of the techniques used in the industry are based off of nature
anyways, if it is plausible for GMOs to do it, then normal plants have been
doing it before GMOs even existed.

