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GMO... "unintended modifications"... present in every GMO and the unintended modifications are one of the biggest WILD CARDs. They are not tested for unintended modifications in the engineering lab. Those specimens that survive the gene injection process are only tested for the intended target result but contain many unintended modifications also. Those showing the most VISUALLY healthy attributes and having the highest target attribute modification are then selected for commercialization. The unintended modification are not scrutinized nor are most of them understood. So a simple short 90 day scientific test is preformed to loosely check for short term toxicity of which the undesired results are typically glossed over and ignored then off to the market it goes for you, the test subject and consumer to ingest. Now maybe you like to play Russian roulette with unknown genetic material introduced into your system but I'll take a pass on that one.
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Genetic modification involves changing specific genes. It is done carefully for a particular purpose and the changes
are tested. It's a not an open slather mass change of random genes. Maybe you're thinking of cosmic rays, which cause mutations in everything you eat. You're playing "Russian roulette" every day without knowing it.
I picked one section from your 138-page GMO Myths and Truths bible and found it to be worthless. I'll pass on reading the rest of it. One or two scientists with a few cherry-picked results doesn't quite weigh up against the overwhelming majority of scientists and decades of research.
If you don't want to eat GM foods, that's fine. Don't.
Still waiting for the list of victims of GMO. What, you can't even find one name? How can this be...
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The FDA does not approve GMO products and has dissolved itself of all responsibility. The approvals are left solely to the company that create the GMO and they alone are responsible for any damages they may cause to the environment, livestock and humans etc.
Imagine if we handled pharmaceuticals in this manner, yet pharmaceutical damages are limited and eventually breakdown whereas unknown gene codes are unleashed into the environment forever altering continued life as we knew it previously. What part of that sounds like anything normal to the environment in which we previously based our laws and ideologies upon? What part of a living GMO has any sort of commercial right to be unleashed upon the planet and into the human genome? What part of a biological hazard deserves legal defense or any special privileged pass? What part of this biological hazard rises to the level of being allowed entry into the worlds food supply without buyer warning? What type of monster would allow such a crime to be perpetrated upon humanity and what sort of individual would defend such irresponsible GMO practices?
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quote:
Originally posted by PaulW
Genetic modification involves changing specific genes. It is done carefully for a particular purpose and the changes
are tested. It's a not an open slather mass change of random genes. Maybe you're thinking of cosmic rays, which cause mutations in everything you eat. You're playing "Russian roulette" every day without knowing it.
I picked one section from your 138-page GMO Myths and Truths bible and found it to be worthless. I'll pass on reading the rest of it. One or two scientists with a few cherry-picked results doesn't quite weigh up against the overwhelming majority of scientists and decades of research.
If you don't want to eat GM foods, that's fine. Don't.
Still waiting for the list of victims of GMO. What, you can't even find one name? How can this be...
Pure BS. Describe the exact process of this claimed precise changing of specific genes.
Obviously you read little to nothing in the file as is clearly evident by your absolutely contradictory statements.
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GM proponents claim that GM is a precise technique that allows genes coding for the desired trait to be inserted into the host plant with no unexpected effects.
The first step in genetically engineering plants, the process of cutting and splicing genes in the test tube, is precise, but subsequent steps are not. In particular, the process of inserting a genetically modified gene into the DNA of a plant cell is crude, uncontrolled, and imprecise, and causes mutations – heritable changes – in the plant’s DNA blueprint.1 These mutations can alter the functioning of the natural genes of the plant in unpredictable and potentially harmful ways.2,3 Other procedures associated with producing GM crops, including tissue culture, also produce mutations.1
In addition to the unintended effects of mutations, there is another way in which the GM process generates unintended effects. Promoters of GM crops paint a picture of GM technology that is based on a naïve and outdated understanding of how genes work. They propagate the simplistic idea that they can insert a single gene with laser-like precision and insertion of that gene will have a single, predictable effect on the organism and its environment.
But manipulating one or two genes does not just produce one or two desired traits. Instead, just a single change at the level of the DNA can give rise to multiple changes within the organism.2,4 These changes are known as pleiotropic effects. They occur because genes do not act as isolated units but interact with one another, and the functions and structures that the engineered genes confer on the organism interact with other functional units of the organism.
Because of these diverse interactions, and because even the simplest organism is extremely complex, it is impossible to predict the impacts of even a single GM gene on the organism. It is even more impossible to predict the impact of the GMO on its environment – the complexity of living systems is too great.
In short, unintended, uncontrolled mutations occur during the GM process and complex interactions occur at multiple levels within the organism as a result of the insertion of even a single new gene. For these reasons, a seemingly simple genetic modification can give rise to many unexpected changes in the resulting crop and the foods produced from it. The unintended changes could include alterations in the nutritional content of the food, toxic and allergenic effects, poor crop performance, and generation of characteristics that harm the environment.
These unexpected changes are especially dangerous because they are irreversible. Even the worst chemical pollution diminishes over time as the pollutant is degraded by physical and biological mechanisms. But GMOs are living organisms. Once released into the ecosystem, they do not degrade and cannot be recalled, but multiply in the environment and pass on their GM genes to future generations. Each new generation creates more opportunities to interact with other organisms and the environment, generating even more unintended and unpredictable side-effects.
How can these unintended, unexpected and potentially complex effects of genetic engineering be predicted and controlled? Promoters of GM crops paint a simplistic picture of what is needed for assessing the health and environmental safety of a GMO. But the diversity and complexity of the effects, as well as their unpredictable nature, create a situation where even a detailed safety assessment could miss important harmful effects.
Edit to add:
1. Latham JR, Wilson AK, Steinbrecher RA. The mutational consequences of plant transformation. J Biomed Biotechnol. 2006; 2006(2): 25376.
2. Wilson AK, Latham JR, Steinbrecher RA. Transformation-induced mutations in transgenic plants: Analysis and biosafety implications. Biotechnol Genet Eng Rev. 2006; 23: 209–238.
3. Schubert D. A different perspective on GM food. Nat Biotechnol. Oct 2002; 20(10): 969.
4. Pusztai A, Bardocz S, Ewen SWB. Genetically modified foods: Potential human health effects. In: D’Mello JPF, ed. Food Safety: Contaminants and Toxins. Wallingford, Oxon: CABI Publishing 2003:347–372.
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“Mutations happen all the time in nature”
GM proponents say, “Mutations happen all the time in nature as a result of various natural exposures, for example, to ultraviolet light, so mutations caused by genetic engineering of plants are not a problem.”
In fact, mutations occur infrequently in nature.9 And comparing natural mutations with those that occur during the GM transformation process is like comparing apples and oranges. Every plant species has encountered natural mutagens, including certain types and levels of ionizing radiation and chemicals, throughout its natural history and has evolved mechanisms for preventing, repairing, and minimising the impacts of mutations caused by such agents. But plants have not evolved mechanisms to repair or compensate for the insertional mutations that occur during genetic modification. Also, the high frequency of mutations caused by tissue culture during the GM process is likely to overwhelm the repair mechanisms of crop plants.
Natural recombination events that move large stretches of DNA around a plant’s genome do occur. But these involve DNA sequences that are already part of the plant’s own genome, not DNA that is foreign to the species.
9. Jain SM. Mutagenesis in crop improvement under the climate change. Romanian Biotechnological Letters. 2010; 15(2): 88–106.
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“We will select out harmful mutations”
GM proponents say that even if harmful mutations occur, that is not a problem. They say that during the genetic engineering process, the GM plants undergo many levels of screening and selection, and the genetic engineers will catch any plants that have harmful mutations and eliminate them during this process.
As explained above, the process of gene insertion during the process of genetic modification selects for engineered GM gene insertion into active gene regions of the host (recipient) plant cell. This means that the process has a high inherent potential to disrupt the function of active genes present in the plant’s DNA.
In many cases, the disruption will be fatal – the engineered cell will die and will not grow into a GM plant. In other cases, the plant will compensate for the lost function in some way, or the insertion will occur at a location that seems to cause minimal disruption of the plant cell’s functioning. This is what is desired. But just because a plant grows vigorously does not mean that it is safe to eat and safe for the environment. It could have a mutation that causes it to produce substances that harm consumers or to damage the ecosystem.
Genetic engineers do not carry out detailed screening that would catch all potentially harmful plants. They introduce the GM gene(s) into hundreds or thousands of plant cells and grow them out into individual GM plants. If the gene insertion process has damaged the function of one or more plant cell genes that are essential for survival, the cell will not survive this process. So plants carrying such “lethal” mutations will be eliminated. But the genetic engineer is often left with several thousand individual GM plants, each of them different, because:
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The engineered genes have been inserted in different locations within the DNA of each plant
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Other mutations or disturbances in host gene function have occurred at other locations in the plants through the mechanisms described above (1.3.4).
How do genetic engineers sort through the GM plants to identify the one or two that they are going to commercialise? The main thing that they do is to verify that the trait that the engineered transgene is supposed to confer has been expressed in the plant. That is, they do a test that allows them to find the few plants among the many thousands that express the desired trait. Of those, they pick one that looks healthy, strong, and capable of being bred on and propagated.
That is all they do. Such screening cannot detect plants that have undergone mutations that cause them to produce substances that are harmful to consumers or lacking in important nutrients.
It is unrealistic for GM proponents to claim that they can detect all hazards based on differences in the crop’s appearance, vigour, or yield. Some mutations will give rise to changes that the breeder will see in the greenhouse or field, but others give rise to changes that are not visible because they occur at a subtle biochemical level or only under certain circumstances. So only a small proportion of potentially harmful mutations will be eliminated by the breeder’s superficial inspection. Their scrutiny cannot ensure that the plant is safe to eat.
Some agronomic and environmental risks will be missed, as well. For instance, during the GM transformation process, a mutation may destroy a gene that makes the plant resistant to a certain pathogen or an environmental stress like extreme heat or drought. But that mutation will be revealed only if the plant is intentionally exposed to that pathogen or stress in a systematic way. Developers of GM crops are not capable of screening for resistance to every potential pathogen or environmental stress. So such mutations can sit like silent time bombs within the GM plant, ready to “explode” at any time when there is an outbreak of the relevant pathogen or an exposure to the relevant environmental stress.
An example of this kind of limitation was an early – but widely planted – variety of Roundup Ready® soy. It turned out that this variety was much more sensitive than non-GM soy varieties to heat stress and more prone to infection.26
26. Coghlan A. Monsanto’s Roundup-Ready soy beans cracking up. New Scientist 20 November 1999.
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" One or two scientists with a few cherry-picked results doesn't quite weigh up against the overwhelming majority of scientists and decades of research."
A very grandiose statement PaulW... perhaps you'd care to share with us this "overwhelming majority of scientists and decades of research"... fact is, it doesn't exist nor do the claimed decades of research that back your fallacy world. It's very much the opposite. Had you taken the time to read through the document you may have been better educated on the matter and been routed to reliable sources while gaining a real understanding regarding the politics, court cases etc. But you don't seem to pay much attention to facts and seem more concerned about covering your ignorance on the matter.
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Why don't you just cut and paste the whole 138 pages here and get it over and done with?
If you read it carefully you'll see that it's all generalizations with very little to back it up.
But thanks to you I now know what a Gish Gallop is.
Still waiting for the name of even one person killed by GM food...
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http://www.who.int/foodsafety/publicatio...stions/en/
Q8. Are GM foods safe?
Different GM organisms include different genes inserted in different ways. This means that individual GM foods and their safety should be assessed on a case-by-case basis and that it is not possible to make general statements on the safety of all GM foods.
GM foods currently available on the international market have passed risk assessments and are not likely to present risks for human health. In addition, no effects on human health have been shown as a result of the consumption of such foods by the general population in the countries where they have been approved. Continuous use of risk assessments based on the Codex principles and, where appropriate, including post market monitoring, should form the basis for evaluating the safety of GM foods.
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