GMO Oranges? Altering a Fruit's DNA To Save It 358
biobricks writes "A New York Times story says the Florida orange crop is threatened by an incurable disease and traces the efforts of one company to insert a spinach gene in orange trees to fend it off. Not clear if consumers will go for it though." The article focuses on oranges, but touches on the larger world of GMO crop creation as well.
Genetic Roullette (Score:0, Interesting)
Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods
ISBN 0972966528
There is a lot of scientific evidence that genetically engineered food is harmful long term, and I have boycotted all GMO food from my diet. I cut way back on processed foods, and always check the ingredients list. If it has corn, soy, conola, or other commonly engineered crops and doesn't say certified organic, I won't buy it. I also go out of my way to find restaurants that use certified organic ingredients.
GMO isn't about saving lives or helping people, it's about monopolizing food crops. They want to GM all food crops globally, plant and animal. Guilt organic seed vaults while you still can, we might actually need it someday.
GMO is scary... for now. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:nature and consumers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:nature and consumers (Score:4, Interesting)
Nature doesn't care whether you live or die, so it is free to modify plants and animals at random even if a mutation breeds an organism that ends up killing off half the species on the planet. Humans are responsible for any harm that they end up causing their fellow creatures so it's right that we hold them to a higher standard.
Not a result of monoculture: (Score:5, Interesting)
Quoth TFA:
“In all of cultivated citrus, there is no evidence of immunity,” the plant pathologist heading a National Research Council task force on the disease said.
Deal with it: there's no all-wise Mother Nature who has arranged for the perfect harmony of all beings. Species evolve taking advantage, in spite of, or in a mutual-benefit relationship with other; and then sometimes because the other simply isn't around. Previously isolated species may meet, and whole taxa may thrive or perish.
Citrus greening disease [wikipedia.org] has been around for a century across species, and it's incurable. The alternatives are 1. eradicating the pathogen (good luck), 2. eradicating the vector (even harder, and craptons of pesticides are required), 3. making the vector immune (read: genetic manipulation), or 4. making the plant immune (again, genetic manipulation). Pick your poison.
Re:nature and consumers (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure there are lots of scary looking methods of splicing DNA, but those are all done experimentally for research purposes. Those don't ever make it to your dinner plate.
You know the human body contains 3 complete genomes from viruses and about a hundred thousand or so incomplete ones. One of these virus genomes includes genetic material that transcribes to create a critical reproductive function that we could not live without today, and it came from some other animal. So indeed, humans themselves carry DNA from some other animal, and in fact depend on it. In fact, 8% of our genome comes from foreign sources.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12paleo.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 [nytimes.com]
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2012/06/14/we-are-viral-from-the-beginning/ [nationalgeographic.com]
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/10/the-lurker-how-a-virus-hid-in-our-genome-for-six-million-years/ [nationalgeographic.com]
GMO has the potential to reduce the need for farmland, which if I were an environmentalist I would be ecstatic for because that means tearing down less forest land to create farms to feed people and end world hunger. In addition, it will make food much less expensive which means your bargaining power goes up, which means less poor people.
In commercially sold GMO, all they do is modify a very tiny number of codons to make the plant resistant to glyphosate. That's it. During natural reproduction, plants go through thousands of mutations, mutations much larger than this one, and we haven't the slightest clue what these mutations do. Yet making a small tiny change where we know exactly what it does has people like you raging? Why? Especially given that the chemical composition of the food that ends up on your plate is not chemically distinct from non-GMO based foods.
I don't know what GMO did to ruin your life, but having a vendetta against it because you're ideologically opposed to it doesn't do anybody else any favors. In fact, it does the world a disservice akin to the new rise of smallpox due to the FUD campaign against vaccines. In fact I'd say it's equally destructive.
Please stop spreading FUD about GMO. Thank you.
Re:nature and consumers (Score:5, Interesting)
Nature is full of extinction events. There is no particular reason to believe that anything that nature does will be beneficial to people; it's a wholly random thing.
The idea that nature is something uniformly beneficial is silly and naive.
Controlling the environment became the lot of man when he learned to make fire. Genetic engineering is just the latest manifestation of this.
Re:Genetic Roullette (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with your point, but to be fair Round-Up (glyphosate) is an herbicide and not a pesticide. I know, sounds like semantics, but making good arguments but messing up the details makes your point less salient. Glyphosate is also one of the safest herbicides in wide spread use, numerous studies have shown little if any long term adverse side effects and while acute toxicity is a possibility it is extremely rare and almost certainly an issue of a accidental extreme exposure. Natural resistance to glyphosate is the REAL reason to not want it used so widely. It is an extremely useful herbicide and to apply it when MANY alternatives exist because it make life easier than those alternatives is poor agriculture.
Re:nature and consumers (Score:5, Interesting)
It does happen in nature... For example the sea slug learned to incorporate plant DNA and thereby became photosynthetic.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16124-solarpowered-sea-slug-harnesses-stolen-plant-genes.html#.UfVDwY1wqPA [newscientist.com]
The GMO head in sand types vastly underestimate the mobility of DNA in nature.
Re:And when the new orange dies? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but the big problem is monoculture. This results in an entire crop being (nearly) genetically identical. THIS results in all plants being susceptible to the same invasive organism...of course it's also what makes the taste, shape, etc. so predictable, and until the invasive organism arrives, that's quite advantageous.