locust said:
Of the nine points you made, a couple are simple truths, a couple are false, and the rest are far more complicated than you present.
The basic error is to lump all GMOs. They are no more alike than, say, all insects. Very few assertions are going to be true of all of them.
This is just as important a recognition, and just as rarely met, in the defenders of "GMOs". For example, the use of benefits from one GMO to justify or defend or promote damaging deployment of another is deeply irresponsible, to the point of criminal deception.
dinosaur said:
The FDA allows crops with such adverse effects to be sold? Nobody sues due to these adverse health effects?
The FDA does no general research capable of discovering or detecting most harms - it requires the marketing corporation to run brief tests for known possibilities of direct short term toxicity and a couple of known allergic reactions, and takes their word for their results. The kinds of problems caused by trans fats, say, would not be detectable in this manner. As no long term consumption studies in a mammal have ever been done for any GMO, and epidemiological studies are made difficult by the lack of labeling, ubiquity of exposure, and the existence of a black market in GMOs (control groups and exposure regimes are difficult to establish), any harms will be a long time in revealing themselves.
aqueous said:
DNA of a food does not affect the consumer. Evidence: the human gut dissolves the DNA into amino acids before digestion is complete. It matters not what order those amino acids appear in the polymer.
There are some issues with the DNA used in some GMOs, when incorporated into foodstuffs. The antibiotic generating markers used in the engineering process, for example, do sometimes make their way into the mouth, esophagus, stomach, and small intestine, where they are made available to the bacteria living there - a very complex flora we are just beginning to investigate, and one in which DNA exchange and abduction from the medium is very common. Holding this in mind, consider that most Western diets include at least occasional low doses of antibiotics from industrial meat and dairy husbandry, as well as bacteria that have colonized plants and so forth. Add to that the common oral abuse of antibiotics in many countries, including some now converting much of the agriculture to GMOs of various kinds, and what does your good common sense tell you should be investigated before giving a particular foodstuff GMO the Good Housekeeping seal of approval?
Well, it's not.
aqueous said:
I'll be very surprised if you have any credible studies that speak to the harm of GMOs
So would I. Studies capable of detecting the kinds of harm obviously possible - just the stuff we know about, not even counting the new hazards inevitable in such a new and poorly understood field of engineering - are not being done, in general. This is visible: Look at the emergency research into potential GMO effects launched in the wake of the mass bee deaths of recent years, for example: that was pretty basic stuff, most of it - but it wasn't just sitting there in the literature for reference, as a sane person would expect. The US soybean crop was 80% GMO before anyone had checked out that particular GMO for its effects on bees, the US landscape was almost completely exposed to Bt engineered corn with only very short term and limited investigation into direct bee toxicity performed - the word you're looking for is "imbecile". So maybe - jury is still out, but the focus is narrowing to neonicotinoids - those two particular GMOs don't harm bees directly (the indirect harms, via landscape modification, are another story), but if so we were just lucky, not competent.
There is no safety in ignorance, dumb luck, and the conscientious safeguarding of the public welfare by enormously profiting business interests with hundreds of millions in investment at stake.
Which brings us to this, which is flagrant
Virtually every agricultural product in existence, before modern genetic engineering methods were available, is a GMO!
Organic chemistry is not the same as cooking food over a campfire. Nuclear power is not just another way of boiling water like all the other ways of boiling water. The bypassing of all the built in safeguards of mutation, hybridization, and reproduction that have protected us all this time - including those of sheer incapability - makes a fundamental difference. That's why the stuff was invented - it can do stuff that's completely impossible otherwise, and like nothing ever seen before, This is brand new, and extraordinarily powerful, and just beginning to be barely understood. The researchers are in a position comparable to that of the first nuke engineers - the ones that used chunks of plutonium as doorstops, and tried to get permission to blow an oil harbor into the Alaskan coastline using hydrogen bombs. Except what they are making can reproduce itself, and live without them, in a system of reactions and influences that makes nuclear engineering look like playing tic tac toe.
side comments:
But, to the main point I was discussing before you went off into the weeds (): DNA is not a carcinogen.
Viral DNA/RNA, inserted into host genomes, often causes cancer. Some types of cancer - cervical cancer, say - have no other major cause. This hints, btw, at the range of side effects that inserting DNA like that can trigger. Prediction is in practical fact impossible - only careful research into each and every different GMO over long stretches of time and in a wide variety of circumstances can begin to get a handle on this stuff.
As for your concern about Roundup, that was one of the principal motivations for developing GMO technology in the first place. Now it's possible to give certain plants a natural immunity to certain competing species that Roundup would be targeting. By the same token, it's possible to make plants immune to certain harmful insects, thereby eliminating the need to dump tons of insecticides on farmers' fields.
The way they have, in reality, made plants "immune to certain harmful insects" was by having each and every plant in a field manufacture insecticide within its tissues. This is not a replacement for "dumping tons of insecticide", but a means for doing that cheaply. It is a particularly bad means, in that it sets up nearly ideal circumstances for the evolution of resistance in the target pests - the bane of insecticides generally, and something that is prevented in responsible agricultural practice by limiting and timing application. Also, in practice, as the comparatively benign insecticide that is the common GMO is rendered increasingly useless (for everyone) by such ill conceived overuse, much more toxic insecticides must be employed in fields starved of natural predators and infrastructurally dependent on this mode of pest management.
But GMOs don't produce the chemical used in Roundup !!!
Partly because of the large increase in application rate, and that directly on the plants, and partly because of the mechanism of resistance engineered into them, Roundup Ready crops do tend to harbor the chemical - including in the seeds and leaves and flowers that people or their animals eat.