GMO: Harmful or Helpful

[Rhaethe]

Re: GMO: Harmful or Helpful

Sources for Buchanan / 10 cents a day.

http://loc.harpweek.com/LCPoliticalCartoons/DisplayCartoonMedium.asp?MaxID=27&UniqueID=16&Year=1856&YearMark=1856

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/82828/James-Buchanan/285316/Presidency

Sources on Bull

http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu/pdf/articles/1988-48-4--he-sowed-others-reaped-ephraim-wales-bull-and-the-origins-of-the-concord-grape.pdf

http://www.anb.org/articles/13/13-02675.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=eQJETLkbZ5UC&pg=PA24&dq=Ancient+Middlesex&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=0_0#v=onepage&q=Ancient%20Middlesex&f=false

My point was not to make any particular suggestions. Was merely to say that at the terms of the time, Bull made an exceptional amount of profit off of that singular grape. He might have not died bitter and lonely if he hadn't fallen, became permanently injured, shoved into a home and became unable to care for himself or his estate.

My posting does not necessarily discount your prior point about perceived need to patent seeds/horticulture ... I am not in that race. But in points of history I will gently correct to view it in the context of the times and larger picture.

I am weird that way.

[B. de Corbin]

Re: GMO: Harmful or Helpful

Sorry about the weird multiple post - my internet connection is going postal again...

[Rae'ya]

Re: GMO: Harmful or Helpful

Hybridization and genetic modification are absolutely not the same thing. Hybridization is natural recombination, genetic modification is not. A pig and a tomato do not mate unless they get some help in the lab. A manufactured pesticide is not going to naturally insert itself into a corn gene without lab help no matter how many generations we wait. To assert that the natural combination of genes is the same as genetic modification in a lab is alarmingly ignorant.

Nobody said they were the same thing.

[ChainLightning]

Re: GMO: Harmful or Helpful

Nobody said they were the same thing.

I think it was an accidental juxtaposition. Probably introduced back in the first pages, like, where TS had mentioned dogs as an example of hybridization. (Which, as he indicated later, isn't hybridization but manipulation of the genetics, i.e., GMO.)

[Rae'ya]

Re: GMO: Harmful or Helpful

I think it was an accidental juxtaposition. Probably introduced back in the first pages, like, where TS had mentioned dogs as an example of hybridization. (Which, as he indicated later, isn't hybridization but manipulation of the genetics, i.e., GMO.)

Yeah that was pretty much my point. The only time that they were mentioned as 'the same thing' was clarified in a later post.

Maybe I was being oversensitive.

[nbdy]

Re: GMO: Harmful or Helpful

The Seralini study was republished (http://www.enveurope.com/content/26/1/14). The Ecologist write up is probably more readable and provides background information if you weren't paying attention when Nature retracted the study's publication about a year and a half ago (http://www.theecologist.org/News/new...th_damage.html). Plus, the Ecologist article has pictures. Anyway, the original study has now been more rigorously reviewed than most published studies could withstand and is republished largely unchanged.

I usually sidestep the is-it-safe-to-eat aspect of the GMO issue because it rapidly devolves into a "my science is bigger than your science" thing. All politics, of course, because science is just science; however, few people have the background to evaluate and understand published literature so it comes down to messaging. The result is that it has become increasingly dangerous to find things that powerful players find inconvenient, with research losing funding and careers destroyed. Many promising avenues of research are never followed simply because of the intimidation aspect of not toeing the line. Science is more and more the handmaid of power, such that the objective is not the refinement of physical understanding (as would be the case under ideal circumstances). Good write up here, http://www.independentsciencenews.or...study-roundup/, if you did not read enough of these tactics at the republished article.

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Correction: You have to click on the little pictures in the source article, but there are more of them. (They would not open for me, but I don't have good internet.)