In a recent email exchange about the merits of mandatory “GMO labeling,” I was asked this question: “Why shouldn’t we be able to know what foreign genes are in our food?” It seems like a reasonable question to most people. After all, we are the customers; don’t we have a right to know what we want to know? The answer to that question is actually a lot more complicated than you might think. Let me explain.
What some people find “creepy” about the idea of “GMO crops” is that they contain genes from organisms other than the crop itself – hence the emotive term, foreign genes. Practical speaking, the novel genes in the commercial biotech crops grown around the world have come from either bacteria or viruses. To your average person, that might still sound creepy, but it needs to be put into perspective. Most people may not know it, but our diet is, and always has been loaded with foreign genes from bacteria and viruses and other living organisms (yeast, other fungi, nematodes, algae…). We don’t live in a sterile world. In fact there are a host of microbes whose natural role in the world is to grow in association with plants – including food crops. Except for the case of recently cooked food, these organisms tend to be alive and well when we eat them – genes and all. I’ll give a quick survey of the microbes which one finds on plants and whose foreign genes genes we regularly consume.
The moral message of this short story, taken from Paul Offit’s inspiring Autism’s False Prophets, is that fuzzy thinking about biology and human health can easily lead people and activist movements to do well intentioned, but tragically dangerous and stupid things.
Lyn Redwood is a nurse practitioner who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. By the time her third child, Will, was born, she had been a medical professional for twenty years. “My son Will weighed in at close to nine pounds at birth,” she said. “He was a happy baby who ate and slept well, smiled, cooed, walked, and talked all by one year of age.” But after his first birthday, Will began to change. “He lost speech, eye contact, and suffered intermittent bouts of diarrhea, [then he was] diagnosed with pervasive developmental delay, a form of autism.” When the AAP issued its press release in July 1999 urging the immediate removal of thimerosal from vaccines, Redwood called her doctor’s office. “I reviewed [Will's] vaccine record and my worst fears were confirmed,” she said. “All of his early vaccines that could have possibly contained thimerosal, had.” Redwood believed she had found the cause of her son’s autism.
Paul Offit goes on to describe how, in the 2000s, the mercury containing vaccine preservative thimerosal was viewed as the cause of autism by some scientists, and by many parents, such as distraught parents like Lyn Redwood who were entangled in the very trying circumstances of their own child having the behavioural patterns of autism.
Critics of agricultural biotechnology have long maintained that the technology is unsuitable for small-scale farmers and harmful to the environment. But according to newly-released adoption rates, evidence is pointing in the opposite direction.
In its latest report, Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2011, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) shows that biotechnology crops now cover 160 million hectares worldwide. Of the 16.7 million people who grew transgenic crops in 2011, 15 million or 90% were small resource-poor farmers in developing countries.
Early critics of biotechnology contended that biotechnology crops would only benefit large-scale farmers in industries countries. But emerging evidence shows that nearly half of biotechnology crops were grown in developing countries. The adoption rate of biotechnology crops was 11% in developing countries against 5% in industrialized countries.
Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest in my series of Pollination Methods videos that I make as part of my thesis project. While carrots and beets are not closely related, they share similar life cycles, pollination methods, and even breeding goals – so I put both of these root vegetables in the same video.
This time of the year, in winter greenhouses, plant breeders will be pollinating carrots and beets – sometimes in the same greenhouse. With help from the carrot and beet experts here at UW-Madison, I give you how to pollinate carrots and beets. Enjoy!
New book by Robert Trivers, Deceit and Self-Deception
The biological study of human behaviour can teach us a lot about ourselves, and Robert Trivers has just written a book Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others (Allen Lane, Penguin Books 2011) from which we can all learn deep insights about ourselves and our fellow humans.
Yes fellow humans, some of us — including even myself –can be very difficult and tricky to deal with.
The first chapter of Robert Trivers’ book gives an overview of the evolutionary logic of human self-deception. It picks out nine categories of self-deception, but three in particular caught my mind:
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RT @antidemagogue: Modern genome assembly would not be possible without his work. RT @mndoci Oh .. de Bruijn passed away last week :( ht ...about 5 hours ago
Evidence Stacking Up Against Biotechnology Critics
Editors Note: republished with permission from www.technologyandpolicy.org.
By Calestous Juma
Critics of agricultural biotechnology have long maintained that the technology is unsuitable for small-scale farmers and harmful to the environment. But according to newly-released adoption rates, evidence is pointing in the opposite direction.
In its latest report, Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2011, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) shows that biotechnology crops now cover 160 million hectares worldwide. Of the 16.7 million people who grew transgenic crops in 2011, 15 million or 90% were small resource-poor farmers in developing countries.
Early critics of biotechnology contended that biotechnology crops would only benefit large-scale farmers in industries countries. But emerging evidence shows that nearly half of biotechnology crops were grown in developing countries. The adoption rate of biotechnology crops was 11% in developing countries against 5% in industrialized countries.
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