In which a Maori beekeeper explains that he doesn't want any unnatural GM modified rats to offend the spirits, while laboriously smoking bees out of their hive to take their honey...
@xj9 It's not really about spirits, but about a selective definition of "natural"
"natural" and "unnatural" are usually proxies for "familiar/understood" and "unfamiliar/not understood". there is also "artificial" vs "natural" which is usually delineated by a thing's origin being human or not.
you are stuck on some semantics that are not important to the question at hand. all of these distinctions are arbitrary. the real issue is one of familiarity. we don't know how gene drives will behave in the wild. we know some very specific and powerful bits of information. we know how to make a gene drive, but we lack the wisdom to predict how it will behave in a large ecosystem.
we are very powerful beings, but we are young and shortsighted. if we aren't careful, we could easily make this planet very difficult to live on. we certainly *should* do and experiment with "unnatural" things, but scope and context need to be taken into account. we have no backup or test planet to work with and no real knowledge of existing in a truly hostile environment for extended periods of time.
Everybody is eating these today even though the radiation-induced mutations were completely random in their effects and might have modified much more genes than just those intended.
Now, when we came up with a very precise surgical techniques like CRISPR that are safer than anything known before a bunch of undereducated activists or scientific crooks like Seralini are fighting them as "unnatural"...
"During the past seventy years, mutation breeding led to more than 2250 plant varieties (Maluszynski et al. [4]; Ahloowalia et al. [5]). 70% of these varieties were released as directly induced mutants, and the other 30% from crosses with induced mutants. The use of chemical treatments was relatively infrequent, but gamma rays were frequently used (64%), followed by X-rays (22%) (Ahloowalia et al. [5])." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2218926/
the article you linked
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.1155%2F2007%2F82612
is a letter to the editor in response to
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.1080%2F02648725.2006.10648085
and
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.1155%2FJBB%2F2006%2F25376
> what crop has CRISPR made safer? how?
I answered with a specific example.
They mention plants that you could buy in supermarkets for the last 3 decades or more. And they are considered safe even though they were produced by chaotic mutations induced with X-ray and Ξ³. Indeed, they have no known side effects as confirmed by millions of consumers over decades.
Now, even more amazingly, these "X-ray varieties" are *excluded* from EU GMO directive restrictions because they are considered "traditionally safe".
At the same time CRISPR varieties are considered "unsafe" and subject to absurd restrictions, that were never in place with the X-ray experiments in 70's.
Even though with CRISPR you know *precisely* what you add/remove/modify and with X-ray you don't.
WTF?
>most characteristics of agricultural importance are quantitative genetic traits... Flavor, yield, cold hardiness, heat tolerance, drought resistance, and other components of ecological adaptation are all traits that involve many genes
@hushroom @xj9 it's like saying we can't use Mastodon because it requires "specialised software and trained people". It does, so what? We do both all the time. It's a poor excuse not an actual issue.
And "standard breeding techniques" took like 10k years to create modern dog breeds (and most of them with defects) and thousands of randomly mutated irradiated tomato samples to create the one we eat now.
And never created rice with vitamin A.
in my own garden i grew Brandywine, peacevine, and a few other novelty colored ones, and the big farm i bought sauce tomatoes from grows San Marzano.
Brandywine was introduced at least as early as 1886
San Marzano 1926
"Peacevine earned its name from its high content of gamma amino butyric acid, an amino acid that acts as a calming body sedative." - http://www.peaceseedslive.com/ (no GM or radiation here)
I know the atomic gardens are a thing (beginning in 1950s apparently), that produced some unique germplasm, but its not some huge breakthrough that revolutionized agriculture and impacted every crop.
Same with CRISPR, even though it occupies 100% of the agriculture related headlines on "Hacker news", get into books and forums on people actually involved and GM is just mentioned and acknowledged but not emphasized because in most cases its not the best technique for the job.
I am not against the concept of any of these high tech genetic modification techniques but from reading on developing agriculturally productive genetics, precise genetic modification isn't a useful technique. using a hex editor is rarely the best way to produce a computer binary you want. of course there are exceptions, like university of hawaii's papayas.
I am against "patents" on genetics,
I am against doing the same idiotic arrogant "THIS TIME we really fully understand the ecosystem *introduces species/chemical and makes things worse*
i am also against any intentional use of even low tech methods that create F1 sterile hybrids
if vegetables were electronics this is like the cryptographic firmware DRM implementations that enable abusive enforcement of "intellectual property rights". i just learned the general term for all of these techniques is "Genetic Use Restriction Technology". So GURT = DRM for plants, thats what i don't support at all.
> humans actually were doing efficient agriculture for centuries
It wasn't really too efficient if in 19th century people were still dying of hunger due to poor harvest or pest.
Part of the Green Revolution of 20th century was creation of high-yield crops, which allowed to increase yield from the same amount of arable ground tens of times.
It's not efficient agriculture either if people are getting blind in Asia due to vit A deficiency...
just like every single year i've been alive, even with precision GMOs, basically never due to global production shortage, also caused by politics and economics preventing distribution, not just agricultural technology
>Green Revolution
Was enabled by discoveries such as the haber-bosch process that consumes fossil fuel energy to convert atmospheric nitrogen to various forms of fertilizer. the genetics don't work without artificially high nutrient levels from synthetic fertilizers, and [pest|herb]icide to suppress competition.
if you don't want to invest millions in farm equipment and depend on chemical factories, the average food grower will be better off with landrace genetics
http://garden.lofthouse.com/adaptivar-landrace.phtml
Average gardeners won't feed a city. They won't even feed their own family unless the whole family works in the field for most of the year, leaving no time for creative jobs or education.
Not surprisingly, this is precisely how people lived in pre-industrial era with life expectancy of some 30 years.
@hushroom @xj9 Bt brinjal was *designed* to be resistant to particular pest (FSB).
Trademarks are not patents. If you are a farmer you can buy the same herbicide under trade name of Roundup (and pay more) or chemically identical generic glyphosate (cheaper) produced by other companies since patents expired in 2000.
>Roundup Ready is the Monsanto trademark for its [!]patented[!] line of genetically modified crop seeds that are resistant to its glyphosate-based [just trademarked, phew] herbicide, Roundup.
So can you save the seeds and replant them?
>Saving beans for replanting on your own farm β Right now, you CANNOT SAVE ROUNDUP READY SOYBEANS FOR REPLANTING. After the patent expires, you can save certain varieties of Roundup Ready 1 soybeans for replanting on your own farm. It likely will not be legal to raise varieties with expiring trait patents and sell them to your neighbors.
>Genuity Roundup Ready 2 Yield trait technology and Roundup Ready trait technology are protected by different patents. While the Roundup Ready soybean trait patent expires in 2015, the Genuity Roundup Ready 2 Yield trait is protected by patents for many more years.
No thanks Monsanto, My freedoms aren't being respected
1) The freedom to save or grow seed for replanting or for any other purpose.
2) The freedom to share, trade, or sell seed to others.
3) The freedom to trial and study seed and to share or publish information about it. 4)The freedom to select or adapt the seed, make crosses with it, or use it to breed new lines and varieties.
image.png
beans, i do save and replant. for squash and brassicas, i plant both saved seeds and new varieties that sound interesting.
im a pretty beginning gardener just doing this for personal enjoyment and hobby, so i just do whats fun for me and if anything is successful i eat it and give it to friends and neighbors, or feed it to chickens. other gardeners around here are much more dialed in with planting diets, routines, and varieties and that stuff.
Especially if its government funded, in a basically non-abstract way the citizens have paid for its development, they should have the rights to access it.
100% right and this is precisely how Bt brinjal or Golden Rice are developed http://www.isaaa.org/resources/publications/pocketk/35/default.asp
The only reason why part of the biotech market was initially taken over by US companies like Monsanto was because other companies did not even try to compete due to GM-phobia in their own countries.
This is now changing, mostly because Asian countries stopped listening to activists like Greenpeace or their own Vandana Shiva
actual publication based on the DOI in your link -> http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.1155%2F2007%2F82612