http://tv.naturalsociety.com/new-csiro-gmo-wheat-can-silence-human-genes-causes-early-death/ “The technology is too new,” the scientists said in the press conference, “What we found is that the molecules created in this wheat intended to silence wheat genes can match human genes and through ingestion can possibly silence human genes. We found over 770 pages of potential matches between the genes in wheat and the human genome.” This is the cause for concern.
This is the paper concerned. http://www.inbi.canterbury.ac.nz/Documents/Reports and others/Heinemann-Report-20120828.pdf I haven't got time to read it at the moment. I'll have a look tomorrow. @mello Two threads is enough on this subject.
Wow, how did you find that? All I got from the OP's link was layer upon layer upon layer of crackpots quoting crackpots quoting crackpots without an actual link to the paper! All that the paper actually says is that it is not possible to rule out certain effects on a theoretical basis, so they should be clinically studied...good thing they are! All of the stuff about "early death" is generated by the crackpots who quote the paper; the word "death" does not appear in the paper.
I agree that the "early death" quote is unsupportable. It does a disservice to the work of reputable scientists, like this NZ group, who are working in the public's interest. We need to be vigilant, because large corporations are determined to make money at any cost. They are amoral. They cannot be allowed free operation unmonitored.
This is a year old. I found the following comments on it were made by experts in the relevant field": Professor Rick Roush is the Dean of the Melbourne School of Land and Environment at the University of Melbourne “Not only are these claims of potential health risks from the CSIRO starch-modified wheat highly speculative, they have been advanced by three anti-GM campaigners who have deliberately bypassed independent scientific assessment of their claims. Instead, this has been launched such that will become another scientific-sounding scare story in cyberspace, a well-worn path of anti-GM so-called “science” by press release. Contrary to the claims being made, RNA interference technologies are already being considered in risk assessment internationally. “Having read the claims in detail, I have absolutely no fear in volunteering to serve as a human volunteer to test the CSIRO wheat.” Professor Peter Langridge is from the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics at the University of Adelaide “Essentially we have two scientists who appear to be ideologically opposed to GM crops and who studiously ignore the majority of the scientific literature and data. They have now tried to give the appearance of credibility by writing a couple of scientifically flawed articles and rather than have these assessed through the normal process of peer review, they find someone with no real knowledge on GM crops to write a supporting statement and put this out as proper science. This is not helping an informed discussion about the technology. If people would like to get some real information on the safety or otherwise of GM crops and foods, they should look at a detailed report from the European Union which summaries the results of 15 years’ study involving over 400 laboratories**.” It seems the work was released to generate scares stories before it was even peer-reviewed. When you have people behaving like this in the anti-GM fraternity, you start to ask yourself how much of the opposition to it is based on real science and how much on prejudice and cynical media manipulation in pursuit of a fixed agenda. (Greenpeace is equally damaging on general environmental matters.)
They were commissioned by the "Safe Food Foundation" to produce the report. The foundation is an anti-GMO charity group. http://safefoodfoundation.org/what-we-do/gm-wheat/ I wish that Professors at Universities would not use their University's reputation to enhance reports commissioned by external bodies. They do the same with cold fusion, and probably global warming too. Even if the work is valid, it makes it look scammy.
Quite. I have been up to now rather opposed to GM on the grounds that it's too new for us to be sure of the possible side-effects and the risk of uncontrolled release into the wild. But things like this make me start to think maybe it's not such a bad thing after all. When people seem to need to resort to shoddy practice and media scare stories to shore up what is supposedly a scientific concern, it makes me think there are perhaps no real arguments against, after all!
