Re: May 25th 2013 MAM- Looking at the "science" behind the safety claims of Gm seeds.

[truedelphi]

Basically there is no science behind the safety claims of GM seeds. One of Bill Clinton's right hand men, one Mike Taylor, decided that the seeds were the nutritional "equivalent" of conventional crops, and he made this decision based on this on zero decades of research.

However, the lack of science behind the Taylor Doctrine has not hurt Mr Taylor's career - he has gone from the Clinton Administration back into the folds of the GM industry, and from there he was plucked for the position of the head of the FDA by Barack "Change and Hope" Obama. And it seems to be only us real activists that are concerned that the Taylor Doctrine is the only statement needed by our government to allow the GM foods and seeds industry the permission to go ahead. We have not witnessed such a blanket conformity of "science based on proclamation" since the days of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and their supreme notion of the sun revolving around the earth.

The GM spokespeople also claim that not a single person has ever been harmed by GM foods. However that is wrong.

In fact, in the late Nineteen Eighties, over 35 people world wide lost their lives to a rare blood disorder that came about after they had their daily tablet of L-Tryptophan, a supplement, that had been grown on a GM medium. Also, hundreds if not thousands were made ill. To conceal the fact that it was the Gm processes that were at fault for these deaths, our government went into hysteria mode over the "lethality" of L-Tryptophan. Dozens of nutritional supplement houses were raided, with products carried off, and inventories destroyed. As well as the fortunes and lives of the business owners. And again, no mention being made of the fact that had the Japanese L-Tryptophan manufacturer not used a GM medium, none of this would have happened. (L-tryptophan-induced Eosinophilia Myalgia syndrome was first recognized in October l989.)

Scientists and researchers across the world laugh at American science. They realize that few US scientists now design their research studies in accordance with the International Protocols used by the rest of the world. In the USA, researchers are subtly and not so subtly forced to cherry pick their data, design tests that have little to do with the methods of consumption relating to the product being tested (Monsanto's feeding study of dogs using glyphosate as a food, when glyphosate is ingested by mammals through inhalation, not in the alimentary canal and its organs, is one example of deliberately misleading test design.)

The media is part of this. I remember after the Blue Ribbon Panel headed by John Froines decided that MTBE the gas additive had no benefits and only risk, in terms of its safety, Immediately the media began to flood daily newspapers touting "newer studies" that showed that MTBE was harmless. Of course, these were all industry studies, and the scientists did not possess the integrity or decent design of study that Froines and his colleagues had used to determine the product's risks and dangers.

This creates the idea inside the minds of the public that "newer" means more accurate. That is a fallacious notion.

Currently the GM companies are not even allowing outside investigators to do research - you may peruse this article on what is going on with researching of the GM seeds by reading the following article:

L-tryptophan-induced Eosinophilia Myalgia syndrome was first recognized in October l989.

Here is a mainstream media article that raises some of the concerns I personally have:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research
“It is important to understand that it is not always simply a matter of blanket denial of all research requests, which is bad enough,” wrote Elson J. Shields, an entomologist at Cornell University, in a letter to an official at the Environmental Protection Agency (the body tasked with regulating the environmental consequences of genetically modified crops), “but selective denials and permissions based on industry perceptions of how ‘friendly’ or ‘hostile’ a particular scientist may be toward [seed-enhancement] technology.”

The perception among indie researchers is that unless the study says what the GM forces need the article to say, it will never be published inside the peer reviewed American science journals where the supposed truths about current day matters are to be discussed freely. In my days as an anti-pesticide and anti-herbicide indie reporter, 1997 to 2005, I would be confounded by the fact that when an indie scientist did a survey of some problem, if the results were unfavorable to the product, that product's manufacturers would immediately exclaim that the study was meaningless because it was too small a study. What especially confounded me was this fact: Not once did anyone in industry ever say: "This brings up a serious concern, and although the data was far too small to be accepted, we want to look into the matter by enlarging on this study."

That struck me as bizarre. Many scientific inquiries begin with individual observations. When five or six years back, our government agencies began receiving reports from people over the fact that individual pet owners were witnessing their beloved pets dying in record numbers, those individual observations brought about the inspection of the ingredients of Chinese produced pet foods, and China was forced to change its pet food formula. This is one proof that "anecdotal stories" count. Edward Jenner's idea for the smallpox vaccine came about after he witnessed the phenomena of milk maids escaping smallpox if they had first been infected with cowpox. His entire data base was fewer than 48 people.

Over a decade ago, the editor of New England Journal of Medicine ran an editorial in which they laid out that the Journal needed to relax its considerations of independence in the arena of decisions over what to publish. In the seventies and even the eighties and nineties, the NEJM could decide that too much industry influence existed in terms of study's funding and results - but that was now such an ubiquitous situation that there was noway the Journal could continue to exist unless it started to publish studies that had been totally funded and totally influenced by Big Money from Big Industry. This is one of the reasons why the rest of the world's scientists no longer take us serious.

I created this bit of writing as "information ammunition" for anyone attending the May 25th March Against Monsanto. Be there or be square.

[bananas]

1. k&r - good article. nt

[baldguy]

2. If GM foods are so wonderful, so safe, and so "the next best thing" PUT IT ON THE LABEL

and let the consumer decide.

The fact that the manufacturers fight against labeling regs tooth&nail speaks volumes.

[Mr. Blue Sky]

3. Anti-Biotech Activist Changes Sides: “I discovered science”

Anti-Biotech Activist Changes Sides: “I discovered science”

If you missed last week’s report from the Oxford Farming Conference, Mark Lynas, the British writer and environmentalist who once helped drive Europe’s movement against biotech crops, apologized for those actions and embraced the technology as a vital tool for ending hunger and conserving the environment.

The change of heart was widely reported in many mainstream outlets such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Discover magazine, Slate magazine and Science 2.0, among others.

The New York Times writes that Lynas’s speech “has displayed an encouraging — and still rare — capacity to shed dogma in favor of data.”

Lynas described how his change of thinking came about saying that as he wrote more about environmental issues, he was determined to be “scientifically credible.” So he began to back up his stories with data, learn how to read scientific papers, discover the importance of peer-review and the importance of scientific consensus.

http://www.biotech-now.org/food-and-agriculture/2013/01/anti-biotech-activist-changes-sides-i-discovered-science?utm_source=Feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BiotechNow+%28BIOtech+Now%29&utm_term=RSS+Subscription#

Snip from Lynas's remarks...

And yet, incredibly, at this time in 2008 I was still penning screeds in the Guardian attacking the science of GM – even though I had done no academic research on the topic, and had a pretty limited personal understanding. I don’t think I’d ever read a peer-reviewed paper on biotechnology or plant science even at this late stage.

Obviously this contradiction was untenable. What really threw me were some of the comments underneath my final anti-GM Guardian article. In particular one critic said to me: so you’re opposed to GM on the basis that it is marketed by big corporations. Are you also opposed to the wheel because because it is marketed by the big auto companies?

So I did some reading. And I discovered that one by one my cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths.

I’d assumed that it would increase the use of chemicals. It turned out that pest-resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide.

I’d assumed that GM benefited only the big companies. It turned out that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers needing fewer inputs.

I’d assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.

I’d assumed that no-one wanted GM. Actually what happened was that Bt cotton was pirated into India and roundup ready soya into Brazil because farmers were so eager to use them.

I’d assumed that GM was dangerous. It turned out that it was safer and more precise than conventional breeding using mutagenesis for example; GM just moves a couple of genes, whereas conventional breeding mucks about with the entire genome in a trial and error way.

But what about mixing genes between unrelated species? The fish and the tomato? Turns out viruses do that all the time, as do plants and insects and even us – it’s called gene flow.

http://www.marklynas.org/2013/01/lecture-to-oxford-farming-conference-3-january-2013/

[truedelphi]

5. As far as the New York Times mentioning

how Lynas' change of heart indicates that the man “has displayed an encouraging — and still rare — capacity to shed dogma in favor of data,” I would point out that the very first thing Bill Casey said to some new CIA recruits back in early 1980's as the new Director of the CIA - "Over the next decades, we will see to it that every single thing the American people are told is a lie."

Whereas in decades past, both the New York Times and The New Yorker were ardently in support of the environment, bringing such a necessary and incredible item as Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" to the fore, these days those publications are little more than shills for the MIGC (Miitary Industrial Governmental Complex)

Both Bill Casey and Dwight Eisenhower's prophetic statements have unfortunately come true.

[truedelphi]

7. Mark Lynas was a member of a radicl cell

That destroyed property and lived outside the law.

That doesn't mean that he wasn't sponsored by M5 or some other government agency.

But it does mean that not at all like he had a long and reputable career as a scientist and then turned his back on that career.

Rather I suspect that whatever forces allowed him to pillage has now decided that his "conversion" to being a GM supporter would garner headlines.

[Motown_Johnny]

4. This is pure lunacy

I don't doubt that people were made sick and even died after they had their daily tablet of L-Tryptophan, but the assumption that it was the GM crop used and not some contamination in the processing is pure fantasy.

The arguments presented here are exactly like the ones "proving" that an advanced civilization on Mars wiped itself out with a war so terrible that no trace of the civilization was left. See, no evidence of the civilization, therefore it must have wiped itself out with such a terrible war that no evidence survived.


The one difference is that in the arguments against GM crops, even the underlying assumptions, make no sense. Life on Mars.. OK.. that can be argued. The fact that DNA was combined in a lab instead of in nature making a difference on how it affects those who consume it... that has no basis in reality what so ever.

Just arguing that there is a cover up isn't evidence of anything.


This post belongs in Creative Speculation.


Oh.. and here is the first paragraph of the article you linked to.

^snip^

Advances in agricultural technology—including, but not limited to, the genetic modification of food crops—have made fields more productive than ever. Farmers grow more crops and feed more people using less land. They are able to use fewer pesticides and to reduce the amount of tilling that leads to erosion. And within the next two years, agritech com­panies plan to introduce advanced crops that are designed to survive heat waves and droughts, resilient characteristics that will become increasingly important in a world marked by a changing climate.



I suppose people should do without food because of your paranoia.

[truedelphi]

6. A citation using the "free use"

For educational purposes copyright, of material from an article from earthopensource.org

http://earthopensource.org/index.php/3-health-hazards-of-gm-foods/3-5-myth-no-one-has-ever-been-made-ill-by-a-gm-food



GM proponents claim that people have been eating GM foods in the United States for 16 years without ill effects. But this is an anecdotal, scientifically untenable assertion, as no epidemiological studies to look at GM food effects on the general population have ever been conducted.

Furthermore, there are signs that all is not well with the US food supply. Reports show that food-related illnesses increased two- to ten-fold in the years between 1994 (just before GM food was commercialized) and 1999.66,67 No one knows if there is a link with GM foods because they are not labelled in the US and consumers are not monitored for health effects.

Under the conditions existing in the US, any health effects from a GM food would have to meet very specific and unusual conditions before they would be noticed. They would have to:

Occur soon after eating a food that was known to be GM – in spite of its not being labelled – so that the consumer could establish a causal correlation between consumption and the harmful effect. Increases in diseases like cancer, which has a long latency period, would not be traceable to a GM food.
Be the cause symptoms that are different from common diseases. If GM foods caused a rise in common diseases like allergies or cancer, nobody would know what caused the rise.
Be dramatic and obvious to the naked eye or to the consumer of the GMO. No one examines a person’s body tissues with a microscope for harm after they eat a GM food. But just this type of examination is needed to give early warning of problems such as pre-cancerous changes.

In addition, health effects would have to be recorded and reported by a centralized body that the public knew about and that could collate data as it came in and identify correlations. Currently, there is no such monitoring body in place anywhere.

L-tryptophan

In 1989 in the US, a food supplement, L-tryptophan, produced using GM bacteria, was found to be toxic, killing 37 people and permanently disabling over 1500 others.69,70,71 The resulting disease was named eosinophilia myalgia syndrome (EMS). Symptoms included an overproduction of white blood cells called eosinophils, severe myalgia (muscle pain), and in some cases, paralysis.

The L-tryptophan that affected people was traced back to a single source, a Japanese company called Showa Denko. In July 1990, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association mentioned that Showa Denko had introduced a new genetically engineered bacterium, called Strain V, in December 1988, a few months before the main epidemic hit.71