
Stop Bashing G.M.O. Foods, More Than 100 Nobel Laureates Say - taylorbuley
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/us/stop-bashing-gmo-foods-more-than-100-nobel-laureates-say.html
======
tgb
Earlier discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012827)

~~~
ctack
Cheers.

------
jballanc
Pick two:

1\. Feed the world

2\. Produce food organically

3\. Don't genetically modify foods

Before the Green Revolution
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution))
the world was facing a truly bleak scenario that involved massive food
shortages. Of course, a large part of the Green Revolution was the usage of
new fertilizers and pesticides, which we now understand have significant
impact on the environment. GMOs provide a way to continue to realize the
benefits of the Green Revolution without all of the chemical-related
downsides.

Well...unless you put Monsanto in charge. The real travesty of the current
state of GMOs is that things like "Roundup-Ready" plants do _nothing_ to
reduce the usage of chemicals. There's also the cautionary lesson of bt-Corn
and its impact on Monarch butterflies.

Learn the lessons of the Green Revolution: you _can_ feed the world with
modified farming techniques, but those techniques should strive to _lessen_
the impact on the environment and should be implemented _carefully_ to avoid
further unintended consequences.

~~~
scott_s
> The real travesty of the current state of GMOs is that things like "Roundup-
> Ready" plants do nothing to reduce the usage of chemicals.

In my understanding, this is not quite accurate. The perception of "organic"
farming is that they do not use pesticides, but this is not accurate. Organic
farming _does_ use pesticides, but they just happen to not be synthetic - that
is, the pesticides happen to be "naturally" occurring. But that does not
necessarily make them safer.

So, if you have a crop which is engineered to be resistant to a very
particular, effective pesticide, then it is possible that you will end up
using less overall pesticides when compared to organic farming. See
[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/organic-
pestici...](http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/organic-pesticides/)

~~~
failrate
I garden organically , and I use no pesticides. What "organic" pesticides are
you thinking of?

Edit: changed farm to garden

~~~
refurb
Nicotine, rotenone, pyrethrins are just a few examples [1]. They are mostly
derived from other plants so are regarded as organic although they can be
quite toxic to humans.

[1][http://www.colostate.edu/Dept/CoopExt/4dmg/VegFruit/organic....](http://www.colostate.edu/Dept/CoopExt/4dmg/VegFruit/organic.htm)

~~~
ceejayoz
Nicotine is also believed to be an issue with declining bee populations.

------
nnq
How about stopping to use _stupid_ and _confusing_ terms like "G.M.O."?!

Manufacturers should be forced to label their plants _explicitly_ with one of
a set of standard labels like:

\- "engineered to be tolerant to spececific herbicides" \- ETH

\- "engineered to be tolerant to specific insecticides" \- ETI

\- "engineered to be tolerant to specific fungicides" \- ETF

\- "engineered for better performance with the use of specific synthetic
fertilizers" \- EPSF

\- "engineered for improved performance in all conditions" \- EP"

\- "engineered for better nutritional profile" \- ENP

etc. And I should see this on the ingredients listing on my cereals package,
like "ETH/I/F corn" or "EP corn" instead of just "corn".

There is _no way_ to both (a) respect consumers' rights and (b) shield them
from technical details. And what such technical terms mean should actually be
inserted into secondary education curriculums worldwide - children should have
to learn what genetical engineering is and how it is used just as they have to
learn to read and write. We live in a world where technical details make all
the difference and we should start educating ourselves and our children to be
less illiterate about them!

Lets stop this whole process of consumer dumbification and extensive usage of
"blanket terms" in all areas. This is the most damaging thing for consumer
rights imho, because you can't have clear meaningful discussion about things
without making clear distinctions about what _specifically_ are you talking
about! "GMO" can mean... _anything!_

~~~
thfuran
There's a big gap between "shielding [consumers] from technical details" and
legally mandating that all packaging contain those details. Why is it
imperative for consumers to know the types of poisons to which a plant was
given resistance? And why do they need to know how the plant came by the
nutrition it contains? Nutrition information already required on packaging.

For that matter, why isn't the method of genetic modification something you
consider important. All modern (and even not so modern) crops are genetically
modified in some fashion, whether by selective breeding or exposure to high-
energy radiation.

~~~
nnq
> Why is it imperative for consumers to know the types of poisons to which a
> plant was given resistance?

Because this is the specific case in which the _economical incentives of
producers_ are massively _unaligned with the health interest of the consumers_
: as a producer, once I start using a crop engineered for resistance to a
chemical, then I will be motivated to increase the dosage of that chemical
until I get to the best yield.

And _realistically_ , I will do this regardless of the fact that the chemical
is at some point proven to "increase by 30% the chances for group X to get
cancer of type Y" or other such risk.

We don't live in an ideal world: if a producer knows that 0.01 mg of chemical
X pe 100g of product is the maximum he's allowed to have in a product, he will
99% of the time still accept it to 0.1 mg (10x!) if he knows that nobody ever
checks for quantity and that in the rare case this happens, he will most
likely be able to blame it to some technical manufacturing error and just pay
a fine and re-tweak the process...

 _Laws and regulations should be about practically guarding against what
happens when you combine human greed+stupidity with advances in science and
technology, not about what 's technically and theoretically correct!_

And about:

> why isn't the method of genetic modification something you consider
> important

If we later discover that such technical details can have harmful effects with
a propensity to be amplified by misaligned economical incentives, then YES, we
should _legally mandate that all packaging contains this information too_ ,
because this is the only way to re-align the incentives (because this way some
of the producers will, for example, be able to exploit through marketing
campaings the fact that they use "EP corn" or "ENP corn" instead of "ETF
corn", and get a rightful economic advantage over the other ones whose
incentives have become misaligned with the ones of the consumer).

Market economies need regulatory adjustment to keep the interests aligned,
"market forces" will do this in theory, but with a delay of decades and a
_cost measured in lost human lives_. Full market freedom is cool, but if we
can engineer systems with faster response times I think it's worth the cost of
some "lost efficiency" in the short term and on narrow niches.

~~~
drakonandor
All food including organic has been modified genetically over the
thousands/millions of years. What we really need, and the only way to be fair,
is to just list everything used for everything. The GED'd idiots who think
"organic = no pesticides" will try to read the long list of stuff applied to
their food and immediately die, win/win.

------
ctack
We can feed the world many times over with existing tech, we just can't
distribute it. How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that?

[http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/global-
econ...](http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/global-
economy/130722/millions-hungry-despite-world-food-surplus)

~~~
afarrell
It makes it easier for and given locality to grow more food, so it makes it
easier to distribute that food.

It means that you can tolerate greater levels of waste. In a world where
logistics are imperfect, there will always be some waste.

Also, if you have greater yield for a given input of labor, more people can go
work in a factory make latex gloves or some huge number of life-saving
products.

~~~
DasIch
Has there been any practical success in that area or is this still mostly
theoretical?

------
Godel_unicode
If you're curious (as I was) the breakdown of these Nobel laureates is:

    
    
      41 medicine 
      34 chemistry 
      25 physics 
      8 economics 
      1 peace
      1 Literature
    

Average year 1998, standard deviation 11.4 years.

Tl;dr - mostly scientists, mostly still working.

~~~
fovc
Wouldn't a 1998 prize year mean that their major work was done in the 60s and
70s? The average age of Nobel laureates is ~60, which would mean many could be
in their 80s now.

[1]
[https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/laureates_ages...](https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/laureates_ages/all_ages.html)

~~~
Godel_unicode
That's a good point, I had remembered that age incorrectly as being lower. Is
there a good source somewhere for mean time-to-nobel per field?

~~~
fovc
I'm not sure about a quantitative source, but Wikipedia has a discussion on
the subject [1]. There's a database [2] of all nominations, but it does not
have the year of publishing of the research in question (if there is a
specific item).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Recognition_time_l...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Recognition_time_lag)
[2]
[https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/manual.html](https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/manual.html)

------
mark_l_watson
I don't object to GMO foods but I do want accurate food labeling. I find the
big push by the corporate food producers to make this accurate food labeling
illegal to be very disturbing.

Consumers have the right to know what the are buying.

BTW, for people arguing that GMO foods are a hard requirement for feeding the
world, I have another suggestion: beef uses a 100 times the water and
resources per gram of protein as lentils do. The beef industry requires HUGE
subsidies from the government in the form of free or cheap water. Eating a
single hamburger uses the water most people use for 3 months of taking
showers, just to put things in perspective. As a tax payer, I am sick and
tired of supporting people eating beef - make them pay they actual cost of
production.

~~~
orangecat
_I do want accurate food labeling._

In theory, yes. In practice, it's obviously a push by anti-GMO groups in the
hope that the labels will irrationally scare customers. It's not unlike the
recent Texas law that pretended to be about health and safety standards for
abortion clinics, but everyone on both sides knew that the actual goal was to
shut them down.

 _I find the big push by the corporate food producers to make this accurate
food labeling illegal to be very disturbing._

Is anyone actually saying that "contains no GMOs" labels should be illegal?
Certainly that shouldn't be the case, although when I see a label like that I
lower my opinion of the producer on the grounds that they're promoting
unfounded fear.

 _As a tax payer, I am sick and tired of supporting people eating beef - make
them pay they actual cost of production._

In principle I agree with this. Do you have a source on the hamburger/shower
figure? That's amazing if true, and it would mean that telling people to take
shorter showers to conserve water is silly.

~~~
FLGMwt
Regarding the hamburger/shower figure, it seems to be a popular pro-veg
rhetoric but here's a good breakdown on skeptics.stackexchange that seems to
support it (for a quarter pound patty even!)

[http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23921/does-
one-h...](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23921/does-one-
hamburger-take-more-water-to-produce-than-2-months-worth-of-showering)

This might push me over the edge from part-time vegetarian.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Thanks for posting that link! It seems like the 3 month figure I have read is
not very accurate, perhaps 1 to 2 months of showers is more accurate.

BTW, I do (very) occasionally eat beef, I just don't like the cost being
subsidized with tax money. It takes much less water to raise pork and chicken,
so when I decide not to eat vegan or vegetarian, I prefer pork or chicken.
Just my opinion, but I think one or two small portions of meat a week, and
vegan (or vegetarian) the rest of the time is best for me health-wise.

------
pipio21
I hate so much when rational discussion is replaced with emotional
manipulation and tribal thinking.

The original source of this comes from:
[http://supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-
le...](http://supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-
letter_rjr.html)

Which obviously is from an NGO created by the GMO lobby. They are free to
expose arguments but ending in "we consider this a "crime against humanity""
is this fallacy:

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

I am not against GMOs but either for it. In the end is going to improve lives,
but in the process experimentation will harm others(like with X-Rays with
pregnant women, nuclear radiation, substances that are mutagens).

People are dying in India for lots of complex reasons. It is not going to be
solved because of "Golden Rice". India has very fertile land, when I worked
there as a volunteer the problems came mainly from overpopulation, pollution
and inequality in big cities.

By "overpopulation" I mean "people against people" fighting for resources.
Like Buddhist against Muslims, Rich versus poor or poor against poor, like
people cutting legs or removing eyes from children so tourist feel sorry and
give those bastards(that legs cutters) money.

I wonder how many of those Nobel laureates have lived in India, are Indians or
have worked with them. Looking at a glance the names it seems the list
contains more or less zero Indians names, so they have total ignorance in the
specific problem.

Talking about 2050...by that time nuclear war could had been destroyed the
entire wold, the West could had collapsed because of derivatives and debt
weapons of mass destruction financial instruments, we could be using nuclear
fusion for cheap energy in order to plant on Sahara dessert or Australia, or
just using LEDs indoors in order not to need GMOs or pesticides...

~~~
Kristine1975
_> Talking about 2050..._

I don't think it's useful to not do anything merely because it's possible the
future might turn out like you describe. We (as in humanity) should try to
solve the food problem while also preventing nuclear war etc.

Or did I misunderstand what you're saying?

------
fovc
I agree let's not bash GMO on principle. But Golden Rice is not the silver
bullet it's billed as:

> Golden Rice showed that beta carotene was produced at consistently high
> levels in the grain, and that grain quality was comparable to the
> conventional variety. However, yields of candidate lines were not consistent
> across locations and seasons, prompting research direction toward assessing
> Golden Rice versions such as GR2-E and others. [1]

Let's keep researching (whether GM or not) ways to make crops more nutritious
and higher yielding (search dilution effect e.g. [2], [3]), not just more
herbicide resistant. Let's get the cost of GM research down so that we can end
the terrible business and ecological practices surrounding GMO.

While I agree that Greenpeace is not helping here, this article is too
friendly to GMO. Ignoring Monsanto in an article about GM is totally
disingenuous.*

[1] [http://irri.org/golden-rice/faqs/what-is-the-status-of-
the-g...](http://irri.org/golden-rice/faqs/what-is-the-status-of-the-golden-
rice-project-coordinated-by-irri)

[2]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065211308...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065211308608871)

[3]
[http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/44/1/15.full](http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/44/1/15.full)

*Showing a picture of their Bangalore Center does not count

------
dekhn
One of the most interesting GMO stories in the primary literature:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8594427](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8594427)

A gene from Brazil Nuts that coded for a protein high in methionine was cloned
into soy plants; soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in
subjects.

Had this rolled out globally (at the scale that GMO soy is currently deployed)
it probably would have (I'm assuming the paper had all the details correct and
did in fact show a causal relationship between the transferred gene and the
resulting allergenicity) had an enormous negative health effect.

~~~
daveguy
I responded in more detail here (ended up longer than I expected):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12018169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12018169)

Briefly two points:

...soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in subjects
_allergic to brazil nuts_.

Not a novel unknown allergic reaction, but still important and something that
should always be evaluated during the regulatory process. GMO should
definitely be regulated and reported with greater scrutiny and transparency
than regular food precisely because of this potential. This was caused
specifically because of the protein chosen to be introduced into the soybean
to increase nutritional value.

From the other (longer) response tl;dr: This is a legitimate concern that
should be included in a regulatory framework that supports safety and
transparency.

~~~
dekhn
Sorry, you're right, I left out the critical point that the only subjects
affected were people already allergic to brazil nuts.

------
tomp
How convenient - scientists ignoring all non-scientific problems that GMOs
have (e.g. legal, social, economic, environmental impacts, monoculture
diseases, ...). Oh well, kind of what I would expect from a group of
scientists...

~~~
DominoTree
It's not productive to conflate all of these issues, as many of them aren't
really directly tied to GMOs.

------
alixaxel
I'm totally pro science by default. But I really have huge issues with GMO
foods. The patenting is worrisome. The seeds are more resistant than natural
occurring seeds and they tend to take over and annihilate other species
(Google what's happening with the corn crops in Mexico) and then ponder if a
scenario like what happened in Finland in the 70s with the potatoes (they were
just farming one kind of crop and it was infected with virus) would happen to
a GMO crop (thankfully we have Svalbard Global Seed Vault now).

One other issue is the lack of oversight - the EU was fighting for 12 years to
be able to scientifically test and publish the results of feeding Monsanto GMO
foods to rats. After this unstable battle, they finally published the results
and they were not good: rats fed with GMO food had developed tumors that were
as big as their original size.

And worst of all, we are running a massive world scale experiment where the
large majority of the the world is feed with GMO food without any prior proof
of its long term safety.

~~~
DominoTree
Seralini and his "studies" are highly discredited.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Séralini_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Séralini_affair)

The study you refer to, "rats fed with GMO food had developed tumors that were
as big as their original size" used Sprague-Dawley rats, typically chosen in
lab studies because the breed is known to quickly develop massive tumors
regardless of other factors. The results in this study were not statistically
significant, and were drawn from a sample size way too small, on a type of
animal that is known to develop tumors on its own.

Furthermore, the numbers in the study actually showed that male rats who
consumed glyphosate in their drinking water (because simultaneously testing
multiple variables on groups of like 5 rats makes sense, right?) actually
lived longer than those which did not, and _all_ rats in the study grew
massive tumors, even the control group.

If you're going to base an opinion on "science", please make sure you actually
read the study and have enough knowledge to determine whether it's bullshit or
not.

Thanks,

Someone who actually is "pro science"

~~~
alixaxel
It's still a scientific study, or an attempt at it at least. The way to go, is
not to dismiss it because it was retracted under dubious circumstances but
rather to have several third parties replicate the study correcting the flaws
that were found in the original one.

If you are curious why I said dubious circumstances, read
[https://www.rt.com/op-edge/monsanto-gmo-studies-
reports-588/](https://www.rt.com/op-edge/monsanto-gmo-studies-reports-588/).

~~~
DominoTree
Russia Today is a dubious source itself.

[https://www.rt.com/usa/alien-bird-deaths-cia-
un/](https://www.rt.com/usa/alien-bird-deaths-cia-un/)

Here's an article they published about aliens and the CIA causing the deaths
of migratory birds by spraying "chemtrails".

The fact of the matter is that GMOs contain the same genetic material we
already consume on a daily basis. We understand how it impacts our bodies (it
pretty much doesn't) and there is no distinction between genetic material from
a GM organism versus a conventional organism. It's chemically and functionally
identical (derived from the exact same nucleotide bases and the genes already
exist elsewhere with the same function), and has the same impact on your body.
This is something that we've studied for a very long time, and understand
fairly well.

------
wazoox
GMO are probably perfectly healthy. They're probably not much worse than
"hybrid" seeds. The problem is handing control of feeding the world to large
multinational corporations.

It's been proved again and again that it's perfectly possible to feed the
world organically. The "Green Revolution" was essentially a sham, pushing one
energy, resource and chemical intensive way of growing food as the only one
possible. It's perfectly possible to produce as much with much less
standardization.

------
anotheryou
How save is it to plant modified plants? My biggest concern was always, that
the plants would spread in to the wild and displace native vegetation.

Or do we already have some commonly used dead man switch so the plants can
only survive with additional chemicals put on to the fields?

~~~
deadowl
This already happens without GMOs, e.g. Africanized bees. Meanwhile, having a
dead man switch would turn GMO-based food systems into a potential weapon
(i.e. don't mess with us or we'll put your country into a famine).

~~~
anotheryou
Exactly, so probably we don't want more of it, no?

And the bees might be an invasive species, but they have no superpowers. I'm
not sure how wide the biological niche of a GMO plant can get.

For the dead man switch: maybe the activator could be something simple and
well known, just not so common in normal surface soil. But I don't even know
how big this risk is...

------
ricksplat
GM sounds like a great idea, but in the open for the benefit of all.

------
ryan606
A perfect example of the left being anti-science (in addition to
vaccinations), just like the right is on evolution and climate change.

------
amawgad
dont put DNA in my foods!!1

