This is the kind of GMO that's generally considered fairly benign as they're only increasing the expression of genes already found in the plant, not doing weird stuff like putting fish antifreeze genes in strawberries. You still have to be careful in some cases (for example, humans have bred toxins out of many food crops by reducing expression levels over generations; the genes for toxins might still be there, i.e. potatoes, so you'd not want to trigger their expression accidentally).
As far as nitrogen use, the claim is that these plants utilize nitrogen more efficiently than wild-type, so that you'd actually have to apply less nitrogen fertilizer and thus there'd be less nitrogen runoff from fields into lakes/streams etc.
From the materials and methods:
> "For nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) measurement, rice plants were grown in three independent field blocks supplied with 0, 100, or 200 kg N/ha. The study was performed in the Experimental Station of the Institute of Crop Science, CAAS, in Beijing from May to October, 2021. The N fertilizer was applied as urea at two stages: 40% at the tillering stage and 60% at the heading stage. Each line was cultivated in randomized plots with 20 cm spacing between rows and plants, and each plot contained at least 50 plants per line."
Oddly enough, the publisher makes materials and methods freely available but not results and discussion, go figure.
> not doing weird stuff like putting fish antifreeze genes in strawberries.
Oooh! Weird! Modifying my immune system to be able to fight cancer is "weird" too, right? Is there a good reason to use "weird" as a criterion in any of this? Because I like being a GMO organism who isn't dying of cancer, and people using "weird" as a metric make me a bit uneasy about how much longer such treatments are going to be allowed.
Remember: GMO isn't just about the "Organic" aisle at Amazon Whole Foods.
I think “weird” here means “things that may have unexpected side effects.” Cancer treatments have loads of those but we put up with them because death is worse. Eating strawberries and rice maybe exists at a different point on the risk continuum.
This is true up to the point of food scarcity. Between geopolitical conflict and crop failures around the world this year due to severe heat waves, we’re looking at a rough few years ahead of us for the global food supply.
So instead of stopping the wars and the global warming which increases the chance of the heat waves, we should jump straight to genetic engineering? Is that the better solution?
More realistic as stopping wars and climate change are much harder. The war in Ukraine hasn’t ended despite the West’s efforts. And CO2 emissions continue on a large scale despite all warnings.
The West's efforts have been to continue the war, not to stop it. When you're supplying arms, you're not acting to stop a war.
Not saying that Ukraine didn't have a right to be defended, but it should be pretty objectively obvious that the war would have stopped long ago had the West not intervened. This would have been unjust and a massive slap to the people of Ukraine, and arguably worse for the world in other ways - so I'm not saying that we shouldn't have supplied them.
But we also can't claim we are doing what we can to stop the war: we're (at best) doing what we can to help the right side to win, while prolonging the war.
>The West's efforts have been to continue the war, not to stop it. When you're supplying arms, you're not acting to stop a war.
The lazy “military industrial complex” take. Tell me, how do you propose that the US should support stopping the war that doesn’t involve Ukraine ceasing to be independent and losing its leaders?
Your comment is basically the same as, “The west’s efforts have been to prolong hunger, not to stop it. When you’re suppling food you’re not acting to stop hunger. It should have been objectively obvious that the hunger would have stopped long ago had we just let people starve to death.”
> Tell me, how do you propose that the US should support stopping the war that doesn’t involve Ukraine ceasing to be independent and losing its leaders?
First of all, I have been very explicit that "stopping the war" and "the best thing that can be done for the people of Ukraine" are not necessarily aligned. The fastest way of stopping the war would have probably been to supply Russia with arms and know-how, but I am not in any way advocating for such a criminal act.
Secondly, the West could have acted to capitalize on Ukraine's initial success in stopping the Russian blitzkrieg by convincing Ukraine's leaders to negotiate a neutrality agreement, similarly to Switzerland.
Instead of seeking to join NATO and/or re-conquer the land they lost in 2014, Ukraine could have accepted the loss of Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea, and started to design a way to become a neutral country, dealing with both Russia and the EU.
Instead, we have been supplying Ukraine with arms, intelligence and even targeting information and stoking their belief that they can actually win a war with Russia.
If we are right, then of course this will be a massive benefit to the people of Ukraine and arguably all of Eastern Europe, with a relatively mild cost to the people of Russia (a huge cost to the leaders of Russia though).
However, I believe that Russia will literally stop at nothing to prevent this outcome. I personally fully believe that Russia will nuke Ukraine before allowing it to win back the territory it has lost, especially Crimeea.
And that outcome, if it comes to pass, will be the worst thing that could have happened to Ukraine and its people, and probably the entire world. It would be much worse than being conquered by Russia in the initial attack, and definitely much much worse than a negotiated peace where they would cede territory to Russia.
> Secondly, the West could have acted to capitalize on Ukraine's initial success in stopping the Russian blitzkrieg by convincing Ukraine's leaders to negotiate a neutrality agreement, similarly to Switzerland.
The difference is that Russia does not respect any agreements it signs. Russia promised to not invade Ukraine or threaten its borders when it gave up its nukes, look how well that went.
> Instead, we have been supplying Ukraine with arms, intelligence and even targeting information and stoking their belief that they can actually win a war with Russia.
The west have been supplying Ukraine with weapons that appear to be making the difference. There’s a reason Russias advances have pretty much stalled entirely, there ammo depots and command centre keep exploding.
Turns out Russia is actually kinda not so great at this entire war thing.
> However, I believe that Russia will literally stop at nothing to prevent this outcome. I personally fully believe that Russia will nuke Ukraine before allowing it to win back the territory it has lost, especially Crimeea.
If Russia even blinks at a nuke the international response will make the sanctions look like child’s play.
I think Ukraine can win this fight, every week they get more and better weapons from the west whilst Russia keeps rolling out older and older equipment.
> If Russia even blinks at a nuke the international response will make the sanctions look like child’s play.
Why do you think this? Unless we're going to start WWIII over this, all of the things currently preventing us from imposing harsher sanctions on Russia will remain as strong - most importantly, Europe still needs Russian gas to be able to sustain its industry and population comfort.
It is true that India, China and all the other countries who didn't agree to the sanctions may change their tune. But Russia has to weigh the probability of that versus the costs to their regional power if they lose the war. And trusting in Putin's rationality is a pretty tough sell from my point of view.
> Why do you think this? Unless we're going to start WWIII over this, all of the things currently preventing us from imposing harsher sanctions on Russia will remain as strong - most importantly, Europe still needs Russian gas to be able to sustain its industry and population comfort.
MAD requires a overwhelming response to any nuclear use, it is true that Ukraine doesn’t have nukes so that response won’t be nuclear itself.
But if the world just “lets it go” then it would be speed up nuclear proliferation like no tomorrow.
I believe any use of a nuke is the end of Russia even if it’s a slow fall.
> should be pretty objectively obvious that the war would have stopped long ago had the West not intervened
It would have never begun if we’d denuclearised Russia in the 90s, yet here we are. Facing, once again, a choice between appeasing a murderous dictator or not.
When I've talked to anti-GMO people in real life, they seem to (1) be anti-Roundup and similar pesticides more so than literally anti-GMO or (2) be anti-IP laws that won't allow farmers to use seeds from their last crop.
Yes, the opposition is as much about things like patents on seeds and refusing to allow farmers to harvest seeds for their next planting season.
There's also the problem of making plants resistant to herbicides, then applying more herbicides, so you get lots of herbicide runoff into lakes and streams. This is really more about upping sales for the chemical manufacturer.
Also there are better methods for getting rid of weeds, I particularly like these field-crawling robots that identify weed seedlings with AI-vision and blast them with IR lasers.
Because modern hybrid seeds give much more productivity, but do not breed true.
Corn variety 1 + Corn variety 2 -> Hybrid with high productivity, disease-resistance, or some other desirable trait (or a combination of desirable traits).
However, the seeds from the hybrid will not be the same as the hybrid. Classically, you'll get some seeds that are more like CV1, some seeds that are like CV2, and some that are like the hybrid (in practice the genetics can be more complicated than that, but that's basically what's going to happen).
If CV1 is resistant to devastating disease D1, and CV2 is resistant to devastating disease D2, the hybrid might be resistant to both D1 and D2. Great! But the seeds from the hybrid are different. 1/4 the seeds from the hybrid will be susceptible to D#1 and 1/4 will be susceptible to D#2, and 1/2 will still be resistant to both. That means that "saving your seeds" = 50% crop loss to disease, if both diseases are present.
Well, your immune system is already capable of identifying and deleting cells that have escaped the normal cell cycle control and have become cancerous, but if there's damage to your immune system then it can lose that capability. Immune system damage can occur by many means: viral infections, chemical carcinogens, ionizing radiation, etc.
Using gene editing technology to repair your immune system using a human template wouldn't be transgenic technology and is probably a relatively safe use of CRISPR gene editing, for example. Throwing in some shark genes to see what happened, because some species of sharks don't seem to get cancer IIRC, that would not be such a great idea I don't think.
You and your clones are not gonna be spread around in nature and multiply uncontrollably. Also you and your clones are not gonna be eaten by predators and affect them in unforeseeable ways (i hope). Those differences matter to the people who worry about GMO technologies. The fact that the development is spearheaded by for-profit companies does not help either.
If you were dying of cancer and told your doctor you planned on drinking a lot of tea I assume your doctor would be like "Yeah, sure - couldn't hurt." Drinking tea is not weird, lots of people do it, and there are no real risks because you're dying anyway.
On the other hand, if you were like "I'm a biohacker, I'm going to genetically modify a virus to infect me and alter my immune system." Then I assume the doctor would say "Hey, let me get some people to take a look at that." Because that is weird and there are risks.
"Weird" doesn't mean good or bad, it means unusual. Unusual things have the property that we don't do what they will cause, because they haven't been done much, because they are unusual. Genetic biohacking probably does have a greater chance of saving your life, or increasing your farm yields, but there are possible downsides to it that are not present in more mundane interventions.
Are you not from the United States? Here, it's very common to find all of those things in one "super store". Walmart, Meijer in the Midwest, Fred Meyer in the Pacific Northwest, no doubt others in other regions of the country...
I'm not from the United States and it's not strange to find those things in one store in many places, but it's also weird to find them as the three things on a shopping list. We could play this game all day but I'm not going to shift from:
a) those three objects together are going to sound weird in pretty much any situation
b) regardless of the effectiveness, mixing genes from a list of things that sound like they would never mix under natural circumstances in any other way than a lab sounds weird
To the person who doesn't really have a valid point, it might be worth trying the tactic of pretending it's a "game", but that would be about as effective as a cat attempting to bury a turd on a hardwood floor.
Cat, turd, hardwood floor - poor effort, that's not a weird combination. I'm sure you might get the hang of it if you keep trying.
Now, if you don't think some triplet is weird, that's subjective (as I would hope anyone would understand and admit) but to try and claim that:
a) some objects together aren't weird, or
b) those objects together aren't weird
and
c) to make either claim means the claimant doesn't have a valid point
that would really be akin to producing a turd into the conversation, logically and rhetorically. Nice of you to bring up tactics during a discussion about what constitutes a game though, that's worthy of a chuckle.
Strawberries don't need to exist in the first place. Nothing does. That doesn't mean we don't want to cultivate them in places that may have a cold climate.
Yes, and many plant species with berries evolved a natural resistance to frost without getting a boost from fish proteins. Why not use genes from plants that already grow in colder latitudes like gooseberries or huckleberries?
> This is the kind of GMO that's generally considered fairly benign
not by me. The rpecautionary principle is not followed in any GM process so invasive.
Even breeding, which is a far less invasive form of genetic manipulation, has caused serious issues. The vast majority of commercial produce has had a lot of its nutrition bred out of it, for example.
These kinds of long arc problems for the consumers of the food are not possible to track over anything but multiple generations (generations of the consumers of the food, not generations of the plants). They become all but impossible to track when the incentives of the systems at play essentially guarantee fuckery with regards to the gathering, interpretation, and dissemination of data that jepordizes profits.
> The [pr]ecautionary principle is not followed in any GM process so invasive.
While that is true, the precautionary principle is also not followed in any other process. It can't be, because the precautionary principle is nothing more than the statement "never do anything, not under any circumstances".
> the PP will always result in the decision to not do something, because you can never be 100% nothing bad will result.
It's worse than that; the precautionary principle will tell you that you can't do [whatever it is], because there might be risks, and it will also tell you that you can't refrain from doing [whatever it is], because there might be risks to that too. It is completely logically incoherent, an intellectual embarrassment.
The only thing that determines what the precautionary principle will tell you to do is what question you choose to ask.
What "happens to them" is that their life is sustained by calories and nutrition they would not otherwise be able to afford.
This kind of GMO is literally (not figuratively!) life-saving technology.
Just like the Haber process enabled fertilizer to be produced cheaply, saving billions of lives. Without it, India would have faced mass-starvation and its population would be half of what it is now.
Now, you may wish to argue that the World has become overpopulated as a consequence, but then the question becomes: How would you reduce the population?
Most people would prefer to elevate societies through sufficient sustenance, comprehensive health-care, and stable governments. This seems to reliably result in negative or zero population growth.
Your view seems to be that it's preferable to starve hundreds of millions to death, leaving the survivors in abject poverty to avoid... what... "meddling with nature"?
No, you misidentify me; I'm not one of those anti-human "the world is overpopulated!! Degrowth!!" People. Better food is good; I just assume someone will fuck up at some point while we're figuring out nutrition and genetic engineering.
Let the hundreds of millions eat what they will; any problems or mistakes with gene-edits that lead to poisoning, carcinogens or insidious malnutrition will be sorted out after a few decades, I'm sure. I just don't want to be the guinea pig, if I can let a hundred million other people do so instead!
Those hordes of hungry mouths are a great laboratory: diverse, far enough away and poor enough they can't take revenge on you if you accidentally poison them, etc.
"Mounting evidence from multiple scientific studies shows that many fruits, vegetables, and grains grown today carry less protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C than those that were grown decades ago."
"Nutrient decline “is going to leave our bodies with fewer of the components they need to mount defences against chronic diseases—it’s going to undercut the value of food as preventive medicine,” says David R. Montgomery, a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington in Seattle and co-author with Anne Biklé of What Your Food Ate."
"Even for people who avoid processed foods and prioritise fresh produce, this trend means that “what our grandparents ate was healthier than what we’re eating today,” says Kristie Ebi, an expert in climate change and health at the University of Washington in Seattle."
"Objectives: To evaluate possible changes in USDA nutrient content data for 43 garden crops between 1950 and 1999 and consider their potential causes."
"Results: As a group, the 43 foods show apparent, statistically reliable declines (R < 1) for 6 nutrients (protein, Ca, P, Fe, riboflavin and ascorbic acid) [...] Declines in the medians range from 6% for protein to 38% for riboflavin."
"Conclusions: We suggest that any real declines are generally most easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties between 1950 and 1999, in which there may be trade-offs between yield and nutrient content."
It hasn't actually been shown that it's the strain variation because identical strains (giving wild plants as samples) are shown to have the same declines. There's no known reason, but one decent hypothesis is that the atmosphere is changing and plants are bulking faster due to the increase of CO2. This is something you can demonstrate in a grow tent by venting in CO2.
When plants have higher CO2 they increase the synthesis of carbohydrates, sugars and starches, and they decrease concentrations of protein and nutrients.
This details someone of these details, including references to some of the studies you linked.
Worth noting is that if GMO varieties had stark differences in nutrient content, it would be noted at the time and likely common knowledge by now. It doesn't seem to fill the nutrient gap though, and some varieties have improved nutrition profiles (though not sufficient to close the gap).
I'm not particularly pro-GMO; I think we'd be better off investing more in farming and our food in the first place. There are some things we think should be cheap in life, and food is one. We went from spending our days finding, processing, and eating food to expecting 20lb of potatoes to cost a few dollars, or less than an hour of work. There's something wrong with that picture in my mind. Even if we don't want to be farming in our day-to-day lives, I think this requires a greater investment than we're giving it.
I'd say the same about education. I think it simply costs more and deserves more than we give it, and we pay the price for skimping. Totally different topic, but, we want to have the best things in life for less all the time when maybe we should want to invest correspondingly to its importance. Perhaps farmers (and teachers) should still be some of the most important people in society. In the case of farmers, GMOs might boost yields and they might be a good investment, but they can't actually replace the farmers.
Edit: There is a decent summary from Veritasium on YouTube as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl_K2Ata6XY (This link contains some good sources in the description as well)
The vast majority of commercial produce has had a lot of its nutrition bred out of it, for example.
As far as I am aware, this is very much untrue. Modern agricultural practices have indeed resulted in lower levels of nutrition in many fruits and vegetables—there was a bit of chat about this earlier in the year—but to say it has been “bred out” is not accurate.
I’m no GMO hawk, but it seems entirely feasible that breeding or GMing produce to reduce dependency on various aggressive agricultural techniques offers the possibility of increasing the nutritional content of produce, rather then diminishing it.
It not the organic nutrients (amino acids etc.) that are low as a result of fast growing crops, it the inorganic nutrients that are low, i.e. metals. Faster growth of the plant means less time to absorb from the ground.
I've no idea how that affects hydroponics, but practically none of the food I eat is hydroponic so that is moot.
Imagine if the precautionary principal had to be used for any other technology. We wouldn't have electricity, cell networks, airplanes or antibiotics. It is an impossible standard.
> These kinds of long arc problems for the consumers of the food
You always have to compare with the long arc problems by not making changes... Like the increased nitrogen runoff destroying ecosystems in lakes and oceans, and the reduced yield meaning humans on the margins die of starvation.
How many humans should we kill by starvation to be a little more cautious about deploying this tech?
I have no idea what they mean, but invasibillity has a specific definition, generally not applied to genetics or genomics. While there is a way I could see this term being used in genetics, the way they've used it, the clearly don't understand.
Invasibillity is the tendency for an organism to expand into an environment and out-compete its native flora/fauna. I've got enough training in biology to understand that there are some cases where individual genes, sets of genes, chromosomes, plastids, viroids, etc.. could be considered invasive? Genes move, so it could be framed that way, but its also clearly not what the author means.
My assumption was that they were using the term as it's used in the medical field. A procedure such as a sonogram is noninvasive because it does not penetrate the organism or cause large changes or damage. Surgery is an invasive procedure.
My understanding of the comment is that breeding plants together and selecting for traits is noninvasive while going in and directly modifying the genome through enzymatic means is more invasive. I don't know if this is the correct way to use these terms in this circumstance, but this is my perspective.
If you’re from the field the only crucial pieces of info you need from a paper would be the abstract and materials section. You can pretty much impute everything else at least to replicate the work. So maybe that’s the reason.
“Generally considered” may not be good enough given that that general considerment is corporately influenced (in terms of research funding, media, narratives inside the industry, etc.).
I mean, I’m not an expert, but altering the expression of genes already present could be hugely dangerous in theory. These expressions are based on extremely precise feedback loops and interrelationships.
I guess we could use a coding analogy: if you’re using a statically compiled language and you make a code change that compiles and makes the unit tests you have in place pass, it probably works. But it might not… and in this case, what are the risks of the “might not,” especially when we’re layering these modifications on top of each other? And do we need to take such risks?
This is an oddly anti-scientific view. We can test and evaluate the safety of the resulting GMO product.
Some of the most important and useful pharmaceuticals are GMO products, produced by genetically modified cells in bioreactors. Do you have an issue with those?
There is also the fact that we allow rampant and unregulated frankenfood production which is obviously harmful and purely profit driven (ie modern processed food production). But when it comes to GMO crops, which would improve the nutrition of the hungriest populations, suddenly it is too dangerous and must be banned. A privileged double-standard if there ever was one.
> But when it comes to GMO crops, which would improve the nutrition of the hungriest populations, suddenly it is too dangerous and must be banned. A privileged double-standard if there ever was one.
There’s a big difference between making Cheese Puffs and genetically modifying a plant and releasing it into the wild.
The first is just irresponsible (unless you enjoy Cheese Puffs) but the second could possibly have major unintended consequences because there’s no way to account for all the variables.
As a somewhat unlikely example what if some poor third-world farmer plants some GMO and it kills their water buffalo, Buffalo Billy, who they rely on to plow their field?
Yeah I'm definitely not an expert here, just raising the question. I guess compared to pharmaceuticals which are something we'd take only as a last resort/backup plan, is there extra danger in modifying the most basic of our food sources? Any unintended side effects that could happen or limitations to our tests?
(I'm definitely am in favor of regulation to prevent overprocessing of food too. So no double standard from my end there.)
I'm really not a fan of Round-Up Ready GMOs, but breeding plants already alters their genes and gene expression. Horticulture has radically altered every food we eat. The natural world already can't sustain 7 billion people, there simply isn't enough nitrogen in the soil. Fertilizer is the reason you and I are alive right now, and its a huge source of greenhouse gasses, so yes, we do need to take such risks.
A better coding analogy would be genetic algorithms versus intelligent fuzzing and manually patching.
There was a study shared here, a while ago, that found total nutritional content remained the same while total yields increased. In other words, all the efforts to increase yield have, so far, only increased the water content of the produce. Our vegetables, today, are fatter, but less nutritious. I expect this development will be similar.
Interesting anecdote: ever since "supply chain issues" became a thing, my local big name grocery stores (Kroger, etc.) have had much smaller but much more flavorful produce as they've resorted to sourcing more locally. Also more expensive, at first, and they go bad/get bruised much faster than they get sold, so they get marked down back to affordability within a few days of a shipment, until there are none left and the cycle repeats. I can't say I mind the change.
> Good nutrition was one reason: Isotopic tracers revealed the plants with extra copies of OsDREB1C took up extra nitrogen through their roots and moved more of it to the shoots.
Land use throughout the globe is at an unsustainable level, causing habitat loss for species and reduction in carbon sinks. Getting farmland to produce more per square meter would be very important, and the results presented in the article seem like a possibility in that regard.
I wonder how this would combine with the effort[1] to modify rice to use the C4 kind of photosynthesis, if realized.
How much more fertilizer and water input is needed to realize these results? As these two resources become scarce, we should start thinking about yield per unit input rather than simply yield per acre.
Is this new crop safe for humans and animals to eat? How do we know?
From the description, proportionally more fertilizer (and water) is required, because one of the effects of the genetic change is an increased rate of extraction for the nitrogen compounds from the soil.
The increased rate of nitrogen extraction, together with the higher rates of photosynthesis (which needs water to provide the hydrogen for reducing carbon dioxide, nitrates and sulfates) and of carbon dioxide reduction lead to a higher productivity.
Unlike for some of the other genetically-modified crops, from the description there does not seem to be any reason to worry about eating such a rice, as the genetic modification does not seem to have any qualitative effects, but only quantitative effects, resulting in higher rates for the same chemical processes as in non-modified rice, obtained by multiplying the reaction sites.
I'm no biologist or chemist, but generally plant growth is a huge chain of chemical processes, and if you make some subset of these faster, can it lead, for example, to accumulation of byproducts that are normally used up nearly completely? Or to unexpected regulation of some other reactions, including possibly expressing something bad that's usually only made in the cells we don't eat, up to the anti-herbivore toxins?
Such things cannot be completely excluded, but they should also be easy to detect. I assume that for any such new cultivar many detailed chemical analyses will be done before deciding that all went well.
Such side effects can also happen when using more traditional methods, i.e. selection of improved cultivars from plants that have suffered spontaneous random mutations or random mutations caused by mutagenic agents.
On the other hand, when you insert a foreign gene in the plant genome, e.g. with the purpose of making it pest-resistant, the results are far more unpredictable then in cases like this, where an already existing gene has been duplicated, in order to increase its activity.
As food, rice is mainly an excellent and easy to transport and store source of energy, with up to 80% of its weight being starch, more than in most other cereals.
All the other nutrients are present in a quantity so small that their contribution is negligible. Rice can cover all of the energy needs of a human, but it must be accompanied by other food for enough proteins, vitamins and minerals.
It isn’t. And that’s why people who argue that GMO food is bad for you just don’t get it. It’s not the food that’s bad, it’s the business practices. The GMO food itself is perfectly fine to eat. In fact, humans have been genetically modifying food for centuries, we’ve just gotten much faster at it.
GM crops that produce BT toxin are supposed to be safe for humans due to the acid in our stomachs breaking down the BT toxin. But, I wasn't able to find any studies that investigated the safety of BT toxin in contact with mucus membranes in the mouth etc. before being processed by the stomach. It seems, at least, possible that this could lead to an increased risk of throat and mouth cancers. GM BT corn, egg plant (aubergine), and potatoes are common.
Herbicide resistant GM crops used to get slathered with more herbicides than non-GM crops, so you probably were getting less exposure to these herbicides with non-GM conventional crops vs. GM conventional crops (I guess you could argue this falls into business practices, but it is the point of these GM crops). But, Ag schools, at least in the US, have been promoting using herbicides like glyphosate and Reglone to desiccate crops immediately prior to harvest[1] to avoid having to mow the crops to get a low uniform crop moisture content for harvesting equipment. So, conventional non-GM grains, oil seeds and legumes may also have high herbicide residues. Of course, buying organic avoids both sources of herbicides.
Your "meh" is similar to disregarding contemporary environmental PFAS contamination because of historic lead contamination from tetraethyllead. "There exist bad things already" does not automatically make the additional potentially bad thing harmless.
BT is sprayed on some food crops, but with GM food crops, it is contained within every cell of the plant, and cannot be washed off. You are consuming BT toxin, if you eat GM BT crops (the US EPA requires BT crops to be registered as pesticides). Putting poison in contact with mucus membranes seems, at the very least, 'possible' to have negative long-term health consequences.
Non GM conventional crops can use systemic pesticides (the irrigation water contains the poison and/or the seed is pre-treated. This also incorporates the pesticide within plant tissues so it cannot be washed off). These systemic pesticides are usually neonicotinoids. Presence of systemic neonicotinoid use in conventional agriculture does not negate concerns about GM BT crops.
My point was that GM, as it exists today, makes conventional agriculture's issues of pesticide exposure and low genetic diversity in our staple food crops worse, not that conventional agriculture doesn't already have issues.
>In fact, humans have been genetically modifying food for centuries, we’ve just gotten much faster at it.
No we didn't, we have been conducting artificial selection for centuries, farmers just pick among the best varieties available to them. By your logic the act of buying GMO seeds is what modifies their genes rather than their production process.
How is that different from use of hybrid seeds, which have been available since forever and don't breed true?
The solution to dependence is to have multiple suppliers. One can always use an older variety of seed. If the complaint is that the benefits are going to the company that made the seeds rather than the farmer, then how is that different from any other patented technology? The farmer is never going to be worse off, since he can always just use older varieties if the cost > his benefit.
Perhaps your actual argument is that this will reduce food prices, driving out producers who don't keep up with the latest advances. But again, how is that different from any other improvement in agricultural technology? Is this just more European objection to the steamroller of US industrial agriculture?
You are aware you're spouting bullshit there, right?
First of all, copyright isn't the applicable IP; patents are.
Second, no farmer has ever been sued for accidental contamination with patented GMOs. There have been cases where farmers deliberately tried to concentrate trace contamination, but the courts properly recognized the deliberate nature of that.
These urban legend arguments are one of the reasons I view the entire anti-GMO movement with a very jaundiced eye.
> Second, no farmer has ever been sued for accidental contamination with patented GMOs. There have been cases where farmers deliberately tried to concentrate trace contamination, but the courts properly recognized the deliberate nature of that.
Yes, deliberate use of the patented gene/interaction. That's still suing small farmers, doing farmer stuff, for IP infringement.
The farmer deliberately attempted to concentrate the gene. The only reason he would do this is to try to violate the patent. This was not an innocent action. Your argument here is like blaming a homeowner for catching a burgler.
No, in the case I'm thinking of he was doing something that wasn't normal at all. He was taking a field of mostly Roundup vulnerable soybeans and spraying it, killing off most of the plants, concentrating the ones that happened to have picked up the patented gene. There is no interpretation of what he was doing that wasn't clear and intentional violation of patent law. And thus he lost in court.
If farmers are trying to isolate a specific thing in their crops, they will kill the other plants, yes!
Artificial selection is a normal farming activity. At the very least it's thousands of years old, that part isn't what the patent is about.
Look, let's get back to the original post maybe? "Suing small farmers for copyright infringement isn't very nice." It was a different kind of IP infringement, otherwise nothing is factually wrong about this statement. We have some conflict about how patents should work in a situation like this, but that's not really the point here.
Look, you need to realize that in this case, the farmer lost in court. He was judged to have deliberately violated the patent. He wasn't innocent. His actions only made sense as an attempt to pirate the patented genes that he knew were there. He tried to argue that because the genes showed up in his crops he was entitled to concentrate them by this selection process and use them. In this, he lost.
Yes, let's get back to that original nonsense post. You are objecting to a patent holder defending their rights under the patent, taking deliberate and knowing violators of the patent to court. That position is bullshit. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Note that no farmers have even been sued for accidental and involuntary contamination of their crops. Nor will they be, since they'd have an excellent defense there in the absence of any intention on their parts to violate the patent. The courts are not stupid on this sort of thing.
If I think a law is flawed, then proof of violation is not going to change my mind!
> You are objecting to a patent holder defending their rights under the patent, taking deliberate and knowing violators of the patent to court.
For this very specific type of violation.
I personally think certain kinds of copyright related to distribution are garbage and should not exist at all. I think it's bad if a company sues over them, even if the party being sued is very guilty.
> That position is bullshit.
Criticizing a law is not bullshit.
Criticizing a lawsuit over a violation you think isn't worth it, even if the violation is extremely blatant, is not bullshit either.
I'm not even saying the initial comment is on the correct side, just that it's a reasonable position.
Generally people carve out potato blemishes, and blight spots, and rotten parts, and smelly parts and butchers will carve out cancerous growths. It's a standard practice, something that humans do, partly do to our sense of disgust. Our senses are not always correct, but most of the time it's a good survival adaptation to avoid rotten food and getting sick.
I think it's fair to say eating one plant is not comparable with eating a different plant. Why is eating one pattern of DNA (rice) less dangerous than another (Castor beans, where ricin comes from)? I think that's pretty self-explanatory. They code for different proteins.
I think the answer is more that we have no reason to believe that these modifications introduced harmful proteins, and we tested it on animals and humans, and they were fine.
The problem I have with GMOs generally speaking is the business model of patenting, selling sterile seeds that put farmers on mandatory subscription model - and that frequently the only genetic modification is to make the crop resistant to pesticides and herbicides so you can soak the fields, sterilize them and kill everything else. Or all 3 at once, like RoundUp Ready corn and soy.
>The problem I have with GMOs generally speaking is the business model of patenting, selling sterile seeds that put farmers on mandatory subscription model
What you said also applies to hybrid varieties, yet they don't receive nearly as much pushback. Furthermore, what's wrong with a subscription model? GMO seeds costs money to develop and that has to be recouped somehow. The alternative is paying some sort of upfront fixed cost, which is probably even worse on a farmer's finances and gives large scale operations even more of an advantage (they have easy access to capital).
> Furthermore, what's wrong with a subscription model? GMO seeds costs money to develop and that has to be recouped somehow. The alternative is paying some sort of upfront fixed cost, which is probably even worse on a farmer's finances and gives large scale operations even more of an advantage (they have easy access to capital).
A subscription isn’t in and of itself a bad thing, but the expectation is a little strange given that the plants themselves spread and grow in places that cannot be regulated by the developers. Thus someone could subscribe once then cancel but still grow the crop. Further, people who didn’t subscribe could end up having some of the crop spread onto their land then could unintentionally grow it without permission. This has sometimes led to attempts to either force people to pay for services they didn’t agree to or to destroy something growing on their own land through no fault of their own. In those cases, non-customers are actively penalized for their non-participation rather being left alone or being incentivized to try product through positive means.
>but the expectation is a little strange given that the plants themselves spread and grow in places that cannot be regulated by the developers. Thus someone could subscribe once then cancel but still grow the crop.
1. As mentioned before, what isn't applicable to hybrid crops. If you try to collect the seeds of hybrid crops and try to plant them, you'll get the seeds of the parents, which aren't going to have the attributes you're looking for.
2. I take it that you're also against copyrights? After all, you can theoretically buy a blu-ray once, and copy it infinitely.
>Further, people who didn’t subscribe could end up having some of the crop spread onto their land then could unintentionally grow it without permission. This has sometimes led to attempts to either force people to pay for services they didn’t agree to or to destroy something growing on their own land through no fault of their own. In those cases, non-customers are actively penalized for their non-participation rather being left alone or being incentivized to try product through positive means.
Source for this? It's been often alleged that monsanto engages in this behavior, but according to wikipedia[1] they've only gone after farmers that were intentionally trying to reverse engineer/breed their seeds.
If I kept getting sent single frames of a bluray whether I want them or not, but I was forbidden from putting those frames together into the full movie, I'd be pretty annoyed about that use of copyright too.
>Furthermore, what's wrong with a subscription model? GMO seeds costs money to develop and that has to be recouped somehow.
Developing countries must import seeds which forces them to export something to maintain balanced trade. Most developed nations are fighting currency wars against each other and developing countries which means they can at best export natural resources like oil, gold, raw copper or diamonds.
This seems like a self-correcting problem. If you can't export stuff then foreign currency/GMO seeds would get more and more expensive, until the increased productivity of GMO seeds isn't worth it anymore at which point you switch back to conventional seeds. Considering that you can't eat "natural resources like oil, gold, raw copper or diamonds", having the option to turn those things into more food (ie. by exporting them and using the money to buy GMO Seeds) seems like a net positive.
Yes, but I wonder if it matters when vitamins are widely available? Or alternatively, some nutrients get added at a later step. Iodized salt, for example.
This might seem less "natural" but it seems like it would work?
That helps, though an issue is bioavailability - vitamin forms are typically harder for the body to process than the forms in food. There can also be other nutrients required together (e.g. calcium with vitamin D). Finally, I am 100% sure that, despite progress (e.g. fortified bread), we don't yet know all the nutrients, forms, and interactions.
ADD: rickets was common in England in the 17th century due to dietary changes, and it took a while for the cause and solution to be figured out: a legal requirement to fortify some foods with vitamin D.
What rising disorders today are caused by dietary changes? Austism? Infertility? You'd think we'd be much quicker at finding a dietary cause today - unless the ones we haven't found yet are harder to find.
One of the greatest health problems today has a obvious relationship to calories: obesity. Perhaps simply getting more calaries for the same mass of food is a factor? Or, maybe our feeling of hunger is triggered by a lack of nutrients other than calories? So we eat and eat but are not satisfied.
It seems pretty low risk. Given that not all cultures are rice-based, it seems unlikely that rice has any mysterious nutrient that's essential but not in other foods we eat. It's also unlikely that having somewhat less of it in rice will have dramatic effects.
After all, people do eat a variety of different diets and often change their diets.
I think we should try to do more with automation to produce food more cheaply. I’d rather have a zillion little robots clipping weeds than spraying roundup on GMO roundup resistant crops to achieve the same effect. A farmer’s job should be to press one button in the spring.
According to the description, there should be no changes in either taste or nutrients, which is a good thing.
This kind of genetic manipulation, where the control of gene expression is modified for greater productivity, is much more promising than the attempts to make a plant produce different chemical substances than it was producing previously or behave differently in the presence of pesticides, because for the latter cases it is still very difficult to predict whether the genetic changes that are done will have only the desired effects, without other undesirable consequences.
What even are "nutrients"? It seems such a nebulous term. Do we really have a vitamin problem with a modern diet? I sure as heck don't know anyone getting rickets or scurvy or beri-beri.
As far as nitrogen use, the claim is that these plants utilize nitrogen more efficiently than wild-type, so that you'd actually have to apply less nitrogen fertilizer and thus there'd be less nitrogen runoff from fields into lakes/streams etc.
From the materials and methods:
> "For nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) measurement, rice plants were grown in three independent field blocks supplied with 0, 100, or 200 kg N/ha. The study was performed in the Experimental Station of the Institute of Crop Science, CAAS, in Beijing from May to October, 2021. The N fertilizer was applied as urea at two stages: 40% at the tillering stage and 60% at the heading stage. Each line was cultivated in randomized plots with 20 cm spacing between rows and plants, and each plot contained at least 50 plants per line."
Oddly enough, the publisher makes materials and methods freely available but not results and discussion, go figure.