The new big stink

[jdurand]

So, if you add fish or other animal DNA into a fruit or veg, can vegans still eat it?  Do they have a case they should be told?

How about forbidden animals into other foods, several religions ban eating various animals.

[jgiffin]

This is one of the few market-limiting principles I abide - "Just tell me what the fuck you're selling. I can decide whether to buy it." If you're gonna sell me an apple that isn't really apple (in the sense it's been known for 20,000 years), well, you gotta let me know. Then it's up to me if I feel like rolling the dice.

[Rev. Gary (revgms)]

If we do as Neil DeGrasse Tyson suggests, break the debate down to its constituents, then we'd can deal with it piece by piece.

For instance the labeling debate. The claim by industry is that we are too stupid to handle labels. They claim that there are too many superstitious people who would irrationally use that information to scare others, a-la anti-vax movement.

Me, I'd argue that that is an acceptable risk given that we as a species are able to move away from irrational fears. Better to let a few tin foil hatters complain than to not give consumers all the facts, as jgiffen stated.

[BikerDude]

Just like, my opinion, dudes.
Always abiding.

I dig Bill's style.
Lot of strands. Lotta in's and out's with these things.
You might think you have a handle on it but when you look more closely it's a lot more ah you know...
Make corn with a "insecticide gene" built in. Bug eats corn. Bug dies. But some bugs get eaten by birds and bats.
Gut bacteria of birds bats effected by new gene. Bird's and Bats shit in the woods like the pope. Gut bacteria enter soil. And about a million other scenarios.
Etc etc etc. Rinse and repeat millions of times. With thousands of new types of shit.
Has it ever occurred to you that this all might not be ah so simple?
I mean given all the new shit?

Remember a lot of this is shit is being brought to us by the people who brought us DDT. Told us that was safe.

[Rev. Gary (revgms)]

While that is essentially true, it is also true that nature does this all by itself, a-la Ebola right now. Mutation is nothing new, and not invented by man.

DNA is not magic and it is not labeled, it is simply a chain of amino acids, there is no "bat gene" per se, it is just some matter in a particular order. It would be like labeling all the origin sources of your DNA, most would be amoeba, reptilian, and fish. Your eyes are from a cave worm, do you call them worm eyes? The arguments that the DNA is from this or that creature, and thus "bad", are fundamentally flawed.

The argument that corporate control of GMOs by entities such as Monsanto are a completely different argument, one that has much more meat to it. And yes, they are hardly the ones I would chose to be providing humanity with this new technology.

Labeling? For it, the fundamental right of the consumer trumps industry concerns.

Profit driven research with little or no ethical foundation? Yeah not cool man!

GMOs are all bad? Blanket generalization, not good for anybody.

Should we be cautious and move with rational intent into the modern era? Yup, that would be reasonable.

To summarize:

GMOs as a concept- fucking awesome Star Trek shit right there man!

Monsanto being in the drivers seat of GMO development and production- Over the fucking line!!! Mark it zero!

There now everybody can both agree and disagree with me all at once.

[jdurand]

You want to see most of the GMO stuff go away...cancel all patents on natural things like plants found in the wild.

Even Ebola is now patented so someone will make a profit off this.

[Hominid]

Well said regms...  Not sure though why you are so pro-GMO; maybe some background would help.  I do understand that developing environmentally hardy strains of crops will help feed the world more efficiently, but I do side with BD that we indeed should proceed with caution.  I think our growth as a species is getting dangerous, in that it's getting harder and harder to remain self-sustaining.  In the end, it's actually more to do with politics and logistics, as we actually have more than enough food for everyone.  So I think the whole GMO thing is a wash; it's a band aid solution for a much bigger problem.

(Letting Monsanto run their own tests is letting the fox guard the hen house.  I don't know how they sleep at night frankly...)

[Hominid]

Oh, and I read that the reason so many people are now becoming celiac is because they keep fucking around with the DNA of wheat, so we've become intolerant of that particular kind of protein.  Grain was only introduced into our diet 10,000 years ago, and it took that long for our species to get used to it...  It's why paleo dieting works so well for so many people.

[BikerDude]

While that is essentially true, it is also true that nature does this all by itself, a-la Ebola right now. Mutation is nothing new, and not invented by man.

DNA is not magic and it is not labeled, it is simply a chain of amino acids, there is no "bat gene" per se, it is just some matter in a particular order. It would be like labeling all the origin sources of your DNA, most would be amoeba, reptilian, and fish. Your eyes are from a cave worm, do you call them worm eyes? The arguments that the DNA is from this or that creature, and thus "bad", are fundamentally flawed.

The argument that corporate control of GMOs by entities such as Monsanto are a completely different argument, one that has much more meat to it. And yes, they are hardly the ones I would chose to be providing humanity with this new technology.

Labeling? For it, the fundamental right of the consumer trumps industry concerns.

Profit driven research with little or no ethical foundation? Yeah not cool man!

GMOs are all bad? Blanket generalization, not good for anybody.

Should we be cautious and move with rational intent into the modern era? Yup, that would be reasonable.

To summarize:

GMOs as a concept- fucking awesome Star Trek shit right there man!

Monsanto being in the drivers seat of GMO development and production- Over the fucking line!!! Mark it zero!

There now everybody can both agree and disagree with me all at once.

Well all that is true. But it is a LOT of matter in particular order. Think of how long it took super computers to map the Human Gnome. And the point is that it started from the simplest and progressed through natural selection to become more and more and more complex. Nature selected out the "Bad" stuff.
By short cutting that and splicing together genes willy nilly we are cruising for a bruising.
The genetic modifications being made are NOT the same as mutation. A mutation is a much much smaller change. By several orders of magnitude. Mutation is a natural occurrence and that is the point. A mutation occurs. It is a very small change and nature acts upon it and it rolls into the organism or not. So things progress over millions of generations at a very very slow and deliberate rate. Small causes and effects being absorbed by the natural environment. Gene splicing is natural mutations at a million times the speed limit.
There simply is no way through natural mutation that one genome can simply manifest genes from a completely other genome. The change is much larger than anything that could happen through natural mutations.

A virus that kills 100% of the hosts that it infects is impossible through natural mutation.
If virus one kills zero hosts. And virus one plus mutations 1-100,000 kills 50% and onward to where virus with mutations 1-1,000,000,000 kills 100% of it's hosts. This defines a scale of success. As the percentage of it's hosts that die increases the success of the virus to reproduce goes down. And the prevalence of the mutations that led to it go down with it. It gets selected out.
But there is NOTHING to prevent engineering a virus on purpose or by accident that kills 100% of it's hosts.
It would have a very short run to it's own extinction where it would rock out with it's cock out. Once you subtract the power of natural selection from the equation it's possible to fuck up big time.