GMO bad, natural selection good?

GMO: Genetically Modified Organism. There is a stark difference between something naturally made by human through natural selection (I.e., me breeding sheep resistant to Barberpole worms), and that of a laboratory.
GMO:
A genetically modified organism (GMO) or genetically engineered organism (GEO) is an organism whose genetic material has been altered using genetic engineering techniques. These techniques, generally known as recombinant DNA technology, use DNA molecules from different sources, which are combined into one molecule to create a new set of genes.


The definitions of GMO, and using natural selection are indeed different, different enough to draw a line through. Instead of "inserting" a gene (a more than polite term) into my sheep, I am going to take a ram resistant to Barberpole worms, and breed him to my other ewes.

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I'm an environmentalist, left wing, Ron Paul loving Prius driver with a farm. If you have a problem with that, kindly go take a leap.

In the mid-1900’s, some very important new sweet corn genes were developed: ‘SH2’ shrunken gene and the ‘SE’ sugary enhanced gene
http://www.uvm.edu/vtvegandberry/fac...genotypes.html

But that was accepted since the Internet hadn't been discovered yet and some scaremonger hadn't come up with the word "frankenfood".

Now everyone add a new word to your GM vocabulary, "cisgenesis". Look it up, study it, and determine where it fits in everyone's criteria for good or bad.

Martin

Very interesting.

Instead of taking decades of human work to achieve the end result, use recombinant DNA technology to shorten the development time.

By some peoples thinking, that should be classified as a GMO, simply because it used a laboratory to get the same result.

Do us the courtesy of providing some information about your credentials and background that makes you an authority on this subject.

I used the term organic, without Websters definition attached. Silly me, I thought in the context of this discussion we all knew what the topic was. Organic as in food raised without the use of chemicals from seeds and plants that are not GMO.

This topic will be educational, thought provoking and a bit entertaining if some folks would just stay on topic and leave their nitpicking to the coondog on the porch. Excuse me, kindly leave their nitpicking and kindly stay on topic.

cisgenesis

Suddenly the line between what we thought was a safe natural hybrid and GMO has become even more subjective.

I might ask you the same thing. I don't have to be an 'authority' on the subject, otherwise, maybe we should all be professors to raise a chicken.

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I'm an environmentalist, left wing, Ron Paul loving Prius driver with a farm. If you have a problem with that, kindly go take a leap.

That's a wonderful idea!

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I'm an environmentalist, left wing, Ron Paul loving Prius driver with a farm. If you have a problem with that, kindly go take a leap.

We already have. To be organic, you cannot use Genetically Modified Organisms.
And we can't 'embrace' a corn that has naturally developed Bt; that is a foreign gene and will probably never show up in the corn plant through natural selection.

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I'm an environmentalist, left wing, Ron Paul loving Prius driver with a farm. If you have a problem with that, kindly go take a leap.

Unless you are claiming that evolution is static, you can't use "probably never" to support your view. Corn originated on this hemisphere over many eons. It developed defenses against just about every type of pest and disease that it encountered. It's only been exposed to the European pests for a few hundred years. Other species of plant life can develop resistance to a pest or disease naturally and there is no reason why corn should be an exception.

Martin

I didn't say corn couldn't adapt, however, genetic modification is not a natural process, which natural selection is. Genetic modification is done in a lab, using 'scientific' methods, which happen to be crude:
"The GMO process is very crude, and leaves large loops for errors. A common term for genetic manipulation is gene "insertion". This is a more than polite term. The most common way of doing "insertion" is a dish full of the cells to be manipulated. A gene "gun" then literally shoots a bullet, coated with the gene to be inserted, into the dish, in the hopes that somewhere, somehow, the proper gene ended up in the proper DNA in the proper place at the proper time. In order to identify the proper cell, they (guess what?) attach an auxiliary gene to the gene to be inserted, that renders it immune to a particular antibiotic that is normally deadly to the cells. They then kill the cells with said antibiotic, and whichever cell has the correct, new DNA will be the one still alive. Now, this creates some rather obvious problems. If you take a line of bricks, and throw another brick into them, chances are, it's going to mess things up. Who knows what got misplaced when that gene 'brick' got thrown in there? And, we have another problem: the RNA. This is a gene that has never before been introduced with the cell. What will the RNA think of it? Will it do what the new gene is supposed to tell it to do? Or will it think it says something completely different, and produce a completely undiscovered new carcinogen? Or will everything go OK? The only way to tell, is long-term testing. This is almost never done, because in almost every case, animals fed GMO food developed things that the animals fed the same food, but non-GM, did not develop; cancer, tumors, organ failure, abnormalities, etc. Unless long-term testing is done to confirm it is safe, no GMO is safe.
There's also the risk of gene-transfers. What happens when that antibiotic resistant gene slides into something else, during mating? Will animals eat it, and then become resistant to, say, Gentamycin sulfate? Who knows.
Source: What I remember from Seeds of Deception. "

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I'm an environmentalist, left wing, Ron Paul loving Prius driver with a farm. If you have a problem with that, kindly go take a leap.

Leaving yourself lots of wiggle room there.

Find me corn that will evolve it's own toxic pesticide. Also, in a proper debate, you don't just post ridiculous one-liners, designed for the specific reason to be provocative.

__________________
I'm an environmentalist, left wing, Ron Paul loving Prius driver with a farm. If you have a problem with that, kindly go take a leap.

And....? So we know what the genes are now and we have them labeled. So we can cross 2 kinds of sweet corn and make new ones. That is still natural. It is still corn grown in a field and while the process to get exactly what you want is more labor intensive it is not GMO. You posted a definition that was basically the same as the one I posted. You have to take a seed and force foreign DNA into it to make it GMO.

From Wiki

I say do it naturally even if it takes longer. Again we still don't know the long term effects of splicing genes.

But genes DO modify naturally. It is happening constantly. There is not a single form or plantlife which is not capable of genetic modification. Ordinary people call them mutants. It is the reason why there are many different related varieties of the same species. Of the thousands of varieties of tomatoes, at least 5% are the result of genetic mutations. The remaining 95% are stabilized hybrids, another form of genetic modification. Those genetic modifications take place via seeds. Garlic has many hundreds of different varieties which are all genetically different. Those changes have not taken place via seeds but genetic modification within the plants.

Martin

I am intrigued by Martin's challenge for us to find out the meaning of "cisgenic" Perhaps this will help:

"Production of cisgenic strawberry plants
In the end, the combined use of all aspects described above enables the production of genetically modified plants which contain only native genes and native promoters and which may therefore be more acceptable to consumers. To demonstrate the possibility of producing such cisgenic plants, the described techniques have been applied to strawberry with the aim to generate strawberry plants that are less susceptible to infection by B. cinerea. For this aim the strawberry FaPGIP1a gene, which natural expression level is expected to be insufficient for inhibition of B. cinerea spread, has been combined with the 1.6pFaExp2-promoter sequence, which directs gene expression to a high level in ripening strawberry fruits. This new strawberry
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Chapter 7 __________________________________________________ __________________
gene combination has been inserted into a binary vector in which the inducible recombinase gene and the bifunctional selectable marker gene are flanked by recombination sites, enabling recombination mediated removal of both genes at the desired point in time. Using this vector for transformation of strawberry and successive removal of the selectable marker and recombinase gene have resulted in 14 putative cisgenic strawberry plants (results not shown). PCR analysis has shown that in 11 of these plants the selectable marker gene has successfully been removed and that the new gene combination is present. These plants have recently been transferred to the greenhouse for production of fruits for further characterisation.
It is envisaged that a significantly higher level of B. cinerea resistance in fruits of these plants will result in reduction of fungicide applications, which will be favourable to both producers, consumers and environment. Since these plants contain no regulatory or coding sequences of foreign origin, it is envisaged that this particular genetically modified strawberry will find good acceptance by producers and consumers of strawberries. In the end, the use of such cisgenic strawberry plants, for example in the production according to organic principles, could lead to a new way of sustainable crop production practices (Ronald et al., 2004)."

This quote is taklen from the treatise:

http://library.wur.nl/wda/dissertations/dis3650.pdf

It seems that researchers are getting smart and finding more consumer-acceptable ways to do genetic modification by using same plant genes.....

And by the way, Page 65 of the treatise gives you an idea of how they did the work. You won't find any "gene guns" mentioned, but I remember that "Shot from guns" was the way they made Quaker puffed wheat. Perhaps we are a bit behind the times, hmmm?

geo

Like I said find me a soybean that mated with a bacteria in the wild and produced a seed. This conversation is pointless until you guys are actually willing to address GMO's. Nobody here disagrees with the possibilities of mutation, adaptability, natural seletion, etc. We have a problem with gene splicing and creating chimeras. You guys are just trying to muddy the subject by dragging in unrelated ideas.

Which, is 'natural'. When it is done in a lab, it is not natural, and is considered a GMO.

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I'm an environmentalist, left wing, Ron Paul loving Prius driver with a farm. If you have a problem with that, kindly go take a leap.