Good video to see the big picture.

I think that responsible science and offering choices are good. I'd rather not starve to death, but most of us will die because of poor choices in diet and lifestyle rather than starving. I think keeping options open and continuing to consider things critically is important as we evolve toward the best path forward.

What is right for one community may not be right for another community. A lot of the GMO research is to help the 3rd world countries produce their own food, without having to rely on the richer countries, or for the 1st world countries to help ourselves in the event of a catastrophy. These are not always seeds offered by the huge corporations, but by other science research and education foundations.

Many folks choose organic for their own personal reasons, but in some cases a conventional crop with less pesticide use and a no till soil cycle might be smarter.

I like to keep an open mind, but was extremely turned off by the anti-gmo movement because of lies and misinformation designed to scare people into buying into the products produced by the huge conglomerates funding the misinformation ads.

Consumers of those misleading ads and articles required no proof - which is what struck me odd. They believed the images of a syringe stuck in a tomato for example - or water truck watering fields but with the caption that it was really hundreds of gallons of expensive pesticides were being sprayed into the air, which is silly. These are people who have never toured a farm. (Yes, I've toured a gmo seed research farm, here on Kauai, where a lot of the myths were debunked.)

It also can be seen as ethnically discriminatory by keeping gmo products from 3rd world countries and from the farmers even in the U.S. who need to farm smartly to make a living. Some farmers are given incentives to produce organically. Whether that seems fair to some or not, it gives people choices and is the direction many consumers have moved.

We do evolve slowly to do what's best for all -- and in doing so perhaps we will kill off our population by some eating ourselves to death with unhealthy processed foods and little physical movement.

Or if everyone starts eating healthy and exercising, making lots of babies we're in trouble! Zero Population Growth sounds pretty good in that way.

@Julie808 Thank you for being more open minded than many on this site. One does need to be aware that more money being involved also means more lies. Overpopulation used to be clear and understandable by most until corporations saw this as a threat to the economic system that requires constant growth. Look up overpopulation and the first hits are about how it's not true and technology will save us (so according to them there is no limit to the number of humans the planet can support). I was on the Seattle Board of ZPG for 8 years and when a new director came along he saw the need for money to get the message out. The name got changed from ZPG to the Population Connection )which only advocated family planning). PBS reported that ZPG and the Sierra Club worked out a deal with certain anonymous entities for $100 million to remove any talk of immigration as a source of population gain for a country). What's going on in the food industry (including GMO's - Monsanto a huge chemical comp[any) is exactly the same. Some major food companies (like cattle companies) lobby congress to outlaw and criticism of food especially the foods they produce. Now just writing about conditions at stockyards or any other big food company gets one in jail.

Years ago one Howard Lyman appeared on Oprah Winfrey and told his story. The Cattleman companies sued Oprah (Lyman didn't have much money so they went after the one who did). She fought back and won but spent a lot to defend herself.
[simonandschuster.com]
Too many refuse to do any real research into the most important aspects of ones life. In this age of science and knowledge people chose to be ignorant. There are independent organizations that are dedicated to their field and they are the ones we need to follow. One is a group Nutrition Action
[cspinet.org]
Again I mentioned the Netflix video on the Stanford University experiment with twins. It seems too many are willing to let their sense of sensuality (eating is often a sensuous activity) affect how we think or even our health. In the case of diet it also has a huge impact on the natural environment and the future of our progeny.

Organic is not some sort of status idea. It is about personal health and, in the end, the health of the planet on which we share with a multitude of life forms. I could also say if you want to eat chemically laden foods which will harm your body go ahead but doing so also increases money being spent for health care which affects everyone. I gladly pay extra for organic as it means not having to spend money, and suffer, from a myriad of diseases. I get a medical checkup (including blood work) annually and am not having to take any prescription meds. How many at my stage of life can say the same thing. Seems, for many ones body is not a temple but simply a way of getting instant gratification with certain foods.

@pedigojr All foods contain chemicals. Everything you eat is a chemical. "Organic" doesn't mean its any healthier for you. But it does mean that more pesticides were used in growing that "healthier" organic food.

Eating healthy food is good but eating something because it has an "organic" label on it isn't any better for you than GMO foods.

@Charles1971 Sorry but I totally disagree. In order to be labeled ORGANIC the crop must pass tests that there are NO pesticides or Herbicides or artificial fertilizer used. Seems when it come to food too many people let their emotions run wild and totally refuse to look into facts.
Also, there is a huge difference between natural chemicals and human made chemicals. Perhaps people should do as a certain orange anus advised and go out and drink bleach.

Of course but is that a bad thing. The question is how is it modified? Many foods are hybridized which does not require chemicals or gene altering. Apples do not grow true from seed. Every seed will row an apple tree very different from the parent. When a viable apple comes along scions are cut from the tree and grafted to a root stock. All the apples on the market have come from one tree. Sometimes researchers will cross fertilize different apples to get a specific trait. Again, no chemicals. Apples are one of many plants that exhibit this trait. Almost all the food (including organic) started very different than what it is today. Nutrition values often also increase. This has been going on for a long time and here we come along with gene splicing and somehow think we can fool mother nature. The only people we are fooling is ourselves.

It's hard to beat locally grown produce eaten immediately after harvest, versus produce trucked in from farmlands far far away. I'm glad we have choices, local farmers markets as well as frozen produce for those of us far far away from where the food was grown.

I've never experienced any difference in flavor between the very few gmo foods actually available on the market and regular conventionally grown or organic produce. Seems the fresher it is, the better, but I'm not much of a connoisseur of food. I'm glad for the chefs in my area who are good at choosing the best food for our farm to fork restaurants. Other than that, I rely mostly on local produce and frozen food, and boxed groceries available to me, since I don't have time/space to grow my own.

[gmoanswers.com]

GMO seeds that are made for particularly harsh environments can be saved, for the next planting, but the quality goes down, so it's a choice whether to buy new seeds or plant the weaker quality ones.

The effective seeds can give a small farmer in Africa, for example, higher yield, without having to spray harmful pesticides daily and the farmer can get ahead, and the village has food. Better than starving or having to buy food from a richer country. Yes it's about money, but also about allowing farmers to prosper and villagers from starving.

There are a lot of myths that won't go away, such as about seeds blowing in to neighboring fields and the seed company wanting payment for seeds they already sold. Doesn't make sense.

[allianceforscience.org]

@Julie808 You are right it doesn't make sense, however Monsanto does take farmers to court for it. It has happened several times.

In America we have huge organic corporations such as Organic Valley, Earthbound Farms, Applegate Farms, and Stonyfield Farms, making large donations and lobbying politicians in hopes of banning conventional farming methods. They have already taken over much of the market.

I feel strongly that we need to keep the avenue open for GMOs in case we have something drastic happen to challenge our food source and we need to create a new strain of the product that is resistant to the challenge.

I'm glad we can respectfully disagree on these issues and perhaps one of us will come to a different conclusion.

I have nothing against small scale farmers, whether conventional or organic. My beef is with the propaganda and misinformation used to create fear in consumers, and that fear mongering comes from Big Organic, not the small farmers.

@Julie808 Organic produce although increasing is still a small part of the total. I believe about 3% in the Uk and between 6 and 14% in the USA. There is a market for organic produce because people want to eat food without the use of pesticides which harm the environment. Remember "silent spring" by Rachel Carson.
AS you say some GM crops use less pesticides but until they are proven safe in the long term it is likely that they will be banned in Europe despite pressure from the likes of Monsanto who are currently being sued by some organic growers for polution of their crops by wind blown pollen.
So called traditional agriculture varies widely around the world. I live in an area where it hasn't changed for generations and all beef and lamb is grass fed unlike the feedlots in the USA where cows never see a blade of grass and they are pumped full of antbiotics,

Not knocking your choices, however I feel that the EWG is instilling fear in the average consumer not to eat any produce that are not organic, without revealing how much pesticide is on organic produce as well. Wash your produce, folks!

I would rather have plentiful fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables than give in to the organic industry's fear mongering for their profits.

[agdaily.com]

[agdaily.com]

@Julie808 My choice is not based on fear mongering; it is based on lack of evidence. Whether or not GMO foods are safe is unknown. There are no “pesticides” on organic produce, however there are herbicides. And absolutely, all produce should be made safe before eating. [communitycancercenter.org]
Agdaily is underwritten by conventional corporate farmers and is considered biased. EWG simply reports testing results. I’ll trust EWG first.

@KateOahu "Pesticide" is the umbrella term covering insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, etc.

Organic foods definitely are grown with pesticides. They are just natural poisons, not synthetically developed ones that target the specific types of pests that challenge the crop. Often the natural poison is more harmful than synthetically developed ones.

The EWG dirty dozen is just a list. It's not a science driven report.

The main purpose of it is to scare people into eating only organic, rather than conventional produce. To me, this is harmful when 90% of our society don't eat enough fruits and vegetables, so scaring them away from eating perfectly good food is depriving citizens of a healthy diet.

Those are my thoughts - and I'm glad you are able to purchase food that goes along with your beliefs.

@Julie808 EWG dirty dozen IS a LIST of the results of TESTS on produce. Your statement is grossly misleading. It isn’t fear-mongering, it’s TEST RESULTS, and certainly those results can be fearsome.

Responsible science can be a good thing. Some years ago, genetic modification is what saved the papaya industry here in Hawaii. Our papaya crops were being devastated by the ringspot virus.

Dennis Gonsalves is a Hawaiian-born scientist at Cornell University, who developed a genetically modified papaya, known as the Rainbow papaya, designed to be resistant to the virus. GMO Papaya no accounts for 90% of the papaya grown in Hawaii.

I appreciate scientists being able to adapt to new challenges, with climate change and other roadblocks we may face in the coming years, to keep our farmers able to produce food sources we depend upon.

[foodinsight.org]

I think it is all a money issue and that is why the lawsuits. I may be wrong but I was led to believe that the GMO version of crops would mean you had to get seeds from the ones that owned the GMO. If it was Monsanto then the seeds would have to come from Monsanto. Do GMO crops still have seeds?

@DenoPenno Yes, in general, if you want to grow a gmo crop, you have to get your seed from some company like Monsanto.

GMO is no panacea. In the short term, use of a Roundup Ready plant can increase yields by giving your crop plant an edge over weeds. But over time, the weeds will evolve resistance to Roundup weed killer. And workers exposed to Roundup run the risk of developing cancer...

A similar thing can happen with bt corn, which has a gene from a bacterium that codes for a protein that is toxic to insect pests like the corn-borer weevil. But with constant exposure over time, the weevil will evolve resistance to the the bacterial protein.

However, for-profit companies are not the only ones who can make use of the technology. Governments and non-profit entities can and are developing new strains that are drought or pest resistant, or producing greater yields. In other words, it's not the technology that's the problem; it's who develops it and how you use it.

@flyingsaucesir Genes are transcribed into various RNAs, some of which (mRNAs) are translated into proteins. There are noncoding genes. Think tRNA and rRNA.

@Scott321 There is non-coding DNA. In fact, the vast majority of human DNA is non-coding. Some of the non-coding DNA has regulatory functions, helping determine when genes are turned on or off. But to my knowledge there are no non-coding genes. If it's a gene, then by definition it codes.

You are correct in that DNA has to be transcribed into RNA before a protein is made.

mRNA carries the code for a protein from a gene to the site of protein production (the ribosome).

tRNA carries individual amino acids to the protein production site.

rRNA makes up the ribosome, which is the is the production site (or machine), joining amino acids into a long chain called a polypeptide. The polypeptide is then folded into a compact shape called a protein.

The non-coding portions of DNA are called introns. The coding parts of DNA are called exons (because they are EXpressed).

Quite a bit of our human intron DNA is actually old viral DNA. In the viruses it came from, some of that DNA was genes, coding for viral proteins or RNA. So technically some of our intron DNA is genes, but from different species. For purposes of discussing human DNA though, I don't think old viral DNA counts as genes. It would get confusing, right?

@Flyingsaucesir Really? I think your judgment is clouded by the incorrect bias that genes only produce proteins.

I mostly discussed protein-coding genes in the previous chapters, but now it’s time to consider noncoding genes. Recall that there are about 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome, but we are less certain about the number of noncoding genes. I suggested that there are probably about 5000 of these genes for a total of 25,000 genes. - What’s in your genome? : 90% of your genome is junk by Laurence A. Moran

An example:
[ashpublications.org]

@Scott321 Okay, in my original comment on the post I said genes code for proteins. I should have said genes code for RNA, which either codes for proteins or otherwise functions to build proteins or regulate protein production. In the interest of brevity, I skipped a level of complexity.

[genome.gov]

@Flyingsaucesir

This gets even further away from the current topic of GMOs but there are cases where retroviruses were coopted in evolution. Part of what grants us status as eutherian mammals (ie- the placenta) may have had a retroviral component. Syncytin-1 is a mindblowing gene of retroviral origin. See:
[ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

Most ERVs [endogenous retroviruses] are considered fossilized relics that can no longer replicate or encode functional viruses, but the occasional insertion may prove beneficial for the host and become co-opted for a cellular role.

Since the discovery of ERVs decades ago, a number of retroviral proteins have been identified that have been co-opted to perform a wide range of biological functions [11]. Notably, there is an apparent propensity for ERVs to acquire new roles in the placenta [12]. One of the most iconic examples of retrovirus "domestication" is the gene Syncytin-1, which originates from a retroviral envelope gene. In primates, Syncytin-1 was repurposed for the development of a multinucleate tissue layer known as the syncytiotrophoblast, which separates maternal and fetal bloodstreams in the placenta [13]. Remarkably, Syncytin-like retroviral proteins have been reported to be expressed in the placentas of nearly all mammals, yet Syncytins in different lineages derive from at least 10 independent infections by unrelated retroviruses [14]. These findings have led to speculation that the co-option of unrelated ERVs in different species was a driving force underlying the evolutionary diversification of the placenta [15].

@Scott321 That's interesting!

Even here though, the co-opted retroviruses are correctly called genes, because they either produce (code for) proteins or regulate protein production through RNA production. Right?

@Flyingsaucesir Without my own splitting hairs too much over definitions Larry Moran quoted above says: “A gene is a DNA sequence that’s transcribed to produce a functional product.” It’s too easy to get hung up on coding and protein production. He later says:
Kostas Kampourakis in Making Sense of Genes concludes that the most acceptable definition of a gene is the one that includes the production of both proteins and noncoding RNAs (see the quotation at the beginning of this chapter).

The idea here is that the primary gene product is RNA and that any segment of DNA that’s copied into RNA (transcription) qualifies as a gene as long as the RNA has a biological function. That last bit is important because there are sequences of DNA that are transcribed but the RNA doesn’t do anything.

@Scott321 In the field if biological evolution it is thought that single-stranded RNA may have been the original genetic material, and that its own assembly may have been catalyzed by clay molecules.

The most common comment I hear from people who avoid genetically modified food is that it hasn't been tested. Well it has been tested quite stringently for many years and it's been proven to be just as healthy and nutritious as non-genetically modified food.

There are 3rd world countries who can not produce enough food for themselves due to huge percentages of their crops being lost to drought, pests, etc., but with GMO seeds they are able to save their crops, use less pesticide and have higher yield.

There's good and bad with everything, but there are some cases where years and years of scientific testing, with results of what is safe and what is not, can give a much needed boost to a community to feed themselves, rather than depend on food coming in from other countries.

@Julie808 I don’t have any issues with the biotechnology aspect itself. My reservations are solely about corporate power and patenting, mostly how GMOs are unfurled via the prevailing economic system and legal philosophy.

@Julie808 When GMO's came out (Monsanto) there were lots of issues and many animals, when fed GMO crops, wouldn't touch it. There have been problems with GMO crop pollen blowing into anothers field and ruining their organic crops. The list went on and on. Being on an island famous for its small farms (all organic because that's what people want) there were lots of discussions and talks. Many people can actually taste the difference between organic and GMO. Organic is always much better.

A group of us once visited N. Italy to see their farming practices. We sat in on a discussion from some chemical scientists bragging how they modified many fruits to naturally repel certain pests and diseases. These guys were upset as most farmers there wanted nothing to do with this. We all laughed as these professors were talking to us who found natural ways to deter pests and pathogens. The biggest problem is this is simply a way of using unnatural means to grow enough food for an exploding human population. So lets see what's next for the genetic science - ways of genetically altering the weather or to bring thousands of species back from extinction.

@pedigojr Yes that is all very true, conventional agriculture has done and continues to do many harmful things. But there are two nuances to add to that. Firstly that most of the harm being done was discovered by conventional science, often working with the conventional agriculture, and not by fringe movements. And secondly most of those harmful things were individual issues with individual technologies working within a complex system. To address problems like that requires hard detailed systematic study, which is why I am still happy to say that single idea cults, like the organic movement are actually distractions from really addressing meaningful issues within agricultural practices.

@Fernapple It has been shown the 'green revolution' is dead. An article in the National Geographic about the great lakes showed how chemical sprays and fertilizers were finding their way to the upper Great Lakes and being carried down the the lower ones. This has caused major algae blooms. A professor it the UC Davis said those who eat organic are elitists in that it takes more land and is more expensive than non-organic which leaves out those that can't afford that type of food. The problem is NOT the way we grow food but the increasing number of us needing food. The recent Netflix video "You are what you eat" said studies have shown we will need at least two planets to provide all the grasslands needed to raise cattle. The Amazon forest is being burnt to gain grassland for those the 'say' they will only eat grass fed meat. In a recent report it was said that there are now major forest fires in the Amazon forest due to the slash and burn techniques used there (of course it did not say why that system was being done). TO me yesterdays conventional science will be today's conventional science in the future. The problem with 'conventional' science is who does it serve?

@pedigojr Well, who pays the piper always calls the tune, its true. So you will not get all of the science to play in tune, until you have a democratic commitment by the vast majority of people to real environmental issues, and all sources of funding come with that as a primary commitment. Which means honesty and education are the main things that environmentally committed people need to deliver. And that won't happen until environmental thinking matures, and stops being dominated by religious cults, like the "organic" movement, which exists mainly just to promote a mindless use of labelling to generate profits, for the cults leadership.

@Fernapple In a perfect world of which this is not even close. There are groups dedicated to not being supported by corporations. One such group is nutritional scientists who do studies onto what's healthy, food wise, and what is not. [cspinet.org]