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Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants in Europe

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Re: Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants in Europe

#41

Post by jrkelly »

manmal wrote: post #24
pvnick wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>didn't control the entire industry While this is obvious hyperbole, I agree with your general sentiment. In fact, GMOs, perhaps more-so than any other modern technology, have an unprecedented potential to save billions of lives. Golden Rice alone could save the lives of one million children every year. As a biochem major, GMOs are something I'm passionate about, and it really aggravates me when I see armchair scient…

>unprecedented potential to save billions of lives Potential, yes; but not with massive financial interests behind it. In a world where shiploads of wheat are held back in order to game the wheat market, things need to change before GMOs can cure 3rd world hunger. I've read that GMOs have to be bought anew for every season because the harvested crops can't be used as seeds. Is that actually true?

Buying new seeds every season began with hybrid crops in the 1920s.

"Today, hybrid seed production is predominant in agriculture and home gardening, and is one of the main contributing factors to the dramatic rise in agricultural output during the last half of the 20th century. In the US, the commercial market was launched in the 1920s, with the first hybrid maize. All of the hybrid seeds planted by the farmer will be the same hybrid while the seeds from the hybrids planted will not consistently have the desired characteristics. This is why hybrid seed is constantly repurchased by growers for each planting season." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed

Re: Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants in Europe

#42

Post by sigzero »

tptacek wrote: post #40
api wrote: post #2

I really think there'd be less opposition to GMOs were it not for the fact that this one company -- a firm with a history of somewhat scummy and antagonistic behavior -- didn't control the entire industry.

That antagonistic behavior being what? I ask because there's a commonly-held belief about Monsanto that they, in effect, wait for the wind to blow IP-encumbered seeds onto fields and then sue the farmers who manage those fields for royalties. The reality is that Monsanto sues farmers when they take Roundup-Ready crops, plant them, and then use Roundup on those crops. You can't do that innocently; if you spray Roundup…

I thought there was pretty much a whole movie (Food Inc) documenting that very thing (i.e. cross contamination). Please don't try and say that the hatred going towards Monsanto isn't deserved because it most assuredly is.

http://www.damemagazine.com/2013/04/03/monsanto-six-truths-a...

Re: Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants in Europe

#43

Post by blhack »

tptacek wrote: post #40
api wrote: post #2

I really think there'd be less opposition to GMOs were it not for the fact that this one company -- a firm with a history of somewhat scummy and antagonistic behavior -- didn't control the entire industry.

That antagonistic behavior being what? I ask because there's a commonly-held belief about Monsanto that they, in effect, wait for the wind to blow IP-encumbered seeds onto fields and then sue the farmers who manage those fields for royalties. The reality is that Monsanto sues farmers when they take Roundup-Ready crops, plant them, and then use Roundup on those crops. You can't do that innocently; if you spray Roundup…

Thanks for being the voice of reason around here.

Re: Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants in Europe

#44

Post by jamesaguilar »

api wrote: post #26
jamesaguilar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- MSG is fine. Denying this is basically anti-scientific. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Safety ) - Preservatives -- it's hard to know what you're referring to without you being more specific. Something being "suspect" is basically a comment about human paranoia, not actual health effects. - Nitrites -- again, weak evidence that they may be carcinogens in some circumstances. Nothing epidemiologic…

"Anti-scientific" Herein lies the problem. Science is a method, not a dogma or a series of religious pronouncements. Trans-fat and even cigarettes were once considered healthy according to the science of the day. As far as suspicion of new food items goes, there's a scientific argument to be made there too. Human beings are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution that has optimized us to m…

Right, and you are denying the outcome of applying that method.

Re: Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants in Europe

#45

Post by blhack »

sigzero wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That antagonistic behavior being what? I ask because there's a commonly-held belief about Monsanto that they, in effect, wait for the wind to blow IP-encumbered seeds onto fields and then sue the farmers who manage those fields for royalties. The reality is that Monsanto sues farmers when they take Roundup-Ready crops, plant them, and then use Roundup on those crops. You can't do that innocently; if you spray Roundup…

I thought there was pretty much a whole movie (Food Inc) documenting that very thing (i.e. cross contamination). Please don't try and say that the hatred going towards Monsanto isn't deserved because it most assuredly is. http://www.damemagazine.com/2013/04/03/monsanto-six-truths-a...

Link to it. There are lots of movies saying lots of things. I'll make you a documentary implying how ASU eats babies if you want me to. That doesn't make it correct.

(ASU because it's across the street from my house)

Re: Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants in Europe

#46

Post by api »

mikeash wrote: post #32
api wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people see opposition to GMOs as irrational, but I don't think it is. It's perfectly rational, especially if you don't really understand genetics (which most people don't... it's an esoteric subject). The reason it's rational is this: were GMOs to be found to be unhealthy, it would be a continuation of a well-established pattern. Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy. - Trans-fats…

MSG? Really? What's next, the evils of vaccines?

So far nobody's responded to my core point, which is about human social behavior and inductive inference in the absence of deep subject matter understanding.

People have also cherry picked this or that. I'll concede MSG. That's not the point. So far nobody's cherry picked margarine because there is now very strong evidence for the unhealthiness of trans fats.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat#Health_risks

For a generation doctors told people to replace butter with margarine. Got to avoid those unhealthy saturated fats!

Butter, it turns out, may actually be good for you: http://quantifiedself.com/2011/01/results-of-the-buttermind-...

What inductive inference are people supposed to draw from this pattern? Or are they just supposed to mindlessly trust in people with credentials next to their names?

It's a problem that goes way beyond medical science, too. Every time the president of the United States stands up and lies the country into war, every time a well-respected economist claims housing prices will always go up or a market pundit calls out that "this bubble is different," every time it is said that "no modern reactor can have an accident like Chernobyl" (this was the refrain prior to Fukushima), people lose a bit of their respect for the social mechanisms our society uses to identify and credential expertise.

This is the cause for the increasing mistrust of expertise. The quacks and fanatics and pseudoscientists are simply exploiting it. They didn't cause it. The claimants of expertise in our culture destroy their own credibility quite well, and when that happens people inductively extend that loss of credibility to entire categories of expertise and even to the concept of expertise itself.

Re: Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants in Europe

#47

Post by chm »

This is a great "precedent" in both agricultural and patent law. Even if it wasn't a ruling, it sends a positive message.

No matter how you look at it, the Americas are a huge agricultural laboratory, and we're the guinea pigs.

Monsanto should disseminate knowledge about the science behind its products. Their current effort(http://www.monsanto.com/products/Pages/monsanto-science-and-...) is too shallow and simple. Give me hard data, not PR stuff.

Re: Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants in Europe

#48

Post by maeon3 »

Imagine if a nation who had a significantly worse obesity epidemic going on that was way worse than in the US. And they were pushing to sell seeds to us.

It's kind of like a hobo who is next to death trying to sell you some health pills while insisting that his poor health is not caused by the health pills he has been taking all the time.

Re: Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants in Europe

#49

Post by criley »

api wrote: post #36
criley wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, just jumping in, I have a BS in Biology and api's post here is full of non-scientific and pseudoscientific garbage. I believe he suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect and his completely unsourced post should create a huge red flag in any readers mind. I'm not going to go point by point as the average HNer should be able to research for themselves, but I will respond to this gem that generated the largest facepa…

I should also have been more precise. By food "innovations" I meant synthetic alterations in the composition of food itself such as the introduction of chemically altered oils, flavoring additives, preservatives, and similar. Borlaug changed the way food is grown, not its composition. I personally am not particularly afraid of GMO foods. I was pointing out the sociological and political reasons for opposition to them…

>Look into the history of health advice and you'll find the same pattern: something is said to be healthy and people are told to do it. Later it is found to be unhealthy, often dramatically so. Cigarettes and margarine / trans-fat are probably the clearest examples, but there are many others and many outside the realm of food.

Bad cherry picking used only to promote your own point. What about the enormous amount of good advice that has changed our lifestyles over the past century? Do you even know how people lived 100 years ago, how they ate?

What you should say is "some health experts have a habit of not always promoting scientifically sound advice, and many times promoting ideas that fly contrary to evidence. Fortunately as more evidence is gathered, those 'experts' are discredited and a better understanding of nutrition is the result".

When you don't cherry pick, you can find sources like:

The Harvard School of Public Health's Nutrition source. By any metric, "health experts promoting ideas". http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/

Can you take issue with these health experts providing advice? Anything they recommend that you think is grossly wrong? Because this is scientifically validated nutrition advice from health experts, the very thing you're trying to discredit by screaming "trans fats and cigarettes" as if those complex cases invalidate an entire scientific field of study.

Honestly, you're trying to smear the name of "experts" in general, without separating "health experts" (medical doctors, nutritionists, idiot laypeople who label themselves naturopaths, etc) from scientists. I feel like you're trying to find a way to ignore the entire science of nutrition because you got burned listening to a fad or because big tobacco ran roughshod over science six decades ago.

Re: Monsanto gives up fight for genetically modified plants in Europe

#50

Post by Create »

sigzero wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That antagonistic behavior being what? I ask because there's a commonly-held belief about Monsanto that they, in effect, wait for the wind to blow IP-encumbered seeds onto fields and then sue the farmers who manage those fields for royalties. The reality is that Monsanto sues farmers when they take Roundup-Ready crops, plant them, and then use Roundup on those crops. You can't do that innocently; if you spray Roundup…

I thought there was pretty much a whole movie (Food Inc) documenting that very thing (i.e. cross contamination). Please don't try and say that the hatred going towards Monsanto isn't deserved because it most assuredly is. http://www.damemagazine.com/2013/04/03/monsanto-six-truths-a...

http://www.arte.tv/de/1930194.html
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