Genetically modified crops are a very complicated issue that are difficult to discuss because the public is mostly clueless about how genetics work. I found myself whipsawed between concern about genetic modification and despair at how uneducated the public is as I read this piece in the New York Times about efforts to save the orange industry. A sequence of DNA that makes a protein is a sequence of DNA that makes a protein. There is nothing “human” or “pig” or “virus” or “spinach” about such sequences. They may in occur in all of those organisms or they may be unique to just one of them. Putting a spinach gene in an orange will not turn the orange green or make it taste like spinach. Yet, the public is more hostile to using virus genes than they are about using plant or animal genes, and they don’t like mixing plant and animal genes. Whatever the legitimate concerns are about genetic modification, these are not among them. People are just very dumb when it comes to genetics and evolution.
Yet, there are plenty of people who are knowledgable about the science who have legitimate concerns on a whole host of issues. And the tradeoffs can be agonizing. We are now allowing more pesticide use in the orange groves because disease is overwhelming them. Would you rather have more spraying or a spinach gene in your oranges that makes them resistant to bacterial infection?
Then there is the issue of patents, where companies can actually own the seeds produced by other people’s crops, and can genetically-modify crops to be resistant to their own pesticides.
What’s the difference between making a genetic modification for purely cosmetic improvements versus changes aimed at increasing yield or preventing the collapse of a whole industry facing some kind of blight?
These questions go beyond my pay grade, but I’d urge caution. I’d also urge people to fight back against the Creationists and other morons who actively misinform people about basic biology. What the public thinks about GMO food is almost meaningless when they don’t understand what a protein is and how it is produced.
One of the good points made in the comment section of the NYT article is that a lot of people have become cynical about GMO (particularly Monsanto) because they have developed crops that are resistant to pesticide and other chemicals that they themselves have developed. In short, they created a product to deal with one problem but created others – so they then created a crop that made the pesticide harmless. In the end, it’s the sense that these big agribusiness companies are just creating problems and fixing them as they go along, without seeing the bigger picture (e.g. evolution means that weeds will become more and more resistant to Roundup, and eventually you’ll have weeds that are resistant to whatever you spray on them).
That said, this article presents the attempts to save oranges from what (at least, from the lightly educated view that reading the article affords me) seems like certain extinction as relatively sound science. The debate around GMO is pretty warped at this point, but agree on the point that a protein molecule (or amino acid or any of those other fun building blocks you learn about in chemistry class) are just that. Are there certain risks to be concerned about? Sure – potential issues may not be readily apparent right off. But worrying about oranges tasting like pig or spinach are just freakin’ stupid.
All things being equal, would I prefer a pure orange? Sure. But the orange itself has evolved over thousands of years, and we wouldn’t recognize their predecessors for being much of anything if it was given to us today. And if the only way to save it is to make a modification by putting in a spinach or pig or synthetic gene, then I’m for that. This solution is to solve some kind of biological issue that started out in Asia in the 1800s; it’s not due to some company that realized it needs some kind of crop to resist some kind of chemicals it wanted to spray on them to get rid of weeds and bugs.
+1 to this. Nothing to really add.
Just the idea that you might decide that one particular gene is the best way to save orange trees but that you can’t use it because it originated with a virus or a pig or some other unsavory organism?
I mean, you can’t force people to drink virus juice.
I’m not saying you should force them – I think GMO stuff should be labeled – but the public really needs to be educated on how this stuff works. The polling that’s been done illustrates there’s enough ill-informed people who think that they’d be eating something bacon-flavored if there’s a pig gene in it.
(of course, the public has been educated it already, in a high school chemistry class, but I would venture to say most people voluntarily forget that stuff as soon as they can)
You have VASTLY over-rated the average high schooler’s knowledge of ANY science in this country. Even my college bio students were more or less ignoramuses. It takes a concentrated effort to understand the genetics involved, and most people will not make it.
Yeah, I’m not surprised. It makes me sad, though, because I paid attention in class, and it makes sense to me (even if I don’t remember the nuts and bolts of how it all works anymore).
Clearly the answer lies in defunding public education further (I went to public high school, FWIW)…
Reminds me of the early proposal to use gamma rays to kill germs in food. People opposed it because they feared the food would become radioactive, which is total nonsense.
My main concerns with GMOs are ecological. Things like herbicide resistance crossing over from cereal food crops into cereal weeds (like quackgrass). Or resistance to Bt becoming universal among insect pest species. Unintended effects and other things like that.
Despite widespread public ignorance on the matter, I think that GMOs should be labeled as such. Let the consume decide. Leave the burden on the producers to justify their use.
I agree with this.
Patent issues mirror the problems created by excessive copyright periods.
University research versus academic scientist compensation also needs to be addressed.
Haven’t show dogs have been bred to the point of inherent flaws?
Sure, I’m concerned.
But if you think about it, we humans have been genetically modifying our food for thousands and thousands of years – fruits, grains, veggies, and animals.
We did that by breeding, and pollinating and grafting – and other assorted methods.
What we should be concerned about, is not only how specific these modification can be nowadays, and their affects, but also, with global travel, how fast the good, the bad, and the ugly, can spread.
Yes. But try telling this to someone who categorically opposes “GMO”, and has NO biology background whatsoever. I have wasted uncounted email hours trying to do a condensed, dummy version of my genetics course to accomplish this, to little avail.
Friedrich Schiller: “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.”
Genetically modifying, yes, within natural parameters.
GMO is a completely new level of genetic modification.
There is a fundamental difference between helping nature do what she could have done herself, or doing to nature what she could never have done.
No, herring genes will not make an apple taste like a herring, but that is a straw man argument. Recombinant genes may very well create unexpected and irreversible environmental effects because they cannot be stopped from spreading and genes never just control “one” trait. By the time this is realized, it may be impossible to find cultivars any longer free of those new genes.
We are playing with fire because not only do we not know all the functions of any particular gene, but genes are not in fact the only mechanisms controlling heredity anyway. So the whole idea is technically sophisticated but scientifically crude.
Also GMO breeding is a financial commitment to a particularly high-input technological direction dedicated to genetic monocultures and industrial monocropping. Meanwhile available genetic diversity (varieties) built up over millions of years of natural evolution and thousands of years of human cultivation is disappearing in both wild and cultivated plants and animals.
There is also a fundamental difference between modifying organisms to suit particular environments (traditional and ethno-horticulture), modifying environments to suit particular organisms (modern industrial horticulture), and modifying plants to suit modified environments (GMO industrial agriculture).
You know, GM is not only a scientific and technical issue that only specialists can understand. It is also a political and ethical issues that any thinking person can understand. But I’m not satisfied with the level of this discussion so far.
When I wrote “genes are not the only mechanisms controlling heredity”, I was thinking of the whole issue of “phenotypic plasticity”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotypic_plasticity
Yes, you said it much better than I.
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I believe that I read elsewhere that Monsanto is trying to stop seed exchanges of heritage plants because they “might” be contaminated (my word) with Monsanto patented genes and hence violate the patent. i.e. Monsanto owns the entire genome of species that it has patented varieties in.
This by the way is a complete reversal of prior law. In the ast, you could cross-breed two patented apples or roses and patent the resulting seedlings yourself. Monsanto is trying to turn plant patents into software patents.
GMO’s are one of the few areas where Environmentalists and Republicans typically agree; but for very different reasons.
Environmentalists (who tend to be liberals) want packaging that specifies if there are GMO’s used so that consumers can decide if they want to purchase those products.
Republicans dislike GMO’s because of the close connection between Monsanto and Obama; they believe he is somehow on the Monsanto dole and therefore Monsanto must be bad.
I have silenced Republicans who are all for big business, and getting Government out of the way, by bringing up Monsanto during debates. It goes against their corporatist/capitalist mind set simply because Obama supports it.
For what it’s worth, I have a degree in Horticulture and do not see any issues with ingesting GMOs that are modified to be resistant to non-selective herbicides (Round-Up). If anything, I am more concerned about the spread of e coli and other bacteria on our fruits and vegetables from workers that are handling the crops and not properly washing their hands.
If plants are genetically modified to be resistant to Roundup, there may not be any harmful effects from the genes, but it stands to reason that they will probably have been exposed to lots and lots of Roundup. Which is poisonous. So now do we keep modifying more and more beneficial organisms, including humans, to be resistant to Roundup?
Actually that is not correct; Roundup is not poisonous/ It is designed to go after a specific enzyme that plants have and which humans do not. You certainly shouldn’t drink it or intentionally ingest a lot of it in its liquid form, but it is not poisonous.
The EPA has already determined that high levels of glysophate-based herbicides (Roundup) taken over a course of a lifetime poses a minimal chronic dietary risk.
So, even if farmers use large quantities of the herbicide on their crops, and even if you ingest those crops over many years, the likelihood of it having any adverse effects if very low.
http://www.epa.gov/oppsrrd1/REDs/factsheets/0178fact.pdf
Safe – just like Agent Orange.
Unless you live within a few miles of the groves, you have no business eating oranges, or drinking orange juice.
What are the CO2 consequences of shipping that stuff from Brazil, or Florida to you? Of keeping the frozen concentrate frozen over those distances? Or of keeping the never-been-frozen, not-from concentrate stuff cold?
One a year. In your Christmas stocking. As a treat, like in Victorian novels.
Anything else is colluding in the destruction of the planet.
Unless you live within a few miles of China you have no business buying a computer. Same argument.
I’m doing this on an abacus of my own creation. The wire rods are scavenged from an old rake… and I’m using my neighbor’s open wi-fi
I do believe I detect a hint of snark in both your comments.
Ha ha ha.
For real, though, it would be better if we beefed up (for lack of a better term) local agriculture. Why don’t grocery stores in Massachusetts have local apple cider sitting in the case with the orange juice? There are actual reasons for that.
It used to be that every town’s apples were different. The kinds we’re familiar with now – MacIntosh, Red Delicious, etc. – are the ones that were selected because they did the best when packed and shipped on trains, not because they were the best tasting apples, or most nutritious, or best for the farmers.
The One Big, National Market vision of agriculture comes with serious costs, while the benefits mostly accrue to the business investor class, not the consumers, farmers, or workers.
When a herbicide such as Monsanto’s Roundup is used around corn crops that have been genetically modified to be Roundup-resistant, the weeds are killed without damage to the crop. This saves a considerable amount of effort and cost for the farmer, who would otherwise have to weed the field by tilling the soil. Tilling is time consuming, expensive, wastes gasoline, and can lead to soil erosion. The required genetic modification does not make the corn any less edible, or dangerous in any measurable way. To me, the environmental movement just looks foolish when they latch onto an issue like this; they would do better to focus on man’s activities that have measurably negative effects on the environment. Going after genetically modified food makes them look nutty and ignorant.
Now one can make the argument that we should not be using any chemicals on our food crops. No artificial fertilizers, no pesticides. I understand that, and that is the way I garden myself. It’s unclear to me that that is a sensible approach for large scale farming. It would lead to far lower yields and far higher costs.
I have no objection to GMO’s that could be produced by traditional cross-breeding and selection. It’s just a quick way to produce the same thing, but I have significant objections to inter-genus, inter-phlylum, inter-kingdom crosses. Genes don’t only control one effect, nor does anyone know what a mutation of the transplanted gene might do. Sure, Monsanto et al tell us there is no problem, so did American Tobacco, and the makers of Thalidomide, both of which knew better but lied to make money.
Exactly. And lest we forget, they have marketed pest-resistant crops that their own research showed would be obsolete in a few years… and they were! In the end, the achieved nothing to make themselves more money. This kind of dishonesty makes me skeptical along with the patent issue.
Right, I made some osimilar points in my comment above. I think we were writing them about the same time.
Looks that way. See my comment there.
The debate about genetically-modified organisms has these problems:
I feel like this about a lot of issues: there is a real debate, about real issues, that very much needs to happen, and we do get a debate, but it’s a really, really stupid one that doesn’t get at any of the genuinely important questions.