Skeptic Project

I think I enlightened a Greenpeace member today. A well meaning young person (probably my age, maybe younger) was canvassing for GP near where I do most of my food shopping. During our conversation, I mentioned that I strongly disagree with GP's 'break into farms and destroy GMO crops' activism, and she looked completely genuinely surprised that GP even does such a thing at all. She asked me where I heard that; I told her I don't necessarily carry sources in my head, and the only one that came to mind was the skeptoid ep on GMOs, but from there she'd probably be linked out. I also said she could probably just google it and find plenty of news articles and probably even videos of GP activists terrorizing poor farmers and destroying their GMO crops. I said I don't care what your position on GMOs is, you don't break into farms and destroy crops and I will not support an organization that sanctions that behavior, because it's a form of terrorism.

Yeah. Score one for skepticism.

Godzilla be proud, and so is this brony.

Maybe they're just Luddite retards.

Quote from Kaiser Falkner

If horizontal gene transfer is possible from food consumption, how is it we have not seen spontaneous gene transfer in humans before this point and with non-modified foods? If youre going to make this suggestion you had best show up with evidence showing that such things are possible in human cells, that the process would be systemic rather than localize, and that there has been legitimate scientific findings suggesting that this has happened before.

No need being so defensive on the consumption of gm food. I was thinking of the risks of cross species contamination in general. For example resistance to herbicide spreading to weeds or pesticide production to wild species with a close genome with all it could entail for the ecosystem.

If you take time to research the topic, you'll also find out it's not always possible to make such sweeping statement as "you had best show up with evidence" when it comes to HGT. As an example... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1574-6941.1999.tb00581.x/full

It begins with "Field releases of transgenic rizomania-resistant sugar beet (Beta vulgaris) plants were accompanied by a study of the persistence of DNA from transgenic sugar beet litter in soil and of horizontal gene transfer of plant DNA to bacteria." and ends with "The presence of bacterial genes, promoters, terminators, or origins of vegetative replication in transgenic plants will enhance the probability of stable integration of DNA stretches based on recombination events [10, 11, 28]. The lack of information on the abundance of naturally competent bacteria in the environment, frequencies of transformation processes and environmental factors triggering these processes currently still impairs predictions of the extent of horizontal gene transfer from plants to bacteria."

Another one: http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v26/n9/abs/nbt.1491.html

"Besides the well-documented integration of DNA flanked by the transfer DNA borders, occasional insertion of fragments from the tumor-inducing plasmid into plant genomes has also been reported during Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation. We demonstrate that large (up to approx18 kb) gene-bearing fragments of Agrobacterium chromosomal DNA (AchrDNA) can be integrated into Arabidopsis thaliana genomic DNA during transformation. One in every 250 transgenic plants may carry AchrDNA fragments. This has implications for horizontal gene transfer and indicates a need for greater scrutiny of transgenic plants for undesired bacterial DNA."

Another example, of collateral mess created by gm crops through continuous and very likely unquantified amount of pesticide:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/31/beetle-monsantos-genetically-modified-corn_n_944138.html

It just took a few min to found these, let me know if you're interested in more.

Regarding your point on spontaneous occurrences of transfer in non-gm plants, the significant difference is gmo are engineered with vectors like viruses and bacteria which are specifically designed to spread and cross the species barrier.

Resistance between insects and bacteria in regards to crops is neither anything new nor something unique to the use of GMO foods. The article you posted was highly spurious in its evidence, and Rox pretty much put that very succinctly.

I'm not being defensive, I'm being very cautious about the terms people use when they try to argue for or against something. Being concerned that there are some environmental ramifications to the production of GMOs is of course absolutely acceptable- but it is not acceptable to assume that it totalizes a subject and creates an automatic trigger of resistance. There should be measured approaches to the production of GMOs and their consumption- but much of the fear that surrounds them are based not on sound science but on a pervasive phobia. That's a problem. It makes for bad discourse and bad consumers.

Again, horizontal gene transfer is a concern whether or not there are GMOs. Organisms have been building evolutionary advantages vis a vis our efforts at pest control for decades. There is of course a need to try and check this, but it is not a valid reason to valorize against GMOs. Antibiotics are creating resistant strains of MRSA and TB, are we to avoid them now completely?

For the record, we can't feed 7 billion people without GMOs, so it's not even an option otherwise, 4 billion people will starve to death if we go all organic, so it's not even worth a shot. Unless of course, you want to pick which 4 billion will die.

Correct me If I'm wrong...........
Isn't EVERY apple farm a GMO crop, because of the splicing of the tree branches, (They take branches from other apple type and bind them to a tree of a different apple type).