Readers respond to a recent post on genetically-modified organisms:
I have this argument with my liberal friends all the time. The problem as far as I can see is the separating of the issue of crops that grow their own pesticides that cannot be washed off from the process that developed the crop to begin with. GM is a method that should be fully supported while embedding pesticides into my corn should be outlawed.
I find a similar problem with nuclear power. Some people on the left just don’t want to hear that just like audio replication technology, nuclear power plants designed and built today are nothing like the ones designed in the ’50s and built in the ’60s.
Another reader:
I’ve been thinking about GMOs and the fear people have of them, particularly those on the Left. And despite any science saying otherwise, I think the reason they are so feared is because of the messenger. Monsanto doesn’t have a very good record. It created Agent Orange, Saccharin, DDT, and PCB – all of which have been linked to either cancer or other health problems. And we’re supposed to trust them with the most basic parts of our lives – our food? Really?
Another:
I used to share skepticism about supposed GMOphobia – until the details of Monsanto’s 11th hour rider in the recent budget bill came to light.
Most of the criticism I read had relatively little to do with the kind of luddite-hippie nexis that the media likes to portray, and much more to do with any one of three concerns, all broadly labeled under the “GMO” heading: a) the Monsanto’s corporate-political nexis of financial interest that, like the drone issue, seems absolutely immune to even sustained public pressure, b) that a major corporate force in our food supply is using political leverage to make it absolutely impossible to grow crops that aren’t part of their intellectual property – to the point where they’re prosecuting independent farmers while legislatively declaring themselves immune to prosecution, and c) that the specifics of certain modifications might have a real effect on our health, our agricultural product and our environment, effects which, again, Monsanto has summarily declared themselves immune from prosecution for thanks to legislative fiat.
None of these concerns should be dismissed as “phobias” – they’re very real, and deserve at the least a thorough airing and debate – but it is maddening to see the media repeatedly rehash GMO criticism as if critics are blanketly opposed to any genetic modification at all. No, we’ve been engaging in genetic modification of agricultural product since the days of Mendel and well before – Guns, Germs and Steel sums up the practice and its advantage rather nicely.
Another:
I am amazed at the faux-science observations of people like PZ Meyers when it comes to GMO crops. He states that: “All of our crops, everyone’s crops, are heavily modified genetically.” While this is a true statement, in the context of the GMO debate it could not be further from the truth.
The truth is that through natural selection and cross pollination, some varieties of fruits and vegetables have changed over time. This happens naturally and through human intervention. GMOs are so different from this process so as to render Meyers’ statement a lie. GMOs have their DNA manipulated in a laboratory in a variety of ways that could NEVER occur naturally. Through gene splicing and protein engineering, scientists create organisms that sometimes contain the DNA from vastly different lifeforms. One of the favorite tricks is to combine virus and plant DNA to deliver some aspect of the virus through the plant.
While this is all cool science, and great for the bottom line of huge chemical companies, no one knows what the long-term effect of these human-created organisms will be. Chemical companies cannot say they are safe in the long run because they don’t know. And, because they are making huge piles of money, they really don’t care. So they use their piles of money to drown out any objections because it is quicker and cheaper than research.
While I find some of the anti-GMO rhetoric a bit overblown, I cannot imagine that this kind of tampering with the genetic makeup of our food should be cavalierly called a “strange unfounded fear” until we know a lot more about the long-term effects of this tampering.
Update from a reader:
I’m a Ph.D student in genetics and have been following the GMO freak out for some time. It’s very frustrating to me to see so much misinformation repeated over and over again as fact with no supporting evidence. Your last poster in the most recent iteration of the topic really pissed me off.
First they claim that all crops being the result of natural selection makes them less scary. If humans are selecting for specific traits, that’s not natural selection. That’s artificial selection. It’s slow, and imprecise, but over time you can turn maize into corn and wild boars into bacon. Using modern genetic tools, we can do that faster and more importantly, more precisely. As ancient humans selected for certain traits, others were lost. Some of these can be regained using targeted genetic manipulations (the story of how tomatoes lost their taste is a recent example).
The second thing that drove me up the wall was this bit: “One of the favorite tricks is to combine virus and plant DNA to deliver some aspect of the virus through the plant.” Viruses are used as a packaging and delivery system; the actual virus proteins are removed. There are many methods to get genetic material into cells, and viral vectors are only some of the options (link). The virus your poster is concerned about is more than likely actually a soil bacteria first discovered in 1907.
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