Monsanto Executive Wins World Food Prize 271
sfcrazy writes "A top Monsanto executive has won the prestigious World Food Prize. Secretary of State John Kerry announced the award where Robert T. Fraley, the executive vice president and CTO of Monsanto, won the prize along with two other scientists from Belgium and the US. The award was given for devising a method to insert genes from another organism into plant cells, which could produce new genetic lines with highly favorable traits."
Who woulda thunk? (Score:3, Insightful)
Winning an award for poisoning people and contaminating innocent neighbor farmers' fields.
Fits With Obama Peace Prize (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, if Obama can win the Nobel Peace Prize for expanding our wars and the war powers assumed by his office, why shouldn't a company that that profiteers on regulatory agriculture monopolies get the World Food Prize? I understand The Pope is being considered for an equally prestigious anthropology prize.
Monsanto won what? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's like saying Hitler won the fucking nobel peace prize.
The biggest danger to the human race right now is not terrorists or asteroids. It's Monsanto. These money hungry whores are destroying our food resources and replacing them with engineered replacements without realizing the full long-term impacts on both our health and the planet's.
Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ruin the US wheat crop, get a prize! (Score:5, Insightful)
What is it about GMO that drives people to this sort of hysteria?
That the consequences are irreversible. You can't put the genie back in the bottle again.
It also ups the ante in the arms race of evolution, which isn't universally seen as a good thing.
Calling objection "hysteria" doesn't make it so. Some protesters are quite enlightened and think long term.
Re:Just like the Nobel (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ruin the US wheat crop, get a prize! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not calling objection hysteria. I'm calling statements like "untold acres" when one plot was found hysteria.
They're not telling us how many acres of this stuff is out there. Sounds like "untold acres" to me.
Re:Proofreading? (Score:4, Insightful)
Monsanto doesn't "sell" any more then Microsoft does. They lease out their "IP". They are working on "embracing and extending" the world food supply. Currently the natural plants and the bees feel a bit like Word Perfect. Farmers downwind are getting introduced to SCO like tactics, only the courts and congress are backing Monsanto.
Re:Ruin the US wheat crop, get a prize! (Score:5, Insightful)
It also ups the ante in the arms race of evolution, which isn't universally seen as a good thing.
It certainty is a bad thing, which is why millions of people protested conventional breeding when late blight overcame the conventionally bred resistances in tomato and when hessian flies overcame conventionally bred resistance in wheat. Oh wait, that never happened because it would be absolutely idiotic, yet somehow, when genetic engineering is involved, the same basic facts of population genetics are suddenly terrible and proof that the technique itself is bad. Perhaps it is because the vast vast majority of the opposition to genetic engineering is coming from those with no background in agricultural or plant science and thus due to their complete lack of context it seems reasonable to them.
Calling objection "hysteria" doesn't make it so. Some protesters are quite enlightened and think long term.
And most of the protesters are the agricultural equivalents to the anti-vaccine movement. And when you are doing little in the way of scientifically justifying your concerns, instead preferring to use bunk science [wikipedia.org], fearmongering [organicconsumers.org], and outright vandalism [biofortified.org] on non-corporate [redgreenandblue.org] projects [freshplaza.com] and farmer's fields [staradvertiser.com], you shouldn't be surprised when you get characterized poorly. Hell, there is no small opposition to even things like Golden Rice (biofortified with -carotene) and the Arctic apple (which does not oxidize when cut). I'm sure there is a perfectly good reason as to why that is, if not unscientific hysteria, because this stuff [facebook.com] isn't looking good.
Just about everything carries risk (again for context, even conventional breeding conventional breeding [nap.edu] carries risk), just about everything has some negatives that come with the positives, there are actual issues, and not every genetically engineered organisms will necessarily turn out to be a good thing. But to paint the anti-GMO movement as a whole as anything even remotely reasonable would be like saying young earth creationists simply have a dispute with the minor details of a few phylogenies.
Re:Proofreading? (Score:3, Insightful)
so let me get this straight, a guy was given a food prize for making food less food-like?
Re:Proofreading? (Score:5, Insightful)
The day someone returns life to a dead organism, they have damn well earned a Nobel prize.
Re:Ruin the US wheat crop, get a prize! (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it is because the vast vast majority of the opposition to genetic engineering is coming from those with no background in agricultural or plant science and thus due to their complete lack of context it seems reasonable to them.
The real problem is "close source food chain" vs. "open source food chain". That is why GM food - Monsanto style - is bad. Really bad. Unfortunately the anti-GM movement has taken a different path of protesting against the science, rather than this very basic fact.
A closed source food chain is a major problem for everyone, except those who hold the patents.
Peace,
Andy.