/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.5781561]

Hey /sci/, I need your help. I'm in the process of writing a college English paper on the negatives of genetically modified organisms (both environmental and on human health). I need some good facts, preferably with sources. I need a little bit from both sides.

The paper is due in three hours.

I promise to stay off this board if I get some help.

Thanks friends.

[Anonymous No.5781567]

+ If in the right hands you can help feed the world (fuck Monsanto)

-Google GMO infertility. It's actually a very easy paper from the sound of it.

[Anonymous No.5781566]

This is the 4th thread we've had on GMO today. You know you can ask /pol/ and they'll reply much much faster.

[Anonymous No.5781652]

bump

[Anonymous No.5781686]

>>5781652
Why did you pick negatives?
There are almost non.

[Anonymous No.5781697]

>>5781561

Negatives: reduced genetic variation

Which means that one disease/virus could affect more crops, potentially devastating harvests.


Any other negative that is a fact? Sheeeeeit idk

[Anonymous No.5781709]

>>5781697
The negative's easily assuaged by an increased ability to modify against methods of infection, largely g-proteins. GMOs can actually improve monocultures that we have now, like bananas and apples

[Anonymous No.5781714]

>>5781686
In retrospect, I should have gone on the other side.
Fuck

[Anonymous No.5781719]

>>5781714
Visit gmonews.com.
It's a crackpot site that's wrong in every case, but it'll get you your essay.

[Anonymous No.5781740]

They're about as dangerous and deadly as a wet carrot.

[Anonymous No.5781752]

OP you may as well have an essay about homeopathy being an effective medical treatment.

>>5781697
>create new strains
>reduces variation
U wut m8? It's not like GMOs will cover the entire earth displacing all the wildlife. It'll all be in controlled farming environments.

[Anonymous No.5781797]

Here take these facts

[Anonymous No.5781801]

>>5781719
Seconded. This is good advice.

[Anonymous No.5781803]

Cons:
- They scare stupid people.
- They could make it into the wild, expose pests to anti-pest traits, and make GMO's slightly less beneficial to humanity.
- None.

[Anonymous No.5781828]

GMOs are antagonized unfairly by luddite types, but I'll try and be an honest help anyways.


Cons - They are bad for Carforre and European agribusiness.

They allow increased application of glyphosphate (round up ready soybeans) which likely have decreased nutrition

Since farmers breed for characteristics other than taste and nutrition, they encourage the creation of foods which conform to these unhealthy criteria.

BT corn negatively impacts the butterfly populations which feed on it.

[Anonymous No.5781854]

these people tend to put real sources in their articles http://www.motherjones.com/topics/food-and-ag use the search bar to find the gmo posts

[Anonymous No.5781899]

>>5781709

This allows us to copy from one to another. We shouldn't have monocultures in the first place.

The way cavendish banana trees are grown is by taking a piece of the stem of a banana tree and replanting. They're all essentially the same tree, not clones in the scientific sense but in the practical sense. These trees are not grown from trees, there is no more breeding undergoing between them, no more genetic exchange. The cavendish has essentially stagnated. This was the same process for the big mike banana and it was wiped out by a plague because what infected and killed one banana tree could easily spread to another one and the tree had no means of developing defenses against it (this is why the big mike banana was erradicated in one fell swoop. It was like the cavendish but larger, sweeter, hardier, and in other ways superior. Now you're saying that with GMO we can fix any problems that bananas have, effectively replacing the natural selection process by adding in genes from other plants.

The problem is that GMO can only COPY from other plants, it cannot currently produce NEW genes. A future of monocultures and GMO will surely lead to genetic stagnation.

The negatives as a whole are not assuaged by that ability. All they do is allow us to continue to sustain an already unsustainable system (monoculture).

Consider how many variants of food humans have been able to use and consume. Hundreds of types of corn, potatoes, carrots, etc.. Why would you throw that away?

[Anonymous No.5781903]

Due to abuses of Copyright law they allow small farms to be wiped out and thereby wipe harm genetic diversity. There have been instances when contamination has occurred due to gross negligence with no repercussions to the company.

The idea is that Monsanto or whoever owns the rights to the genes that they use. We'll refer to the roundup ready genes to avoid confusion though they produce more (not all available to consumers). Plants such as canola, corn, etc.. have the Round Up Ready genes added to them this makes them immune to their pesticide Round Up. They then sell the seed to farms at a slightly higher cost than normal seed, the benefit of higher yields offsets the cost of the seed. This comes with a license that they have to renew yearly in order to continue using the seed. Because the farmers do not own the rights to the genes they can't just harvest the plant and replant the seeds, that would be infringing on the rights of Monsanto. Monsanto claims that many people pirate their seed by reselling it to other individual farmers without licenses. In response Monsanto goes to different farms and either asks the farmers if they can test their plants (which most farmers agree to anyways on the basis that they've done nothing wrong) or they secretly test the plants without permission. If the gene is found to be in the plants on a farmer's property and the farmer is without a license then the farmer is taken to court for copyright infringement.

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[Anonymous No.5781912]

>>5781903

Recall that copyright law is civil law, not criminal. This means that in order to be taken to court for something like this another person (legal term) must file a claim against you using their own research. In other words, it's not something that the police would be involved in. This is in the same vein as suing your ex room mate for not paying their half of the rent.

So, monsanto does their own tests and generally (as has been the case) around two years later the person gets served with documents notifying them they're being sued. Since two years have elapsed however the farmer is no longer capable of running their own tests and having them admissible in court and has no way to defend themselves. The nature of these court cases generally favor monsanto heavily and because of this most farmers settle out of court. Due to the nature of how people settle out of court (one of the clauses stipulates that the individual is not allowed to speak about the issue) then it's difficult to obtain details over what happens n these cases. What is known (from people who have refused the "standard" deal) is that Monsanto orders to have all the seed burned including all the seed they've saved over many generations (it may be contaminated). They are required to pay a huge sum of money. Not allowed to speak about the issue.

Here's an article on monsanto's site regarding the agreement.
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/why-does-monsanto-sue-farmers-who-save-seeds.aspx


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[Anonymous No.5781917]

>>5781912

This leads to one of two outcomes.

>The farmer settles out of court and loses their seed.
>The farmer fights Monsanto, goes bankrupt, loses the court case, and loses their seed.

In either case the farm has it's seed destroyed.

Now, as far as how the farms get contaminated in the first place. There have been many instances where the cause has been found out but it not affecting the court case. Examples include a Monsanto Truck wrecking on the side of the road near a farm, a Monsanto truck driving through the area where the farm is and having it's tarp blown off by high winds, neighbors owning Monsanto GMO crops and the gene entering your own plants through natural means, and many others.

So you can see the problem becomes incredibly muddled. If you have a neighbor who's plants contaminate yours are you responsible for having it int your land? What if you don't want it do you have ANY legal recourse to take against Monsanto for contamination? On the other hand if you stop allowing Monsanto to sue for this then how are they able to stop people from pirating? It all boils down to the fact that they fundamentally can't tell if their gene got there on purpose (through piracy) or unintentionally.

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[Anonymous No.5781920]

You might as well try to prove that god is real, OP. You would have better luck.

[Anonymous No.5781921]

>>5781917

What does this do to farms in a surrounding area?

You can model an array of non-GMO farms surrounding a GMO farm on paper. It's a little contrived but effective for illustrating how this is unsustainable. Just draw a grid of green squares with a yellow square in the middle. Your yellow square has a small probability of contaminating the neighboring cells (if you weren't an english major I'd give you advice on how to do this with AI methods but really that's overkill).

So run some iterations and suppose it contaminates one square next to it (color it orange or something). This square will continue proliferating the gene until it becomes a yellow square and it's probability of contaminating a neighboring square also increases. Continue this process till you have some more yellow squares.

Now suppose Monsanto decides to have it's investigators work in the region. Suppose they only test a percentage of the sites and their tests aren't 100% (they may grab plant that isn't contaminated or it could just be not a very good test). So there is a probability that a site will be tested and a small probability that a negative site will test positive as well as a large probability that a positive site will test positive. This turns some of your clandestine yellow squares into copyright infringement squares. These can do whatever they want but they will lose their seed, at which point the farm will either stay barren or it can have new crop planted (new ownership or just the same ownership somehow surviving).

The next generation of crop may have a probability of being GMO or non-GMO. Due to the past lawsuit and the now known possibility of infringement the farm will have a larger probability of going with GMO for their new crop than non-GMO. You can assign probabilities to all possibilities (including staying barren).

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[Anonymous No.5781922]

>>5781921

Continue this process over many iterations and you will definitely see that genetic diversity on the whole drops and more farms switch to GMO (barren farms can be bought up or stay abandoned, assign probabilities accordingly). The way it spreads is almost disease-like.

This is the reason many other countries refuse GMO. Haiti even turned away a full boatload of GMO seed right after their shit got rocked. You can find news articles about it fairly easily. Mexico currently has boycots on Corn Flour because it's being made with GMO. There is a lot of genetic diversity throughout Latin American food markets (in modern times, not just historically). They used to have a ban on the importation of GMO corn into Mexico and had people check farms on the border to the US for contamination. If contamination was found the farm would be burned down. You may ask why this is and the reason is that Latin America doesn't just deal with a couple types of corn, they deal with hundreds of types, many local to only some communities. Monoculture industrial farming to communities like this isn't just destructive to genetic diversity it's also destructive towards cultural diversity. Imagine if all the beer in the world started being replaced by Budweiser because it's more efficient, has higher yields, etc..

There are a lot of cons to GMO, but you won't find them by skimming the surface as there are a lot of idiots who don't understand the first thing about the issue and argue on either side of it.