Independent research states GM corn should be removed immediately from the market

jeremiah foster

Tue Mar 13 06:46:20 -0700 2007

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Thanks for the English link, I couldn't find one on the CRII-GEN web site. Must improve Google skills. :)

Independent research states GM corn should be removed immediately from the market

Unomi

Tue Mar 13 06:51:08 -0700 2007

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From anyway to the other, I don't see any benefits from putting GM food on the market anytime sooner than when it's guaranteed of stable results.

Oh, cigarettes where so good for you these days and now a lot of people have troubles with their health. Even now, these studies follow up so quick, that we can't believe anymore what is trustfull or reliable. The next day the results are turned backwards etc.

The sole reason most people in the GM-business want it so bad is profit. Not uncommon, but to push farmers in third-world countries to buy these GM-seeds with no alternative in front of them is insane. They can't reproduce from these seeds, so they have to buy from the monopolist every time they want to seed the soil. Yeah, make every farmer in the world dependent of your GM-product. It feels so good, all that money...... No, the argument to the farmer is: "At least it is healthy seed because it is Gene-modified, guaranteed healthy seed. Good price. Buy it. NOW!!!".

In years there will be no 'natural corn-seed', only GM-corn. What will the result of that? We can't go back to natural then. It is extinct. What if every vegetable is GM and natural vegetable is extinct? Can we trust it? If I see the results with these rats, I would say: "STAY AWAY FROM GM!!!! FOR EVER!!!!".

But that's even more because we can't mess with God's creation any longer.......

- Unomi -

" removed immediately from the market" or "from the food market"

phred14

Tue Mar 13 08:25:49 -0700 2007

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Seems to me that there's an obvious niche for GM crops, and that's in biofuels. Toxicity concerns vanish, because they won't be consumed. There are also new freedoms for tinkering, because the end goal is no longer food. I once heard about gene-tinkering a potato to store its food as a polyester-precursor instead of as starch. The end goal was to harvest these potatoes to make plastics. There has been quite a bit of talk of algae as a biofuel, which is even better. It could be given some basic deficiency so it couldn't live in nature and live only in its production environment. (Shades of the lysine deficiency in Jurassic Park., but I'd choose something less easily circumvented by raiding bean fields.)

" removed immediately from the market" or "from the food market"

Thomas Lord

Tue Mar 13 10:06:26 -0700 2007

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Concerns about GM crops extend beyond what is merely consumed.

I'm appalled by the casual release and, indeed, industrial-scale release of GM crops into the wild.   There is ample evidence that these clowns simply do not know what they are doing, that in fact they have already caused great harm, and, anyway, duh: that is entirely predictable from first principles.    "Released into the wild" would include what seems to me to be unforgiveably sloppy handling of GMOs in the lab.  ("seems": I'm not perfectly well informed yet but what I've seen so far I don't like.)

That said:  there are (at least) two (potentially) green uses for GMO species that I think we shouldn't ignore and should pursue.   One, potentially quite banal, is the use of GMO micro-organisms to efficiently convert biomatter into fuel -- that use can be carried out with reasonable safeguards for containment.   The other, sadly, is preparing for release of GMO species into the wild, as an emergency response, to deal with cleanups of even worse contamination problems, to reboot the ocean if that proves necessary, and for carbon sequestration.

Ugh.

My mind isn't made up on any of these issues.   I hope to have a chance to learn more.

-t

" removed immediately from the market" or "from the food market"

femto

Tue Mar 13 15:34:33 -0700 2007

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Do toxicity concerns really vanish for biofuels?  These fuels are going to be burned and the reaction products breathed by people, especially in cities.  If the toxins are not destroyed in the processing or burning  of the fuel they will still make their way into people's bodies.

" removed immediately from the market" or "from the food market"

Thomas Lord

Tue Mar 13 18:00:32 -0700 2007

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It sounds like you mean chemical toxins which, while certainly a concern, don't generally have the exponential growth problems associated with containing GMOs and can be eliminated by routine mass spectrometry (as I understand things -- admitting that mass spectrometry would need to be industrialized in a big way if it is to be injected in a fuel-production pipeline).  What you do point to, and good for you, is an aspect of containment for GMO converter organisms that I, for one, hadn't previously contemplated.

Thanks,
-t

Independent research states GM corn should be removed immediately from the market

Uncle Entity

Tue Mar 13 14:49:31 -0700 2007

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FTA:
Consequently, the observations which follow do not constitute, in any manner, a statistical analysis of the data from MON 863. On the one hand, they show the importance of carrying out this statistical analysis in a serious and independent way, and on the other hand, demonstrate the necessity of doing again the EU risk assessment of MON 863 before any decision on market authorisation can be taken.

From this link dated 8 August 2005:
The European Commission authorised today the placing on the market of the genetically modified maize MON 863 for import and processing as animal feed. The decision does not cover uses as human food or cultivation. The maize has been modified by Monsanto to make it resistant to the corn rootworm. This authorisation has been granted to Monsanto for 10 years.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say maybe its not natural for rats to eat a diet based solely on corn, kind of like this previous Technocrat discussion where we learned cows have health problems from a pure corn diet.

The real story seems to be that this group has the data, computerized it and realized that statistics can be used in many different ways. What I don't understand is why it will take them months to run their own statistic analysis on the data if its already digitized ... throw it in a spreadsheet, add some formulas, hit calculate and then start sending out doomsday calls to pull it from the market. I would think that if it had some serious side effects as cattle feed they would have shown themselves in the year and a half it has been on the European market.

Independent research states GM corn should be removed immediately from the market

Thomas Lord

Tue Mar 13 18:08:01 -0700 2007

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Ok, suppose that I tell you that I have here a binary-only copy of a complex random GNU/Linux distro (perhaps RHEL, perhaps Ubuntu, whatever...).   In theory, I can get the complete source code however I have done diddly squat in the direction of analyzing that nevermind the toolchain that produced the binaries or the digital ecology that defines the release process.   However, I was screwing around with binary patching and was reliably able to produce certain effects.   You want those particular effects.

I can give you a copy of my binary to install on your 10,000 globally distributed servers but, keep in mind, empirical evidence shows that without any further effort than that it will spread further in the wild.

Wanna run this binary?  Actually, I don't care about your answer.   Look, I've identified at least 1000 separate execution paths through this many-millions of lines of code and traced those paths out in detail.   Not only do I claim to know what I'm doing with my binary patch but, if that isn't enough, well back off man because I've got investors.

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Is that a fair analogy to where the gene hackers are?  

-t