Guilty of activism

Hmm, the company got them out of the way so it could plant the maize, they got to stand up for their beliefs and make a political statement. Sounds like everyone's happy.

stop it -- i'm getting dizzy...

is there a record for multiple postings?

All I'm saying is that what they engaged in was civil disobediance. Knowingly violating a law in order to protest the law or practices carried out under it is perfectly reasonable as long as you're willing to accept the consequences, which these people obviously are, as they'd rather accept prison than compromise their ideals and pay the punitive charges.

Unless they're very shortsighted activists their primary goal should be the publicity caused by their actions and the legal case brought on by them. Although this field may be planted, the public awareness raised by their actions may prevent thousands of other GM crops from being implemented. In any case, they've succeeded in drawing attention to their cause.

On the other hand, the company is probably happy too. After all, it was engaging in legal activity on property it owned. The activists broke the law and cost the company money by tresspassing and chaining themselves to equipment that belonged to the company, not them. They were rightly removed, and the company won the case on appeal. It was a minor inconvenience for sure, but it appears to have been resolved in the company's favor, leaving it free to continue planting crops.

So, everyone's happy, more or less.

This is odd, that place is less than five miles from my house and I've never heard of this before.

I think it's so funny how Europeans are so stridently opposed to GM food (which has no proven health consequences at all) but they smoke cigarettes like chimmineys. Tobacco use being proven the enormous health hazard that it is.

[Edited on Dec 24, 2003 by stockula]

yeah but they put warnings on tobacco products
not on gm food at least i havnt seen any labels

What exactly would they warn consumers about? "WARNING: YOUR CONSUMPTION OF GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOOD MAY UPSET IRRATIONAL IGNORANT LUNATICS"?



[Edited on Dec 24, 2003 by stockula]

Nah. more like:

"The effects of long term consumption of GM food are unknown".

Yeah. wow, that's sure an unreasonable thing to ask for, huh? I mean, I can't believe food manufacturers already have to put lists of ingredients on their product packaging. All just to placate those irrational ignorant lunatics. Yeesh.

doooood - easy on the quadruple posts!

Nothing at all. But that wasn't the point of my snarky remark. There's a big irrational opposition to GM foods in Europe. It's not based on anything scientific or empirical. More like "It's icky and we dont like it".

Which I guess is fine if you want to make a personal lifestyle choice about what you eat like your wife does with veganism. But these ideological rejections of GM foodshave humanitarian reprecussions, like how in Zambia tons of food from the US sent to alleviate famine was rejectedby the Zambian government. Why? Because EU told them if they accepted the aid, future food exports to Europe would be banned, for fear they might be contaminated. That's when it starts getting superstitous and weird, to the point where you see fanatics handcuffing themselves to tractors in order to prevent the sowing of GM'd seeds at all costs.

Personally I'd like to know whether I'm eating something that exists through evolution's trial and error or something somebody whipped up in the labratory.
I think it's pretty arrogant of us as a species to to think we can do better than nature with our limited time on this planet.

Personally, I wouldn't care if I was eating something that was whipped up in a lab...if I knew it was safe. Both for me and the world I'm living off of.

And it wouldn't be arrogant for us to think that we could do better than nature, if it was proven that we could.

This is the whole of the problem: when the lines blur between science and industry, we do some form of damage to ourselves or the planet. We tend to realize it after the damage has been done. It's been scientifically proven, over and over again, that when we rush something radical, oftentimes it ends up causing problems we wouldn't know it would. You'd think people would know to look at the long-term by now. While I'm not a "tree-hugger", I still have to live here.


Here's one thing you should remember: The guy who invented the process of the pre-frontal lobotomy won the Nobel Peace Prize for it. We all know what a fine medical procedure that turned out to be. Yeah...GO SCIENCE!

Well geeze.

First off, if there are salmon genes in an apple....so what?

I mean, I eat salmon, its genetic code doesn't affect me. Not exactly sure what the deal with veganism is or the ethos behind it, but do you really carry it so far you're opposed to consuming matter that was formed by the DNA of certain animals? At heart, think of what DNA actually is; it's just atoms organized in patterns. And consuming them doesn't affect you in the least. You can eat RAW DNA from a test tube, nothing will happen.

Knowing that, what's the big fucking deal with eating barley with spider DNA in it? Same nutrition, etc.

Grain and livestock genetics have been selected and winnowed by man for millenia. What we eat as corn today used to look little diiferent from tall grass. Horses used to be the size of dogs. None of this is exactly unheard of.

Ecclesiacties said that there is nothing new under the sun, and GM stuff isn't any different. All that is different is the speed in and efficiency in which it is implemented.

[Edited on Dec 24, 2003 by stockula]

[Edited on Dec 24, 2003 by stockula]

*bzzzzt*

I, for one, have never seen an apple mate with a salmon in the wild - if you have, please show us the film, it must be fascinating.

Stockula: I don't think the cause for concern (at least amongst those who have bothered to educate themselves about the issue) is absorption of DNA from foreign sources. The concerns that I've seen listed most often are: First - potential allergy interactions (if you have, for example, a shellfish allergy and a shellfish protein ends up in your orange juice you could go into completely unexpected anaphylactic shock.) This is something that can be tested for, and should be, IMO.

Second - Horizontal gene transfer. A typical lab technique used for selecting seeds and other cells that have taken up foreign DNA is to cointegrate a gene incorporating antibiotic resistance, then treat the cells with the antibiotic. Only those that are resistant (and, therefore, have the gene) will survive. This resistance gene stays in the crop, and there have been studies showing how bacteria living on the crop will eventually pick up this resistance, and having more antibiotic resistant infectious bacteria is not good for anyone. There is a technique involving Cre recombinase that can alleviate this problem as well, but is more complicated and less cost effective than just leaving it there.

Third - Loss of natural resistance genes. The example commonly used is so-called "Bt corn." This is a transgenic corn crop that expresses a pesticide found in nature referred to as Bt (I forget what it stands for)that I believe is normally found in milkweed. Bt kills off a particular type of insect that has been damaging corn crops. The fear is that by having tons of crops expressing Bt protein that you then set up an instant selection for insects that are resistant to Bt. So now the transgenic crops are no longer effective, and this natural pesticide has lost its usefulness forever. That's an example of the type of short-sighted thinking that has, unfortunately, come to symbolize corporate america.

I do believe there are certain uses for GM foods that are beneficial, like golden rice. However, they need to be extremely well thought out and planned before being released into the wild - once in the ecosystem, they're never coming back. It's something to think about.

Cool legionnaire! That's what I was trying to get at with my limited edjumacation.
I'm not against science at all;far from it.The problem, as I see it, is that there hasn't been enough thought gone into the long term effects of introducing GM foods into the foodchain.
It would be far more prudent to play it safe with a technology that we have any doubts about.Why the big rush anyways?The food I eat now seems to do allright for me.

Not to be rude, but could you provide a link or quote to evidence of any of that? The article in your first post doesn't say anything about whether they were denied a fair trial or not, nor anything about them not being heard before being sentenced. I don't want to insinuate that you're jumping to conclusions, so I assume there's more to the story.

As for the appeal and retrial, I don't know what the basis for that was, so I can't say either way. It could have been that they were innocent but the company pulled some strings to punish them. It also could have been that the judge willfully disregarded the law the first time around out of sympathy to the activists, which could explain why a retrial with specific instructions to him was necessary. I don't know what really happened, and the article sure doesn't say.

More importantly, is shellfish protien kosher or not?

Thanks for your comments. I knew something about the risks of introducing GM modified strains into the wild, but I didn't see why that was cause for much concern. I'm not disturbed by the idea of unnatural combinations of genes in food as long as it's of net benefit to humanity. It's not natural to have a baboon heart transplant, but if it keeps your daughter alive, would you care? I look the same way at GM food.


[Edited on Dec 25, 2003 by stockula]

Once again, Stockula, the comparison dosen't work. The baboon heart affects one person; the GM crops cannot be recalled once introduced to the wild.

That one person who is affected is comfortable with the risks of the transplant, but the unknown risks of GM food are being unleashed upon a populace without their consent. Labeling GM food is the least they can do, to allow consumers to choose for themselves wheher they want to take the risk.