Activists Destroy Scientific GMO Experiment 1229
Freggy writes "In Belgium, a group of activists calling themselves the Field Liberation Movement has destroyed a field which was being used for a scientific experiment with genetically modified potatoes. In spite of the presence of 60 police officers protecting the field, activists succeeded pulling out the plants and sprayed insecticides over them, ruining the experiment. The goal of the experiment was to test potato plants which are genetically modified to be resistant to potato blight. It's a sad day for the freedom of scientific research."
Dumbasses (Score:2, Informative)
Funny thing is that the movement that called for the destruction is a movement primarily directed against multinationals. Of course, only one plant on the field was from scientific research of a multinational, the other plants were from a government initiative to do genetic research without relying on hard to regulate multinationals. By doing the research themselves they were hoping to prevent the multinationals gaining the upper hand in such research, and thus making a lot of this obscure by calling in protection of their research via patents and secrecy.
A great day for human beings (Score:5, Informative)
Lack of background, nuance (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Informative)
While not 100% relevant in and of itself, it emphasizes how easily cross pollination can occur, and how it's a huge problem to plant a GM crop anywhere near a non-GM crop and keep there from being cross contamination
Re:GMO scientists, who do you think you are? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Informative)
Selective pollenation and crossing is not GMO.
Re:Sounds like (Score:4, Informative)
I'd also like to point out that you have been eating GM plants your entire life. Wheat? Hundreds of years of selective growing of only the best stock. Its the same thing it's just been done on a farm instead of in a lab.
Do not spread diss-information.
These are not genetically modified, crops, they are artificially-sellected crops.
Re:GMO scientists, who do you think you are? (Score:4, Informative)
Nonsense. With 'traditional methods', you still have the chance of spreading a dangerous recessive gene across the entire population, or even a dominant gene that later becomes a disadvantage as the environment changes. There are countless examples of food crops becoming extinct in large regions as a result of this. Take a look at the ancestry of a 'French' grape vine some time...
With GM crops, we are less likely to see that, because we're tweaking smaller numbers of genes at a time.
Update from Belgium (Score:3, Informative)
About 20% of the potatoes on the field have been destroyed, the researchers who are involved say that the end result is not too bad. There is however a lot of damage on the infrastructure.
The Flemish government will spend 250,000 Euros to keep the experiment on track
One researcher of the Catholic University of Leuven participated in the destroying. She will be punished by the university.
Bart Staes, a member of the European parliament for the Flemish Green Party, called the action "a democratic form of protest" and "civil disobedience". The Flemish Green Party distances itself from his statements.
The scientists have not yet decided if they will sue the protesters. They will decide this after they have seen the police reports.
Coverage in English on Flemish public radio/television. [deredactie.be] (The word "Flemish" is used so often in this post because Belgium is a federation, and the action was in Flanders.)
Re:Sounds like (Score:3, Informative)
Actually they do, but don't let facts get in the way of your argument.
http://healthimpactnews.com/2011/europe-has-gm-food-label-law-but-consumers-concerned-about-food-produced-with-gm-feed/ [healthimpactnews.com]
The law requires that any direct ingredients involving genetically modified food must be labeled as such. It does not require indirect use of GM foods for farm animals, but that's irrelevant for potatoes.
Re:Stopping Science = Stopping Thought. GL,HF (Score:5, Informative)
GL;HF = Good Luck; Have Fun
QQ = cry (supposed to look like eyes with tears)
Re:Sounds like (Score:3, Informative)
Partly accurate. Monsanto sued farmers for using their GM varieties without paying royalties, and in some of those cases the farmers' defense was that their fields were contaminated by the GM pollen.
Re:Different plants are DIFFERENT (Score:5, Informative)
"Potato plants are at even less risk of outcrossing because they are propagated clonally"
Not always. I always carry a stock of true potato seed. Guess what caused the blight in the first place? Lack of genetic diversity and natural selection.
Looks like where the poster above slept through biology, you slept through history and critical thinking. You apparently slept through biology as well, as potatoes are nightshades and spread pollen like wildfire with their particularly light and fluffy pollen.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Informative)
If you had read the article (yes, I know, I know...) you would realize that many of the protesters are local farmers. So they probably already worked a few years for local farms. But please don't let facts interfere with your knee-jerk reaction.
We have very different definitions of "natural" (Score:5, Informative)
You are correct that "The wheat and corn from 50 years ago is NOT genetically modified in the modern sense of the word" however I believe the point the GP was making is that the changes made by artificial selection were equivalent to, if not greater than, those that are now being produced with genetic modification "in the modern sense of the word."
The genome of B73, a completely un-genetically modified variety of corn, was published back in 2009 and I've had my head buried in it ever since. I've seen broken genes, moved genes, genes missing the sequences that should control when and where they are turned on, even frankenstein genes assembled from the pieces of other genes. All these changes occurred naturally in individual corn plants and are found today in B73 as the result of either artificial or natural selection.
For example, and yes, this is real, they make crops that have weaknesses so that you need to buy more pesticides of the kind they sell.
Citation needed. I know there are GM crops resistant to certain herbicides, but in the absence of those herbicides they grow identically to their unmodified siblings. I don't even know how an effect like the one you describe could be produced. But if you can back it up I will certainly look into it.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, precisely WHAT "billions of people"?
Have a watch of "We Feed The World [topdocumentaryfilms.com]", by Erwin Wagenhofer.
Have a look at precisely what happens to all of this spectacular bounty of surplus food we could be using to feed starving people. Pay particular attention at 52:10, where Karl Otrok, Director of Production for Pioneer in Romania, explains how things REALLY are...
At little later, he explains things a bit more clearly...
After you get done with that, you can comment on the billions of farm subsidies the US and EU governments pay to industrial farmers, so they can undersell everyone else by two-thirds.
Re:Sounds like (Score:4, Informative)
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/science/28crop.html?pagewanted=print [nytimes.com]
The safety tests already required of GM crops in the US mean it already costs ~$150 million dollars to get a single new GM trait in a single crop approved for human consumption which is one of the reasons only a handful of giant companies like Monsanto are still in the business of engineering crops. You're right, that's still less than a pharmaceutical company would have to spend to get a drug all the way through regulatory approval, but it's a lot less than the laissez-faire modify whatever they like and release it into the food supply approach many people seem to think is going on.
Re:Sounds like (Score:3, Informative)
But for me the worse is the fact that they sell seeds such that the next generation is not fertile (will not grow). So you cannot just plant some of last year's crop, as farmers have done for millennia.
You're right that the technology to make such seeds has been developed (and patented). However no company is now, nor have they in the past, sold seeds genetically engineered to produce sterile offspring ("suicide seeds" "terminator technology" etc) and this is one of the most frustrating pieces of zombie misinformation to confront over and over again in the debate over GM crops.
There are patented seeds where you are not permitted to resow the seeds the next year (once more because of patents), but regardless of whether or not you think gene patents are a good idea (I do not), in the event of a series economic/social/natural disruption, farmers would just plant the seeds anyway and ignore the intellectual property laws.
I agree with you that selling plants that are designed to be sterile is indefensible on both pragmatic and ethical levels.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Informative)
To those who haven't been paying attention to the world seed market, this may appear to be an appropriate response. Granted, they hardly did us any favors by taking this path, but their intentions were honorable. Don't Mod me until you have read the rest of this. I have references.
Genetically altered plants have been engineered in such a fashion that future generations of food bearing plants are *sterile* requiring you to *buy new seeds * every year. As in, You can't save a few ears of corn to re-plant next year. You have to rely on the corporation with the patent on the seed to allow you to buy more.
In some countries this is illegal, however precedence has been set where one filed of non-altered plants were rendered sterile by another field of steile-altered-plants and the victim with the non-sterile plants ( to start with ) was sued in court and *lost*.
We have grown accustomed to our freedoms being legislated away but this has dangerous implications on the sustainability our food supply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology [wikipedia.org]
http://www.healthy-eating-politics.com/genetically-modified-plants.html [healthy-ea...litics.com]
For the record, and Heirloom seed is a seed that is not genetically altered.
- Dan.
You do realize that.... (Score:2, Informative)
....EVERY crop grown for human consumption has been generically modified?
EVERY SINGLE ONE.
There is not a single food staple crop that exists in its as-evolved state. Every single crop has been changed by humans to better suit us.
Most of them were done over time, through breeding programs. Recently, it has been possible to speed up the process using more direct methods. But the same process has been going on since the Sumerians discovered agriculture some 6000 years ago,
And you are calling people "morons"? Glass houses, mon ami.
DG
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Informative)
then I trust the free market to make the right decision and choose the seed that is best for the food supply.
That, actually, is a mistake in an era of regulatory capture and corporatism. You think that only applies to the phone company and ISPs?
Screwmaster's This sentiment is correct. Monsanto, specifically, has been suing farms not using their seeds as well. Here's the details:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Goliath_and_David:_Monsanto's_Legal_Battles_against_Farmers [sourcewatch.org]
http://nelsonfarm.net/ [nelsonfarm.net]
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/26/eveningnews/main4048288.shtml [cbsnews.com]
So much for a free market...
- Dan.
Re:Sounds like (Score:5, Informative)
"Genetically altered plants have been engineered in such a fashion that future generations of food bearing plants are *sterile* requiring you to *buy new seeds * every year."
I thought that was proven to be a myth. And that Monsanto simply relies on contract law, mostly.
No Myth, and still moving forward:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Terminator_seed_controversy [wikipedia.org]
- Dan.
Re:Sounds like (Score:3, Informative)
If you had ever done any farming, you would know that you almost never ever keep "seed" from last years crop, you buy it cus it is so bloody cheap compared to everything else.
Re:Sounds like (Score:4, Informative)
No, they are not engineered to not produce pollen.
They are engineered to "not fertilize" other plants.
So, the effect is: the GM plant produces pollen that is not fertile. That pollen inseminates wild plants. The wild plants are not fertilized by that pollen. So in the long run the wild plants die out.
The farmers also have to buy new seed every year, as even the FRUITS of the plants they grow wont seed again.
angel'o'sphere
Re:Its economic, rather than scientific (Score:2, Informative)
They won't come after you necessarily, but they know that any bees (or other insects) that try to pollenate your crops (so you don't have to buy off them next year) will be unsuccessful as their GM plants are sterile.
Blowing sterile pollen and seeds around the globe will kill off wild species in time, including desirable mutations, and the only thing that will grow is the rapidly diminishing supply of human created life that doesn't support the same ecosystem that we have adjusted to on this planet.
PLEASE! Only use this stuff in a firewalled environment (as in a few miles of space, Mars or the moon spring to mind) before you bring it home to a place where you can't fix any accidental mistakes in time for our species to survive.