Recently, in honor of Norman Borlaug’s 95th birthday, Ron Bailey of Reason Magazine posted a quote from his 2000 interview with Borlaug. For those unfamiliar with him, Borlaug was the most famous pioneer of the “Green Revolution” seeds of the 1960s, credited with a drastic expansion in food production. The claim that Borlaug saved a billion people from starvation is a persistent meme on the Internet.
In keeping with his rather in-your-face attitudes in favor of genetically-modified organisms and against anything organic, Bailey’s excerpts from the interview consisted mostly of digs against organic farming.
For example, Borlaug dismissed claims on behalf of organic farming as “ridiculous,” adding that “this shouldn’t even be a debate.”
Now, just as an aside, whenever a spokesmen for the establishment view on any subject fails to correctly and honestly state the issue of contention, he pretty much loses all credibility with me. Even if you don’t have personal knowledge of the empirical data that would falsify the claims of one side or the other, if one side doesn’t even frame the question correctly you can discount their opinion from the start. For example, when a registered dietitian repeats the little gem about vitamin doses above the RDA just creating “more expensive urine in your toilet,” they’re missing the whole point. First of all, the RDA is simply the minimum dose for preventing outright deficiency-related diseases, not the ideal dose to promote optimal functioning. Higher doses continue to provide benefits, on a diminishing return basis, in the case of Vitamin C up to a dose of several grams a day for most people. Second, that obnoxious little bumper sticker slogan ignores the whole idea of antioxidants: each molecule of (say) ascorbic acid in your urine has a free radical attached to it.
Along the same lines, it’s interesting that, in making his arguments against organic farming, Borlaug displayed an almost total lack of awareness of what the available organic techniques actually are.
For example, he claimed it was impossible to get enough nitrogen from organic material. Existing nitrogen inputs organically, he said, “would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure.” This would require enormous sacrifices of wild land for forage. “There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.”
Indeed there is. Apparently Borlaug, a professor of agronomy, has never heard of green manuring with nitrogen-fixing cover crops. You don’t need additional land to grow the legumes—you grow them on the land you’re fertilizing. And they reproduce themselves—you just have to save the seed. Once you have fertile soil, you don’t need continuing inputs from off-site; intensive, closed-loop recycling of crop residues and human and animal waste will maintain fertility.
Borlaug also asserted that, if all agriculture were organic, “you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.”
He apparently conflates the distinction between large and small agriculture with the distinction between chemical and organic. He seems to assume that “organic farming” is simply the mechanized row-cropping that prevails in conventional agribusiness—but minus the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
But in fact, small-scale agriculture is almost universally more productive than large-scale agriculture. The prevailing techniques used in American-style agribusiness were not introduced primarily to economize on land or maximize output per acre. After all, in most parts of the country the largest agribusiness operations have had privileged access to large tracts of land, going back in many cases to land grants at the time of first European settlement. For example, in California many of the largest operations were built on expropriated haciendas dating from Mexican or Spanish colonial times. No, the prevailing techniques of American agribusiness have focuses on the substitution of capital for labor, in order to increase output per man-hour and reduce the agency problems of labor—even at the cost of reduced output per acre. And small-scale operations, accordingly, tend to have both lower outputs per labor-hour and higher outputs per acre than large ones.
What’s more, it’s simply incontrovertible that the most intensive organic techniques produce far more per acre than conventional agribusiness. For example, John Jeavons’ raised bed technique can feed one person on a minimum of 4000 sq. ft. That’s one tenth of an acre. And it’s done, by the way, without cattle manure or additional land for foraging them. Of course, it’s a relatively spare diet—about 80% legumes, cereal grains and starchy tubers, and only 20% green vegetables and fruits—but that only demonstrates the theoretical limit. We’re not, in fact, limited to anything near as low as a tenth acre of arable land per capita. And where there are genuine constraints on access to land, they’re generally political: e.g., the more than half of arable land enclosed in Latin American haciendas and latifundia that are held out of development, while surrounding peasants hire themselves out as day laborers to the patron because they can’t support themselves on their inadequate family plots.
Borlaug asserted that “if we had tried to produce the harvest of 1990 with the technology of 1960, we would have had to have increased the cultivated area by another 177 million hectares…”
But that’s dirty pool. That assumes that the only available choice is Borlaug’s preferred method in use today, versus “the technology of 1960.” In such a cramped little intellectual schema, there was only one technologically determined path for advancement; the only choice was to take the one correct path or to remain static.
There is no such thing as neutral or generically “efficient” technology, and very few technological imperatives that remain constant independent of institutional and power considerations. The most “efficient” farming methods depend on who will be using them. At any given time, there are numerous alternative paths of technical advance. The main selective factor determining which one is adopted is the power needs of the dominant political and economic institutions.
The proper comparision, therefore, is with the path not taken.
“Green Revolution” seeds and technology, for example, were developed to be usable primarily under the conditions prevailing in large-scale cash crop production on land from which peasant subsistence farmers had been evicted: i.e., heavily subsidized irrigation water and other large-scale inputs like expensive chemical fertilizer.
Frances Moore Lappe eschews the term “high-yield varieties,” preferring to call them “high-response varieties,” because they only have high yields under the artificial conditions prevailing in politically privileged and subsidized, large-scale cash crop production. Under the conditions prevailing for peasant small-holders, without subsidized irrigation water or synthetic nitrogen inputs, relying primarily on careful soil stewardship and rainwater recycling, the most productive varieties are often the native and traditional varieties–drought-hardy, and otherwise adapted to local conditions over many generations.
The very claim that Borlaug “saved a billion lives” starts from a false assumption: that the main cause of Third World starvation was economic, rather than political. It assumes that starvation resulted mainly from insufficient production, from a lack of land, or from the inadequacy of farming techniques. In fact, the main cause of Third World starvation was what Franz Oppenheimer called “political appropriation of the land”: great landlords and landed oligarchs holding fertile land out of cultivation altogether, or tractoring off peasant smallholders so the land could be used to grow cash crops for export. The real source of starvation is the hundreds of millions of people living in shantytowns who might otherwise be supporting themselves on their own land, but who now can’t afford the “more efficient” crops produced on their former land at any price, because they don’t have any money.
To take just one example of the arbitrary assumptions concealed in Borlaug’s “now vs. 1960” contrast: Lappe has shown that the absolute calorie value of Third World food output during the period under consideration was sufficient to provide a protein-balanced diet of 2000 or 3000 calories per capita. The problem was that so much of that output was used as livestock fodder to raise meat for export, rather than domestic consumption. The problem, in other words, is who owns the land and whose interests it’s being used in. You can make your own comparison to the Irish potato famine, when the great landlords were actually producing wheat for export.
Another irritating thing Borlaug said in the interview, not excerpted in Bailey’s birthday piece: “As far as plants are concerned, they can’t tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter.”
That’s a bit like saying your body can’t tell the difference between an ascorbic acid molecule in your food from one in a pill. The molecule itself may be identical, but it makes a huge difference to biological absorption whether it’s part of a synergistic complex of bioflavonoids and other phytochemicals, many of which have yet to be isolated or available in pill form. Likewise, in agriculture, there’s a big difference in bioabsorptive function when nitrogen is put into the soil through bacterial decomposition, as opposed to a handful of white pellets. And as regular commenter P.M. Lawrence helpfully pointed out, it’s quite likely that nitrogen spikes from synthetic fertilizers have a different effect on plant growth compared to the slow release of nitrogen from organic decomposition—much like the harmful effects of insulin spikes from injection compared to the body’s manufacturing it on-demand. Borlaug completely ignores the bacterial ecology of the soil and root systems (like the need for appropriate flora and fauna like nitrogen-fixing bacteria and mycorrhizae coexisting symbiotically with root hairs), along with the importance of soil friability and osmotic quality.
Kevin, this is ridiculous. How on earth you can claim that this justifies breaking windows at Macy’s is beyond me.
What’s your position on the most commonly used argument against the food-production methods of agribusiness: that it’s “Frankenfood”?
I confess my instinctive reaction is similar to having a neighbor with a nuclear bomb: the sheer scale of the possible disaster from careless biotech experiments, if the wrong kind of organism were released into the biosphere, makes me lean toward viewing it as a threat to be taken seriously.
As P.M. Lawrence argued in a comment thread on GMOs somewhere, the comparisons of genetic engineering to gene manipulation by selective breeding are rather disingenuous. Selective breeding involves selecting for particular characteristics already existing to some degree within a species; even when new characteristics arise from mutation, the balance between the rate of natural selection and the rate of mutation is much different for selective breeding than for genetic engineering.
I recall reading something at Alternet, although I can’t remember the details, about a genetic engineering experiment that resulted in a plant that somehow crowded out others by interfering with the interaction between their root hairs and the soil’s bacteria. It was very nearly released into the environment, and had it spread it might have led to the extinction of competing land vegetation.
Kevin,
Do you suspect that a GMO would be more disruptive than your typical invasive species?
-adam
“At any given time, there are numerous alternative paths of technical advance.”
You may be interested in this article in Public Library of Science: Computation Biology : On the Growth of Scientific Knowledge: Yeast Biology as a Case Study .
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000320
One of their conclusions was this: “expansions of different domains of knowledge are highly heterogeneous and episodic such that the temporal turnover of knowledge hubs is much greater than expected by chance.”
The conclusions are very preliminary, but it is encouraging to see quantification of this issue.
This article reminds me how ridiculous it is for a supposedly libertarian magazien like Reason to have Ron Bailey report on science issues. The man is as clueless a statist as they come.
Ricketson, the issue with genetic engineering isn't whether "a GMO would be more disruptive than your typical invasive species" – it isn't. Rather it's that, instead of a finite number of new insertions into an ecology waiting in the wings, you have a system that keeps on churning them out indefinitely. Not only is this a prescription for Russian Roulette – keep on until you get it wrong – there's the time scale issue that makes it work differently from ordinary evolution, that Kevin Carson mentioned I described elsewhere. That means you can get problems with whole ecologies, quite apart from specific effects related to specific species.
Here's the thing. Evolution isn't a single process but the system arising from the interaction of two processes that work at very different rates, spontaneous mutation and natural selection. You can effectively treat natural selection as though it worked on each mutation separately, reaching a new ecological equilibrium between each mutation. With genetic engineering, though, that isn't true. New changes arrive faster than old ones can be absorbed, and you can get all sorts of wild ecological swings driven by, e.g., "Pilot Induced Oscillation" as people react to changed conditions by making yet more changes based on faulty (premature, incomplete) knowledge just as they do when trying to manage an economy – typically "too much, too late". Mathematically, you have a system of "rigidly coupled simultaneous differential equations". An analogy is, you can describe the behaviour of an electric motor by treating its electrical and mechanical parts separately: first you make the engineering approximation that mechanical angular velocities etc. are constant; then you solve the electrical part to get electric current, voltage, phase, etc. as a function of those mechanical angular velocities etc.; then you plug those in to solve the mechanical behaviour. That works because the electrical and mechanical parts work on very different time scales so the approximation is a realistic simplification; it isn't rocket science (though it's non-trivial). However, if you try the same trick with a hot water central heating system, say, it doesn't work because the pump responses and the fluid flow responses are on too similar time scales so you can get unexpected hammering and surges in the pipes – and that is rocket science, because just precisely that problem comes up in supplying fuel to liquid fuel rocket motors.
P.M. Lawrence, thanks for that response. I especially like your rocket science analogy.
So for GMOs, I take it that you consider them to have disruptive potential that is comparable to other non-native organisms*, but that the GM technology will/may greatly increase the rate at which new organisms are introduced to local ecosystems. If that is the case, then don't we have the option of placing safeguards/restraints on GM technology after we've had one or two destructive releases? As long as we can identify a disruptive release before we've initiated 100s of them, then we should be able to respond to reduce the rate of release. If we take this view, then we don't need to reject GM agriculture overall, but we should be wary of overestimating the ability of GM crops to address future food shortages, since we may not be able to deploy the technology quickly/fully.
Your other argument related to the difference between variation that arises from mutation and that which arises from genetic engineering. This is tantalizing, but I need a more thorough explanation. Can you provide a link to your essay on the topic, or other writings (i have access to academic journals)? Is your concern with gene flow from GM crops into wild populations, or with the behavior of the crops in the absence of wild relatives?
*Kevin's story of a genetic engineering experiment gone astray reminds me of Garlic Mustard (http://www.ipm.msu.edu/garlicAbout.htm), which is a natural plant that is invading Pennsylvania woods and apparently releases chemicals that disrupt the sub-soil ecology. In combination with the exploding deer population, garlic mustard is really doing a number on our forests.
Adam: I fear a worst case scenario in which it would be more disruptive. The experimental organism I mentioned (I wish I could track it down) would have been beyond comparison to lesser inconveniences like the introduction of kudzu to the U.S., rabbits to Australia, etc.
ricketson – Comparing the disruptive potential of GMO with that of non-native species is an interesting.proposition.
1. Let’s consider the disruptive potential of native species first. HIV is a wonderful example. As far back as blood samples are available, evidence of HIV has been found in just under 1% of the population in parts of Africa (this goes back to the 50’s as I recall). It mostly killed faster than it spread. No epidemic. As the rural population moved to cities and traditional sexual taboos were violated, HIV became an epidemic. Partner fidelity (whatever size a group of partners are, keep sex only within that group) for six months would be enough to stop the epidemic.
When HIV was native to the bush it posed little or not threat to human society (albeit a major threat to those who contracted it). When it migrated to cosmopolitan society it began to decimate populations.
2. And we’ve already made our way to non-native invasive species. I spent several months working at White Sands Missile Range some years ago. The area used to be home to herds of native antelope. During WWII and the years that followed, fighter pilots made sport of strafing the herds. It should surprise nobody that the antelope no longer roam at White Sands. Then some genius brought over some oryx from Africa, figuring that they are beautiful and could survive in the abandoned antelope-niche.
The oryx are nearly the size of mules. They also have horns that are three to four feet long. They are powerful and swift. The cougars won’t go near them. Bears cannot catch them. Without predators they began to out compete the native deer. They also became a serious threat to vehicular traffic – they like to play chicken with cars, and this led to increasing numbers of fatalities as their numbers increased.
The only solution was to allow hunters onto the base to keep the numbers in check. Every general’s nightmare … a bunch of armed civilians running around a facility with highly secret and vulnerable military systems being tested.
3. Consider the natural mutation of a species, in this case avian influenza. The current strains only attach well to cells in the lower lungs. Consequently, airborne transmission is very inefficient. Most cases of human to human transmission have been via blood transfer.
But, it is not unreasonable (in fact some argue it is expected) that this strain will mutate to attach to upper respiratory tissue. Then humanity would be confronted with a highly lethal virus that could be transmitted by coughing.
4. Now, to consider engineered substances that escape into the wild. It would be fun to pause here and read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Although his “ice nine” was not a species, he captures the essence of the problem.
It seems innocuous to meddle with a species’ genes. Using genetic modification to produce a useful evolutionary step may be quite helpful. The argument that somebody in a laboratory is just helping mother nature out is probably a good one in this case. The issue of the rapidity of change has already been raised. This can be good if all we get are helpful mutations. If things go wrong, it can be argued that the problem is not likely to be any worse than problems arising from natural mutations. And perhaps this point can be conceded – HIV, influenza, kudzu, and White Sands oryx are hardly the stuff of apocalypse.
But some of the genetic work being done transplants material across not just species, but families and even kingdoms. These changes would NEVER (in any practical sense) happen in nature. Instead of gradual changes we would be faced with tremendous discontinuities in the gene pool. Just letting my imagination run wild a moment, here are new things to fear: venomous house cats, rabid mosquitoes, airborne HIV, wheat that expresses prions.
Other than a James Bond villain, I cannot imagine anybody setting out to create such horrors, and some may be impossible. But what accidental horrors might one create by taking a piece of this and a piece of that and mixing them together with the other thing? I don’t want to wait until AFTER somebody has loosed an “armagedon species” into the ecosystem to “place safeguards/restraints.”
To the extent this article points out the potential role of the “Green Revolution” in preventing agrarian reforms in the third world, that’s one thing. To the extent this article seems to have an underlying ulterior motive of being a screed against nanotechnology, that’s quite another.
There seems to be some sentiment here that nanotechnology(by nanotechnology, I’m refering to the whole technological space of manipulating matter at the molecular level, which, includes, of course, such things as transgenic engineering/breeding) ought to be banned or highly regulated. That position, more or less, amounts to “collectivizing” the molecular world and the biological sciences, which is not only highly impractical, but also quite “un-libertarian.” Impractical at this point because such things like the GenBank sequence database have been publicly available for some time and, unlike such things as nuclear weapons(where mere knowledge of nuclear physics is not sufficient to produce such a weapon) practical experimentation in many cases does not require any substantial capital goods infrastructure(the garage laboratory). Un-libertarian because collectivizing something means to restrict access to State-approved institutions or entities, which effectively means, in this case, that not only would non-State approved manipulation of matter at the molecular level be forbidden, but that science itself would have to become more or less closed-source.
The libertarian approach to something like nanotechnology is to treat the knowledge as part of the commons and to allow “social institutions” to organically arise to best “regulate” it’s use. Arguments that nanotechnology is too dangerous to be left to “the commons,” and needs to be collectivized, in reality amount to the a de facto argument that nanotechnology be restricted to governments and government approved academcic and corporate labs–that closed-source biology(e.g., GenBank become closed-source and access restricted) is more secure than open-source biology. I don’t find such arguments particularly compelling based on experience in computer security, where “the wild” has proven open source software to be more secure and the open source community more adaptive and pre-emptive in addressing security issues than the closed-source counterparts. Of course, ecological systems are not the same as computer networks..duh… but my argument is that nanotechnology is here to stay; it’s just a question of who controls it and how open it is.
Sure, but one has to wonder whether truly voluntary social institutions would be able to take advantage of such capital intensive technologies as genetic engineering. And I don't think there's anything wrong with admitting skepticism of a given technology. I saw no advocacy in the above article of government bans of any sort.
"And perhaps this point can be conceded – HIV, influenza, kudzu, and White Sands oryx are hardly the stuff of apocalypse."
I'm guessing there is a little sarcasm in this line. Even if they aren't apocalyptic, they are still bad enough to worry about.
"Instead of gradual changes we would be faced with tremendous discontinuities in the gene pool. Just letting my imagination run wild a moment, here are new things to fear: venomous house cats, rabid mosquitoes, airborne HIV, wheat that expresses prions."
I don't see how the first sentence implies the second. These complicated modifications that you imagine are basically inconceivable in the absence of conscious design (and I doubt that venomous house cats would be feasible — anyway, cats are evil enough as it is) .
But more likely are the following modifications: mosquitoes who can't carry the Malaria parasite, severely attenuated HIV for vaccination, and staple foods that provide more balanced nutrition. Even if commercial corporations won't bother to develop these organisms, philanthropists will. I know that projects of this type are already underway — the mosquitoes and virus projects focus on deleting genes or making single-nucleotide changes, though they may insert foreign genes as part of the process.
Anyway, the technology exists and will continue to be developed for scientific and medical reasons. The only place where there seems to be any room for intervention is with the large scale production and distribution of GMOs, such as for agriculture. If a super-villain attempts to make a bioweapon, that's something that we're going to have to deal with directly.
Jeremy:
Nanotechnology is not necessarily capital intensive; it's open to the citizen biologist with modest resources.
http://diybio.org/
Just wait for the genetically modified microbes in mass scale. I'm afraid
the problems and fears with the current GM-plants pale in comparison.
See for example:
http://newsblaze.com/story/20080920112924tsop.nb/…
or
http://greenlight.greentechmedia.com/2008/09/16/g…
Note that the chemical in question, "One Four B-D-O", has similar effects
as the "popular" drug "gamma". Now, just go figure what kind of diseases
we might soon have.
More innovations from this shining new company:
http://www.greentechmedia.com/front2/sitesearch/r…
Ricketson asks "I take it that you consider them to have disruptive potential that is comparable to other non-native organisms, but that the GM technology will/may greatly increase the rate at which new organisms are introduced to local ecosystems. If that is the case, then don't we have the option of placing safeguards/restraints on GM technology after we've had one or two destructive releases? As long as we can identify a disruptive release before we've initiated 100s of them, then we should be able to respond to reduce the rate of release."
Nice idea, doesn't work. That's the PIO problem I mentioned; putting people in a control loop like that actually makes instabilities worse. The thinking for the proposed solution is wrong, too. It's what led to people thinking it would be safe to introduce cane toads to Australia deliberately as a biological control for a previous mistake, because they had learned from previous mistakes and were testing for dangers and applying safeguards. The pattern of introducing a flawed fix for a previous flawed introduction – on a human response time scale – is a case of PIO at work. And, of course, there is the scope for malice, both at the "mad scientist" level and at the level of introducing animals that were tailored for one environment to another, say by teenage boys deliberately catching a few and transporting them.
He then suggests "If we take this view, then we don't need to reject GM agriculture overall…"
No! No! No! What counts isn't whether you have a view, but whether it is right. The former only works for shifting blame, not for stopping harm.
Sorry, I have no formal published work on the differential equation instabilities, I merely commented on this area in private communications, in the light of that background knowledge of mine.
"Is your concern with gene flow from GM crops into wild populations, or with the behavior of the crops in the absence of wild relatives?" It's to do with both, at an ecological level as well as species or individual level. Since we can actually see such things with introduced natural species, we know that at least as much problem will come up with genetic engineering – plus, the shortened time scale issues and the indefinite supply of new variation.
JohnElder writes "Other than a James Bond villain, I cannot imagine anybody setting out to create such horrors, and some may be impossible". Curiously enough, I have just submitted a short story along those lines to a competition linked at Ken MacLeod's blog (http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com), about someone devoting his life to finding a small change that would wipe out the human race. But it isn't truly fiction, except in the details. Almost precisely the technique I used in the story is being pursued by John Abramyan, supervised by Professor Peter Koopman (http://www.invasiveanimals.com/about/our_students/john_abramyan/index2.html), looking for a way to deal with the aforementioned cane toads. The problem here is twofold: cane toads from Australia could be taken back to the original populations inadvertently or maliciously, so wiping out a chunk of a working ecology; and, the more the techniques get developed and applied, the lower the barrier gets for the same thing being done where we don't want. Part of that lower barrier is just that the techniques get easier and cheaper, but part is like (say) financial regulatory systems; the longer things work, the more casual the regulators get.
Please read also “India’s Farming ‘Revolution’ Heading For Collapse”, April 13 2009
(The first of a two-part series):
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102893816
A. Karttunen,
That NPR story is a good find. Thanks.
Anyway, regarding GM microbes, this is what the GreenTech article wrote:
"The biologically produced BDO is chemically identical to regular BDO, but it costs far less to produce and far less energy gets consumed in the manufacturing process, he added. Making regular BDO involves cooking up several different chemical intermediates at high temperatures. Biological BDO requires genetically enhanced microbes (E. coli by the way) and an environment that allows them to grow and breed. The reaction takes place at normal air pressures and requires only slightly higher-than-normal room temperatures."
If you are concerned with chemical contamination of our environment, I think this is a big breakthrough. Sure, BDO is toxic, but I'd bet that many of the intermediates used in its production are also toxic. When a microbe is used to produce this compound, manufacturers no longer need to keep large stocks of the intermediates, which inevitably will leak into the environment. Instead, the intermediates are produced and consumed with high efficiency within a single cell.
If you are concerned with a microbe producing a toxic compound, my only thought can be "so what?" Microbes already produce a wide variety of toxic compounds. That's why we don't eat rotten food.
Okay, so maybe the choice of E. coli (a gut commensal) is bothersome. But the chance of these GM E. coli colonizing our guts is virtually zero. First, engineers typically use laboratory strains that have been extensively modified from the wild-type that was isolated from a human host (50 years ago, if they are using the standard lab strain). Not only have these strains adapted to the laboratory environment over the past 50 years, but engineers typically make extensive changes to them in order to facilitate the engineering process. One strategy is to systematically knock out any gene that isn't necessary in the laboratory environment; these bugs wouldn't know what to do if they were introduced into an intestine and had to compete with wild E. coli. Another reason that these microbes would be at a competitive disadvantage in the gut is that they are designed to export large amounts of high-energy compounds (BDO)– wild competitors would not bear that same burden, and even for this strain, a single mutation could knock out the BDO production function and provide a huge boost in the energy available to the microbe..
Here is the second part of the India/Punjab story:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor…
About the GM-microbes or plants. No, I'm not categorically against them.
However, the current venture capitalist driven proprietary model
with strong pressure to get profitable soon, and all the assorted
information hoarding, doesn't reassure me that the outcome
would be the optimal.
And yes, the safety measures you list sound reasonable. However, we still
have much less control (in a sense of knowing absolutely what we are doing,
in terms of functions and consequences) when hacking genetic material
of living beings, than hacking with the source (or machine) code of computer programs.
It is in the latter field, that we _in principle_ have the total control of
what we are doing. I.e., we KNOW the purpose of each instruction and
subroutine working in 100% deterministic automaton.
Bearing this in mind, it would not be at all impossible to write 100% safe programs
with no security holes for "worms" or other computer parasites.
However, the status of our computer and network security is still dismal!
Now contrast that to a situation with the genetic manipulation,
that we are effectively just GUESSING the "purpose(s!)" of each gene, which are
acting in widely differing genomes (bifurcating from each other
as the evolution proceeds, which is quite fast with microbes).
Here are some examples of horizontal transfer with plasmids:
http://iai.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/48/1/241
http://www.pnas.org/content/96/24/14043.full.pdf
[…] Another website calls Borlaug a liar. […]
BTW, I finally stumbled across the genetic engineering experiment I referred to at No. 3 above:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18503_how-biotech-…
QUOTE: How did the leading biotech researchers of the day not realize that they had engineered a bacterium that would kill all plant life it touched? Did they not test it on any, you know, plants?!
Well, for all intents and purposes: No, they didn't….
If released from the lab–which, I cannot stress enough, it very nearly was–the modified K. planticola would have spread worldwide in a matter of months, killing all plants it touched within a week, and turning all soil-based plant life into sweet, sweet liquor.
Tell you what, mate. why don't you and your chums go and live down on the organic farm and just leave everyone else to carry on with what they want to do?
I don't know what you've got against someone who earned a nobel prize for saving millions of lives, but i don't want any part of your elitist fantasies based on "The Good Life".
"it’s quite likely that nitrogen spikes…" define "quite likely". Does this mean, "studies indicate", or, "I am using a comparison to try to reason my way to scientific fact". Sounds like the later.
Somehow I am not really buying the global plant Apocalypse thing. Maybe, just MAYBE, because you are referencing a facking CRACKED article, Carson. Go ahead and link me to college humor and maddox's view on GMO while you are at it. Actually Maddox is probably more believable. Cracked is known for making humorous stories *from* fact, not for making knockdown arguments or conveying anything a honest person would put forward as evidence pro/con to a position to be included in a debate, especially something political. I think if you aren't expecting someone to give you hell about that, you are delusional.
I also find it kind of hard to take this as a serious blow to the science or practice of genetic engineering itself when it seems pretty clear, even in this damn cracked article, that the fault can almost squarely be blamed on the poor testing and standards put forward by a government agency (FDA) (not that the Cracked article was even accurate about this). I also did not see even a single mention within as to WHY this would have spread worldwide. It is just put forward with all of our big scary thoughts about plague and the like as airborne diseases that spread like fire over straw. There is not a shred of evidence that the GM strain would out compete the non GM strain and spread anyway. Even the savior of the article admits this. OH SNAP!
Here are some links for you Carson, ones not from freaking humor sites. Try using teh google:
Rebuttal of Dr Elaine R Ingham (written brief and presentation to the Royal Commission on Genetic Engineering, 1 February 2001). http://www.biotech-info.net/ingham_rebuttal.pdf – oh shiz dawg!
Ingham's apology to this Royal Commission. http://www.gene.ch/gentech/2001/Mar/msg00013.html
UH OH! you got served!
notable lulz worthy excerpts:
"the possibility of destruction of terrestrial plants that I referred to as an outcome of releasing this organism is an extrapolation from the laboratory evidence. It is one possible scenario, based on the findings that introducing the genetically engineered bacterium into this type of soil killed or harmed plants. There are other possible scenarios which could occur, we need more data to be able to make a clear judgement on the most likely outcome." – *biff!*
"soil tests I set out are intended to indicate the kinds of soil tests which could be carried out to determine the effects of introducing genetically engineered organisms into the soil, based on the soil tests I am familiar with. I am not suggesting this is a definitive set of methods for analysing the effects of genetically modified organisms on soil." – *kapow!*
Now Batman strikes his final blow:
"I was incorrect in stating that the specific genetically engineered Klebsiella Planticola I was talking about had been approved for field trails and was going to be released. I had received this information from third party sources and was mistaken about it."
– *KADOOOOSH!* I guess all that CRAP about it being finalized and ready to ship out, all that bull about it being this patent pending, approved, ready to go apocalypse was a bunch of over blown crap. LIKE A NORMAL PERSON WOULD EXPECT FROM A HUMOR SITE LIKE CRACKED. But then again, we are more concerned about our big scary boogeyman GM and anything that supports and promotes the implied localism and small scale of organic farming to go along with our biases towards mutualism. AREN'T WE?