Could Monsanto Destroy Irelands Farmers

djpbarry wrote: »

Genetic modification is used extensively in scientific research, if that's what you mean. Cancer research, for example, would not be where it is today without GM technology.

Source?

djpbarry wrote: »

Because there is no evidence to suggest that it is.
And now what? Tabloid journalism?

I'm pretty sure every Article I linked to lists their source (I tried to find ones that did) so if you want to read the overly-long overly-complicated reports, look them up yourself. They'll just say the same thing. This "tabloid Dailymail rabble rabble" of yours is boring tiring pointless<-->pick one. I had two links for that but you chose to link to just the paper one to throw in your rabble.

djpbarry wrote: »

You’re telling me there’s a link between mobile phone use and brain tumours because one guy, who happened to be a heavy mobile-phone user, developed a tumour? Seriously?

No, the Italian supreme court with evidence from Respected Oncologists and Neuroseurgeons is telling you that.

The possible Class Action from it tells you it's many (more than one) I assume you knew that...or you really have had your head in the dirt for a long time. Are You even reading these Articles??

djpbarry wrote: »

How many heavy mobile phone users have not developed brain tumours? The overwhelming majority perhaps?

Do you not know that Tumours due to radiation may not appear for 15 years, very difficult to connect back and that in 4 to 5% of Cancer patients (10,000 of thousands in the US alone) the primary tumor is never found so even a bowel/liver/whatever cancer could be a result of a metastasise from a brain tumour caused from cell phones.

Cancer of unknown primary origin (CUP), look it up.

And actually, it's irrelevant how many have not developed it, once some have, it's a problem.

djpbarry wrote: »

“It is not known what, if any, harm the chemicals might cause...”

I can only take from this that you think pesticides running through your body are no harm because you never read/were told otherwise? OK then.

djpbarry wrote: »

I think you need to put down The Telegraph now.

As above.

djpbarry wrote: »

Because there is no evidence linking GM foods with obesity.

Well you see that's the thing, their is

http://www.globalresearch.ca/does-genetically-modified-gm-food-increase-the-incidence-of-obesity/29869

You seriously never wondered why they have such high BMI over there? People need to open their eyes and look at all the knock on effects of this.

djpbarry wrote: »

I’m already reading plenty of sensationalist nonsense about GM, so I won’t be at all surprised if I see more in the future.

Open your eyes.

djpbarry wrote: »

Are you even reading these articles?

One of us is.

djpbarry wrote: »

What are you talking about? Based on that plot, women of child-bearing age are extremely unlikely to be diagnosed with cancer.

But alot more likely than men in that group...why? Can you reply without the smart arse undertones?

djpbarry wrote: »

Have those scientists since published their findings?

I don't know. I may check, Industry backed bodies making their life miserable as a result is a good deterrent.

djpbarry wrote: »

He was immediately pulled from any more media appearances by the institute director.

http://www.energygrid.com/ecology/2002/10jm-pusztai.html

He was dismissed for incompetence as part of a disinformation campaign by the influential pro-GM lobby, which was quick to trade the longstanding reputation of a top-level scientist (with a brilliant 36-year career) for continued public ignorance of the potential dangers of GM foods and GM research. They did this by portraying Pusztai as a doddery old fool who had made a mistake with his research by using potatoes, not modified with the non-toxic snowdrop lectin, but with the very toxic Concanavalin A (Con A) lectin. Pusztai's results, therefore, would imply nothing about the safety of genetic engineering, only his own incompetance, which would justify him being "retired".


This smear campaign, led not only by companies like Monsanto but also the director of the Rowett Research Institute himself, Professor Philip James, was effective. Pusztai was discredited and ridiculed by government scientists and newspapers alike, bringing an ignoble end to an illustrious scientific career. And because he was still under contract with the institute, he was effectively gagged and thus prevented from defending himself. The two-faced James would say publicly, "I am desperate to protect him [Pusztai]" whilst privately threatening him with court action if he spoke to the press.


In the end, a scientific audit committee vindicated Pusztai's work — it confirmed that he had been working with the snowdrop lectin and not the toxic Con A lectin, although it stopped short at agreeing with Pusztai's conclusions. (Quite what other conclusions can be drawn from Pusztai's research is a complete mystery! In fact, the committee didn't make a single recommendation on how he could have improved his experimentation, except to nebulously state that it could have been better designed.) Finally, in February 1999, a 20-member international panel of scientists publicly went on record to support Pusztai's research. But by this time it was too late. The disinformation campaign left enough lingering doubts in the public's mind to dilute the biting implications of Pusztai's ground-breaking research.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/283/5405/1094







The new PCB: Monsanto's Roundup weed killer turning up in air, rain and rivers

I don't really have an opinion on Monsanto and Irish farmers (I really don't have enough information to form one), but I used to work with GM plants (not intended to be released into the open, but for glasshouse production of recombinant protein, and not a food crop) and I noticed that a lot of the conferences I attended were sponsored by Monsanto or Syngenta or the likes. I always wondered if researchers came up with some anti-GM crop research, would they be allowed to present their findings.

I suppose that really wouldn't happen anyway because 1) it's really hard to get grants these days and no scientist wants to do research that could potentially put themselves out of a job by showing GM to be unsafe, and 2) no one gives money to do research for research's sake anymore. If you apply to the likes of the HRB or SFI, it's all about having some sort of medical or commercial application of what you're applying for. It's REALLY hard to get money for proof of concept experiments; it's all about focussing on getting a return on an investment (however hypothetical).

As you can imagine from my background, I'm not anti-GM but I am very pro-GM-control. I think it's easier than we (as scientists) ever realised to have escapes into the wild type population (for example, plastid transformation was lorded over nuclear tranformation as being 100% safe because the transgenes could not be passed on in pollen, but recent papers by Pal Maliga of Rutgers University - the man considered as the "father" of plastid transformation in higher plants - show that this is not the case, but it took around 15 years from the first use of the technology before this was discovered).

Pharma companies take 10-20 years to bring a drug to market. GM recombinant proteins will undergo the same rigorous testing. The way I see it, GM food crops should be the same.

SURROGATE PROTEINS
Biotechnology companies rarely test the transgenic protein actually produced in their engineered crops.
Instead, for testing purposes they make use of a bacterially generated surrogate protein that may differ in
important respects from the plant-produced one. The same genetic construct used to transform the plant
is expressed in bacteria (usually E. coli), and the surrogate transgenic protein is then extracted from the
bacteria. This surrogate protein is then employed for all subsequent testing, such as short-term animal
feeding studies and allergenicity assessments. This is, however, a serious mistake in testing paradigms,
since plants and bacteria are very likely to produce different proteins even when transformed with the
same gene (for discussion, see Schubert, 2002).

This part isn't really true any more. In fact, a LOT of focus over the last ten years has gone into looking at protein extraction methods for various plant species. The fact is, it's really easy to extract protein (even specific ones) from bacterial cultures. There are TONNES of protocols and it's easy to scale the process up to get LOTS of protein (you need a lot to do all your analysis). It's significantly harder to extract specific proteins from plant cells. There are a lot of problems wrt removing the cell wall, and that's before you consider that some proteins are pretty "sticky" (i.e. they like to latch onto membranes and organelles) and tough to get out. Then you also have the issue that it's a lot harder to scale up the amount of plant tissue you have available to you. For bacteria you can grow your cultures overnight and have a significant amount to work with, but for plants you may have to wait two months for them to have sufficient biomass, and you also have to take into account that glasshouse and tissue culture space in research facilities is precious; there simply isn't space to grow as many plants as you want. So this point is more from a practicality point of view, rather than companies being too lazy or evil to test with the correct protein and it's something that is improving every year. I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, but often, especially ten years ago, it simply wasn't possible to get enough protein out of plants to test with.

djpbarry wrote: »

It's extremely unlikely that anyone is going to show that all GM foods are unsafe.

Such an experiment could never take place, there are too many permutations and new crops being developed. But one GM-isn't-safe result would have a wide impact on public perception.

djpbarry wrote: »

Sure - we've seen that already:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19654825

But we see knee-jerk reactions to lots of things, be they GM crops, nuclear power or drug side-effects. I don’t think it’s correct to say that this dictates who gets science funding and who doesn’t.

The point to all this, as you allude to, is there is a difference between the scientific fundamentals and how the technology is put into practice in industry – being critical of the latter does not necessitate being opposed to the former.

I wouldn't say public opinion has no effect on where funding goes. For governmental agencies at least, they have to be seen to spend taxpayers' money on "relevant" research. If there was significant public outcry on a particular subject then I imagine they would find it hard to justify offering hundred grand towards research on it. Not that that is right-if we went with popular public opinion we'd probably all be prescribed antibiotics on a prophylactic basis >_>

Companies, of course, can offer money to research whatever they want. They only have to answer to their shareholders, which probably means they aren't going to be too invested in looking into results that damage their product's commercial viability.

I definitely appreciate that there is a difference between the beginning research and where the company goes with it in the end. I think the biggest problem is that if the government won't impose statutory testing, it's not in a company's interest to try to prove themselves wrong, particularly if, like in America, they have something like GRAS going for them.

I'm not sure fears about the American situation are validly applied to the Irish situation because European law is a LOT stricter with respect to GMs. There are a lot of hoops to jump through to get ethical approval and to meet the EPA's standards just to do the primary research. I honestly don't know enough about the law to know how hard it would be to bring GM food crops to field trial, let alone market, but I imagine it would be a fair bit tougher than across the pond.

djpbarry wrote: »

Ok, but does the average person in Ireland really have any idea what kind of (publicly-funded) research is taking place there? I doubt it, particularly given that there seems to be a popular belief at present that Irish third-level institutions do not compare well internationally.

That's a good point. I wouldn't say their consideration of our universities' international standing has much to do with it, but more likely than not their awareness of what research is going on is limited to what pops up in the news every once in a while.

EFSA is after discovering a potentially Toxic viral gene (It was always there but since their is very little to no research/testing of GMOs since people are the guinea pigs, it went unnoticed)

How should a regulatory agency announce they have discovered something potentially very important about the safety of products they have been approving for over twenty years?


In the course of analysis to identify potential allergens in GMO crops, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has belatedly discovered that the most common genetic regulatory sequence in commercial GMOs also encodes a significant fragment of a viral gene (Podevin and du Jardin 2012). This finding has serious ramifications for crop biotechnology and its regulation, but possibly even greater ones for consumers and farmers. This is because there are clear indications that this viral gene (called Gene VI) might not be safe for human consumption.

The researchers themselves concluded that the presence of segments of Gene VI “might result in unintended phenotypic changes”. They reached this conclusion because similar fragments of Gene VI have already been shown to be active on their own (e.g. De Tapia et al. 1993). In other words, the EFSA researchers were unable to rule out a hazard to public health or the environment.

In general, viral genes expressed in plants raise both agronomic and human health concerns (reviewed in Latham and Wilson 2008). This is because many viral genes function to disable their host in order to facilitate pathogen invasion.

Commercial transgenic crop varieties can also contain superfluous copies of the transgene, including those that are incomplete or rearranged (Wilson et al 2006). These could be important additional sources of Gene VI protein. The decision of regulators to allow such multiple and complex insertion events was always highly questionable, but the realization that the CaMV 35S promoter contains Gene VI sequences provides yet another reason to believe that complex insertion events increase the likelihood of a biosafety problem.

A further key point relates to the biotech industry and their campaign to secure public approval and a permissive regulatory environment. This has led them to repeatedly claim, firstly, that GMO technology is precise and predictable; and secondly, that their own competence and self-interest would prevent them from ever bringing potentially harmful products to the market; and thirdly, to assert that only well studied and fully understood transgenes are commercialized. It is hard to imagine a finding more damaging to these claims than the revelations surrounding Gene VI.

Even now that EFSA’s own researchers have belatedly considered the risk issues, no one can say whether the public has been harmed, though harm appears a clear scientific possibility. Considered from the perspective of professional and scientific risk assessment, this situation represents a complete and catastrophic system failure.

Footnotes
1) EFSA regulators might now be regretting their failure to implement meaningful GMO monitoring. It would be a good question for European politicians to ask EFSA and for the board of EFSA to ask the GMO panel, whose job it is to implement monitoring.

^:eek:


http://independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/regulators-discover-a-hidden-viral-gene-in-commercial-gmo-crops/

RUCKING FETARD wrote: »

In better health is questionably? Lingering on with some kind(s) of chronic illness be more like it.

Last 5 people I know that died, all died from Cancer. Near two thirds of Cancers are caused by diet, so says literature I've read. How do you know it's not GM?

Never smoked or drank, poultry and fish only, mid 30s, 2.5k swim every other day, blader....and out of the blue I get cancer:eek:
Quite sure it wasn't GM