What's your vote on genetically modified organisms?

Rens

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I would think: hey that's handy! But I'm afraid you only get worse problems and diseases from it. If not I'm for it.
What does it matter if you slam mosquitos dead to a wall or genetically modify them? At least they're useful this way.
 

psalms 91

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Am not in favor of GMO's
 

MoreCoffee

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I would think: hey that's handy! But I'm afraid you only get worse problems and diseases from it. If not I'm for it.
What does it matter if you slam mosquitos dead to a wall or genetically modify them? At least they're useful this way.

If the mosquitoes managed to end malaria without introducing some new and nasty disease it would be great! I think ...
 

psalms 91

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MoreCoffee

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Nope glad my country has made manufacturers identify GMO food, I really dont want that

In Oz we mostly do not have GMOs ... some are grown, canola for example ...
 

MarkFL

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I have no issue with GMOs...we have been doing that through selective breeding for thousands of years.
 

Stravinsk

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Like GMO?

Like cancerous tumors ?
Rat-Tumor-Monsanto-GMO-Cancer-Study-3-Wide.jpg


Article: http://www.gmo.news/2016-04-19-not-...rn-grow-horrifying-tumors-die-very-early.html



Like terminator seed technology?

bag-seeds-t.gif

monsanto.gif


Today's GMO is not synonymous with selective breeding. Selective breeding can be done within kinds of animals, and kinds of plants. Today's GMO has gone way beyond that.
 

tango

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I have no issue with GMOs...we have been doing that through selective breeding for thousands of years.

It's not really the same.

Selective breeding might take two parents of the same species and choose individuals with desirable characteristics in an attempt to propagate the genes that provide those characteristics. Someone breeding dogs might choose a particularly strong male and a female with a particularly nice coat in the hope of producing more strong offspring with a nice coat. But that's a far cry from taking a gene from a strawberry and putting it into corn - that's a line that nature would never cross. A dog would breed with another dog, a flower would be fertilised by pollen from another flower of a close enough species, but crossing species wouldn't happen without intervention.

My concern with genetic modification is the scope to unleash all sorts of destruction without realising it until it's too late to roll back the experiment. To take just one example, if a gene from a peanut is put into something else do people with peanut allergies suddenly find they can't eat dairy products because the peanut genes were put into grass to make it grow faster, the cows ate the peanut-enhanced grass and whatever triggers the peanut allergy ended up in the cows' milk?

Another concern I have, although this isn't a reason to stop genetic engineering in its entirety, is the potential for technologies like the so-called terminator gene to devastate farming globally. It has been the norm to preserve seeds from one crop to plant the next crop but the so-called terminator gene would mean crops would produce infertile seeds. Quite aside from being concerned that a single company could effectively control the global food supply the consequences of a genetic structure like that "escaping" into the wild are terrifying.
 

Ackbach

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My current objection to GMO's has to do with the incredibly bad and overly politicized science surrounding the whole issue.

Definitions: Establishment medicine consists of mainstream medical thought. Examples: regular hospitals, vaccines, US government medical agencies such as the CDC and the FDA, Monsanto, GMO food, etc.

Alternative medicine consists of the natural, organic, non-mainstream medical thought. Examples: doctors who refuse medical insurance and post up-front prices on their websites, everything-organic-is-better folks, Dr. Mercola, Monsanto-is-public-enemy-number-one folks, anti-vaccine, anti-GMO folks, etc.

My problem is this: these two medical camps are so highly politicized, and regularly employ such bad science (and the media is about the worst offender of all, regularly blowing even careful scientific discoveries all out of proportion) that I've come to a rather singular conclusion: we know almost nothing about anything medical.

Case Study #1: Dr. Mercola. I'm not going to link to his atrocious webpage; if you're feeling particularly inclined to inundate yourself with self-referential fallacies, go ahead. On his website, you can be 99.9% sure that anytime Dr. Mercola references another paper, that paper is written by... Dr. Mercola. This is not good science, because you are shutting yourself off from all discoveries made by other scientists. This is kind of basic, but it seems to have escaped Dr. Mercola.

Case Study #2: The Monsanto GMO corn rat study. For context, the alternative side believes that GMO corn causes infertility, at least in rats. So, when Monsanto did their 90-day study, they should have done one long enough to convince their detractors. The rat life cycle is significantly longer than 90 days (barely time for rats to reach sexual maturity), hence the Monsanto study certainly didn't investigate multiple generations. In addition, the Monsanto study had too few rats taking the GMO corn: 20 male and 20 female rats taking the GMO corn, and the rest of the 400 rats in control groups. This is incorrect experimental design, because there aren't enough rats taking the GMO corn to be statistically significant.

Conclusions:

1. Do not trust the media at all on anything medical. You can pretty much guarantee that they're wrong about every single pronouncement they make on medical matters.
2. If you want to learn about things medical, and get as straight a story as you can, follow this procedure:
  • Take a course, or refresh your knowledge of statistics.
  • Avoid Google, and go to Google Scholar. Search for scholarly articles on your subject of interest.
  • Once you find articles that aren't behind a paywall (or if you are in academia, and paywalls aren't a problem), find the money trail. Scholars these days have a bad habit of not always revealing their funding sources. All scientists are biased, so the only honest thing to do is come out and say what your bias is. Good scientists do this as a matter of course.
  • Evaluate the studies you find on the basis of the quality of the statistics employed, and the biases revealed in the previous step.



That's the best you can do.
 

tango

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A major issue is the way the media sensationalizes everything so that even if the figures they quote are true the impression is misleading.

When we hear things like "eating bacon results in an 80% increase in the chance of getting liver cancer" our natural instinct is to stop eating bacon. But if the study in question effectively proved that if we eat 10 rashers of bacon every day our chances of contracting liver cancer increases from 0.000010% to 0.000018% the difference is vanishingly small, so small in fact that it makes no practical difference. But "80% increase in cancer risk" makes for a better headline, it encourages people to buy the paper to read the article, so it's easy to see why the media does it.

Then there's the concept of what it means to announce something as "safe". I think part of the whole issue with vaccination is that the vast majority of vaccine recipients experience no ill effects but a small minority do. That doesn't automatically mean the vaccine is unsafe - virtually every medicine has listed side effects - just that it does have adverse effects on a small percentage of the population. It seems to me that one side insists "vaccines aren't safe" and the other side insists they are 100% safe and both sides are being economical with the truth. It's much the same as arguing over whether peanuts are safe - for the vast majority of people peanuts are perfectly safe to eat but for a small minority they would cause anaphylactic shock leading to death. But once again sensationalist reporting sells media, so that's what they run with.

I think a large part of the problem is that each successive generation appears, on average, less and less able to consider the facts, weigh different observations, and draw a conclusion for themselves. I suspect part of this is down to the hugely increasing amount of conflicting information out there and part of it is the sense that people fuss over what makes a difference right here and right now (it can be observed in the way someone will spend hours researching which DVD player to buy but when dealing with something like a mortgage they shrug, announce they don't understand all that financial stuff, and take whatever the salesman offers them) and abdicate responsibility over increasing parts of their lives to people they see as experts. So when it comes down to an issue of whether something is safe or not, there is no such thing as "perfectly safe" but people increasingly expect to be told "it's safe" or "it's not safe", and hence battle lines get drawn over black and white when really most thinks are somewhere on a grayscale.
 

Ackbach

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Here's a more recent example of the kind of slipshod thinking rampant in this field. The Institute for Responsible Technology has a post on a paper that came out recently. Incidentally, Sèralini is one of the authors, and he has had a paper retracted recently. In any case, the IRT links to the paper, and says the "paper shows that consuming genetically modified (GM) corn or soybeans leads to significant organ disruptions in rats and mice, particularly in livers and kidneys." Hmm. Ok. Now you go to the paper. What do you find in the conclusion section of the abstract? This: "The 90-day-long tests are insufficient to evaluate chronic toxicity, and the signs highlighted in the kidneys and livers could be the onset of chronic diseases." That's not what the IRT guy says he said! The IRT has greatly magnified the claim actually made in the paper. This is the kind of thing that goes on all the time in this field. It drives up the wall. This is why, in total agreement with [unm]tango[/unm] here, you simply need to ignore the media, and go to the scholarly papers yourself if you want to understand anything.
 

tango

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Here's a more recent example of the kind of slipshod thinking rampant in this field. The Institute for Responsible Technology has a post on a paper that came out recently. Incidentally, Sèralini is one of the authors, and he has had a paper retracted recently. In any case, the IRT links to the paper, and says the "paper shows that consuming genetically modified (GM) corn or soybeans leads to significant organ disruptions in rats and mice, particularly in livers and kidneys." Hmm. Ok. Now you go to the paper. What do you find in the conclusion section of the abstract? This: "The 90-day-long tests are insufficient to evaluate chronic toxicity, and the signs highlighted in the kidneys and livers could be the onset of chronic diseases." That's not what the IRT guy says he said! The IRT has greatly magnified the claim actually made in the paper. This is the kind of thing that goes on all the time in this field. It drives up the wall. This is why, in total agreement with [unm]tango[/unm] here, you simply need to ignore the media, and go to the scholarly papers yourself if you want to understand anything.

... and of course the average person in the street isn't sufficiently versed in concepts like statistical analysis to know whether the results quoted can actually support the conclusions drawn, whether an alternative conclusion has comparable validity etc. Even that assumes the average person has enough time to find the papers, read the papers, consider other papers that may have drawn a different conclusion and so on.

Hence we see more and more people just endlessly deferring to "the experts", as if that was the beginning and the ending of the discussion. It does get tedious when people speak as if something is settled based on nothing more than an appeal to their chosen scientists. The whole climate change issue is rife with this - even if it is true that 97% of scientists agree on something that doesn't mean it's automatically true. Back in the day Galileo was the only one who believed in the ridiculous notion that the earth revolved around the sun.
 

Stravinsk

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(snip)
Conclusions:

1. Do not trust the media at all on anything medical. You can pretty much guarantee that they're wrong about every single pronouncement they make on medical matters.
2. If you want to learn about things medical, and get as straight a story as you can, follow this procedure:
  • Take a course, or refresh your knowledge of statistics.
  • Avoid Google, and go to Google Scholar. Search for scholarly articles on your subject of interest.
  • Once you find articles that aren't behind a paywall (or if you are in academia, and paywalls aren't a problem), find the money trail. Scholars these days have a bad habit of not always revealing their funding sources. All scientists are biased, so the only honest thing to do is come out and say what your bias is. Good scientists do this as a matter of course.
  • Evaluate the studies you find on the basis of the quality of the statistics employed, and the biases revealed in the previous step.




That's the best you can do.

pubmed
National Center for Biotechnology Information ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Regarding paywalls, I assume that the studies done on fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and legumes - by default, *aren't*. That is, unless it's some exotic fruit grown only in X tropical region that some company is extracting a compound from, or similarly any combination of *extracts* that some company is marketing. Otherwise - there is no monopoly or "cornering of the market" to be gained from things everyone can buy or grow - and with the proviso that the person or persons who have made the discovery have actually attached their real names to it, contact details for themselves, the method(s) used and how the conclusions are come to, along with any degrees they have and in what fields, I generally find these types of studies more trustworthy. In short - there is more accountability - openness, professional backing and a lot less of the marketing hype that can go with money driven studies.

For those who need a biblical reason: Simply read the story of Daniel and his time in Babylon. All Daniel's men got healthy eating pulse over the "king's meats".
 
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