Print

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

[Trekkin]

Yes; the sea bass with frikkin laser beams attached to their heads kept improperly secreting a lasing medium so we had to scale back our ambitions slightly.

[Virex]

Plasmids!! What's this, Bioshock? Lightning-generating salmon?

How did you figure out I'm trying to make eel-salmon-manta ray-squirrel hybrids to rule the sea lanes? No matter, I'll just have to take care of you first...

[Euld]

Then Jesus said, go forth and make eel-salmon-manta ray-squirrel hybrids, maaaan!

If only I could draw.

[Akura]

So, what's wrong with eating blobfish? Topic is tl;dr.

It'd actually be pretty funny if it was, because certain crops like corn and soy are almost all GM in the US.

Actually, corn was created from generations of crop breeding, which is itself basically a primitive form of genetic modification. So there's no such thing as natural non-gene-modified corn.


I don't see how genetically modified salmon would "taste bad", since preference of taste is dependant on the person. As for it being cancerous, I doubt that too, because it's not like they're being modified to be poisonous, and fish meat normally doesn't contain any natural toxins(pollution-based toxins like mercury are a whole different story).

Ethically, it's hard to condemn gene modifying, since really, humans have been loading the dice with genetics ever since we developed agriculture, ~8000 years ago. We're just doing it faster now, in a more complicated(?) way.

I wouldn't mind labeling, since I would appreciate being able to know the details of what's in what I eat, which I think people have a right to know about what goes in their body.

[ChairmanPoo]

kind of relevant
http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/

[Phmcw]

And way more relevant : http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/jul/25/gm.food
To those who said that gmo crop couldn't affect other species, it just did.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/545504.stm and this about the danger of gm salmon.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

You do realize that a) the salmon in question (as opposed to whatever the fuck they were fucking around with there) are sterile, b) they're not engineered to produce more hormones, they're engineered to not stop producing when the weather gets cold, meaning they'd starve to death if released since they'd keep burning energy to grow when food is scarcest, and c) they're grown in tanks on land, next to a completely different ocean from salmon. It's rather incomprehensible the FUD that gets thrown around whenever something important is happening in genetics or even something like theoretical physics.

[Mysteriousbluepuppet]

Would allow to increase fish production. If we can produce more in a cheaper it could reduce overfishing. ( Wishfull thinking, i know it wont happen, but a man can dream)

[Criptfeind]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/545504.stm and this about the danger of gm salmon.

Wait wait wait.

If I am reading that right they are saying their biggest fear is that they will out breed the other population and that is bad because they are bad at breeding.

What is it?

[Eagleon]

And way more relevant : http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/jul/25/gm.food
To those who said that gmo crop couldn't affect other species, it just did.

Er. It 'just' did in 2005 you mean? Here is an article I found on it that makes some interesting arguments. It also manages to link to the original report, something most anti-GM news articles lack, conspicuously. Does this bother anyone else? More and more, news organizations seem to trust in their reader's disinterest in the facts and forget about citing sources, even in print.

Anyway. It also has a link to an article about a coca plant that developed round-up resistance, which is particularly interesting to me - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/columbia.html

I couldn't find anything else on the herbicide-resistant mustard in question, but I didn't look too much. Anyone else?

[Phmcw]

Sorry but the counter article, coming from an obviously partial blog, is everything but reliable.
And really, re read him, what is this : "only two grew into plants with the herbicide resistance: that’s only 0.002%".
Didn't he notice that one fertile plant, give the "huge evolutionary pressure" put into the specie by the roundup, is enough.
And that he is speaking about a mass marketed product.
And the argument about the salmon being raised in a foreign ocean doesn't sound convincing (but there I'm just guessing) : isn't forced fish migration a problem? (fish being caught in ballast and dropped in another ocean where they couldn't arrive by natural means.)

[Eagleon]

The problem is that roundup is (not yet) a pervasive strain on other plants in the environment, meaning there is no evolutionary advantage to being resistant to it besides on farmer's fields. That's a problem for farmers, not ecology - you'll have mustard (which is already a pain in the ass to get rid of, coming from working in a garden when I was younger) possibly crowding out food species. Add to that the fact that it's being crossed with a food plant that has been grown for centuries, so all opportunity has been had for the crossing of mustard with rape to mess with the ecosystem long since.

It might not be reliable, but my point still remains - he linked us to the original report on the incident. He also didn't just glance over counter arguments. There's a significant amount of weight applied to fear of GM in the Guardian's article. At least that's my subjective opinion.

[Phmcw]

I understand, and I'm not yelling that the end is near. But think of what may happen with the pesticide producing ones for instance. I don't think that the technology is ready for massive use (and have yet to see the benefits)

[Criptfeind]

Sorry but the counter article, coming from an obviously partial blog

I loled.