Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

No

9 (37.5%)

Yes

15 (62.5%)

Total Members Voted: 23

[Strife26]

Yeah, re:agriculture, I'm way more excited by agroecology and agroforestry than by gene technology, at least for the major crop. We already went so far to improve germplasm, we're hitting diminishing return on investment.

What did Greenpeace do to the Nazca lines?

Edit: mainiac, the Green Revolution was accomplished using conventionally bred varieties, not GM crops. GM crops only started popping up in the 90's.

Screwed them up as part of a half assed protest
   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Greenpeace#Damage_to_Nazca_Lines
Edited for linky

[mainiac]

Edit: mainiac, the Green Revolution was accomplished using conventionally bred varieties, not GM crops. GM crops only started popping up in the 90's.

Pfft like there's a difference.  We play god one way, we play god the other day.  At the end of the day it's playing god.

[Loud Whispers]

Ideally most GM crops would be researched as a public investment by governments and then made freely available rather than made by corporations and copyrighted, but the budget for public/academic funding is pretty abysmal and usually goes into more immediate interests. As is it we just need to maintain proper regulations of GM crops and try to sort out issues of copyright infringement that come from GM crops crossbreeding with non-GM crops in their vicinity, that's still an odd situation legally as I recall.

Honestly that sounds like a great idea. Make it all public domain and allow it to be vigorously peer reviewed.

In general though GM is something to welcome, though I am biased in it's favour somewhat seeing as it's the direction much of my education has been dedicated to.

ermagerd monsanto owns the schools

Last time I checked the information on that was indicating that it doesn't hurt bees, but it was being introduced around the same time as a few other things that caused problems for some insects, especially bees, that muddied the waters so to speak. I think the pollen is toxic to some butterflies though, the American monarch butterfly certainly, but they only get exposed to wind blown pollen from most crop plants rather than direct exposure, so it can be manageable.

Hmph. Well, on the bright side they could just phase out usage of Bt toxins and still use genetic engineering to increase crop yields. I'm interested to see if whether the GM crop causes death in these pollinators, or whether the farm itself is what caused their deaths. For example some English farms precipitated the death of local bumblebees when the local countryside was cleared for farm use, but when rows of wild flowers were planted bumblebee populations began to return to normal levels. It would be interesting to see if this is also the case where GM crops are used.

Most of the studies done on the subject are based on American fauna, so it's not clear how they'd affect European insects. 

True as well.

What did Greenpeace do to the Nazca lines?

In a botched stunt they permanently damaged the only [formerly] unblemished and perfect lines.

LW, if you like stupid regulation, you will love the ones about genetic engineering. Randomly mutating a gene through PCR will make your organism GM and will cause you endless regulatory pain, but mutating that gene by frying it with UV is fine. There is a whole industry of biologist trying to find ways around the regulations to have their creating declared not GM. The biggest group in my lab work on ways to get yoghurt bacteria to incorporate DNA from their environment into their own chromosomes, so you don't need to GM them, you just "let that interesting piece of DNA lay about" and let nature do its work.

How strange. The combination of science and lawyerese has been... Incredibly productive. The future of science could be artificially imposed problems and restrictions for scientists to overcome and find new solutions. In short? Aperture science.

[Grim Portent]

In the case of Bt toxin killing Monarch Butterflies, the plant pollen contained traces of the toxin and was being blown onto Milkweed plants downwind, which serves as the primary food source of Monarchs, which resulted in some of their population being exposed to high amounts of Bt toxin. Unfortunately for them they're one of the organisms it can effect. 

There's probably ways around that problem, and it's not much different than the situation with normal pesticides, but still something that needs to be remembered when dealing with GM. The secondary effects can be unexpected, mostly since exposure can occur in a much larger area than you'd expect.

[SirQuiamus]

Monarch butterflies destroy fortresses, please exterminate.

Your post has also given me an idea about modifying the wasteful feeding habits of useless European monarchs like Kalle XVI or Queen Lizard II: Let them eat milkweed, I say!

[mainiac]

Is that a venture brothers or dwarf fortress joke?

[Loud Whispers]

And no need for total deregulation either
It's like what the Buddha said, always travel the middle way when changing DNA.

[mainiac]

That was Confucius, you decadent westerner.

[Reelya]

The Greenpeace effect on the Nazca lines was very llmited compared to corporations damaging the same thing:

http://www.peruthisweek.com/news-3743-peru-heavy-machinery-destroys-nazca-lines/

Greenpeace walked up and laid out a banner in a section between the lines (i.e they disrupted topsoil) whereas this company, a year earlier, destroyed entire sections of lines themselves. And the people in charge of preserving the site tried to talk down the implications of the damage. Man, if shifting some topsoil around is "irreparable" damage then what is outright destroying parts of the monument itself? Actually news reports about the corporate damage tried to make the point that the bit destroyed by the mining company wasn't a very important part, actually, so don't worry your little head about it.

Mario Olaechea Aguije, Nazca’s regional head of culture, said the limestone quarry was located within private property, and that the owner was free to work the land.

However, according to the daily, the private property is located within an area that was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, 18 years ago.

So the same people freaking out about Greenpeace are saying they don't give a shit if parts of the lines are destroyed for profit. So you have real damage downplayed and the story buried, because it's for-profit, and minor / temporary damage hyped to the max, because it wasn't for profit.

[martinuzz]

Where does everyone here stand on GM crops?

As long as we have no way to ensure that altered genes cannot escape into the wild, GM crops should only be grown under strictly quarantained, indoors closed-system conditions.

It might sound great, making crops that grow faster on poorer soil, or crops that are highly resisitant to natural pests, but when such a trait manages to cross-over to an unwanted wild plant, we could be facing superweeds that overgrow our crop fields, that we can't get rid of.

BURN DOWN THOSE MONSANTO FIELDS, AND KEEP DOING IT (at least that's what my genetics and ecology professors at biology university kept saying)

Also, NO to TTIP. Keep those GM crops out of Europe. Go full Australian ecology protection border control on them.

[Arx]

The issue with recalling screwups is that it's a lot harder to recall a living, reproducing lab experiment. As far as I understand (I've been wrong about this stuff before), the other issue is that we actually genuinely don't know all the side effects of some of the modifications. If that's the case, it's more akin to selling a line of cars with experimental brakes that haven't been tested properly. Sure you can recall them, but only after you cause damage.

[scrdest]

Where does everyone here stand on GM crops?

As long as we have no way to ensure that altered genes cannot escape into the wild, GM crops should only be grown under strictly quarantained, indoors closed-system conditions.

It might sound great, making crops that grow faster on poorer soil, or crops that are highly resisitant to natural pests, but when such a trait manages to cross-over to an unwanted wild plant, we could be facing superweeds that overgrow our crop fields, that we can't get rid of.

BURN DOWN THOSE MONSANTO FIELDS, AND KEEP DOING IT (at least that's what my genetics and ecology professors at biology university kept saying)

Also, NO to TTIP. Keep those GM crops out of Europe. Go full Australian ecology protection border control on them.

Well, it's a damn shame people Monsanto was demonized for trying to introduce Terminator crops now, eh?

[Sergarr]

if you sell super-good crops that can reproduce in the wild, you're evil because what if they cause superweeds to appear

if you sell super-good crops that can't reproduce in the wild, you're evil because you force the poor farmers to buy new seeds every year

if you don't sell super-good crops at all you're evil because millions of hungry africans


you can't do anything good to people without them calling you out as evil in this modern society

[Grim Portent]

Terminator crops?

All I can think of is Arnold Schwarzenegger with a cob of corn instead of his face now.

There was work on both Terminator and Traitor genes. I forget which was which, but one was meant to make the plants infertile without special treatments, the other was intended to make them die if exposed to a specific chemical. I think anyway, it's been a while since I looked into that stuff, so my knowledge is sketchy.

[scriver]

"We have to be careful about this and consider the consequences" is a bit different than "durr evulz".