Another GMO shoe drops

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by iceaura, Sep 27, 2018.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    There is no pinned thread for GMO updates, as there is regarding climate change.
    So these items are disconnected.
    But another dog long named by the GMO alarmists came around and bit, recently:

    https://phys.org/news/2018-09-common-weed-killer-linked-bee.html

    In case anyone was wondering: yes, human beings have a gut microbiome; yes, their exposure to glyphosate rises sharply if they include the common GMO derived foods in their diet; and no, the effects of glyphosate on the human gut microbiome have not been investigated or described carefully.
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. exchemist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    12,452
    Very interesting, thanks for this. Of course glyphosate isn't just a GMO issue: it is used everywhere. But I presume your point is that there may be higher glyphosate residues in food from glyphosate-resistant GM crops, so humans will ingest those, not just bees etc.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    There are occasionally, in fact, measured, much higher levels of glyphosate residue in common GMO derived foodstuffs. There is also, inevitably, much greater and more continual exposure to low levels. There's no "may be".
    And also in everything nearby, gardens downwind, surface water runoff wherever it goes, etc. The milkweeds in the borders and ditches are killed as well, and the 80% decline in wintering monarchs since GMO deployment is not a coincidence.
    And yes, abuse of glyphosate at this level is "just a GMO issue" - it cannot be plastered all over the landscape as it is unless the nonweed plants are resistant, and the only reason for the creation of the GMOs involved is that resistance.

    Part of the reason for the large boost in exposure is the genetic modification itself, which works in some plants by establishing the ability to sequester the herbicide in chemical complexes within plant organelles. The expectation was that humans would not be exposed to large amounts of these complexes, since most of them would be in plant parts humans don't eat - in the leaves of soybeans, etc. The expectation was also that these chemical complexes would be inert, and pass through the human - or honeybee - body undisturbed, if they were ingested - so eating small amounts would be harmless. Neither one of these expectations was thoroughly tested in the lab or in the field, the first being ignored in food chain and processing circumstances, the second adopted without even considering the human - or honeybee - microbiome.

    And part of the reason is the corporate PR and marketing lines: that glyphosate use would be limited and responsible and in all common circumstances prudently moderated and governed, that resistance would not develop rapidly and significantly in the common weeds (necessitating higher application levels for the same protection), and that no black market or uncontrolled usage would be significant. That was all bullshit, of course - and the fact that it was deliberately misleading, rather than merely the common mental effect of corporate greed and job insecurity and groupthink and so forth, is proved by the simultaneous expenditures of large sums for rapidly developing the next generation of modifications involving far more dangerous herbicides (such as 2,4-D) - with approval for their deployment intentionally piggybacked on approval of the comparatively benign glyphosate via repetition of "GMOs are safe" memes.

    And that's just one GM, and just the bee/human side effects. AFAIK not a single one of the dozens of GMO deployments has been carefully monitored for its influence on microbial flora of any kind - even the ones built on bacterial or fungal genetics modified for easy transferal. The entire field is walking blind. Rolling dice in the dark. Living under a population of shoes of almost completely unknown nature and extent.
     
    Last edited: Sep 27, 2018
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,864
    GMO hiding under our beds, stealing our pets, running amok at Starbucks. VERY SCARY!!!!
     
  8. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,447
    interesting when the same methadology of human behaviour of collective exposure is used for vehicle speeding causing death.
    fining drivers who go over the lmit saying they contribute to road deaths etc...
    seems like a logical concept to prevent prolonged exposure to a long term fatal outcome.

    yet long term exposure to chemicals in diet as a concern to cause death is called quackery and extremist politics.

    interesting

    "is the substance fatal ? yes but only at a much higher dose!"
    "so lots of small doses over a long period is legal ? "yes"...
    "ok so only going over the speed limit on occasion you should not be fined?"
    "no! going over the speed limit even if it is safe to do so, you will still get fined, because if you do it now, you will do it even more later"

    oh ...

    quackery ?
     
  9. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,864
    "Gee, how much of the substance is really needed?"

    "Is there any chance that the substance will be expelled by the body?"

    "Will that process prevent the needed accumulation of the substance?"

    voodoo?
     
  10. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,447
    like heroin
    crack cocaine
    alcahol

    children with sugar or fat addictions...

    the way various chemicals effect the brain, nervous system, metabolic system and combined effects with brain metabolism nervous system and dopamines and endorphines...
    food combinations with MSG and high salt mixed with low quality diet creates dopamine release after eating and causes food addiction to fats and carborhydrates.
    doing this to children should be illegal
    usualy sugar addiction is created at the same time with repeatedly giving the child a highly sugery drink to eat with the high fat high carb low protien low vitamin low vegetable low mineral food.
     
  11. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,864
    Whoa, false equivalence much?
     
  12. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,635
    So in other words - like water.
    Most people go over the speed limit on occasion and are not fined. So in that sense you are correct.
    No, you usually won't.
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Among the relevant matters involved in evaluating the possible side effects of the kinds of genetic engineering common in creating GMOs, the new and nascent research into microbiotic ecology has begun to make its first discoveries:
    https://www.sciencealert.com/for-th...en-bacteria-fishing-for-dna-from-dead-friends
    The bacteria involved are of a kind common in the human gut.
     
  14. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    11,888
    This is a pesticide issue not a GMO issue.

    National academy of science - GMOs are safe.
     
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    As described above, if you reread more carefully, it is an issue with the actual deployment of a specific GM employed in creating a half dozen related GMOs planted as crops.
    The fact that a couple of specific GMO food crops not directly injuring by a couple of specific mechanisms a batch of lab rats that ate chow made from them is so often headlined as "GMOs Are Safe" is one of the most striking features of the GMO debate.

    GMOs Are Safe. No joke - that is the conclusion being publicized.

    Never mind the immediate objections - that the microbiome effects were and are unknown, that not a single long term consumption study has been done, that the record of such food safety declarations without adequate investigation is quite bad (artificial colors, artificial sweeteners, trans fats, preservatives, BPH and like packaging materials, radiation, etc). That's all obvious, but more or less familiar. We've seen all that before.

    The new and striking aspect is the bizarrely poor quality of the argument. How could anyone capable of scientific research and analysis conclude from anything known about the health effects of eating a couple of GMO food crops that "GMOs"

    - all of them, food and nonfood, plant and animal and bacterial and fungal and combinations, familiar and brand new and hypothetical,

    were "Safe"? - Not just safe to eat (bad enough), but safe in general?

    That makes no sense. There's no way to draw that conclusion, or anything remotely similar to that conclusion.

    What is wrong with these people?
     
  16. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    11,888
    That is the same thing the climate deniers say.
    It annoys me when liberals (I'm a bleeding heart liberal) accuse conservatives of being anti-science and then turn around and dismiss science they do not like.
    For instance a greater percentage of liberals than conservatives are anti-vaxxers and anti-GMO even though mainstream science says there is not issue.
    Hell, gas fracking done properly is no worse than normal gas drilling according to what I have read in Scientific American. Of course no worse than normal gas drilling ain't saying a lot...
     
  17. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,635
    Problem in that statement highlighted.
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    It's the opposite. You have the sides reversed.
    Denial of risk, in a situation of ignorance, is what the money talks up.
    I'm neither - not a bleeding liberal, not anti-GMO.
    You are dismissing the science, and buying into corporate bs - Monsanto's take on GMOs is equivalent to Exxon's on CO2.
     
  19. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,635
    OK. So where is the science that shows that ingesting GMO's is harmful to humans?
     
  20. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    That question makes no sense.

    Some GMOs are obviously harmful when ingested - weaponized anthrax, for example. Others are pretty obviously safe - single point Crispr insertions creating alleles already present in customarily ingested subvarieties of the engineered organism, for example. Other clearly worrisome GMOs might, once the missing research and evidence is in, prove themselves harmless - it's quite possible, although unknown at the present time. Still others are never ingested, and nobody cares.

    There are no true statements anyone can make about the "safety of GMOs", for much the same reasons there are no such true statements about the "safety of fish" or the "safety of insects" or the "safety of tools".

    There's plenty of evidence of high risk in the current deployment of the GMOs we have to deal with in real life - starting with the lack of knowledge and absence of public or transparent monitoring and research that has accompanied their spread, the obvious sources of bias and fraud and concealed injury in the corporate profits governing and riding on this deployment, and the evidence of slipshod irresponsibility or willful blindness governing it all that we see in such media feeds as the link in #11.

    I linked to a couple items of evidence of high risk - the microbiome effects in bees, the horizontal DNA and RNA transfer mechanisms common in human gut biota, the mechanism of the engineered glyphosate resistance in some ingested plants. But that list is pages long. It's a new field.

    And that is just considering ingestion. The safety of GMOs involves many more considerations than ingestion, and the dangers or harmful effects of GMOs involve much more than individual human safety.
     
    Last edited: Jan 11, 2019
  21. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,635
    If you asked for the science showing that smoking was harmful to humans, I could easily produce studies that show a greatly increased risk of lung cancer, emphysema and heart disease as a result of smoking. Can you do something similar?
    I assume you mean "harmful" rather than "harmless."

    Yes, that could happen. And that is the same argument that anti-vaxxers make. Sure, it LOOKS like vaccines do more good than harm. But we just don't know! They might cause autism. They might cause seizures or eczema. They might cause some other horrible diseases that we don't know about now. And NO ONE CARES! Why not wait until the science is settled before you inject babies with potentially deadly pathogens that could cause autism?

    That is not a sufficient argument to advocate against vaccination.
     
  22. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,447
    scientifically you can swap out the word vaccination with science.

    weaponsofmasturbation
    thesmokinghandjob
    awelllubricatedsubjectdoesntneedtobeforcedupthewrongway

    you and your antiwaxers
    closeshavesleavelittlerooomtomove
    smashingtheknobendthroughthepressplaybutton

    that size is insufficient to advocate

    what was the subject ?
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Of course not. I meant harmless - the condition of having had the visible risks investigated and found to be little problem.
    Of course not. There is no such body of studies, with any GMO let alone all of them. So?

    Actually, I could, in a sense, as you would accept: There's plenty of research showing weaponized anthrax and other such bioweapons are harmful to humans. That isn't the point, right? We are all supposed to just accept the slippery reference to "GMOs" as meaning whatever serves the corporate funder of the reference the best. They don't mean "those" GMOs, they mean whichever GMO would make their bullshit about "thirty years experience" and "just another form of breeding/domestication/etc" not flagrantly false or deliberately deceptive.

    If drawing parallels to smoking, note that
    1)the human health safety claims for the two most common food crop GMs (half a dozen Os dominate) are largely based on corporate sequestered research - not public or transparent research. The parallel would be with tobacco safety claims based on tobacco company research.
    2) many of the harms from tobacco took a long time to show up - much longer than the five or ten years of the common GMOs in the food supply, even longer than the thirty or so years of the very best studied and most familiar GMOs. They were found by adequate research, which has not been done with any GMOs.
    3) tobacco is one plant, in its native form equivalent to one GMO, or one GM in a few closely related deployments. Each different GMO is a separate organism, with its own risks.
    4) tobacco itself is a GMO, nowdays. Actually, it's three or four different GMOs - pesticide expression is one or two, a photosynthesis modification that increases biomass yield is another, etc. It's a common research plant, and the deployments are not restricted even as much as the food crops are. Would you say that as a GMO it was "safe"? Or do you agree that the claim "GMOs are safe" is not one a careful and responsible scientist would make?
    And the people warning the public about designer recreational drugs, plastic residue in food packaging, trans fats, artificial sweeteners and colors, etc etc etc. It's a good argument, when soundly made.

    The antivaxxers are generally wrong, about the science. Vaccines have been tested for safety, are continually monitored in real life human use, and are carefully restricted in their employment. The official statistical analyses of vaccine studies is transparent and well done, not proprietary or obviously garbage. We know they probably don't cause autism because we checked, thoroughly and publicly. Significantly, when the critics are right, when gaps in the research and associated risks are noticed, they are normally addressed - as with the autism scare, as with sudden realization that vaccine based mercury exposure in developing children had been greatly increased for inadequate reasons without attention to risk, an anti-vaxxer observation that was not wrong, and led to safety improvements (risk reduction) in children's vaccines.

    With vaccines, the warnings and criticisms are not revised into their weakest forms or recognized from their least credible sources and then mocked or dismissed - instead, they are formulated in the strongest way, by competent scientists, and then if warranted addressed.

    That may be because there is less opportunity for enormous corporate profits, in most vaccines. There's no golden goose to defend. With many GMOs, as with tobacco and trans fats, there is.
     
    Last edited: Jan 12, 2019

Share This Page