Sorry, Monsanto: The Science Is on Our Side, Not Yours

[FarrenH]

94. I dislike any argument that treats GMOs

Last edited Sat Mar 28, 2015, 08:18 PM - Edit history (3)

as a class of organisms that share some common physical quality that is unique to GMOs, which sadly is about 60% of the anti-GMO positions I'm exposed to. HGT in itself is no more relevant to GMOs than any other organisms, and breathless pronouncements that GMOs *might alter our genes*, as if that extremely tentative suggestion is solely or even peculiarly a risk of GMOs, reflects more of the same old scientific illiteracy.

We have relatively large amounts of bacterial and viral DNA in our genes and seemingly deliberate HGT between the mitochondria of animal cells has now been observed for the first time. Along with a lot of other evidence, it's starting to look like HGT is a lot more common in nature that we previously realized.

The idea that modifications to, say, make plants express Bt crystals is somehow introducing a kind of genetic change that wouldn't normally happen through natural evolution is also silly. Nature is chock-a-block full of natural analogs between plants, animals, fungi, archea and bacteria. Cannabis produces stuff we have special receptors for in our brain. Catnip produces a close analog of a pheromone found in Tomcat pee. The list of such analogs is vast. There are even more startling examples of natural "transgenics", like the green sea slug Elysia chlorotica, which appears to have hijacked enough algal DNA to actually photosynthesize, or the common aphid, which produces carotinoids, quite possibly with hijacked plant DNA too.

The whole "conventionally bred crops came about through a slow dance with nature" thing is rubbish too, considering half the world's staples came from South America and were spread to completely alien ecosystems across the globe in the last few hundred years, to be consumed by people who had not co-evolved with them. And in South America we went from wild teosinte, which looks like ordinary grass, to corn in only two or three millenia of selective breeding. And evidence suggests it went through one or two very rapid changes rather than being gradual.

On top of that a huge number of popular so-called "organic" cultivars were achieved through mutation breeding in the 20th century. It's absurd that you can pick up "Ruby Red Grapefruit 100% Organic Marmalade" when the Ruby Red Grapefruit cultivar was the result of bathing plants in massive amounts of mutagen and introducing dozens of poorly understood genetic changes, but people somehow think that's less "unnatural" than more precisely modified organisms. What's even worse, according to some of the life scientists I know, is that organic farmers often use far less regulated and studied combinations of herbicide and pesticide that are potentially far worse for both human health and/or the environment.

But as you say modifying organisms in the way that present tools allow us to does raise some complex issues. For one, the IP issue. I'm firmly in the camp that says life forms shouldn't be patentable. There are biological risks too. An academic friend provided me with some of her research on the use of modified food plants to produce pharmaceuticals. Because the plants in question are fairly promiscuous, this raises the real risk of actual food crops being contaminated and we don't want our food crops suddenly producing powerful drugs that you would normally need a prescription for. Her work was on the clearance between such crops and food crops, showing that the regulated clearance was inadequate to prevent cross-pollination (in New Zealand).

There are various other issues that we do need to consider and address, but in my view all this neo-luddite "OMG GMO" bullshit propagated by people who's level of scientific understanding is such that they conflate "chemical" with "synthetic" serves to cloud the real issues. And in the case of groups like Greenpeace encouraging South East Asian mobs to burn down Golden Rice fields, it can rightly be said to be directly harming the health of millions, who might otherwise benefit from humanitarian efforts to supplement vitamin-A deficiency in regional diets that causes severe conditions in up to 100 million people, like blindness. It's outright dangerous ignorance and stupidity. In fact it's mainly their stunningly ignorant and harmful position on GMOs that has made me go from being a Greenpeace supporter to someone who opposes them and believes my money is best spent elsewhere.