Author Topic: Cherrios Facebook Fail  (Read 9907 times)

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Offline NGTM-1R

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Eh... he's using "GM" to refer exclusively to the modern kind. Stubborn, but not self-contradictory.

He's stating that natural progression through unnatural selection has qualitatively different results not excluding time to output from direct modification. Considering we don't create designer genes, we splice existing ones, that's a direct contradiction. Selective breeding is also gene-splicing but without the certainty.

He's also saying GM is outright change which would not occur without human intervention and this is why it is bad, after stating selective breeding is exactly that (unnatural selection).

Even in his own context he's contradicting himself.
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Offline Lorric

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Eh... he's using "GM" to refer exclusively to the modern kind. Stubborn, but not self-contradictory.

Yes. I'm talking about the difference between the two methods. Whether it's natural or not isn't an issue for me. One is tried and tested over hundreds of years, the other has never been done before. If it's proven to be harmless and healthy then serve it up and I'll chomp it down! I don't care whether it's GM crops or maybe in the future I wonder if meat could be grown instead of having to kill animals. I'd eat that too if it was safe.

 

Offline Nuke

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if i didnt kill it its not food.
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Offline Dragon

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I'm not against GMOs. However, I am against corporations denying people knowledge what's in their food. So, they should not only mention that GMO is in there, but also some sort of code so that buyers may check exactly what kind of changes were made. I'd buy it anyway, but people deserve to know what they eat.

 

Offline redsniper

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SCIENCE is BAD
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Offline karajorma

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It's worth pointing out that one of the biggest invasive species stories on that list (africanised bees) might not have happened if they had used modern genetic techniques rather than the cross-breeding that the stupid environmentalists now insist is better. The African bees were known to be more aggressive but hives of them were needed in order to cross-breed them.

Ironically the kind of scenario you see  in the movies, where there is an accidental release of something bred by crazy genetic manipulation was actually caused by the kind of cross-breeding the hippies tell us we should be using. Well done guys! :yes:


To be honest though, when it comes down to it, I side with the guy who saved 1 billion lives over hippies.
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Offline Nuke

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im kinda concerned the thing that happened with nuclear power will happen to gm foods. that being a bunch of uninformed hippies protesting it until a defacto research ban is established (which in the case of nuclear power resulted in us still using 1970's reactor designs). hippies are bad for science.
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Offline MP-Ryan

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im kinda concerned the thing that happened with nuclear power will happen to gm foods. that being a bunch of uninformed hippies protesting it until a defacto research ban is established (which in the case of nuclear power resulted in us still using 1970's reactor designs). hippies are bad for science.

It's a very real scenario.

Policy-oriented protest is usually not science-driven, but fear-based, and most of the people doing the protesting have great intentions but are sorely uneducated on this subject.  They think internet "research" is a substitute for education.

Oh, and to whomever said the IP of genetic modification is ****ed up, you are 100% right, and it's why most of the folks I studied with do not support gene patents except in cases where a person has designed a gene from the ground up - a completely novel, artificial sequence (which to my knowledge has not actually been done except in primer sequences, which aren't genes).
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Offline Beskargam

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just want to say environmentalist /= to hippie ban science GMO. I'm an environmental scientist to be, am my compatriots and myself are not up at arms protesting GMOs

 

Offline MP-Ryan

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Teehee.  I'm posting in the comments section of that second site Alex linked to; it's hilarious.

EDIT:  Oh good grief, this site belongs to a raw milk advocate who recommended raw milk consumption to a pregnant woman who asked about it.  *boggles*  Maybe I don't want to even bother... yikes.

EDIT2:  Oh, and she makes her money on a food allergy treatment program.  Except what she's talking about are food sensitivities.  Which she is attributing to the immune system.  And sensitivities are not immunological in nature.  In fact, very few people have food allergies as an allergy measn that consuming a food results in anaphylaxis.  And she proposes that probiotics can cure allergies (they can't) but makes no mention of the fact that they can be used to treat sensitivities (they can).  And...

*head explodes*

How the hell did you stumble on this wackadoodle, Alex?
« Last Edit: December 04, 2012, 11:45:51 pm by MP-Ryan »
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Offline MP-Ryan

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Yes. I'm talking about the difference between the two methods. Whether it's natural or not isn't an issue for me. One is tried and tested over hundreds of years, the other has never been done before. If it's proven to be harmless and healthy then serve it up and I'll chomp it down! I don't care whether it's GM crops or maybe in the future I wonder if meat could be grown instead of having to kill animals. I'd eat that too if it was safe.

It has been proven.  Molecular techniques are simply more precise ways of achieving Mendelian results.  This isn't done blindly - gene functions have to be identified before you go putting them in places where they didn't previously exist.

This isn't cowboy magic, it's a pretty empirically-sound science.  Cutting edge science I'll grant you, but that doesn't make it objectively more risky.
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Offline karajorma

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As the African bees thing quite clearly proves, the old-fashioned method can also be very risky.
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Offline MP-Ryan

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As the African bees thing quite clearly proves, the old-fashioned method can also be very risky.

Indeed.  Should I talk about antibiotic resistance or do we think people grasp the point? =)
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Offline Lorric

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Yes. I'm talking about the difference between the two methods. Whether it's natural or not isn't an issue for me. One is tried and tested over hundreds of years, the other has never been done before. If it's proven to be harmless and healthy then serve it up and I'll chomp it down! I don't care whether it's GM crops or maybe in the future I wonder if meat could be grown instead of having to kill animals. I'd eat that too if it was safe.

It has been proven.  Molecular techniques are simply more precise ways of achieving Mendelian results.  This isn't done blindly - gene functions have to be identified before you go putting them in places where they didn't previously exist.

This isn't cowboy magic, it's a pretty empirically-sound science.  Cutting edge science I'll grant you, but that doesn't make it objectively more risky.

It seems strange then, why aren't we eating it now? I'm not denying what you say, but why isn't it out there feeding people now in a global recession? I would have thought in the current economic climate, it would be more imperative than ever that this goes through.

Come to think of it though, eugenics in general have a bad rep. Think of anything, any work of fiction involving eugenics. The story always tells you in the end it was a mistake, often a mistake with dire consequences, and/or morally wrong. I'm sure the nazi connection really doesn't help either. In fact maybe that's where the root of it all is.

I had a look in on that site where you've been commenting. You seem pretty passionate about this.

 

Offline MP-Ryan

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We are eating it now.  It's just that manipulation by molecular genetics takes longer right now because we don't have a 'catalogue' of all the various genes and what they do.  Mendelian genetics allows for trait selection directly.  To use molecular genetics, you need to know what gene(s) correspond to what traits, then splice and insert them.  It's a pretty involved process, and it's why most GMOs are still produced via selection, hybridization, and isolation.  Molecular techniques become exponentially more efficient as they're used, but we're at the extreme bottom of that curve.

Most, if not all, crops feeding people today can be considered GMOs.  Not via molecular techniques, but GMOs nonetheless.

And eugenics and genetics have literally nothing to do with each other.  If you're confusing those two terms, I'd suggest you take a trip over to Wikipedia and refresh your memory.
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Offline z64555

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inb4 Jurassic Bark :nervous:

As someone said before, I'm OK with genetically modified foodstuffs, so long as it doesn't turn out to be a bigger pain in the ass than what it's worth... such as a super-staple that inadvertently chokes out any and all native plant life that happens to come into contact with any of its seeds. I've had nightmares about mowing 9 foot tall Johnson grass day after day.
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Offline Lorric

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We are eating it now.  It's just that manipulation by molecular genetics takes longer right now because we don't have a 'catalogue' of all the various genes and what they do.  Mendelian genetics allows for trait selection directly.  To use molecular genetics, you need to know what gene(s) correspond to what traits, then splice and insert them.  It's a pretty involved process, and it's why most GMOs are still produced via selection, hybridization, and isolation.  Molecular techniques become exponentially more efficient as they're used, but we're at the extreme bottom of that curve.

Most, if not all, crops feeding people today can be considered GMOs.  Not via molecular techniques, but GMOs nonetheless.

And eugenics and genetics have literally nothing to do with each other.  If you're confusing those two terms, I'd suggest you take a trip over to Wikipedia and refresh your memory.

I suppose you are right in a way, everything now will be different from when it was simply growing there all on it's own and pulled from the ground and eaten.

The thought process for me goes with the splicing genes in, let's say you have some disease which kills a crop. And someone puts in something to make that crop resist that disease. So the thought goes it can't have naturally occured or the disease resistent strain would have flourished naturally and spread all on it's own. So where did they get the new strain from and is it safe? I just don't know. And I'm going to be eating it. At school, I remember learning about food production techniques over the years in history class. No one teaches anyone this stuff in school though I'm sure. Maybe people just need educating. If the scientific community puts it's stamp of approval on it, I'm sure that will be good enough for me.

I guess I should stick to genetics then.
inb4 Jurassic Bark :nervous:

As someone said before, I'm OK with genetically modified foodstuffs, so long as it doesn't turn out to be a bigger pain in the ass than what it's worth... such as a super-staple that inadvertently chokes out any and all native plant life that happens to come into contact with any of its seeds. I've had nightmares about mowing 9 foot tall Johnson grass day after day.

That was me.

 

Offline karajorma

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One thing I find really hilarious is the whole issue about people saying GMOs are untested. Let me give you an analogy.

General Motors decide that they want to make a budget car with a fancy special braking system that is better than ABS. They currently have a car on the market with this (Car A) and they have a very popular budget model (Car B). Two execs are asked how they should make the new car.

The first exec suggests that they go back to the blueprints for Car A, and see how the brake system can be adapted for Car B to give them Car C. After the system is ready, they'll test the new version of Car C to make sure the new brakes work. They'll also test to make sure that any systems that could have been affected by the change of the brakes are also unaffected.

The second exec suggests a different method. They'll work in rounds. They'll simply take brake components from Car A & B and stick them together. Then they'll test to see if that works. If it works better in Car B, they'll use that new model as the basis for the next round. If it doesn't, they'll throw it away and start the round again. They'll keep doing that until they run out of money or they have something that seems good enough.


Which one do you think has been better tested? Exec 2's car has been through more tests but when you think about it, you'll realise that only the very last set of tests were on the car you'd actually be driving. All the other tests were on versions of the brake system that you are not using. If this last set of changes resulted in a hidden flaw, you've only had a short set of tests to realise it.

Personally, I'd pick Exec 1's car every time. Funnily enough, that is of course the one based on GMO style methods.
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Offline redsniper

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Uh... excuse me kara, but you can't just compare building a car to growing a plant like that. I mean, cars are man-made and artificial, and therefore bad. Plants come from nature, which as we all know is magic and can never be understood by mankind. Now then, the audacity displayed in this thread has me so flustered I need to go realign my chakras.
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Offline MP-Ryan

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The thought process for me goes with the splicing genes in, let's say you have some disease which kills a crop. And someone puts in something to make that crop resist that disease. So the thought goes it can't have naturally occured or the disease resistent strain would have flourished naturally and spread all on it's own. So where did they get the new strain from and is it safe? I just don't know. And I'm going to be eating it. At school, I remember learning about food production techniques over the years in history class. No one teaches anyone this stuff in school though I'm sure. Maybe people just need educating. If the scientific community puts it's stamp of approval on it, I'm sure that will be good enough for me.

The something you put in the crop is usually from the same crop type, or a closely-related crop type.  Every so often it comes from a different organism, but that's not as common.

Most disease-resistant strains aren't produced through molecular techniques but rather through selection experiments.  Basically, you grow a crop, expose it to the pathogen you want to breed resistance to, and wait to see what lives.  You take the surviving plants (there will always be some that have innate resistance due to genetic diversity; no disease on Earth is 100% lethal to its target organisms), breed them, and expose the new plants to the same disease.  Take the survivors, breed them, re-select.  After several generations (depends on the ploidy of the plant) you'll have a seed stock in which virtually all (but not quite all - natural diversity) specimens have the resistance you're looking for.  If all you want to do is grow plants of that type with resistance, you're done after this step - just keep using the same seed stock.  Re-selection may be necessary every few generations.

This is how we breed disease or herbicide resistant plants.  Once we have a 'pure' stock for that genotype, you can then set about sequencing it to determine what gene conveys that resistance (I just described a process that can take months or years in one sentence; this is NOT easy).  When the gene is identified you then have to figure out how that gene is regulated (switched on or off).  Finally, you sequence the entire coding region you're interested in.

Once you have that sequence, we then have several ways to get it into another organism (or different strain of the same crop).  Electrical shock tends to work sporadically, viral insertion is better.  But first you need copies of the original gene - sequencing only tells you what the gene is made up of, it doesn't let you make copies.  So you take the cells from the original disease-resistant strain, break them up to release the DNA, and then apply a technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to select and amplify the particular sequence you want (probably a few times at several thousand dolllars a shot over several days) to amplify that sequence.  Then you either insert it into a viral vector (again, weeks of work in one phrase) or try electrical shock on the plant germ cells to get the gene into the new plant.  Once it's there, you then have to grow the plant up and re-expose it to the disease to see if it worked.  If it didn't, back up until you figure out where you screwed up along the way.  If it did, breed the new plants and conduct selection until you have a 'pure' stock again.

All molecular techniques do is take a gene sequence from one organism and put it into another - often of the same species, just a different strain, sometimes of a different species.  It's tedious, detailed work that can be frustrating as hell but the beauty is that one you have that gene sequenced and know which PCR primers to use, it can then be done on a mass scale much more quickly than producing an entire pure strain from wild stock.

This same type of selection/isolation/extraction/amplification/insertion/selection procedure is the basis of pretty much all modern genetics.  It's how we identify disease-resistance genes, antibiotic-resistance genes, chemical-resistance genes, genes that convey resistance to cold/heat, and many other things.  It's used constantly in research as well, and a similar process was responsible for restoring the immune systems of SCIDs patients.

I mentioned that all of the genes we use to convey resistances occur naturally (which is true), so you're probably wondering why all the plants haven't evolved to have that resistance.  The answer is selection pressure.  Where there is high selection pressure (e.g. the place gets the same lethal disease every season), the local strain will probably have a high-proportion of disease-resistance.  This can become permanent in the population, but it usually doesn't.  The reason is that resistant strains often have drawbacks (increased resource requirements compared to non-resistant plants, for example) compared to non-resistant plants.  The lower the selection pressure, the lower the proportion of a population that will be resistant to that selection pressure.

Bacterial antibiotic resistance is probably the publicly most well-known example of this phenomenon.  There is currently a bit of a crisis in health care when it comes to a nasty bacterium called Staphylococcus aureus.  "MRSA" may be an acronym you've heard that stands for methycilin-resistant S.A.  There are now very high proportions of MRSA in health care settings around the world.  The reason is because of over-use of methycilin.  This antibiotic was for a very long while the best treatment against stubborn Staph aureus infections, and it was heavily used.  Now, ordinarily antibiotics work by killing the vast majority of a pathogen, including some of the lesser-resistant individuals.  There will always be a small number of completely resistant individual bacteria left, but they typically are incapable of causing further infection because they are either out-competed by natural flora (bacteria that live in and on us) and die, or the population of natural flora prevents them from growing to levels that cause disease.  This is why broad-spectrum antibiotics can be ugly - if you kill off the natural flora, you make it easier for pathogens to come back.  Anyway, over-use of methycilin without patients completing their course of medication and in isolated areas (health care settings) has resulted in the proportions of MRSA compared to regular Staph aureus in those areas skyrocketing.  There are now some hospitals where virtually the entire Staph aureus population is MRSA.  That's really scary, because there is only one other antibiotic that can treat MRSA (vancomycin), and we are now seeing the development of VRSA populations.  These individuals have always existed, but when you apply selection pressure (antibiotic), you eliminate individuals susceptible to it and the surviving population reproduces to replace it, thereby increasing the proportion of the resistant population.

TL;DR:  Resistance genes are all naturally-occurring.  We can influence the frequency of the occurrence by applying selection pressure.  This allows us to isolate a population that all carries resistance.  If we want to spend the time and money, you can then isolate what gene is responsible and consider transferring it to another strain or species.  Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't, and most of that depends on how closely related the species/strains are and how complicated the resistance mechanism is.  When it comes to chemical/antibiotic/pesticide resistance, it's usually only a couple genes (sometimes one).  When it comes to disease-resistance, it's usually several genes working in concert, which makes the whole process much more difficult.
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