Genetically Modified Maize Is Toxic — Greenpeace 655
gandracu writes "It appears that a variety of genetically modified maize produced by Monsanto is toxic for the liver and kidneys. What's worse, Monsanto knew about it and tried to conceal the facts in its own publications. Greenpeace fought in court to obtain the data and had it analyzed by a team of experts. MON863, the variety of GM maze in question, has been authorized for markets in the US, EU, Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Mexico, and the Philippines. Here are Greenpeace's brief on the study and their account of how the story was unearthed (both PDFs)."
Hmm. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Summary? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Progress ? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cant we just eat corn as it was created by natu (Score:2, Informative)
(This is why you'll find references to 'corn' in European texts predating Columbus: it is being used in the general sense.)
Greenpeace data? Same as Monsanto's data (Score:3, Informative)
Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology: http://www.springerlink.com/content/02648wu132m078 04/fulltext.html [springerlink.com]
So the "Independent Scientists" for Greenpeace got the Monsanto data and reanalyzed it and say there are significant biological differences (which is different from statistically significant). The only definite conclusion though I can find is that rats should not subsist entirely on this genetically modified corn.Re:Summary? (Score:4, Informative)
Journal looks high quality: Springer published (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA. The peer reviewed journal noted is "Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology" published by Springer. http://www.environmental-expert.com/magazine/spri
Looks a proper journal to me.
"Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology is a repository of significant, full-length articles describing original experimental or theoretical research work pertaining to the scientific aspects of contaminants in the environment. It provides a place for the publication of detailed, definitive, complete, credible reports concerning advances and discoveries in the fields of air, water, and soil contamination and pollution, human health aspects, and in disciplines concerned with the introduction, presence, and effects of deleterious substances in the total environment. Acceptable manuscripts for the Archives are the ones that deal with some aspects of environmental contaminants, including those that lie in the domains of analytical chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, toxicology, agricultural, air, water, and soil chemistry.
All manuscripts are subject to review by workers in the field for significance, credibility and accuracy, as well as for proper arrangement (format, style, language, etc.) Review articles, abstracts, short communications or notes will not be accepted for publication. Where appropriate, these will be referred to Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, or Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. "
Proteins can be toxic (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Toxicity based on what? (Score:5, Informative)
But even if this corn does NOT produce anything un-natural, you still have the issue of farmers being able to indiscriminately spray pesticides on their fields without affecting the corn. Undoubtedly this means that more RoundUp is getting on the corn, in the ground, etc., than would otherwise be possible, so I wouldn't doubt that some of the pesticide is moving up through the food chain to us. Either way, you have non-natural chemicals entering the human food supply, which could easily have adverse health effects.
While we're on it, I want to say that Monsanto is about as virulently evil as Greenpeace when it comes to protecting their interests. They have actually made patents on seeds, and have gone after farmers for "patent infringement" if they find evidence of seed on their fields with similar genetic code. Farmers have been jailed over this; Monsanto's kind of like the MPAA of grain. They are even pushing "Terminator" seeds, which are sterile, forcing farmers into purchasing seed from suppliers every year instead of keeping their seed for the next crop. Monsanto tried to cover up reports of the adverse health effects of BGH (bovine growth hormone), the list goes on and on. The wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has decent, somewhat unbiased (IMO) coverage of the issue and I'm sure you can google up some more.
Re:Toxicity based on what? (Score:5, Informative)
Umm, most plants produce natural toxins they use for biological warfare against other plants and animals. Most genetic modification is an attempt to either increase a toxin to kill a pest (rootworm) or increase a resistance to a toxin to fight another plant or a artificially introduced toxin. In this case the corn was designed to create a toxin (Bt-toxin (Cry3Bb1)) and as a byproduct also is said to create (Cry1Ab).
So the most probable indication is that one of those two toxins has more of a negative affect upon rats and thus possibly other mammals like humans than was previously believed. Greenpeace responsibly refrained from making specific claims about the intermediate causation as that is still not yet determined. There is, however, a reasonable amount of evidence that this strain of GM corn could be dangerous to humans and animals and should be investigated and possibly pulled from the market or at least labeled until the topic is fully investigated.
Greenpeace is a bunch of marketing people for the most part. It is possible every tuesday night they gather beneath an abandoned monastery and eat human babies.That doesn't however, speak to the accuracy or implications of this research.
Genetic engineering is a science where people mess about with code without understanding the full implications of what that will result in. It's like modifying software while only having read and understood a small portion of the code and not the other code dependent upon it. As such, I think that while it is promising, extra caution and care needs to be exercised and I don't think the FDA or the commercial enterprises involved give a damn about anything but money and are uninterested in taking appropriate precautions.
Genetically modified foods almost all produce toxins. The question is did some change to the genetic structure cause it to create different ones or toxins in different levels and what does that mean for normal people? Another part of the problem is the food almost always appears to be the same as non-modified food and is often not labeled. Would you eat some random plant when you did not know if it was edible and no one had ever seen it before? Every GM food is one of those. Most are probably fine, just like most plants are. Some might be developing toxins that are harmful or concentrating something from their environment which is harmful. If we made it to other planets and found them with ecosystems very much like the earth, but separated by millions of years of evolution, would you trust that something that looks like corn has not adapted in such a way that it is poisonous? That's sort of what GM food is, a common food, modified not by evolution but by man in a way we don't fully understand the consequences of. Often the results are beneficial, but caution should be the byword and thorough testing and serious consideration of possible problems. The fact that this corn might be at the grocery store near you with no indication that it is not the natural corn most people expect it to be is a deception and needs to be considered.
Coming from Monsanto it is not suprising (Score:2, Informative)
Posilac [wikipedia.org]
There is more than enough evidence that Monsanto is willingly and knowingly putting human lives at risk.
Re:Toxicity based on what? (Score:5, Informative)
April 8, 2003: The German competent authorities publish their assessment of the MON863 application. In their report they state that the amino acid sequence of the Cry3B1 toxin produced by the MON863 maize has similarities to some other toxins. Most notably, the German authority found some "homologies to sequences from Clostridium bifermentans, Caenorhabditis elegans, Vibrio cholerae and Bacillus popilliae." These homologies are of high relevance in respect to human and animal health.
It seems warranted to at least be concerned about the unknown effects of introducing a protein which is classified as a toxin into one's diet. Particularly where the "science" backing it up is not analyzed independently, and cannot be reviewed, as the underlying data submitted to the regulatory agencies is held to be confidential.
Alternatively, you seem to suggest that data or experience suggesting the safe use of substances independently of each other somehow implies they are safely used together. It's fairly easy to come up with counterexamples in everyday life (ammonia and chlorine as cleaning supplies, for example), let alone in the more complex and unpredictable field of biochemistry.
Re:Progress ? (Score:1, Informative)
Agriculture is technology, and as such, is capable of being used in both constructive and destructive ways.
Lacandon [geocities.com]
Agroforestry [mongabay.com]
Sustainable Agriculture [rainforest-alliance.org]
The only reason rain forest agriculture is currently unsustainable is because of the ease of slash and burn techniques and, frankly, laziness.
Re:Journal looks high quality: Springer published (Score:5, Informative)
You have the Science Publisher Springer: http://www.springer.com/ [springer.com]
And then you have the Axel Springer Verlag, which produces the Bild: http://www.axelspringer.com/ [axelspringer.com]
Do not let the common "Springer" part confuse you
The 'good' of genetically manupilated crops (Score:2, Informative)
As for genetically modified (GM) crops, I fear he really simplifies the subject too much to be useful in making a rational decision about the pro's and cons. Basically, he over-optimistically only conveys the pros, while barely mentionning any of the cons - as if they were unimportant.
It should be noted however, that with living organisms, you can not simply test it out in the wild, and then expect to be able to put the genie back in the bottle when things go wrong. Once you contaminated a natural area, and the contamination has a sufficiently advantage (in a darwinistic sense) to stay around in the genepool, there is no way in hell you can get rid of it completely, when it turns out it is damaging humans, or other species and ecological systems.
Now, his counterargument that those won't survive in the wild seems rather weak. In effect, some GM genes *already* have contaminated other 'wild' crops, and it didn't sizzle out in the wild, on the contrary (a prominent example of that are some strains of GM corn in south-america). So... it may be that some GMs will not survive in the wild, but you can bet some *will*, however. And he, nor anyone else, can garantuee that such GM or hybrid crops can't be damaging or unhealthy to the ecosystem or local species, including humans.
Also, the reductionistic view of "we're not doing anything else then what people have been doing for centuries" is somewhat misleading too. Yes, people have been breeding crops, and cultivated crops are not 'natural' in the sense that they occur in the wild...but it's an unfair analogy, because one is comparing oranges with apples. For instance, with GM, it is perfectly possible to make genemodifications between two completely different species of plants. In effect, this trans-species swapping of genes with GM, can be done between animals and plants. In all those centuries that "we have always done this" I would like to see any example where this has actually been done before.
No; this is a totally new technique, with new possibilities, certainly, but also new consequences (which we don't know anything about) and new dangers. You can't just shrug those of with claiming, falsely, that we've been using those techniques for millenia. And you can't just merrily test it out in the wild, and see if anything happens.
Apart from that, even purely economically, I doubt it has all those beneficial effects the author claims it has or will have - but more about that at the end.
So, in conclusion; the author is fully right about some things, but a bit too simplistic (and, perhaps, biased) in other points. The nuclear/weather point is, indeed, logical. The world-demographics is correct, though there is a need for caution as to determine what is the cause, and if simple extrapolation is enough to make a conclusion. As for the GM-crops, I fear he is a bit misguided himself; this is obvious by the naive assumption of how much 'good' GM-crops will do - which is, I suspect, derived from an overly (and typical USA) optimistic viewpoint on capitalism, which I don't share.
GM-corporations do not care about worldhunger, nor about the living quality of poor farmers in third (or first, for that matter) worldcountries. What matters to them is maximising profit for their shareholders. In the authors' view, this is fully compatible with eachother, but I rather think that, in the end, you can't have both: if it's really about maximising profit, then it is about holding control of the market, and if it's about control, then it's not about the freedoms and abilities and rights of the farmer. This already can be seen by the fact many GM corporations have forbidden the 's
A note on 'sterile' seed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Journal looks high quality: Springer published (Score:3, Informative)
What? You trust the NIH?
"It was Ancel Keys, paradoxically, who introduced the low-fat-is-good-health dogma in the 50's with his theory that dietary fat raises cholesterol levels and gives you heart disease. Over the next two decades, however, the scientific evidence supporting this theory remained stubbornly ambiguous. The case was eventually settled not by new science but by politics. It began in January 1977, when a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its ''Dietary Goals for the United States,'' advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of ''killer diseases'' supposedly sweeping the country. It peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat. By that time, fat had become ''this greasy killer'' in the memorable words of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the model American breakfast of eggs and bacon was well on its way to becoming a bowl of Special K with low-fat milk, a glass of orange juice and toast, hold the butter -- a dubious feast of refined carbohydrates.
In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith. Basil Rifkind, who oversaw the relevant trials for the N.I.H., described their logic this way: they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same. ''It's an imperfect world,'' Rifkind told me. ''The data that would be definitive is ungettable, so you do your best with what is available.''
Some of the best scientists disagreed with this low-fat logic, suggesting that good science was incompatible with such leaps of faith, but they were effectively ignored."
(http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res= 9F04E2D61F3EF934A35754C0A9649C8B63&sec=health&spon =&pagewanted=all [nytimes.com])
The NIH is for sale like any other government agency. If you have an agenda to push, just show up with your bag of cash and a representative will be with you shortly.
Re:Terminator technology. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:They're (not) associated (Score:4, Informative)
"Springer Verlag" is the (german) root of the scientific publisher founded by a man called "Julius Springer" in 1842 which is now "Springer Science+Business Media" (Which is basically the Springer Verlag merged with Kluwer Publishers). If you are interested here is the company history: http://www.springer-sbm.de/index.php?L=0&id=165 [springer-sbm.de]
The "Axel Springer Verlag" is a completely different company, which was founded by a man called "Axel Springer" in 1946. See also: http://www.axelspringer.com/englisch/unterneh/fra
The founders of both companies shared the last name, hence the "Springer" in both company names.
Re:Proteins can be toxic (Score:2, Informative)
If I recall... (Score:4, Informative)
At least, that's how it was explained to me some time ago. I could very well be wrong.
Re:Summary? (Score:5, Informative)
The reason they can trace mad cow to individual cows is because the inspections done to test for mad cow disease are done very early in the process. The only thing they do know about the cow at that point is which farm it came from. They still dont know anything about what the cow was fed, what injections it has recieved, etc.
And the cases where they have singled it down to single cows were in Canada (as far as I know), where the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has developed a Canadian Cattle Identification Program for cattle and bison. This was necessary because of the BSE scare, because no responsible government would spend that kind of money if it wasnt to help out an industry that was being damaged by bad PR.
This Identification Program is not that hard for a country that slaughters 65,000 cattle per week. In the US we slaughter about 100,000 cattle per day. That is a huge difference. The same rules and procedures do not always scale up easily by that level.
I just need to know that they have to have a method to keep from double dosing animals
The problem is not only tracking this data, but verifying it. You are correct that individual farmers mostly keep track of what is happening to their herds. But if they are going to be passing on that information then you need government/industry oversight to check their claims. Without this oversight the farmers could just lie. This is where the costs come in, not just the price of the hard drives and data entry people necessary to keep track of the numbers.
And with meat costs already going up because of the rising price of corn (because of ethanol), this is the worse time to add extra costs to our meat inspection/packaging process.
As for public panic, I frankly don't care. If they worry that people will stop eating their produce because of what they put in it, maybe they should think twice about what they put in it.
Not caring about public panic is a very irresponsible attitude. Public panic did enormous damage to the Canadian and UK cattle markets, even though the actual damage from BSE was very minimal. It cost their governments alot of money in subsidies to keep the industries going. Even if it was the fault of the leaders of the cattle industry, why should individual farmers who had no idea what was going on suffer also?
Public panic can often make problems much worse. For instance if there was a disease outbreak in a major city, a public panic would cause people to flee the city and spread the disease further.
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