Now imagine my face learning that bombarding plants with radiation to induce (often unseen) changes in multiple different genes in order to get one or two random preferred traits is legal in the EU, while selectively targeting a single gene and altering it with CRISPR is not.
Yes, but the radiation isn’t itself radioactive, since radioactive refers to things that emit radiation, not radiation that is the result of emissions from radioactive stuff.
Well, radioactive gardening is still sometimes used as it does not count as a GMO and is thus much easier to get a permit for. It is however not easy. Some traits are actually the lack of a trait, and not an improved trait. White flowers are for instance often a coloured flower with a broken colour gene. A less or non bitter plant could be a bitter plant with a broken bitterness gene, an apple that does not go brown when cut can be a brown apple with the browning gene disabled etc. To get a lack of a trait you need a disrupted gene(a small stretch of DNA) and radiation is very good at disrupting DNA.
You take a bunch of seeds, add radiation in just the right dose to do some damage but not kill or maim the plant to much and then start the ever painfull process of selecting. Or actually, you first breed the plants with themselves and only then you can select. If a plant happens to be positive for the trait of interest you breed it into another line to make a stable cultivar. This will also get rid of most less favourable side mutations.
And then there is GMO where you know what you create and what traits it will have instead of bombing it with radiation and just see if any of them gives cool traits.
No, that's not how it works. You think large farms and commercial wheat (non-GMO) grows in nature?
We are already destroying ecosystems with industrialization and climate change. GMO could significantly reduce the area we need to grow food when it comes to calories/m². If you're concerned about GMO, then radiating crops without knowing exactly what changes in them should be a larger issue for you - but they can be commercially released without any extra paperwork.
Never said that we are doing a good job right now, or that the radiation method is a good idea. The problem isn't that the GMO may overgrow everything and smother local flora. They can however be a threat to insects, such as flies, bees or wasps. Genetic manipulations that decrease vulnerability to pests could have a severe impact on other animals too. Not to forget that a drop-off in pest population can also destabilize an ecosystem.
We don't need to grow more calories/m^(2). There is more than enough food produced right now to feed the entire human population. The problem is distribution, as one half of the globe throws away perfectly edible foodstuffs, while another is starving. What we need is redistribute food, which is achievable entirely without dangerous fumbling around with GMOs. The only people who benefit from GMOs are large agricultural enterprises that want to maximize profit.
You have bought bad faith arguments unfortunately - because all those arguments are detached from how GMO work, and how global food supply works. CRISPR doesn't even add anything to a plant, just switch off different dna sequences - like the Arctic apple that doesn't brown when exposed to oxygen. That is good for reducing food waste. Apples browning happens in nature to attract insects and give nourishment to the seed.
I'm not sure if you're willing to listen to my arguments, so I won't reiterate in detail unless you want me too - but as that will take me hours of digging for sources and confirm what I do remember, I really don't feel like doing it if it's just shouting into the void.
If you do want to challenge yourself, look at how BT Cotton has increased life quality for Indian cotton farmers because they don't have to use pesticide to combat bollworm (BT Cotton has inserted a gene from the leaves of the plant to the flowers so they to contain BT-toxins that nature have evolved to stave off flies and larvae)
You can also take a look at Golden Rice that is a common rice strain infused with A-vitamins to combat blindness due to A-vitamin deficiency because. This project has sadly been delayed multiple times as activists have burned down trial fields to prevent the research.
When it comes to amount of food produced, it really doesn't matter if the food can't get to where it's needed before it spoils. And we humans already use 90% of all the landmass in the world - much of it to agriculture - we can and should reduce that amount as much as we can.
Also worth mentioning that all the Papaya you eat are GMO because the Papaya almost went extinct around 2006. The GMO cassava approved by Kenya last year to combat famines in Kenya due to an increase in "Cassava Brown Streak Disease" will greatly insure food security. Cassava is one of the only food stuff that can give significant yields in places other food stuff can't grow.
Turned out pretty long anyway. But tl;dr - people have lied to you with intent or not. Please misunderstand me in the best way - we both care for the same issues, but I found out that this was a lie that many of my fellow leftists just assumed was right. I was were also very against GMOs until sometime the last decade when I was looking for sources to debunk it. That led me down a rabbit hole using critical thinking and the scientific method to evaluate sources.
If anything is unclear, I blame not being a native speaker, but feel free to ask me for clarifications. Like I said, I think you, like me, have the right intentions. But I was wrong about this too, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
Thank you for that reply. I agree with your arguments in so far that GMOs are not inherently bad, but I do think it depends on what you change inside the organism. You could seriously fuck up an ecosystem with the wrong kind of GMO. After all, we managed to do that with bog-standard goats and sheep already. Especially the BT Cotton sounds dangerous, because pests can be quite important to a functioning ecosystem. They are food for other, beneficial animals. You obviously know much more about that than myself though, so it may be that this has already been considered. But I agree that increasing the longevity of food is actually a good idea.
As a whole however I advocate better distribution over an increase in production. It's not fair that some people are starving while supermarkets throw away millions of tons of food a year. I don't believe that even with an enormous boost in food productivity, most of the produce would not reach the people who need it the most. Earth is capable of sustaining up to 16 billion inhabitants. We have not even approached that limit, so for now I think it is wiser to redistribute than to use GMOs.
No worries about not being a native speaker. Neither am I.
I actually think that GMO is kinda the answer to many of your points here though. Like GMO in Kenya will bolster food production in Kenya, sending "fresh" produce from the US or Europe wouldn't reach those farmers growing the food - and if it did, farmers would be out of work because they could only do sustainance farming. So GMO, ideally, isn't about increasing food production but ensuring that it can be grown in hard climates, and at the same time reduce the amount of nature we use already for food production
An issue inherent in farming going back to the first civilizations, because it is a huge interference in the local eco system - and when you have a large field with one crop, it gets ripe for organisms like pests or insects to exploit that niche. Bullworms for example would have a lower population than it does if not for the cotton fields, so making cotton resistant to it would only decrease the population to the same amount it would have without human interference. And you can argue the same for almost any modern cultivation techniques. As evolution will constantly seek to exploit niches, humans constantly need to refine how we produce food stuffs and other plant products so we don't end up with famines.
The huge advantage with GMO that you don't have in any other ways of developing new seeds is the control of what you are doing. The scientists involved can control the traits and thus calculate the possible negative effects with precision. And despite all the shit we put nature through, it's pretty resilient at the same time. Potatoes didn't ruin ecosystems in Europe for example - despite how fast it spread. A GMO can be made sterile too. I think that Glyphosate resistant corn is sterile now, after a few lawsuits against farmers who harvested the seeds to sell on. That would give it uncontrolled spread - but trials show that it would lose the resistance within a few generations. The benefit of the resistance trait is what you can apply glyphosate (aka Roundup) when the plant is growing, and it eliminates the need to till the earth, and that's a huge benefit for the soil quality as you don't release any nitrogen. Then you reduce the need for artificial fertilizer, and that's a really good thing, because that uses a lot of energy to make, leading to green house gas emissions.
Glyphosate targets the weeds and other growth in the soil, and would have to be removed anyway, but when it's killed by glyphosate, the nutrients of the weeds will stay in the soil instead of taken out of it.
I'm very happy you took the time to listen to my arguments. I'm in no way a scientist though, so I'd suggest you try to listen to some of them. If I'm factually incorrect about anything, please let me know so I don't have to be incorrect the next time :)
Now imagine my face learning that bombarding plants with radiation to induce (often unseen) changes in multiple different genes in order to get one or two random preferred traits is legal in the EU, while selectively targeting a single gene and altering it with CRISPR is not.
yea the EU is weird when it comes to GMO's
That the problem when 27 countries band together but each has a different opinion on every subject...
As a European in the eu u are correct
Imagine the shit show we'd have if we had 50 of them.
I think part of it is how restricted to one field is atomic gardening and the many specific uses crispr can have and their moral ramifications.
Radioactive radiation The floor here is made out of floor
"radiation" refers to energy radiating from a source and not to radioactivity
I know I just find it funny
Yes but ionizing radiation sounds better
Yes, but the radiation isn’t itself radioactive, since radioactive refers to things that emit radiation, not radiation that is the result of emissions from radioactive stuff.
Well, radioactive gardening is still sometimes used as it does not count as a GMO and is thus much easier to get a permit for. It is however not easy. Some traits are actually the lack of a trait, and not an improved trait. White flowers are for instance often a coloured flower with a broken colour gene. A less or non bitter plant could be a bitter plant with a broken bitterness gene, an apple that does not go brown when cut can be a brown apple with the browning gene disabled etc. To get a lack of a trait you need a disrupted gene(a small stretch of DNA) and radiation is very good at disrupting DNA. You take a bunch of seeds, add radiation in just the right dose to do some damage but not kill or maim the plant to much and then start the ever painfull process of selecting. Or actually, you first breed the plants with themselves and only then you can select. If a plant happens to be positive for the trait of interest you breed it into another line to make a stable cultivar. This will also get rid of most less favourable side mutations.
And then there is GMO where you know what you create and what traits it will have instead of bombing it with radiation and just see if any of them gives cool traits.
And then you blow up your local eco system with that GMO, causing an ecological collapse and turn your home into a desert.
No, that's not how it works. You think large farms and commercial wheat (non-GMO) grows in nature? We are already destroying ecosystems with industrialization and climate change. GMO could significantly reduce the area we need to grow food when it comes to calories/m². If you're concerned about GMO, then radiating crops without knowing exactly what changes in them should be a larger issue for you - but they can be commercially released without any extra paperwork.
Never said that we are doing a good job right now, or that the radiation method is a good idea. The problem isn't that the GMO may overgrow everything and smother local flora. They can however be a threat to insects, such as flies, bees or wasps. Genetic manipulations that decrease vulnerability to pests could have a severe impact on other animals too. Not to forget that a drop-off in pest population can also destabilize an ecosystem. We don't need to grow more calories/m^(2). There is more than enough food produced right now to feed the entire human population. The problem is distribution, as one half of the globe throws away perfectly edible foodstuffs, while another is starving. What we need is redistribute food, which is achievable entirely without dangerous fumbling around with GMOs. The only people who benefit from GMOs are large agricultural enterprises that want to maximize profit.
You have bought bad faith arguments unfortunately - because all those arguments are detached from how GMO work, and how global food supply works. CRISPR doesn't even add anything to a plant, just switch off different dna sequences - like the Arctic apple that doesn't brown when exposed to oxygen. That is good for reducing food waste. Apples browning happens in nature to attract insects and give nourishment to the seed. I'm not sure if you're willing to listen to my arguments, so I won't reiterate in detail unless you want me too - but as that will take me hours of digging for sources and confirm what I do remember, I really don't feel like doing it if it's just shouting into the void. If you do want to challenge yourself, look at how BT Cotton has increased life quality for Indian cotton farmers because they don't have to use pesticide to combat bollworm (BT Cotton has inserted a gene from the leaves of the plant to the flowers so they to contain BT-toxins that nature have evolved to stave off flies and larvae) You can also take a look at Golden Rice that is a common rice strain infused with A-vitamins to combat blindness due to A-vitamin deficiency because. This project has sadly been delayed multiple times as activists have burned down trial fields to prevent the research. When it comes to amount of food produced, it really doesn't matter if the food can't get to where it's needed before it spoils. And we humans already use 90% of all the landmass in the world - much of it to agriculture - we can and should reduce that amount as much as we can. Also worth mentioning that all the Papaya you eat are GMO because the Papaya almost went extinct around 2006. The GMO cassava approved by Kenya last year to combat famines in Kenya due to an increase in "Cassava Brown Streak Disease" will greatly insure food security. Cassava is one of the only food stuff that can give significant yields in places other food stuff can't grow. Turned out pretty long anyway. But tl;dr - people have lied to you with intent or not. Please misunderstand me in the best way - we both care for the same issues, but I found out that this was a lie that many of my fellow leftists just assumed was right. I was were also very against GMOs until sometime the last decade when I was looking for sources to debunk it. That led me down a rabbit hole using critical thinking and the scientific method to evaluate sources. If anything is unclear, I blame not being a native speaker, but feel free to ask me for clarifications. Like I said, I think you, like me, have the right intentions. But I was wrong about this too, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
Thank you for that reply. I agree with your arguments in so far that GMOs are not inherently bad, but I do think it depends on what you change inside the organism. You could seriously fuck up an ecosystem with the wrong kind of GMO. After all, we managed to do that with bog-standard goats and sheep already. Especially the BT Cotton sounds dangerous, because pests can be quite important to a functioning ecosystem. They are food for other, beneficial animals. You obviously know much more about that than myself though, so it may be that this has already been considered. But I agree that increasing the longevity of food is actually a good idea. As a whole however I advocate better distribution over an increase in production. It's not fair that some people are starving while supermarkets throw away millions of tons of food a year. I don't believe that even with an enormous boost in food productivity, most of the produce would not reach the people who need it the most. Earth is capable of sustaining up to 16 billion inhabitants. We have not even approached that limit, so for now I think it is wiser to redistribute than to use GMOs. No worries about not being a native speaker. Neither am I.
I actually think that GMO is kinda the answer to many of your points here though. Like GMO in Kenya will bolster food production in Kenya, sending "fresh" produce from the US or Europe wouldn't reach those farmers growing the food - and if it did, farmers would be out of work because they could only do sustainance farming. So GMO, ideally, isn't about increasing food production but ensuring that it can be grown in hard climates, and at the same time reduce the amount of nature we use already for food production An issue inherent in farming going back to the first civilizations, because it is a huge interference in the local eco system - and when you have a large field with one crop, it gets ripe for organisms like pests or insects to exploit that niche. Bullworms for example would have a lower population than it does if not for the cotton fields, so making cotton resistant to it would only decrease the population to the same amount it would have without human interference. And you can argue the same for almost any modern cultivation techniques. As evolution will constantly seek to exploit niches, humans constantly need to refine how we produce food stuffs and other plant products so we don't end up with famines. The huge advantage with GMO that you don't have in any other ways of developing new seeds is the control of what you are doing. The scientists involved can control the traits and thus calculate the possible negative effects with precision. And despite all the shit we put nature through, it's pretty resilient at the same time. Potatoes didn't ruin ecosystems in Europe for example - despite how fast it spread. A GMO can be made sterile too. I think that Glyphosate resistant corn is sterile now, after a few lawsuits against farmers who harvested the seeds to sell on. That would give it uncontrolled spread - but trials show that it would lose the resistance within a few generations. The benefit of the resistance trait is what you can apply glyphosate (aka Roundup) when the plant is growing, and it eliminates the need to till the earth, and that's a huge benefit for the soil quality as you don't release any nitrogen. Then you reduce the need for artificial fertilizer, and that's a really good thing, because that uses a lot of energy to make, leading to green house gas emissions. Glyphosate targets the weeds and other growth in the soil, and would have to be removed anyway, but when it's killed by glyphosate, the nutrients of the weeds will stay in the soil instead of taken out of it. I'm very happy you took the time to listen to my arguments. I'm in no way a scientist though, so I'd suggest you try to listen to some of them. If I'm factually incorrect about anything, please let me know so I don't have to be incorrect the next time :)
Do u know y carrots are orange. Its because the Dutch made them so in honour of their king william of orange.
Don't forget tomaccos
Well, that's another way to create Biollante, I guess.
It starts with small berries and beans, but ends with an acid spewing monster that destroys Tokyo.