Is genetically modified food safe?

Some genetic engineering of food shows real promise for benefit with almost no risk. For example, we could breed corn with most of the benefits of hybrid corn, but that breeds true, in much less time than an ordinary breeding program would need.

That would involve imitating the natural cross and backcross system, using nothing but existing corn plant alleles and genes from the hundreds of existing strains of corn, in one lab in a few months rather than in dozens of fields over decades.

That would mean farmers could get all the benefits of hybrid corn without having to buy their seed every year.

Likewise with most hybrid food crops.

For some reason, nobody is doing that.

 

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The reason they are not doing that is because they want ongoing profit. GM is not about helping people. It is about making farmers dependent on the GM producers.

 

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sowhatifit'sdark i do have to agree to some exstent. After all why make the plants you a giving to poor farmers in africa sterile. Yay they grow in the desart for one crop and then you have to buy them again

 

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Yea, I've heard the same thing, that's their business model - make farmers dependent on their grain unable to produce it themselves, thus creating a hooked consumer market. Quite evil.

 

http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/

 

The first blogarticle is about what can happen. But it things like this will not be the bulk of and is not the bulk of what does happen.

The second article does not mention that many GM crops are made because they are PESTICIDE resistant. So the farmers do not have to worry about using MORE pesticides. In fact this is one of the products selling points.

I am quite sure there are some nice scientists coming up with nice ideas that could potentially help people. But the corporations are looking for steady incomes and anything humanitarian and not a big breadwinner will be allowed through as PR.

And they are still playing Russian Roulette with every life form on this planet whatever their goals are.

 

The thing that bothers me about all this GM food, irradiated food, imported food, etc, is that the consumer is not given a choice. Its the lobby effort to exempt labeling so people cannot make an informed or uninformed decision based on our own personal preferences. It doesnt matter if someone decides they dont want to use a product because its GM and [insert misleading website name here] says it has problems. I should be able to make my own food decisions on whatever floats my boat.

Involuntary consumers. Involuntary servitude to corporate profit. Involuntary guinea pigs for corporations and scientists who discover something new and want to force you use it too.

 

All foods can be dangerous, be they modified or not. Plants naturally mutate all the time, doing by accident more than any scientist might dare. They have doing so for as long as there have been plants.

Nothing can be done by man to a tomato plant's DNA that couldn't have (and probably has) been done by a billion years of evolution and chance mutation. Its better not to give in to irrational worry... and instead worry about things that are bringing hardship to people now.

The free market will take care of companies who produce undesirable products. GM crops that are designed to require copious amounts of fertilizer or other such things will become useless as rising gas prices drive up the costs for petrolum-derived chemicals. They will be left at the wayside. More useful products, on the other hand, will spread like wildfire and be re-modified to make them even more desirable.

 

I somehow doubt wheat would get a gene from a fish or a mouse naturally.

 

"The free market will take care of companies who produce undesirable products." how long will this take though?
I dont trust the free market, how many sealed payouts will they give before its less profitable to pay out than to pull the product off the market?

Would much rather trust CSIRO and the Australian and New Zeland Food agency than a company to do the right thing

 

Free market is a fairy tale propaganda enjoyed by multinationals. If the masses can be brainwashed into believing that something really is a good thing, when it isn't, but it's just more profitable for the producer, the free market concept is just a word without meaning.

 

Baloney. They can do stuff to a tomato genome in five weeks that a billion years of evolution and chance couldn't begin to do.

 

A million monkeys typing on a million keyboards would eventually come up with the entire works of Shakespear.

The genetic code, nothing but a long string of chemicals that regulate the growth and function of the host organism, changes literally every single generation. A lot. Whole chromosomes are duplicated or discarded, chunks of the sequence are flipped around, viruses inject their own code into a cell but fail to kill it, whatever. And nature is doing it hundreds of billions of times a year every year since life started and will continue until our sun is cold and dead. A billion years ago we were less than worms.

Millions of plant species are toxic or otherwise dangerous. They became this way due to chance and evolutionary pressure long before man learned to swing a stick. Nature already has kudzu and poison ivy and the mulberry. Nothing man cooks up is going to stand a chance against the wildly opportunistic might granted to plants that have to live every day tooth-and-claw.

Mandkind bred wheat back in the cradle of civilization. Did we invent a raging photosynthetic plague that would come to dominate the face of the earth? No. We invented a grain with such a dysfunctional reproductive system that it couldn't even breed without human assistence. It was useful to us but couldn't last more than a single season without us there to harvest and thresh it.

As for the free market, would you prefer the regulated agriculture of the Soviet Union or Mao's China? We know how well that worked.

 

That won't do nothin' to a tomato genome, compared with what a genetic engineer can do in a few weeks on purpose.

It would take a million monkeys on a million typewriters a million years to come up with any one of Shakespeare's plays. He wrote them in a few weeks.

 

I thought he plagiarized them.

 

In a couple weeks, an entire genetic engineering lab will barely be able to get a plant to produce a single atypical enzyme. It took thirteen years of joint research between companies in Australia and Japan just to come up with a blue rose, for god sake. Thirteen bloody years... just to make a flower a different color.

The entire field is slow and tedius beyond imagining. The results are far more likely to be underwhelming than overwhelming.