5 ms·

(This comment is going to get me so much hate, but match to kindling...) Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta et al. are easy boogeymen. So are pharmaceutical co

by ethbro 11y ago

(This comment is going to get me so much hate, but match to kindling...) Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta et al. are easy boogeymen. So are pharmaceutical companies. I mean, they're just like the *AA, trying to create artificial scarcity through draconian IP laws, no? No. You may argue about compensation, and whether they're using unfair market tactics or taking an excessive share of the profits created by their products. But when you boil it down, these companies are burning incredible amounts of money (and talent) to fuel R&D engines that are literally keeping humans alive. Look at Monsanto's research pipeline: http://www.monsanto.com/products/pages/research-development-pipeline.aspx http://www.monsanto.com/products/pages/research-development-... http://www.monsanto.com/investors/documents/2015/2015.01.07_mon-q1f15-rd-update-presentation.pdf http://www.monsanto.com/investors/documents/2015/2015.01.07_... Those profits aren't just being pissed into the wind. These are extremely competitive industries, doing cutting edge science, with the goal of feeding and/or healing humans. How downright evil of them. I'm probably just as suspicious about GMOs as the next guy, but I've yet to hear any of the anti-GMO / anti-Big-Ag crowd propose a feasible solution for how we're going to keep pace with a ballooning world population. Farm to table or heritage variants don't feed the world. And it's just not cheap to (a) make something useful & (b) make sure it doesn't kill anyone. If you think Big Ag is a problem, try imagining what a world with steadily declining food security looks like in terms of stability. End result? Yes, protecting the golden goose so that it can keep laying eggs merits some extraordinary protections. Although, like everything else, I'm perfectly willing to debate on whether those are not-enough, just-right, or too-far. But I don't see how "none" gives us a very nice future.

e40 11y ago
these companies are burning incredible amounts of money (and talent) to fuel R&D engines that are literally keeping humans alive. And, according to another FPP today[1], they're bilking us for a lot of these "wonder" drugs. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10080680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10080680
- refurb 11y ago
  You're confusing clinical trials with FDA approved drugs. The FDA already has regulations in place to prevent the kind of abuse of statistics seen in that thread.
rayiner 11y ago
> These are extremely competitive industries, doing cutting edge science, with the goal of feeding and/or healing humans. How downright evil of them. There's this idea that certain classes of activity are "too important" for profit-motive to be allowed. Education, healthcare, science, and agriculture usually fall in the line of fire. These people cheer on the companies that make their money in advertising or solving first world problems and demonize those that work on the capital-intensive problems in healthcare, science, or agriculture. Then they loudly complain about how the best of the best are going into the wrong lines of work. It's bonkers. Moral tale: my brother was at the top of his class at an Ivy-league school and got his degree in physics. He did lab research on nanotechnology since high school. He seriously considered getting his PhD in physics. I counseled him to go to Wall Street instead, which he did. Now he makes a bunch of money and couldn't be happier. What's my point? Getting a PhD in a hard science should be a license to print money like going into advertising or finance. Until that's true, you're not going to get the allocation of social resources you want. And government research isn't a solution to that. You'll never make a bunch of money working for the government. And if e.g. the government lets people keep the patents on research that's initially publicly-funded, so they can make a bunch of money on the endeavor, then the aforementioned people will demonize that as evil.
- tomp 11y ago
  It's not that they are "too important" for profit, it's that the supply and demand laws are such that a free market is very hard to establish. Taking healthcare for example, the incentives of the buyers (patients) and sellers (doctors) are inherently conflicting, as the former seek health, while the latter benefit when the former are sick. Furthermore, the patients very often urgently need help and don't have the time (nor the knowledge) to "shop around". Or education. The "value" of a college is the increase in lifetime income vs. a high-school education, but given the slow feedback cycle (30 years or so of working) the market equilibrium is trending towards the price of college being the discounted value of all discretionary income of the graduates. This is aided by the US government that guarantees the loans and prevents them being discharged in bankruptcy. A similar field is also infrastructure. None of these fields must inherently be constrained by the government, but they need to be regulated in such a way that a free competition is encouraged.
Synaesthesia 11y ago
We don't need protection of these to help the world food security, the research could be publicly funded (and a lot of it is already) and publicly distributed. Of course then nobody makes a profit off owning the seed but that's not really necessary. It could just benefit everyone.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 11y ago
  > the research could be publicly funded (and a lot of it is already) I can say with absolute certainty that this is not the case. Funding is available for basic science only; the very difficult work of bringing genetics to market is simply not funded. Funding for research into e.g. drought resistance is limited to understanding genetic pathways. The closest you get to useful traits is QTL analysis. Make no mistake, this is very useful, foundational research. It enables a variety of approaches to creating new crops. It does not, however, create them. Public funds should be used in this way. We should bring back seed banks, co-ops, and fund grants that actually aim to bring marketable traits to useful inbreds. I'd love to be able to point to GM intra-poaceae drought-tolerant corn and say, "this is what transgenics are capable of!" That's not the reality, though.
  - agavegoose 11y ago
    This is also not true. There is public funding going into creating new biotech varieties and publicly distributing them. Last year, for example, Arkansas released its first public roundup ready soybean (http://arkansasagnews.uark.edu/8273.htm http://arkansasagnews.uark.edu/8273.htm). Sadly though these researchers had to wait for the patent to expire.
    - throwawaykf05 11y ago
      If they had to wait for the patent to expire, how is this a "new" variety?
      - agavegoose 11y ago
afarrell 11y ago
We don't have to imagine it. In the 1940s, Germany launched a war to take control of vast amounts of agricultural land and starve or explicitly mass-murder its inhabitants. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan John Green has a good video on this: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-2q-QMUIgY http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-2q-QMUIgY
pyre 11y ago
Well, you also don't feed people hamburgers, steak, and bacon for every meal either if your goal is to "feed the world" and "keep humans alive." That doesn't stop people from doubling down on meat at every meal.
tremendo 11y ago
> propose a feasible solution for how we're going to keep pace with a ballooning world population. Only half joking: By not feeding the ballooning of the world's population. Population growth was sustainable for most of history, then we eliminated scarcity and, well, we've yet to learn to control our growth in this context of resource abundance.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > we've yet to learn to control our growth in this context of resource abundance. Untrue. Most of the parts of the world with the most resource abundance have very low or negative natural growth rates, with the overall growth in those areas driven by immigration from places with less abundance rather than natural increase, and we have very good information that strong social support networks promote reduced rates of natural population growth. We know quite well how to control growth in the context of resource abundance.
  - dllthomas 11y ago
    At least, population growth. Our waistlines may be another matter...
  - tremendo 11y ago
    You make a good point. What prompted my comment was remembering when we were hitting the 3B mark and there were dire predictions, some efforts to curb population growth worked, a few too well (Japan, Europe). But thanks to the green revolution, and that not everyone made those same efforts, we are now more than double that with no sign of slowing down. In any case, point taken.
gech 11y ago
What if they lobby against better, safer solutions developed in the future because it affects their bottom line?

by ethbro 11y ago

e40 11y ago

these companies are burning incredible amounts of money (and talent) to fuel R&D engines that are literally keeping humans alive. And, according to another FPP today[1], they're bilking us for a lot of these "wonder" drugs. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10080680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10080680

refurb 11y ago
You're confusing clinical trials with FDA approved drugs. The FDA already has regulations in place to prevent the kind of abuse of statistics seen in that thread.

rayiner 11y ago

> These are extremely competitive industries, doing cutting edge science, with the goal of feeding and/or healing humans. How downright evil of them. There's this idea that certain classes of activity are "too important" for profit-motive to be allowed. Education, healthcare, science, and agriculture usually fall in the line of fire. These people cheer on the companies that make their money in advertising or solving first world problems and demonize those that work on the capital-intensive problems in healthcare, science, or agriculture. Then they loudly complain about how the best of the best are going into the wrong lines of work. It's bonkers. Moral tale: my brother was at the top of his class at an Ivy-league school and got his degree in physics. He did lab research on nanotechnology since high school. He seriously considered getting his PhD in physics. I counseled him to go to Wall Street instead, which he did. Now he makes a bunch of money and couldn't be happier. What's my point? Getting a PhD in a hard science should be a license to print money like going into advertising or finance. Until that's true, you're not going to get the allocation of social resources you want. And government research isn't a solution to that. You'll never make a bunch of money working for the government. And if e.g. the government lets people keep the patents on research that's initially publicly-funded, so they can make a bunch of money on the endeavor, then the aforementioned people will demonize that as evil.

tomp 11y ago
It's not that they are "too important" for profit, it's that the supply and demand laws are such that a free market is very hard to establish. Taking healthcare for example, the incentives of the buyers (patients) and sellers (doctors) are inherently conflicting, as the former seek health, while the latter benefit when the former are sick. Furthermore, the patients very often urgently need help and don't have the time (nor the knowledge) to "shop around". Or education. The "value" of a college is the increase in lifetime income vs. a high-school education, but given the slow feedback cycle (30 years or so of working) the market equilibrium is trending towards the price of college being the discounted value of all discretionary income of the graduates. This is aided by the US government that guarantees the loans and prevents them being discharged in bankruptcy. A similar field is also infrastructure. None of these fields must inherently be constrained by the government, but they need to be regulated in such a way that a free competition is encouraged.

Synaesthesia 11y ago

We don't need protection of these to help the world food security, the research could be publicly funded (and a lot of it is already) and publicly distributed. Of course then nobody makes a profit off owning the seed but that's not really necessary. It could just benefit everyone.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 11y ago
> the research could be publicly funded (and a lot of it is already) I can say with absolute certainty that this is not the case. Funding is available for basic science only; the very difficult work of bringing genetics to market is simply not funded. Funding for research into e.g. drought resistance is limited to understanding genetic pathways. The closest you get to useful traits is QTL analysis. Make no mistake, this is very useful, foundational research. It enables a variety of approaches to creating new crops. It does not, however, create them. Public funds should be used in this way. We should bring back seed banks, co-ops, and fund grants that actually aim to bring marketable traits to useful inbreds. I'd love to be able to point to GM intra-poaceae drought-tolerant corn and say, "this is what transgenics are capable of!" That's not the reality, though.
- agavegoose 11y ago
  This is also not true. There is public funding going into creating new biotech varieties and publicly distributing them. Last year, for example, Arkansas released its first public roundup ready soybean (http://arkansasagnews.uark.edu/8273.htm http://arkansasagnews.uark.edu/8273.htm). Sadly though these researchers had to wait for the patent to expire.
  - throwawaykf05 11y ago
    If they had to wait for the patent to expire, how is this a "new" variety?
    - agavegoose 11y ago

afarrell 11y ago

We don't have to imagine it. In the 1940s, Germany launched a war to take control of vast amounts of agricultural land and starve or explicitly mass-murder its inhabitants. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan John Green has a good video on this: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-2q-QMUIgY http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-2q-QMUIgY

pyre 11y ago

Well, you also don't feed people hamburgers, steak, and bacon for every meal either if your goal is to "feed the world" and "keep humans alive." That doesn't stop people from doubling down on meat at every meal.

tremendo 11y ago

> propose a feasible solution for how we're going to keep pace with a ballooning world population. Only half joking: By not feeding the ballooning of the world's population. Population growth was sustainable for most of history, then we eliminated scarcity and, well, we've yet to learn to control our growth in this context of resource abundance.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> we've yet to learn to control our growth in this context of resource abundance. Untrue. Most of the parts of the world with the most resource abundance have very low or negative natural growth rates, with the overall growth in those areas driven by immigration from places with less abundance rather than natural increase, and we have very good information that strong social support networks promote reduced rates of natural population growth. We know quite well how to control growth in the context of resource abundance.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  At least, population growth. Our waistlines may be another matter...
- tremendo 11y ago
  You make a good point. What prompted my comment was remembering when we were hitting the 3B mark and there were dire predictions, some efforts to curb population growth worked, a few too well (Japan, Europe). But thanks to the green revolution, and that not everyone made those same efforts, we are now more than double that with no sign of slowing down. In any case, point taken.

gech 11y ago

What if they lobby against better, safer solutions developed in the future because it affects their bottom line?