Transgenic technology

[Hagakure]

public arent ones regulating - there are regulating bodies who are experts in the field

the public are too stupid and have too short attention spans to grasp the details of technology.

the only type of GMO that would pose a threat like the kind you are talking about would be a bioweapon which i am of course against.

increasing vitamin A, and iron levels in rice for third world countries to prevent malnutrition is another matter

[darkstar]

But is GM not safer than current technologies under the influence of those same flaws?

What about bio-weapons? They only kill humans and are one of the most environmentally friendly weapons available. If you JUST have to kill ppl & go to war that is.

Far shorter lived consequences than Atomic bombs or nerve agents, counter measures such as vaccine’s can be made, and a % of a population will naturally survive.

(Just playing devils advocate )

[Rev]

quote

public arent ones regulating - there are regulating bodies who are experts in the field

you obviously have more faith in bureaucracy than i do

I trust 'experts' just as little as i do layman

really i once had trust in authority and trusted that those who supoiosedly knew really cared or even really knew what they were doing

but having done a little work on the inside of some institutions i now realise that its a a ruse

nobody really knows the half of anythings thats going on and how one appears to be doing often overides what one actually does

as for bioweapons

i dont mind nuclear weapons - so long as everybodies got them

the most lethal things arent always the most destructive

the threat of Mutually assured destruction gave hesitation to the fingers on the button during the cold war

if weapons become more targeted and less destructive they are more likely to be used

quote

increasing vitamin A, and iron levels in rice for third world countries to prevent malnutrition is another matter

giving them vegetables to go with their rice solves tha same problem, as well as strengthening food security and economic prosperity by crop diversification.

a few orange veggies and some green veggies grown on small plots or the edges of rice fields gives all the vita A and carotenoids, as well as the folate,VitC, magnesium and iron.

Rice is a wonderful think but i think its telling of the narowmindedness of GE advocates that we should try and get everything into one monocultured crop

I bet these guys know NOTHING about the range of wild foods and intercopped foodplants taht go with traditional rice polyculture - all they know is rice and polished rice at that

I wonder if they even know about Koji and rice ferments, or sweated rice, harvested slightly green and sweated in the husk which boots vitamin levels sigtnificantly

Edited October 29, 2005 by Rev

[Ymir]

i think we are getting a little caught up in specific issues here rather than looking at the big picture.

YES GM can be abused

YES humans are greedy and stupid

BUT YES this tech has some greatly beneficial uses besides producing specky rice

as was mentioned earlier the production of human insulin in a bacterial vector was a huge leap forward in medical and GE science. the potential exists for other highly theraputic compounds to be manufactued in bacteria, plants and animals.

at what point do we say this is good GM and this is bad GM. surely we cant say that ALL GM science must be abolished. Any lab studing functional genomics, be it animal or human will be generating knockout and null mutant lines in order to study their particular protein. if GM was banned, than this research would not be possible. our understanding of medical science in relation to viral proliferation, genetic disease, cancer, and virtually all our research on proteomics would halt. the techniques we have developed are not olny commercially important, but also exceedingly usefull as analytical tools.

i think that simply saying we are too irresponsible to use GM tech wisely is a little blind, there are other applications besides simply making a GM crop. who should decide what is far enough to push the envelope?

[Auxin]

Give me Examples of reproductively viable hybrids!

Sure, genus Capsicum is a nice example:

baccatum X praetermissum partially fertile

praetermissum X eximium partially fertile

frutescens X chinense partially fertile

chinense X annuum partially fertile

annuum X frutescens partially fertile

pubescens X eximium Highly fertile

eximium X praetermissum partially fertile

eximium X cardenasii Highly fertile

cardenasii X pubescens Highly fertile

And thats from a genus with only 22 species in which most possible inter-species hybridization permutations have yet to be attempted... and is it Atropa belladonna or Solanum dulcamara that can cross with tomato, a plant in a whole other Genus, and produce (poisonous) fruit bearing viable seed? ...works in genus Brassica too, and many others. Google "interspecific hybridization" some time.

[darkstar]

Thanks Auxin,

Examples are the layman’s references, they distinguish hearsay from useable information and allow a more civil level of debate (IMHO).

How many interspecific hybridization events occur in the environment I wounder?

Could these Species be isolated by geographic distance or behaviourally isolated (as in different flowering times for plants? or is that reproductively isolated?) and not "need" to be reproductively isolated to avoid loss of its own identity as a pure species? (Now were is the smiley for a guy flogging a dead horse?)

I recently read a book on the transfer of a signal gene from one species of fruit fly to Drosophila melanogaster casing a change in the behaviour (Mate attracting song frequency) of D. melanogaster to that of the fly sp. that the gene came from!

I would never believe that a single gene could transfer such a specific behavioural trait from one animal species to another.

[Darklight]

I would never believe that a single gene could transfer such a specific behavioural trait from one animal species to another.

I remember reading Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker ( an excellent counter to the current waffle on intelligent design as a science ).

In it he said something like individual genes don't necessarily encode for one thing only. The genome is like a recipe book, if you cut it up you get a lot of discrete units but that doesn't mean each unit makes sense without the rest of it- context causes expression. Not sure if that metaphor is still scientifically current, but the discussion made sense to me

[Ymir]

"The genome is like a recipe book, if you cut it up you get a lot of discrete units but that doesn't mean each unit makes sense without the rest of it"

thats actually a good way of putting it. alternative splicing is only really starting to be understood as the ability to sequence whole large genomes has only recently occured. but it's really nifty that one sequence of exons can be used to create multiple proteins. there was a whole load of research done on alt splicing recently in a paper called "master and commander" worth checking out, but it lead to the discovery that some plants have the ability to express multiple resistance proteins agaisnt different pathogens from the same locus, simply by including/excluding a few exons.

nifty.

[Darklight]

there was a whole load of research done on alt splicing recently in a paper called "master and commander" worth checking out, but it lead to the discovery that some plants have the ability to express multiple resistance proteins agaisnt different pathogens from the same locus, simply by including/excluding a few exons.

That sounds absolutely fascinating, is it the sort of document say a layperson could understand?

Any lab studing functional genomics, be it animal or human will be generating knockout and null mutant lines in order to study their particular protein. if GM was banned, than this research would not be possible. our understanding of medical science in relation to viral proliferation, genetic disease, cancer, and virtually all our research on proteomics would halt. the techniques we have developed are not olny commercially important, but also exceedingly usefull as analytical tools.

Excellent point! I accept the use as analytical tools, but really can't see a need at this point for such constructs being released into the environment

[Ymir]

"That sounds absolutely fascinating, is it the sort of document say a layperson could understand? "

ummm...considering the average perosn needs to be told that apples have DNA in them......probly no...in fact im gonna go out on a limb here and say its fairly certain it's not for the average joe on the street