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I work at a company that has a technology that reduces the formation of a cancer causing chemical in certain foods. We built a self-cloned (i.e. it contains no DNA from other organisms, just duplicate DNA from the same organism) GMO that worked great in a few months, but food manufacturers wouldn't even consider using it because it was a GMO (even though it didn't contain any DNA from other organisms). Instead we had to spend the last 3 years bombarding it with mutagens and radiation to get it to undergo the same changes "naturally" through adaptive evolution and selective breeding. This process added millions of dollars to the development cost and took approximately 10 times longer, during which food manufacturers continued to make and sell food containing this carcinogen. Additionally, while the GMO only added one specific gene, many other point mutations in other genes were added during mutagenesis. This is an example of how a GMO could be a cheap and effective solution to a problem, but wasn't because of anti-GMO hysteria, and of how adaptive evolution and selective breeding are expensive, imprecise, and slow ways of attaining the same results, especially compared to new DNA editing technologies such as CRISPR.
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Aug 29, 2015 23:29
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Discendo Vox posted:You gotta tell me what this carcinogen is and what category of foods it's in. Acrylamide, so technically it's an IARC Group 2A carcinogen (probable human carcinogen). It's in foods you probably shouldn't be eating anyways such as fried potatoes, but also bread and coffee. Edit: Basically you want to stay away from any carbohydrates cooked at over 120°C (250°F). Boiled food is fine because it's cooked at 100°C, while fried food (donuts, potato chips, french fries, etc.) is super bad. Coffee is bad because of the roasting process. A light roast is probably better for you. McGavin fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Aug 30, 2015 |
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Aug 30, 2015 00:17
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Absurd Alhazred posted:The risks aren't because the genes are spliced. They are because of a very mundane cause: evolution of immunity among the pests. This is relevant regardless of whether the Bt is provided through genetics or being sprayed on. This is correct. Bt resistance is caused because the only insects that survive to breed are the ones with some innate immunity to Bt, which they then pass on to their offspring. The regulations mandating areas of non-Bt crops being planted alongside Bt crops are so that insects without Bt resistance can survive and dilute the gene pool enough with their lack of Bt resistance so the technology doesn't become useless in a few generations.
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Aug 30, 2015 00:34
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Fly posted:For example, a risk from the new technology is that we have to control the modified organism's life cycle and progeny... We don't want such a crop gene to become successful such that it is expressed outside the confines of specific fields of crops during specific seasons. We have the ability to do this with terminator technology, but that's one of the GMO technologies that people have a specifically intense negative reaction towards. People don't like the idea of taking away a farmer's ability to save seeds, despite the fact that hardly any industrial farmers save seeds in the first place since many recent crop varieties are hybrids that rely on heterosis (hybrid vigour) to increase yields and their direct progeny would have terrible yields compared to the parents.
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Aug 30, 2015 00:51
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Fly posted:I am making a sad face. I am a bit reluctant to say because the fact that we have a GMO product (even though it is not being used in any way) could hurt the adoption of our non-GMO product simply by association. We have a separate unrelated technology that was created 100% through selective breeding and we still have difficulty convincing people, who honestly should know better, that it's non-GMO. Fly posted:It seems like terminator genes, if they were to become "successful" at escaping would also be a huge problem, though it also seems like they would be self-limiting. I'm not sure if that's a cop-out like the ending of The Andromeda Strain or not. Is there a way to ensure that a gene is recessive? The whole thing about terminator technology is that it makes it impossible to produce offspring, so even if it did somehow manage to escape (ignoring the statistical unlikeliness of this happening in the first place) anything carrying it would only last for one generation.
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Aug 30, 2015 01:16
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FRINGE posted:Apparently this is new? Another Seralini study using Sprague-Dawley rats published in a journal whose policy on peer review is basically "We trust that you aren't lying, so we won't bother to check your results.*" Nope, this definitely doesn't raise any red flags. Nobel prizes all around!  *The actual quote from the editor: "When we read a paper we invest its author with an extraordinary amount of confidence: that the citations say what the author alleges they say (although we can check this, few people check every reference; we take it on trust); that the methods were conducted as described; that the results accurately reflected what was actually found, etc."
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Aug 30, 2015 05:56
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The graph actually shows that 1996/1997 is a bumper crop of Monarchs, roughly 3 times the numbers in 1994/1995. Edit: Reading the actual paper, the population decrease is probably being exacerbated less by the fact that glyphosate tolerant crops exist and more by the fact that there has been a large increase in the area in which glyphosate tolerant crops are grown due to increased demand for their use in biofuel production combined with massive habitat loss due to development. Whether it's caused by herbicides or development, habitat loss is habitat loss, and doesn't really have anything to do with the safety of GMOs. McGavin fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Sep 2, 2015 |
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Sep 2, 2015 22:34
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Anosmoman posted:And again, GMO can mean suppressing one single gene - trivial changes - which happens all the time naturally, from one generation to the next. His argument relates to changing "too much" at the time which begs the question: What is the acceptable amount of change? Considering that entire genome duplication events can and frequently do occur naturally, the acceptable amount of change must be "all of it".
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Oct 14, 2015 18:24
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Had a job interview for a regulatory affairs position at one of the big six yesterday. Possibly joining the dark side. 
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Dec 18, 2015 19:14
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Anosmoman posted:Probably the big 6 pesticide and GMO companies, of which Monsanto is one. Yeah, I'd be one of the people organizing the submissions to get new pesticides and GMOs approved by regulators. I hear that the complimentary orphan blood is just barely enough to prevent the stain on your soul.
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Dec 19, 2015 11:16
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Discendo Vox posted:Genuine advice- be guarded about sharing information about your job on social media. Ecoterrorists are out there, and they still do occasionally do things like carbombs. Yeah, I'll worry about that more when I actually have the job, not when I am applicant #13,956. Besides, there has only been one case of environmental terrorism ever in my country, and even then there are much better targets than yours truly, considering I don't drive because it's bad for the environment  .
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Dec 20, 2015 09:48
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Please keep your dick pics out of this thread.
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Dec 22, 2015 20:10
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Bonus hilarious news coverage: New Study: Splenda causes cancer; a safer sweetener comes from anal glands of beavers To be fair, lots of things come from the anal glands of beavers.
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Mar 12, 2016 05:40
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It's nice to be on the other side of the fearmongering for a change. Also, if you look at the other GMO labelling stories under "related news", it looks like Vermont's law is forcing companies to adopt GMO labeling nationwide.
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Apr 18, 2016 17:45
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GlyphGryph posted:Has there any attempt at pro-GMO branding? The closest I can think of right now are all the "synthetic biology" companies that are popping up like Ginkgo Bioworks and Zymergen.
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Sep 9, 2016 22:51
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The Devil Monsanto, or Arguing over the Definition of a Monopoly
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Sep 20, 2016 22:48
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