RCL 2 #5: Appeals of an Anti-GMOs Organization

Arguments of the NON GMO Project against GMOs:

  1. GMOs are Unsafe
    • Claim that “there is no scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs”
      • There have been studies upon studies supporting the cause that GMOs cause no harm to humans
        • Lots of information why the studies done to prove GMOs are safe are wrong, but do not provide any evidence of GMOs actually harming humans
      • I can agree that genetic engineering is unsafe, but mostly just in the aspect that many times, genes come from creatures that aren’t endemic to the region where genetic engineering experiments take place and there must be extra containment to prevent them from escaping from the lab and wreaking havoc on the local ecosystem
      • The non-GMO paper continues by saying that genetic modification isn’t a precise technique due to mutations
        • In lab, there are PCR machines to verify that the gene you want is in the correct place and various sequencing tools to get the exact order of nucleotides within your recombinant DNA, so you can check if your DNA did what you wanted it to do
        • Of course there are mutations, but due to the wobble effect, they can still code for the same amino acid and that won’t kill you
        • The magic of checking your DNA lets you see if these mutations are harmful or not
  2. Promote the “natural” method of crossbreeding seeds
    • Technically speaking, the natural method is also intentional genetic modification. but instead of taking a few months/years to develop more food, this method is as fast as watching grass grow, literally
    • People have been taking seeds out of plants that showed favorable traits such as pest resistance, largest fruit, sweetest flavor, etc, which caused a natural change in the genetic makeup of the plants since certain genes were selected for
    • One source referenced on the NON GMO project website gives an accurate depiction of plant transformation, but then goes to to say that transformation is a “long, arduous, labour-intensive, and expensive process’
      • That’s true, depending how you look at it. Maintaining explants takes a lot of time to make sure that the transformed leaves don’t have bacterial overgrowth and there’s constant transfers of the explants, but it takes only a few months to set up the process and once that happens, you can pump out transgenic plants pretty quickly
      • Especially in comparison to the natural “pick a seed and replant, wait a year for it to grow, and hope that it grows with your selected trait,” genetic editing allows you to transform a copious amount of plants at once and various hormones can help you determine whether the plant is transformed or not
      • This is important in areas with severe food shortages: genetically modifying plants to withstand drought and other stresses is much more important to areas where food isn’t guaranteed and banning GMOs would negatively impact many of those who aren’t as well off to choose to eat that haven’t been genetically modified
      • The main fear is that GMOs are unnatural and genetic engineering “evades natural barriers between species and kingdoms that have evolved over millennia”
        • Considering that at one point, there was only one species and every living created evolved from that organism, this is weak evidence of why people shouldn’t eat GMOs
  3. Bank upon the fact that GMOs cannot be tested upon humans
    • As mentioned before, the website provides no real evidence for why people shouldn’t eat GMOs other than the fear of what will happen to the human body after a long-term consumption of GMOs as well as links to various other websites that use big words to make genetic engineering seem like a mad scientist’s toy which also do not give any substantial evidence proving the negative of consuming GMOs
    • This whole argument is based on personal preferences: some people don’t like the idea that their mass produced food was given a gene to help it proliferate faster so farmers and stores can sell more food for less money
    • Their main argument includes that we don’t know how GMOs will impact humans in the long term even those most of us are already test subjects
      • Scientists cannot do experiments testing the impact of GMOs on humans due to ethics
      • There was an experiment in which rats that ate GMOs grew tumors, but it was later revealed that these rats were already cancer-prone to begin with and the scientists left out trials in which many of the rats that were given GMOs grew no tumors at all

Testing Labs

Click to access GMO-Myths-and-Truths-edition2.pdf

 

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