Print

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

[kuro_suna]

Now, suppose this company is allowed to patent this particular genetic combination much as DuPont can patent a molecular combination or Ford can patent a mechanical combination. What incentive do they have to release them into the wild? None. If they release their fish into the wild they can't exactly sue fishermen for catching them.

Monsanto can sue people using wild seeds with their patented DNA in them.

[Sergius]

Now, suppose this company is allowed to patent this particular genetic combination much as DuPont can patent a molecular combination or Ford can patent a mechanical combination. What incentive do they have to release them into the wild? None. If they release their fish into the wild they can't exactly sue fishermen for catching them.

Monsanto can sue people using wild seeds with their patented DNA in them.

Even when they're propagated on their own via natural means.

Ain't that great?

[Auto Slaughter]

I haven't said that it will definitely produce prions, but Eagleton is asserting that there is "no danger of creating prions" without anything at all to back that up.  This seems like no more than blind faith to me.

If the only difference between a prion and the protein it affects is the way the prion is folded then you might not even need to have a transcription error, I would think that a difference in the machinery that assembles proteins might result in a different folding.  And the machinery that assembles the proteins is different between animal A and animal B, I think.

Wrong. Here is an overview of the process, in video form, from BBC. Every living creature that uses DNA uses this machinery to create proteins, from bacteria to plants to human beings. Eukaryotes have different ribosomes from bacteria, etc, but they do not differ within the domains as far as I'm aware. It's methodical, predictable, and only fails in extreme circumstances, usually with catastrophic results to the host organism.

This is another one I have difficulty accepting.  You're saying that protein synthesis and posttranslational modification of proteins is not significantly different between different species or between bacteria and human beings?  Comparative proteomics is a field unto itself and proteins are differentiated to a much wider variety than genes are.  Even different tissue types within the same organism can have wildly different proteomes.  It doesn't make sense to me that there wouldn't be any specialization of the mechanisms and enzymes creating proteins in different species, indeed I'd expect there to be extreme variation due to the range of possibilities.

Believe it or not, food companies don't want their customers dying horrible deaths from their products. That's bad business.

Are you kidding?  Food companies end up killing people all the time; they've been some of the most lethally exploitative corporations during the last century, going all the way back to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.  To take just one example: tainted beef containing pesticides, veterinary antibiotics and heavy metals gets marketed and sold all the time to consumers.  And the industry has arranged it so that all recalls are voluntary - the FDA can't order a recall no matter what, just recommend one - and the U.S. standards are so lax that Mexico has rejected shipments of U.S. beef for having levels of toxins that are too high by Mexican standards.

That is why I am arguing against assertions that there is zero possible risk from GMO foods if my motivation isn't clear.

I guess we aren't going to convince each other.  If you really believe that it's more likely that we would create a self-replicating nanoswarm in a coal plant's smokestack than accidentally create prions in the course of genetic engineering I don't know what to say to that; I don't feel that I have to do any research to know that isn't true and that seems much more like a straw man than anything I've said here.

Somehow lethally dangerous consumer products end up on the market all the time.  That's the core reason why I don't think that people should be blasé about the possible risks from GMO foods.  Maybe I think this because I don't have a brain but I'm just not going to take the company's assurances at face value.

[ChairmanPoo]

You're saying that protein synthesis and posttranslational modification of proteins is not significantly different between different species or between bacteria and human beings?

No. He is saying that protein synthesis in animals is quite simmilar from one to the next. It's not a wild concept; after all, many methabolic pathways are conserved in different organisms.

As for bacteria vs eukaryotes, I wouldn't bet on there being terrifying differences either, as they've been shown in the past to be able to synthethize proteins from eukaryote transgenes.

Comparative proteomics is a field unto itself and proteins are differentiated to a much wider variety than genes are.  Even different tissue types within the same organism can have wildly different proteomes

Of course they would, as different genes are being expressed. But it's not like the same protein  will end up having a wildly different structure in tissue A and tissue B, or, indeed, from one animal to the next.

It doesn't make sense to me that there wouldn't be any specialization of the mechanisms and enzymes creating proteins in different species, indeed I'd expect there to be extreme variation due to the range of possibilities.

It doesn't make sense to me that there would be too glaring differences in practice, given that it's a very basic step in cell biology. I'd expect it to be conserved from species to species.

[Phmcw]

@ auto slaughter : I agree with eaglon on that one : If a fundamental mechanism is likely to go wrong, even monsanto won't be able to mute scientist working in the field for long.
However, I agree with you regarding the danger of gmo in this way : If a phenomenon binded to a particular modificaion may cause trouble, monsanto will suppress all evidence until it's too late. It have always been that way. (Remember the infamous marketing of roundup as biodegradable, or the whole growth hormone business. Speaking of growth hormone, won't the increased level of growth hormone in the salmon cause trouble? )

[Sir Pseudonymous]

My understanding is that they're not engineered to produce more at any given time, but rather to stop seasonally stopping their growth (an evolutionary advantage when a certain season means less food, so less energy should be spent growing larger, not so much when kept in a tank where there's food all year long), so they mature in half the time they normally would.

[Eagleon]

You

Wernstrom!!

Seriously though I feel bad for blowing up like that. I'm sorry, it was uncalled for. I get pretty heated about this stuff because I feel that people are becoming misinformed by popular media, to the point where we're already having a GE winter due to lack of commercial interest.

It really is pretty much as simple as 'rna gets made, ribosome reads rna turning it into protein using free amino acids, protein goes on its merry way'. After the protein is made it can react and fold differently from environmental cues, but that's another story.

RNA is coded such that 3 nucleotides (the TCAG of DNA, except RNA replaces T with U) equals one amino acid, and the amino acid it codes for is identical in every organism because every organism uses the same amino acids. There's literally no reason for this to change between organisms - it was perfected by life even before the split into different domains.

Differences occur in transcription factors, which select where to start mRNA and other types of RNA from DNA, but any ribosome will process mRNA as long as it's formatted correctly for its domain differences. In Eukaryotes, for instance, mRNA is modified after being read off from DNA, in order to remove non-coding sections (introns) and add a cap and tail which ensures that RNA is stable (and also helps ensure unstable damaged RNA isn't read erroneously) but these do not change protein structure. In order to use a protein from bacteria, etc, you have to add these introns, but once you do it works the same way.

The politics I don't even know. It's crazy shit. I'm just a programmer. I'd trust GM foods as far as I can read the FDA evaluation, which fortunately is public information. If I can list out what proteins, chemicals, etc. are involved and look them up, I have no problem eating the stuff. Environmental impact is always where I look first, though, and my impression was that they figured out a pretty thorough way to ensure that the risk there is essentially nil.

[evirus]

mandatory labelling.

the only problem with mandatory labeling is that GM has long been criticized by those who don't have a vary good knowledge of even basic genetics, and when it comes to public opinion its much easier to spread a rumor than it is to disprove a rumor, so labeling it GM in this current public opinion environment would be equivalent to labeling it "poison"

but i am all for genetically engineered food, its simply the next step in us controlling the foods we grow, we started with simple domestication, agricultural practices like fertilizers, then selective breeding, next is GM.

[ChairmanPoo]

in order to use a protein from bacteria, etc, you have to add these introns,

you do? (sauce?)

[Phmcw]

mandatory labelling.

the only problem with mandatory labeling is that GM has long been criticized by those who don't have a vary good knowledge of even basic genetics, and when it comes to public opinion its much easier to spread a rumor than it is to disprove a rumor, so labeling it GM in this current public opinion environment would be equivalent to labeling it "poison"

but i am all for genetically engineered food, its simply the next step in us controlling the foods we grow, we started with simple domestication, agricultural practices like fertilizers, then selective breeding, next is GM.

So you want to force them on he poeple despite their opinion?

[Virex]

in order to use a protein from bacteria, etc, you have to add these introns,

you do? (sauce?)

I thought it was the other way around? To make prokaryotes produce eukaryotic proteins you have to remove the introns?

[Pillow_Killer]

Allow me to begin my post with this:

I want to eat genetically modified food products.
Science, for your average human being is something akin to sorcery. There's some guy, he's not exactly public and is probably a wizard. Not a lot of people saw him, and its unknown, is he counting the stars through some brass pipe or poisoning your cattle. People see his maid all the time: She comes to the towm market to buy some food. Maid is nice, beatiful, chatty, proud of her master, but cant exactly tell aything, because she's afraid of going into his room. She saw fire and smoke, tho. From stuff the sorceror tells her when one of the experiments finally suceeded she cant understand a word. Such were medieval times, so it is in modern times. Only instead of a chatty maid we got a chatty journalist.

People will believe until the end that acient medicine heals better than modern, plastic window frames poison the room air, any substance in form of a pill already harms you because its a pill, and there's always a goddamned special table to calculate the favourable day for impregnation.
What fucking progress? Get the fuck out cience, and take your stupid fruits away. We dont fucking need them, so out! Just leave mobile phones. And antiradars. And some cleaning compound for kitchenware because soap isnt working. And the sticker for the mobile phones to protect me from harmful radiation.
But yeah, Im getting drawn out here, so lets get back to GMF...
And here we are, brilliant year 1996. Journalists are screaming about approaching end of the world - 2000, but in the food industry we see a much smaller crisis brooding...

First GMF products hit the markets. Sure there were precendents before, but nobody knew what GMF means so nobody gave a shit.
The conflict, was first introduced by Monsanto Company competitors: Bayer AG, Bash, Singente, etc. Why? It's pretty goddamned simple:
Monsanto became a too dangerous competitor. They already were smacking everyone on their tomatoes, pardon the pun, by selling their "Roundup ready" herbicide, and by then introducing the cultures immune to these herbicides, they began a massive shitstorm: Instead of buying old fashioned wheat nobody gives a shit about, treating it with herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, lead homocides, they can now just plant a GM-wheat with added genes to resist the sickness, parasites and such, and then pour the Roundup over it, killing all the weed dead. Wheat doesnt gives a shit, It's GM and cant be poisoned by glyphosate since it inhibites the ferment which doesnt do anything in the GM-wheat metabolism, unlike the rest of cultures, not-GM, which, you know, die.
Well, actually, wheat is a bad example - they stopped growing it that way. Corn, soy, cotton and napus are grown exactly this way. And they arent the only ones.

Right, so, since none of Monsanta competition did it massively, and GMF planet-march had to be stopped, they took the easy route:
Fling poo at Monsanto and GM-products by lobbying the laws about prohibiting them in the food products. Result didnt made them waiting for too long: Retards of all world are terrified of GMF and are shitting massive bricks, enough to rebuild washington just when they hear a mention of transgenome products. Any discussion of transgene products always come to one thing:
GM IS DANGERS BUT HOW MUHC IS IT DANGEROUS"?!?!?!?!1!?!?1?1!
The real problem here? Journalists. They know about GM just as much as a wild pig know about genemodded oranges. Their usual habit of making a big steamy elephant turd where there's only a single poodle kaka, throwing hyperboles around, coupled with mental SCIENTISTS and other "experts" which they interview, turns any article into a drug-induced shitstorm about GM IS DANGERS WER GETIN TAILS AN DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So hey, lets think for a moment, what is your average american thinks of when he reads, or hears about "X with gene from Y"?
A chimera - some creature which shares appearance of X and Y. (Holywood helped a lot on this one, thankfully before all the shitstorms, or I'd write another paragraph discussing the possibility of economical conspiracy.) Actually, what really the thing is, it's just goddamned X with genes from Y helping it produce a protein making it resistant to heat, or something.
As a result, we have articles telling us that we "cannot digest modified genes" Im quoting a real one here, actually.
So in  the article-induced nightmares about growing random tentacles and pinuses on your face after eating your daily bread, nobody, for some goddamn reason remembers  theirt biology classes from fourth grade.
Yes, sure there are some people telling about transposon genes, but for some reason, even they forget their classes. Which is weird, since they still remember this word, for some reason. So, whats a transposon? Basically, its a wild sequence that moves around, and sometimes randomly inserts itself and causes mutation. For some reason, they ignore the fact that:

1: Transposon really happen. In single-cellular organism. Yeah. No, they dont happen anywhere but single-cellular organism. No, humans are not made of a single cell. If you manage to get one in yourself, go get a nobel prize.Tho I dont think the comitet can award a single-cell.
2: In any food, there are shittons of genes. Please, tell me, why exactly is the modified gene is going to "insert itself into you", and not the rest of normal, unmodified ones. Not like it can happen, because goddamned #1. Oh, wait, did I mention they arent transposon?
3: EVEN if it somehow manages to insert itself(Please see #1 and #2 to find out why the capsed even.(Anti-GM people, no need, single-cellular organism seem to be exactly your case.)) into your genome, it wont exactly do a shit. Inserting a couple of words from McDonalds ads into War and Peace wont exactly do anything to enchance or degenerate it. In fact, it will simply trigger your body defensive mechanism and the modified cell quickly becomes an hero.

Another experiment, which anti-GMO people are quick to quote, is the british experiment about how they fed lab mice ONLY with GM-soy for few months and then found signs of reproduction mechanisms failing and fur falling out. Believe me, if you were fed exclusively with soy for few month not only your pinus would fall off, but the rest of your organs would cancel out as well, regardless of GM in the food.
A pretty hilarious thing, is that Greenpeace, yes, these guys, are extremely anti-GM. They say it hurts mother nature and cancels out normal crops. The fact that genemodded cultures(And creatures) are completely sterile and cannot reproduce is ignored for some reason.
So here ends my short(Oh wow, did I just fucking write all this?) excure into history and reasons. Let's do a quick roundup:

PRO

• No pesticides
• More fat/less fat, changeable when needed.
• Faster growing and metabolism. 
• Chance to test positive mutations on crops and animals.
• Appearance of safe narcotics. (Yes, I did fucking just say that. Those are only for medical applications, of course)
• Better harvests, which, in fact, could actually solve hunger. Like in africa.
• Cheaper.
• Easier to grow, less maitenance, less susceptible to shit like heat.

ANTI

• It's against the nature
• IT WILL KILL US
• WE LL GROW TENTACLES 
• Plants are god creations and you shall not interfere with them
• ALL plants will lose ability to reproduce! IM A SCIENTIST

Okay, I have around this post worth of text more to actually write, but this took me a good portion of the hour to word out, so I think i'll stop here.

[Il Palazzo]

Pillow_Killer, you're my Dasleah now.

[Phmcw]

Pillow_killer what do you know about GMO?
Also did you read my posts? I feel that I pointed threats a bit more serious than "it will grow tentacle".
The passage about how all gmo organism are sterile is completely false. Please inform yourself a bit more before bassically calling everyone against gmo an ignorant moron.

Ps: I also suspect that these "new" salmons will be less tasty than their natural counterpart.
 Another reason to label them as such.

[ChairmanPoo]

1: Transposon really happen. In single-cellular organism. Yeah. No, they dont happen anywhere but single-cellular organism. No, humans are not made of a single cell. If you manage to get one in yourself, go get a nobel prize.Tho I dont think the comitet can award a single-cell.

Actually, there are transposons in humans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposon
http://www.cell.com/AJHG/abstract/S0002-9297(07)63704-5
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v6/n5/full/nmeth0509-329.html (a positive application for transposons in human cells)

and there's always a goddamned special table to calculate the favourable day for impregnation.

This one isn't that crazy either. There are days during the ovarian cycle that are more favorable to pregnacy than others.