9 ms·

Stop Bashing G.M.O. Foods, More Than 100 Nobel Laureates Say

155 points by taylorbuley 10y ago

ctack 10y ago
We can feed the world many times over with existing tech, we just can't distribute it. How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that? http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/global-economy/130722/millions-hungry-despite-world-food-surplus http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/global-econ...
- afarrell 10y ago
  It makes it easier for and given locality to grow more food, so it makes it easier to distribute that food. It means that you can tolerate greater levels of waste. In a world where logistics are imperfect, there will always be some waste. Also, if you have greater yield for a given input of labor, more people can go work in a factory make latex gloves or some huge number of life-saving products.
  - DasIch 10y ago
    Has there been any practical success in that area or is this still mostly theoretical?
  - moptar 10y ago
    If you can grow food in more hostile environments, won't that mean people move to those more hostile environments and again end up dependent on unreliable food supplies, but now slightly further into the desert/salt flats/etc than before?
  - ctack 10y ago
    This would be it, you'd deal with the inefficiencies of distribution by having more a robust ability to grow food where you need it.
  - therestisgone 10y ago
    How is that supposed to help subsistence farmers who can't afford the seeds and heribicides?
- sp332 10y ago
  If you want to protest that, then protest that instead of GMOs.
- eivarv 10y ago
  How is "privatising/patenting seeds" synonymous with "G.M.O. Foods"? The Nobel Laureates are not talking about the business-practice of certain companies, but rather about fear-mongering about G.M.O.s themselves, e.g. appeals to nature as basis for "health concerns", etc.
  - BonsaiDen 10y ago
    They are simply ignoring the real world economic impacts though, which is stubborn to say the least. The world is no utopia, and as long as money / economic gain is the utmost priority for most of humanity and its corporations, allowing widespread use of patented G.M.O.s will only cause more damage in the long run. Imagine a whole countries population being dependent upon a companies patented seeds. Now add some secret courts implemented via trade agreements so the country is effectively unable to just "use" these seeds without paying up incredible amounts of money and suddenly you got yourself a situation where the country might end up under effective control by the company. Yes there's probably still a way out of this dilemma, but with the right/wrong people coming to power through the course of action, you might quickly end up with nationalist government for which the most easy solution is out is a war.
    - etatoby 10y ago
      Spot on. Let's try not to end up as the Century of the GMO Wars.
  - etatoby 10y ago
    They are synonymous because that's the current situation: GMOs are the product of billion of dollars of R&D, on which the owners fully expect a return on investment. Which means protecting the IP of GMOs, aka. sterilizing / privatizing / patenting seeds, and usually selling additional chemical products related to the GMOs, as in RoundUp resistant seeds, with their own set of problems when deployed on a massive scale. The Laureates are effectively saying: "GMOs are OK to eat. This scientific / statistical fact has no direct link to how they are developed and sold in practice and what consequences that will have on society, the economy, and the environment. That's a different problem. Stop bashing GMOs." They are not only missing the point: they are behaving in a very irresponsible way.
- vlehto 10y ago
  Patenting and privatizing is different from GMO itself. Food surplus means nothing if it can't be distributed reliably. It matters nothing if you can spread food nice and even in 2017 if we get famines in 2018. Transporting and trading food makes it vulnerable to problems in transport and economics. So nothing beats locally grown high yield nutritious crops. And GMO can improve yields and nutritional values.
  - fovc 10y ago
    Do you have a source for GMO improving yield and nutrition? I thought most GM was Roundup Ready and similar, designed to be herbicide resistant. I've heard of e.g., Golden Rice being more nutritious with beta carotene, but was under the impressioname that yields weren't great. Even with non-GMO there's a well known tradeoff between yield and nutrition (search dilution effect), so this would be a big deal
    - Kristine1975 10y ago
      >Do you have a source for GMO improving nutrition? Golden Rice comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice >Golden rice is a variety of rice (Oryza sativa) produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, in the edible parts of rice. But see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12015708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12015708
  - tomp 10y ago
    > It matters nothing if you can spread food nice and even in 2017 if we get famines in 2018 That's exactly what happens with sterile GMOs if you throw away all your non-GMO seeds then can't pay next year's GMO licencing costs.
    - vlehto 10y ago
      Some of the most productive varieties of traditionally bred plants are sterile already. Patent laws are completely different set of problems. They don't necessarily need to have anything to do with GMO as process.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- douche 10y ago
  Most vegetable seed you can buy is already a proprietary hybrid cross that doesn't seed back true anyway.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    Yes, exactly. The same even more true with grains, where the production of "organic" grain using heirloom varieties is even smaller than it is with vegetables (it's basically a rounding error). The bulk of seed grain is produced by specialized seed companies who hybridize Cool Variety #1 with Cool Variety #2 and sell the resulting seed which produces Cool Variety #3. The problem is that if you plant Cool Variety #3 seeds, only a minority of them will be Cool Variety #3. This is a real problem. If you kept growing the seeds for many generations, ruthlessly weeding out anything that didn't exhibit CV #3 traits, you'd eventually get something close to a pure CV #3 strain, but most farmers don't want to do that. Let's say that CV #1 is resistant to "gray-green rot" (made up names here), while CV #2 is resistant to "early leaf blight". CV #3 is resistant to both, thanks to having one GGR-resistant gene from CV #1 and one ELB-resistant gene from CV #2. But what happens if you grow CV #3 seeds? The kicker is that genes (usually) come in pairs. You'll get 25% offspring that are resistant to both (what you want), 25% resistant to GGR (but not ELB) 25% resistant to ELB (but not GGR), and 25% resistant to neither. If both GGR and ELB kill the plant, congratulations! You've managed to reduce your crop yield by 75%. That is why most modern farmers do not save seeds.
- daveguy 10y ago
  Agreed. To address some other comments: 1) You can't patent seeds unless you have modified them genetically. Occurrences of nature are not patentable. No GMO, no associated business practice. 2) Some of the modifications (I'm looking at you Monsanto roundup ready) allow plants to be tolerant of increased quantities of herbicide. This is obviously not something you want to encourage on a global industrial scale. Like you said, we have the food, we don't have the distribution. 3) That said, there is absolutely no inherent danger of genetic modification. We do it all the time, it's well controlled for effectively getting a specific modification. Calling GMO "frankenfoods" or implying there is some inherent health risk to GMO food (outside specific problematic modifications) is just bullshit.
  - smackay 10y ago
    I agree with your points but the genetic modification is not just about tinkering with the existing set of genes that the plant has but adding new ones from sources that would never happen naturally, https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/gefood/glowingpotato.php https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/gefood/glowing.... This is where the "frankenfood" moniker comes from. Apologies for the partisan/political link objective data is not so easy to come by.
    - eivarv 10y ago
      Why does it matter what would or wouldn't happen "naturally", though?
      - tomp 10y ago
        The point is, we know pretty well (based on millions of years of "natural" mutation and evolution) what can and cannot happen in "nature". If you introduce mutation based on human engineering, you could easily (even inadvertedly) develop something very dangerous, e.g. move a gene from a bacterium to a plant, but now all of a sudden this plant becomes as resistant/dangerous as the bacterium was, on a much larger scale! Compare this with nuclear weapons - humans have in a few decated managed to engineer something way more dangerous than millions of years of "natural" permutations/combinations of atoms.
- saalweachter 10y ago
  To the lesser question: > How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that? The patent on the first generation of Roundup-Ready soybeans expired last year. A third party immediately produced a generic version of Roundup-Ready soybeans and sold it for half the price of the Monsanto seeds, with no restriction on seed saving. Madness! A company created something new, obtained a patent, and enjoyed a limited monopoly until their patent expired and the free market used the now-public information to undercut them. This is an example of the system working. Regarding your greater point -- the claim that we are producing many times more food than we need -- the important question isn't how much food we're "wasting" but how much food waste is avoidable, given the constraints we want to live under. The difficulty in food distribution -- as the article you linked pointed out -- isn't just a matter of warlords hording food or rich westerners cramming their maws with too much food[1]. The larger problem is that food is an organic product (as in, literally, not philosophically) produced in messy conditions with a limited shelf-life. Some food produced will be of substandard quality; some food produced will spoil before reaching a consumer. Agriculture is a leaky pipeline between the farmer and the hungry consumer, and most of the leaks that are left are difficult to plug, or shouldn't be plugged. Consumers shouldn't eat spoiled or fouled food, so if you can't prevent the food from being fouled or spoiling you should let it fall out of the system. What all this means is that we need to be producing some multiple of the amount of food people consume to actually get that amount to them. We should try to improve distribution as well, of course, but the returns there will be as diminishing as they are everywhere else. By 2050 we'd like 60%-85% more food to be reaching end consumers than is now, to both keep up with population growth and to feed those who are hungry now. Some of that will almost certainly come from improvements in distribution, some of it will probably come from shifting diets away from meat and other inefficient crops, but we'll also need to ultimately produce more food per acre than we are now. [1]: I found this sentence in the article particularly offensive: > "And yet more people in the world—1.7 billion—are considered obese or overweight from a daily caloric intake that in some cases is at least six to seven times the minimum." There may be someone out there eating 6-7 times some minimum (1500 calories?), but that is a weird abnormality and ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As someone who is mildly overweight, my calorie surplus is about 50-100 calories, about 2% extra, which adds about 5 pounds per year. That is the typical overfed westerner. Adding in the extra calories to support my extra body weight amounts to about 10% more calories than would need at my ideal weight. If 30% of the world consumed 10% fewer calories, it would indeed have a measurable impact on the global food supply, but it is a bit of a red herring.
tgb 10y ago
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012827
- ctack 10y ago
  Cheers.
ricksplat 10y ago
GM sounds like a great idea, but in the open for the benefit of all.
Godel_unicode 10y ago
If you're curious (as I was) the breakdown of these Nobel laureates is: 41 medicine 34 chemistry 25 physics 8 economics 1 peace 1 Literature Average year 1998, standard deviation 11.4 years. Tl;dr - mostly scientists, mostly still working.
- fovc 10y ago
  Wouldn't a 1998 prize year mean that their major work was done in the 60s and 70s? The average age of Nobel laureates is ~60, which would mean many could be in their 80s now. [1] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/laureates_ages/all_ages.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/laureates_ages...
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    That's a good point, I had remembered that age incorrectly as being lower. Is there a good source somewhere for mean time-to-nobel per field?
    - fovc 10y ago
      I'm not sure about a quantitative source, but Wikipedia has a discussion on the subject [1]. There's a database [2] of all nominations, but it does not have the year of publishing of the research in question (if there is a specific item). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Recognition_time_lag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Recognition_time_l... [2] https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/manual.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/manual.html
- 13years 10y ago
  I find it a fallacy with these types of things where it is simply implied very smart people have this opinion and since they are smart, it must be correct. As an engineer in my field, there are so many specialized skills, even other engineers in the same field often are not qualified to analyze certain technologies without training, experience etc.
anotheryou 10y ago
How save is it to plant modified plants? My biggest concern was always, that the plants would spread in to the wild and displace native vegetation. Or do we already have some commonly used dead man switch so the plants can only survive with additional chemicals put on to the fields?
- deadowl 10y ago
  This already happens without GMOs, e.g. Africanized bees. Meanwhile, having a dead man switch would turn GMO-based food systems into a potential weapon (i.e. don't mess with us or we'll put your country into a famine).
  - anotheryou 10y ago
    Exactly, so probably we don't want more of it, no? And the bees might be an invasive species, but they have no superpowers. I'm not sure how wide the biological niche of a GMO plant can get. For the dead man switch: maybe the activator could be something simple and well known, just not so common in normal surface soil. But I don't even know how big this risk is...
- collyw 10y ago
  GM opponents made the same criticism, then they came up with the terminator gene. But GM opponents criticize that because no seeds come from it.
  - anotheryou 10y ago
    Ah,i see. Well all valid points I guess. Better than GM plants running loose, but if no seeds come from it and it's "closed-source" you are at the mercy of the supplier for the next year.
alixaxel 10y ago
I'm totally pro science by default. But I really have huge issues with GMO foods. The patenting is worrisome. The seeds are more resistant than natural occurring seeds and they tend to take over and annihilate other species (Google what's happening with the corn crops in Mexico) and then ponder if a scenario like what happened in Finland in the 70s with the potatoes (they were just farming one kind of crop and it was infected with virus) would happen to a GMO crop (thankfully we have Svalbard Global Seed Vault now). One other issue is the lack of oversight - the EU was fighting for 12 years to be able to scientifically test and publish the results of feeding Monsanto GMO foods to rats. After this unstable battle, they finally published the results and they were not good: rats fed with GMO food had developed tumors that were as big as their original size. And worst of all, we are running a massive world scale experiment where the large majority of the the world is feed with GMO food without any prior proof of its long term safety.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  The other issue is whether we can trust their studies. They're notorious about fraudulent data to push their agenda. I remember reading about all the bribery happening at every level thinking it's probably overstated. There'd be way more whistleblowers or something. Then I see something like the $10,000 policy referenced below: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/04/05/new-england-journal-medicine-increasingly-targeted-critics/9H3JFKzTNJpCsOQqIUNXJP/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/04/05/new-england-jou... The original article I read on that said they basically couldn't find enough people taking less than $10,000 from the institutions whose science or products they were reviewing. I'm thinking, "Holy shit! Almost all the "independent" researchers are getting enough bribes to buy a car. How is their validation in any way trustworthy?" I had to stop there. Especially watching Monsanto's games with seeds and such plus history of hiding health dangers of stuff they intend to sell with bogus studies. I don't trust GMO's or about any highly-profitable thing coming out of such organizations until I see what they do to a lot of people over a long period of time.
  - alixaxel 10y ago
    Exaclty, 90 day studies are not even enough. they are clearly designed to pass: http://www.gmoseralini.org/faq-items/why-this-study-now/ http://www.gmoseralini.org/faq-items/why-this-study-now/
idiocracy2016 10y ago
So you have to sell your soul to get a Nobel?
pipio21 10y ago
I hate so much when rational discussion is replaced with emotional manipulation and tribal thinking. The original source of this comes from: http://supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-letter_rjr.html http://supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-le... Which obviously is from an NGO created by the GMO lobby. They are free to expose arguments but ending in "we consider this a "crime against humanity"" is this fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion I am not against GMOs but either for it. In the end is going to improve lives, but in the process experimentation will harm others(like with X-Rays with pregnant women, nuclear radiation, substances that are mutagens). People are dying in India for lots of complex reasons. It is not going to be solved because of "Golden Rice". India has very fertile land, when I worked there as a volunteer the problems came mainly from overpopulation, pollution and inequality in big cities. By "overpopulation" I mean "people against people" fighting for resources. Like Buddhist against Muslims, Rich versus poor or poor against poor, like people cutting legs or removing eyes from children so tourist feel sorry and give those bastards(that legs cutters) money. I wonder how many of those Nobel laureates have lived in India, are Indians or have worked with them. Looking at a glance the names it seems the list contains more or less zero Indians names, so they have total ignorance in the specific problem. Talking about 2050...by that time nuclear war could had been destroyed the entire wold, the West could had collapsed because of derivatives and debt weapons of mass destruction financial instruments, we could be using nuclear fusion for cheap energy in order to plant on Sahara dessert or Australia, or just using LEDs indoors in order not to need GMOs or pesticides...
- Kristine1975 10y ago
  >Talking about 2050... I don't think it's useful to not do anything merely because it's possible the future might turn out like you describe. We (as in humanity) should try to solve the food problem while also preventing nuclear war etc. Or did I misunderstand what you're saying?
fovc 10y ago
I agree let's not bash GMO on principle. But Golden Rice is not the silver bullet it's billed as: > Golden Rice showed that beta carotene was produced at consistently high levels in the grain, and that grain quality was comparable to the conventional variety. However, yields of candidate lines were not consistent across locations and seasons, prompting research direction toward assessing Golden Rice versions such as GR2-E and others. [1] Let's keep researching (whether GM or not) ways to make crops more nutritious and higher yielding (search dilution effect e.g. [2], [3]), not just more herbicide resistant. Let's get the cost of GM research down so that we can end the terrible business and ecological practices surrounding GMO. While I agree that Greenpeace is not helping here, this article is too friendly to GMO. Ignoring Monsanto in an article about GM is totally disingenuous.* [1] http://irri.org/golden-rice/faqs/what-is-the-status-of-the-golden-rice-project-coordinated-by-irri http://irri.org/golden-rice/faqs/what-is-the-status-of-the-g... [2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065211308608871 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065211308... [3] http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/44/1/15.full http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/44/1/15.full *Showing a picture of their Bangalore Center does not count
tomp 10y ago
How convenient - scientists ignoring all non-scientific problems that GMOs have (e.g. legal, social, economic, environmental impacts, monoculture diseases, ...). Oh well, kind of what I would expect from a group of scientists...
- DominoTree 10y ago
  It's not productive to conflate all of these issues, as many of them aren't really directly tied to GMOs.
- throwwit 10y ago
  Was just going to say the same thing. Appeal to Scientific Consensus becomes the new Appeal to Popularity or Authority fallacy, just due to scope of study.
jballanc 10y ago
Pick two: 1. Feed the world 2. Produce food organically 3. Don't genetically modify foods Before the Green Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution) the world was facing a truly bleak scenario that involved massive food shortages. Of course, a large part of the Green Revolution was the usage of new fertilizers and pesticides, which we now understand have significant impact on the environment. GMOs provide a way to continue to realize the benefits of the Green Revolution without all of the chemical-related downsides. Well...unless you put Monsanto in charge. The real travesty of the current state of GMOs is that things like "Roundup-Ready" plants do nothing to reduce the usage of chemicals. There's also the cautionary lesson of bt-Corn and its impact on Monarch butterflies. Learn the lessons of the Green Revolution: you can feed the world with modified farming techniques, but those techniques should strive to lessen the impact on the environment and should be implemented carefully to avoid further unintended consequences.
- scott_s 10y ago
  > The real travesty of the current state of GMOs is that things like "Roundup-Ready" plants do nothing to reduce the usage of chemicals. In my understanding, this is not quite accurate. The perception of "organic" farming is that they do not use pesticides, but this is not accurate. Organic farming does use pesticides, but they just happen to not be synthetic - that is, the pesticides happen to be "naturally" occurring. But that does not necessarily make them safer. So, if you have a crop which is engineered to be resistant to a very particular, effective pesticide, then it is possible that you will end up using less overall pesticides when compared to organic farming. See http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/organic-pesticides/ http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/organic-pestici...
  - jballanc 10y ago
    Sure, there are many, many nuances surrounding the whole GMO debate. It turns out that while bt-Corn could pose a threat to Monarchs, in practice (in the wild) the risk is negligible. (One might also ponder how to weigh protection of an insect species against providing food for humans.) And, as you point out, the whole pesticide/GMO equation is not as simple as it might seem. Nuance, moderation, and caution are the orders of the day, but these values seem to be increasingly scarce in a world of self-selecting echo chambers...
nnq 10y ago
How about stopping to use stupid and confusing terms like "G.M.O."?! Manufacturers should be forced to label their plants explicitly with one of a set of standard labels like: - "engineered to be tolerant to spececific herbicides" - ETH - "engineered to be tolerant to specific insecticides" - ETI - "engineered to be tolerant to specific fungicides" - ETF - "engineered for better performance with the use of specific synthetic fertilizers" - EPSF - "engineered for improved performance in all conditions" - EP" - "engineered for better nutritional profile" - ENP etc. And I should see this on the ingredients listing on my cereals package, like "ETH/I/F corn" or "EP corn" instead of just "corn". There is no way to both (a) respect consumers' rights and (b) shield them from technical details. And what such technical terms mean should actually be inserted into secondary education curriculums worldwide - children should have to learn what genetical engineering is and how it is used just as they have to learn to read and write. We live in a world where technical details make all the difference and we should start educating ourselves and our children to be less illiterate about them! Lets stop this whole process of consumer dumbification and extensive usage of "blanket terms" in all areas. This is the most damaging thing for consumer rights imho, because you can't have clear meaningful discussion about things without making clear distinctions about what specifically are you talking about! "GMO" can mean... anything!
- thfuran 10y ago
  There's a big gap between "shielding [consumers] from technical details" and legally mandating that all packaging contain those details. Why is it imperative for consumers to know the types of poisons to which a plant was given resistance? And why do they need to know how the plant came by the nutrition it contains? Nutrition information already required on packaging. For that matter, why isn't the method of genetic modification something you consider important. All modern (and even not so modern) crops are genetically modified in some fashion, whether by selective breeding or exposure to high-energy radiation.
  - nnq 10y ago
    > Why is it imperative for consumers to know the types of poisons to which a plant was given resistance? Because this is the specific case in which the economical incentives of producers are massively unaligned with the health interest of the consumers: as a producer, once I start using a crop engineered for resistance to a chemical, then I will be motivated to increase the dosage of that chemical until I get to the best yield. And realistically, I will do this regardless of the fact that the chemical is at some point proven to "increase by 30% the chances for group X to get cancer of type Y" or other such risk. We don't live in an ideal world: if a producer knows that 0.01 mg of chemical X pe 100g of product is the maximum he's allowed to have in a product, he will 99% of the time still accept it to 0.1 mg (10x!) if he knows that nobody ever checks for quantity and that in the rare case this happens, he will most likely be able to blame it to some technical manufacturing error and just pay a fine and re-tweak the process... Laws and regulations should be about practically guarding against what happens when you combine human greed+stupidity with advances in science and technology, not about what's technically and theoretically correct! And about: > why isn't the method of genetic modification something you consider important If we later discover that such technical details can have harmful effects with a propensity to be amplified by misaligned economical incentives, then YES, we should legally mandate that all packaging contains this information too, because this is the only way to re-align the incentives (because this way some of the producers will, for example, be able to exploit through marketing campaings the fact that they use "EP corn" or "ENP corn" instead of "ETF corn", and get a rightful economic advantage over the other ones whose incentives have become misaligned with the ones of the consumer). Market economies need regulatory adjustment to keep the interests aligned, "market forces" will do this in theory, but with a delay of decades and a cost measured in lost human lives. Full market freedom is cool, but if we can engineer systems with faster response times I think it's worth the cost of some "lost efficiency" in the short term and on narrow niches.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I don't object to GMO foods but I do want accurate food labeling. I find the big push by the corporate food producers to make this accurate food labeling illegal to be very disturbing. Consumers have the right to know what the are buying. BTW, for people arguing that GMO foods are a hard requirement for feeding the world, I have another suggestion: beef uses a 100 times the water and resources per gram of protein as lentils do. The beef industry requires HUGE subsidies from the government in the form of free or cheap water. Eating a single hamburger uses the water most people use for 3 months of taking showers, just to put things in perspective. As a tax payer, I am sick and tired of supporting people eating beef - make them pay they actual cost of production.
- orangecat 10y ago
  I do want accurate food labeling. In theory, yes. In practice, it's obviously a push by anti-GMO groups in the hope that the labels will irrationally scare customers. It's not unlike the recent Texas law that pretended to be about health and safety standards for abortion clinics, but everyone on both sides knew that the actual goal was to shut them down. I find the big push by the corporate food producers to make this accurate food labeling illegal to be very disturbing. Is anyone actually saying that "contains no GMOs" labels should be illegal? Certainly that shouldn't be the case, although when I see a label like that I lower my opinion of the producer on the grounds that they're promoting unfounded fear. As a tax payer, I am sick and tired of supporting people eating beef - make them pay they actual cost of production. In principle I agree with this. Do you have a source on the hamburger/shower figure? That's amazing if true, and it would mean that telling people to take shorter showers to conserve water is silly.
  - FLGMwt 10y ago
    Regarding the hamburger/shower figure, it seems to be a popular pro-veg rhetoric but here's a good breakdown on skeptics.stackexchange that seems to support it (for a quarter pound patty even!) http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23921/does-one-hamburger-take-more-water-to-produce-than-2-months-worth-of-showering http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23921/does-one-h... This might push me over the edge from part-time vegetarian.
amawgad 10y ago
dont put DNA in my foods!!1
dekhn 10y ago
One of the most interesting GMO stories in the primary literature: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8594427 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8594427 A gene from Brazil Nuts that coded for a protein high in methionine was cloned into soy plants; soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in subjects. Had this rolled out globally (at the scale that GMO soy is currently deployed) it probably would have (I'm assuming the paper had all the details correct and did in fact show a causal relationship between the transferred gene and the resulting allergenicity) had an enormous negative health effect.
- daveguy 10y ago
  I responded in more detail here (ended up longer than I expected): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12018169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12018169 Briefly two points: ...soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in subjects allergic to brazil nuts. Not a novel unknown allergic reaction, but still important and something that should always be evaluated during the regulatory process. GMO should definitely be regulated and reported with greater scrutiny and transparency than regular food precisely because of this potential. This was caused specifically because of the protein chosen to be introduced into the soybean to increase nutritional value. From the other (longer) response tl;dr: This is a legitimate concern that should be included in a regulatory framework that supports safety and transparency.
  - dekhn 10y ago
    Sorry, you're right, I left out the critical point that the only subjects affected were people already allergic to brazil nuts.
wazoox 10y ago
GMO are probably perfectly healthy. They're probably not much worse than "hybrid" seeds. The problem is handing control of feeding the world to large multinational corporations. It's been proved again and again that it's perfectly possible to feed the world organically. The "Green Revolution" was essentially a sham, pushing one energy, resource and chemical intensive way of growing food as the only one possible. It's perfectly possible to produce as much with much less standardization.
ryan606 10y ago
A perfect example of the left being anti-science (in addition to vaccinations), just like the right is on evolution and climate change.

155 points by taylorbuley 10y ago

ctack 10y ago

We can feed the world many times over with existing tech, we just can't distribute it. How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that? http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/global-economy/130722/millions-hungry-despite-world-food-surplus http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/global-econ...

afarrell 10y ago
It makes it easier for and given locality to grow more food, so it makes it easier to distribute that food. It means that you can tolerate greater levels of waste. In a world where logistics are imperfect, there will always be some waste. Also, if you have greater yield for a given input of labor, more people can go work in a factory make latex gloves or some huge number of life-saving products.
- DasIch 10y ago
  Has there been any practical success in that area or is this still mostly theoretical?
- moptar 10y ago
  If you can grow food in more hostile environments, won't that mean people move to those more hostile environments and again end up dependent on unreliable food supplies, but now slightly further into the desert/salt flats/etc than before?
- ctack 10y ago
  This would be it, you'd deal with the inefficiencies of distribution by having more a robust ability to grow food where you need it.
- therestisgone 10y ago
  How is that supposed to help subsistence farmers who can't afford the seeds and heribicides?
sp332 10y ago
If you want to protest that, then protest that instead of GMOs.
eivarv 10y ago
How is "privatising/patenting seeds" synonymous with "G.M.O. Foods"? The Nobel Laureates are not talking about the business-practice of certain companies, but rather about fear-mongering about G.M.O.s themselves, e.g. appeals to nature as basis for "health concerns", etc.
- BonsaiDen 10y ago
  They are simply ignoring the real world economic impacts though, which is stubborn to say the least. The world is no utopia, and as long as money / economic gain is the utmost priority for most of humanity and its corporations, allowing widespread use of patented G.M.O.s will only cause more damage in the long run. Imagine a whole countries population being dependent upon a companies patented seeds. Now add some secret courts implemented via trade agreements so the country is effectively unable to just "use" these seeds without paying up incredible amounts of money and suddenly you got yourself a situation where the country might end up under effective control by the company. Yes there's probably still a way out of this dilemma, but with the right/wrong people coming to power through the course of action, you might quickly end up with nationalist government for which the most easy solution is out is a war.
  - etatoby 10y ago
    Spot on. Let's try not to end up as the Century of the GMO Wars.
- etatoby 10y ago
  They are synonymous because that's the current situation: GMOs are the product of billion of dollars of R&D, on which the owners fully expect a return on investment. Which means protecting the IP of GMOs, aka. sterilizing / privatizing / patenting seeds, and usually selling additional chemical products related to the GMOs, as in RoundUp resistant seeds, with their own set of problems when deployed on a massive scale. The Laureates are effectively saying: "GMOs are OK to eat. This scientific / statistical fact has no direct link to how they are developed and sold in practice and what consequences that will have on society, the economy, and the environment. That's a different problem. Stop bashing GMOs." They are not only missing the point: they are behaving in a very irresponsible way.
vlehto 10y ago
Patenting and privatizing is different from GMO itself. Food surplus means nothing if it can't be distributed reliably. It matters nothing if you can spread food nice and even in 2017 if we get famines in 2018. Transporting and trading food makes it vulnerable to problems in transport and economics. So nothing beats locally grown high yield nutritious crops. And GMO can improve yields and nutritional values.
- fovc 10y ago
  Do you have a source for GMO improving yield and nutrition? I thought most GM was Roundup Ready and similar, designed to be herbicide resistant. I've heard of e.g., Golden Rice being more nutritious with beta carotene, but was under the impressioname that yields weren't great. Even with non-GMO there's a well known tradeoff between yield and nutrition (search dilution effect), so this would be a big deal
  - Kristine1975 10y ago
    >Do you have a source for GMO improving nutrition? Golden Rice comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice >Golden rice is a variety of rice (Oryza sativa) produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, in the edible parts of rice. But see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12015708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12015708
- tomp 10y ago
  > It matters nothing if you can spread food nice and even in 2017 if we get famines in 2018 That's exactly what happens with sterile GMOs if you throw away all your non-GMO seeds then can't pay next year's GMO licencing costs.
  - vlehto 10y ago
    Some of the most productive varieties of traditionally bred plants are sterile already. Patent laws are completely different set of problems. They don't necessarily need to have anything to do with GMO as process.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
douche 10y ago
Most vegetable seed you can buy is already a proprietary hybrid cross that doesn't seed back true anyway.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  Yes, exactly. The same even more true with grains, where the production of "organic" grain using heirloom varieties is even smaller than it is with vegetables (it's basically a rounding error). The bulk of seed grain is produced by specialized seed companies who hybridize Cool Variety #1 with Cool Variety #2 and sell the resulting seed which produces Cool Variety #3. The problem is that if you plant Cool Variety #3 seeds, only a minority of them will be Cool Variety #3. This is a real problem. If you kept growing the seeds for many generations, ruthlessly weeding out anything that didn't exhibit CV #3 traits, you'd eventually get something close to a pure CV #3 strain, but most farmers don't want to do that. Let's say that CV #1 is resistant to "gray-green rot" (made up names here), while CV #2 is resistant to "early leaf blight". CV #3 is resistant to both, thanks to having one GGR-resistant gene from CV #1 and one ELB-resistant gene from CV #2. But what happens if you grow CV #3 seeds? The kicker is that genes (usually) come in pairs. You'll get 25% offspring that are resistant to both (what you want), 25% resistant to GGR (but not ELB) 25% resistant to ELB (but not GGR), and 25% resistant to neither. If both GGR and ELB kill the plant, congratulations! You've managed to reduce your crop yield by 75%. That is why most modern farmers do not save seeds.
daveguy 10y ago
Agreed. To address some other comments: 1) You can't patent seeds unless you have modified them genetically. Occurrences of nature are not patentable. No GMO, no associated business practice. 2) Some of the modifications (I'm looking at you Monsanto roundup ready) allow plants to be tolerant of increased quantities of herbicide. This is obviously not something you want to encourage on a global industrial scale. Like you said, we have the food, we don't have the distribution. 3) That said, there is absolutely no inherent danger of genetic modification. We do it all the time, it's well controlled for effectively getting a specific modification. Calling GMO "frankenfoods" or implying there is some inherent health risk to GMO food (outside specific problematic modifications) is just bullshit.
- smackay 10y ago
  I agree with your points but the genetic modification is not just about tinkering with the existing set of genes that the plant has but adding new ones from sources that would never happen naturally, https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/gefood/glowingpotato.php https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/gefood/glowing.... This is where the "frankenfood" moniker comes from. Apologies for the partisan/political link objective data is not so easy to come by.
  - eivarv 10y ago
    Why does it matter what would or wouldn't happen "naturally", though?
    - tomp 10y ago
      The point is, we know pretty well (based on millions of years of "natural" mutation and evolution) what can and cannot happen in "nature". If you introduce mutation based on human engineering, you could easily (even inadvertedly) develop something very dangerous, e.g. move a gene from a bacterium to a plant, but now all of a sudden this plant becomes as resistant/dangerous as the bacterium was, on a much larger scale! Compare this with nuclear weapons - humans have in a few decated managed to engineer something way more dangerous than millions of years of "natural" permutations/combinations of atoms.
saalweachter 10y ago
To the lesser question: > How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that? The patent on the first generation of Roundup-Ready soybeans expired last year. A third party immediately produced a generic version of Roundup-Ready soybeans and sold it for half the price of the Monsanto seeds, with no restriction on seed saving. Madness! A company created something new, obtained a patent, and enjoyed a limited monopoly until their patent expired and the free market used the now-public information to undercut them. This is an example of the system working. Regarding your greater point -- the claim that we are producing many times more food than we need -- the important question isn't how much food we're "wasting" but how much food waste is avoidable, given the constraints we want to live under. The difficulty in food distribution -- as the article you linked pointed out -- isn't just a matter of warlords hording food or rich westerners cramming their maws with too much food[1]. The larger problem is that food is an organic product (as in, literally, not philosophically) produced in messy conditions with a limited shelf-life. Some food produced will be of substandard quality; some food produced will spoil before reaching a consumer. Agriculture is a leaky pipeline between the farmer and the hungry consumer, and most of the leaks that are left are difficult to plug, or shouldn't be plugged. Consumers shouldn't eat spoiled or fouled food, so if you can't prevent the food from being fouled or spoiling you should let it fall out of the system. What all this means is that we need to be producing some multiple of the amount of food people consume to actually get that amount to them. We should try to improve distribution as well, of course, but the returns there will be as diminishing as they are everywhere else. By 2050 we'd like 60%-85% more food to be reaching end consumers than is now, to both keep up with population growth and to feed those who are hungry now. Some of that will almost certainly come from improvements in distribution, some of it will probably come from shifting diets away from meat and other inefficient crops, but we'll also need to ultimately produce more food per acre than we are now. [1]: I found this sentence in the article particularly offensive: > "And yet more people in the world—1.7 billion—are considered obese or overweight from a daily caloric intake that in some cases is at least six to seven times the minimum." There may be someone out there eating 6-7 times some minimum (1500 calories?), but that is a weird abnormality and ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As someone who is mildly overweight, my calorie surplus is about 50-100 calories, about 2% extra, which adds about 5 pounds per year. That is the typical overfed westerner. Adding in the extra calories to support my extra body weight amounts to about 10% more calories than would need at my ideal weight. If 30% of the world consumed 10% fewer calories, it would indeed have a measurable impact on the global food supply, but it is a bit of a red herring.

tgb 10y ago

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012827

ctack 10y ago
Cheers.

ricksplat 10y ago

GM sounds like a great idea, but in the open for the benefit of all.

Godel_unicode 10y ago

If you're curious (as I was) the breakdown of these Nobel laureates is: 41 medicine 34 chemistry 25 physics 8 economics 1 peace 1 Literature Average year 1998, standard deviation 11.4 years. Tl;dr - mostly scientists, mostly still working.

fovc 10y ago
Wouldn't a 1998 prize year mean that their major work was done in the 60s and 70s? The average age of Nobel laureates is ~60, which would mean many could be in their 80s now. [1] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/laureates_ages/all_ages.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/laureates_ages...
- Godel_unicode 10y ago
  That's a good point, I had remembered that age incorrectly as being lower. Is there a good source somewhere for mean time-to-nobel per field?
  - fovc 10y ago
    I'm not sure about a quantitative source, but Wikipedia has a discussion on the subject [1]. There's a database [2] of all nominations, but it does not have the year of publishing of the research in question (if there is a specific item). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Recognition_time_lag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Recognition_time_l... [2] https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/manual.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/manual.html
13years 10y ago
I find it a fallacy with these types of things where it is simply implied very smart people have this opinion and since they are smart, it must be correct. As an engineer in my field, there are so many specialized skills, even other engineers in the same field often are not qualified to analyze certain technologies without training, experience etc.

anotheryou 10y ago

How save is it to plant modified plants? My biggest concern was always, that the plants would spread in to the wild and displace native vegetation. Or do we already have some commonly used dead man switch so the plants can only survive with additional chemicals put on to the fields?

deadowl 10y ago
This already happens without GMOs, e.g. Africanized bees. Meanwhile, having a dead man switch would turn GMO-based food systems into a potential weapon (i.e. don't mess with us or we'll put your country into a famine).
- anotheryou 10y ago
  Exactly, so probably we don't want more of it, no? And the bees might be an invasive species, but they have no superpowers. I'm not sure how wide the biological niche of a GMO plant can get. For the dead man switch: maybe the activator could be something simple and well known, just not so common in normal surface soil. But I don't even know how big this risk is...
collyw 10y ago
GM opponents made the same criticism, then they came up with the terminator gene. But GM opponents criticize that because no seeds come from it.
- anotheryou 10y ago
  Ah,i see. Well all valid points I guess. Better than GM plants running loose, but if no seeds come from it and it's "closed-source" you are at the mercy of the supplier for the next year.

alixaxel 10y ago

I'm totally pro science by default. But I really have huge issues with GMO foods. The patenting is worrisome. The seeds are more resistant than natural occurring seeds and they tend to take over and annihilate other species (Google what's happening with the corn crops in Mexico) and then ponder if a scenario like what happened in Finland in the 70s with the potatoes (they were just farming one kind of crop and it was infected with virus) would happen to a GMO crop (thankfully we have Svalbard Global Seed Vault now). One other issue is the lack of oversight - the EU was fighting for 12 years to be able to scientifically test and publish the results of feeding Monsanto GMO foods to rats. After this unstable battle, they finally published the results and they were not good: rats fed with GMO food had developed tumors that were as big as their original size. And worst of all, we are running a massive world scale experiment where the large majority of the the world is feed with GMO food without any prior proof of its long term safety.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
The other issue is whether we can trust their studies. They're notorious about fraudulent data to push their agenda. I remember reading about all the bribery happening at every level thinking it's probably overstated. There'd be way more whistleblowers or something. Then I see something like the $10,000 policy referenced below: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/04/05/new-england-journal-medicine-increasingly-targeted-critics/9H3JFKzTNJpCsOQqIUNXJP/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/04/05/new-england-jou... The original article I read on that said they basically couldn't find enough people taking less than $10,000 from the institutions whose science or products they were reviewing. I'm thinking, "Holy shit! Almost all the "independent" researchers are getting enough bribes to buy a car. How is their validation in any way trustworthy?" I had to stop there. Especially watching Monsanto's games with seeds and such plus history of hiding health dangers of stuff they intend to sell with bogus studies. I don't trust GMO's or about any highly-profitable thing coming out of such organizations until I see what they do to a lot of people over a long period of time.
- alixaxel 10y ago
  Exaclty, 90 day studies are not even enough. they are clearly designed to pass: http://www.gmoseralini.org/faq-items/why-this-study-now/ http://www.gmoseralini.org/faq-items/why-this-study-now/

idiocracy2016 10y ago

So you have to sell your soul to get a Nobel?

pipio21 10y ago

I hate so much when rational discussion is replaced with emotional manipulation and tribal thinking. The original source of this comes from: http://supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-letter_rjr.html http://supportprecisionagriculture.org/nobel-laureate-gmo-le... Which obviously is from an NGO created by the GMO lobby. They are free to expose arguments but ending in "we consider this a "crime against humanity"" is this fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion I am not against GMOs but either for it. In the end is going to improve lives, but in the process experimentation will harm others(like with X-Rays with pregnant women, nuclear radiation, substances that are mutagens). People are dying in India for lots of complex reasons. It is not going to be solved because of "Golden Rice". India has very fertile land, when I worked there as a volunteer the problems came mainly from overpopulation, pollution and inequality in big cities. By "overpopulation" I mean "people against people" fighting for resources. Like Buddhist against Muslims, Rich versus poor or poor against poor, like people cutting legs or removing eyes from children so tourist feel sorry and give those bastards(that legs cutters) money. I wonder how many of those Nobel laureates have lived in India, are Indians or have worked with them. Looking at a glance the names it seems the list contains more or less zero Indians names, so they have total ignorance in the specific problem. Talking about 2050...by that time nuclear war could had been destroyed the entire wold, the West could had collapsed because of derivatives and debt weapons of mass destruction financial instruments, we could be using nuclear fusion for cheap energy in order to plant on Sahara dessert or Australia, or just using LEDs indoors in order not to need GMOs or pesticides...

Kristine1975 10y ago
>Talking about 2050... I don't think it's useful to not do anything merely because it's possible the future might turn out like you describe. We (as in humanity) should try to solve the food problem while also preventing nuclear war etc. Or did I misunderstand what you're saying?

fovc 10y ago

I agree let's not bash GMO on principle. But Golden Rice is not the silver bullet it's billed as: > Golden Rice showed that beta carotene was produced at consistently high levels in the grain, and that grain quality was comparable to the conventional variety. However, yields of candidate lines were not consistent across locations and seasons, prompting research direction toward assessing Golden Rice versions such as GR2-E and others. [1] Let's keep researching (whether GM or not) ways to make crops more nutritious and higher yielding (search dilution effect e.g. [2], [3]), not just more herbicide resistant. Let's get the cost of GM research down so that we can end the terrible business and ecological practices surrounding GMO. While I agree that Greenpeace is not helping here, this article is too friendly to GMO. Ignoring Monsanto in an article about GM is totally disingenuous.* [1] http://irri.org/golden-rice/faqs/what-is-the-status-of-the-golden-rice-project-coordinated-by-irri http://irri.org/golden-rice/faqs/what-is-the-status-of-the-g... [2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065211308608871 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065211308... [3] http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/44/1/15.full http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/44/1/15.full *Showing a picture of their Bangalore Center does not count

tomp 10y ago

How convenient - scientists ignoring all non-scientific problems that GMOs have (e.g. legal, social, economic, environmental impacts, monoculture diseases, ...). Oh well, kind of what I would expect from a group of scientists...

DominoTree 10y ago
It's not productive to conflate all of these issues, as many of them aren't really directly tied to GMOs.
throwwit 10y ago
Was just going to say the same thing. Appeal to Scientific Consensus becomes the new Appeal to Popularity or Authority fallacy, just due to scope of study.

jballanc 10y ago

Pick two: 1. Feed the world 2. Produce food organically 3. Don't genetically modify foods Before the Green Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution) the world was facing a truly bleak scenario that involved massive food shortages. Of course, a large part of the Green Revolution was the usage of new fertilizers and pesticides, which we now understand have significant impact on the environment. GMOs provide a way to continue to realize the benefits of the Green Revolution without all of the chemical-related downsides. Well...unless you put Monsanto in charge. The real travesty of the current state of GMOs is that things like "Roundup-Ready" plants do nothing to reduce the usage of chemicals. There's also the cautionary lesson of bt-Corn and its impact on Monarch butterflies. Learn the lessons of the Green Revolution: you can feed the world with modified farming techniques, but those techniques should strive to lessen the impact on the environment and should be implemented carefully to avoid further unintended consequences.

scott_s 10y ago
> The real travesty of the current state of GMOs is that things like "Roundup-Ready" plants do nothing to reduce the usage of chemicals. In my understanding, this is not quite accurate. The perception of "organic" farming is that they do not use pesticides, but this is not accurate. Organic farming does use pesticides, but they just happen to not be synthetic - that is, the pesticides happen to be "naturally" occurring. But that does not necessarily make them safer. So, if you have a crop which is engineered to be resistant to a very particular, effective pesticide, then it is possible that you will end up using less overall pesticides when compared to organic farming. See http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/organic-pesticides/ http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/organic-pestici...
- jballanc 10y ago
  Sure, there are many, many nuances surrounding the whole GMO debate. It turns out that while bt-Corn could pose a threat to Monarchs, in practice (in the wild) the risk is negligible. (One might also ponder how to weigh protection of an insect species against providing food for humans.) And, as you point out, the whole pesticide/GMO equation is not as simple as it might seem. Nuance, moderation, and caution are the orders of the day, but these values seem to be increasingly scarce in a world of self-selecting echo chambers...

nnq 10y ago

How about stopping to use stupid and confusing terms like "G.M.O."?! Manufacturers should be forced to label their plants explicitly with one of a set of standard labels like: - "engineered to be tolerant to spececific herbicides" - ETH - "engineered to be tolerant to specific insecticides" - ETI - "engineered to be tolerant to specific fungicides" - ETF - "engineered for better performance with the use of specific synthetic fertilizers" - EPSF - "engineered for improved performance in all conditions" - EP" - "engineered for better nutritional profile" - ENP etc. And I should see this on the ingredients listing on my cereals package, like "ETH/I/F corn" or "EP corn" instead of just "corn". There is no way to both (a) respect consumers' rights and (b) shield them from technical details. And what such technical terms mean should actually be inserted into secondary education curriculums worldwide - children should have to learn what genetical engineering is and how it is used just as they have to learn to read and write. We live in a world where technical details make all the difference and we should start educating ourselves and our children to be less illiterate about them! Lets stop this whole process of consumer dumbification and extensive usage of "blanket terms" in all areas. This is the most damaging thing for consumer rights imho, because you can't have clear meaningful discussion about things without making clear distinctions about what specifically are you talking about! "GMO" can mean... anything!

thfuran 10y ago
There's a big gap between "shielding [consumers] from technical details" and legally mandating that all packaging contain those details. Why is it imperative for consumers to know the types of poisons to which a plant was given resistance? And why do they need to know how the plant came by the nutrition it contains? Nutrition information already required on packaging. For that matter, why isn't the method of genetic modification something you consider important. All modern (and even not so modern) crops are genetically modified in some fashion, whether by selective breeding or exposure to high-energy radiation.
- nnq 10y ago
  > Why is it imperative for consumers to know the types of poisons to which a plant was given resistance? Because this is the specific case in which the economical incentives of producers are massively unaligned with the health interest of the consumers: as a producer, once I start using a crop engineered for resistance to a chemical, then I will be motivated to increase the dosage of that chemical until I get to the best yield. And realistically, I will do this regardless of the fact that the chemical is at some point proven to "increase by 30% the chances for group X to get cancer of type Y" or other such risk. We don't live in an ideal world: if a producer knows that 0.01 mg of chemical X pe 100g of product is the maximum he's allowed to have in a product, he will 99% of the time still accept it to 0.1 mg (10x!) if he knows that nobody ever checks for quantity and that in the rare case this happens, he will most likely be able to blame it to some technical manufacturing error and just pay a fine and re-tweak the process... Laws and regulations should be about practically guarding against what happens when you combine human greed+stupidity with advances in science and technology, not about what's technically and theoretically correct! And about: > why isn't the method of genetic modification something you consider important If we later discover that such technical details can have harmful effects with a propensity to be amplified by misaligned economical incentives, then YES, we should legally mandate that all packaging contains this information too, because this is the only way to re-align the incentives (because this way some of the producers will, for example, be able to exploit through marketing campaings the fact that they use "EP corn" or "ENP corn" instead of "ETF corn", and get a rightful economic advantage over the other ones whose incentives have become misaligned with the ones of the consumer). Market economies need regulatory adjustment to keep the interests aligned, "market forces" will do this in theory, but with a delay of decades and a cost measured in lost human lives. Full market freedom is cool, but if we can engineer systems with faster response times I think it's worth the cost of some "lost efficiency" in the short term and on narrow niches.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I don't object to GMO foods but I do want accurate food labeling. I find the big push by the corporate food producers to make this accurate food labeling illegal to be very disturbing. Consumers have the right to know what the are buying. BTW, for people arguing that GMO foods are a hard requirement for feeding the world, I have another suggestion: beef uses a 100 times the water and resources per gram of protein as lentils do. The beef industry requires HUGE subsidies from the government in the form of free or cheap water. Eating a single hamburger uses the water most people use for 3 months of taking showers, just to put things in perspective. As a tax payer, I am sick and tired of supporting people eating beef - make them pay they actual cost of production.

orangecat 10y ago
I do want accurate food labeling. In theory, yes. In practice, it's obviously a push by anti-GMO groups in the hope that the labels will irrationally scare customers. It's not unlike the recent Texas law that pretended to be about health and safety standards for abortion clinics, but everyone on both sides knew that the actual goal was to shut them down. I find the big push by the corporate food producers to make this accurate food labeling illegal to be very disturbing. Is anyone actually saying that "contains no GMOs" labels should be illegal? Certainly that shouldn't be the case, although when I see a label like that I lower my opinion of the producer on the grounds that they're promoting unfounded fear. As a tax payer, I am sick and tired of supporting people eating beef - make them pay they actual cost of production. In principle I agree with this. Do you have a source on the hamburger/shower figure? That's amazing if true, and it would mean that telling people to take shorter showers to conserve water is silly.
- FLGMwt 10y ago
  Regarding the hamburger/shower figure, it seems to be a popular pro-veg rhetoric but here's a good breakdown on skeptics.stackexchange that seems to support it (for a quarter pound patty even!) http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23921/does-one-hamburger-take-more-water-to-produce-than-2-months-worth-of-showering http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23921/does-one-h... This might push me over the edge from part-time vegetarian.

amawgad 10y ago

dont put DNA in my foods!!1

dekhn 10y ago

One of the most interesting GMO stories in the primary literature: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8594427 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8594427 A gene from Brazil Nuts that coded for a protein high in methionine was cloned into soy plants; soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in subjects. Had this rolled out globally (at the scale that GMO soy is currently deployed) it probably would have (I'm assuming the paper had all the details correct and did in fact show a causal relationship between the transferred gene and the resulting allergenicity) had an enormous negative health effect.

daveguy 10y ago
I responded in more detail here (ended up longer than I expected): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12018169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12018169 Briefly two points: ...soy from the resulting plant caused allergic reactions in subjects allergic to brazil nuts. Not a novel unknown allergic reaction, but still important and something that should always be evaluated during the regulatory process. GMO should definitely be regulated and reported with greater scrutiny and transparency than regular food precisely because of this potential. This was caused specifically because of the protein chosen to be introduced into the soybean to increase nutritional value. From the other (longer) response tl;dr: This is a legitimate concern that should be included in a regulatory framework that supports safety and transparency.
- dekhn 10y ago
  Sorry, you're right, I left out the critical point that the only subjects affected were people already allergic to brazil nuts.

wazoox 10y ago

GMO are probably perfectly healthy. They're probably not much worse than "hybrid" seeds. The problem is handing control of feeding the world to large multinational corporations. It's been proved again and again that it's perfectly possible to feed the world organically. The "Green Revolution" was essentially a sham, pushing one energy, resource and chemical intensive way of growing food as the only one possible. It's perfectly possible to produce as much with much less standardization.

ryan606 10y ago

A perfect example of the left being anti-science (in addition to vaccinations), just like the right is on evolution and climate change.