GM food....

You own Syngenta shares (albeit only a few). I'd sell them if I were you

Nothing to do with your current employment.

 

There we are agreed, Julian. I'm not saying that GM=evil, I'm saying that we don't know enough and that greed is pushing us into the unknown faster than we should. If GM indeed is harmless, or can be rendered thus, I've no problem with it. But we need to know more, and that'll take time.

However, I think that fear is a very healthy trait, especially when faced with so many unknowns that potentially can have huge effects on the food chain.

Alas, I think that GM crops for poor countries is a looooong way down the track. There just isn't the money in it to justify the expense. Don't expect it to happen any time soon.

 

Aha, those. Sorry, read in haste and misunderstood. Might as well, they never earn much, such is the boom and bust nature of the agro business (no wonder Novartis got rid of it). I never actually bought them, they just happened - my Sandoz shares transmuted themselves into Novartis and Ciba Specialty Chemicals shares, and when Syngenta was formed, I found myself with Syngenta shares too!

 

Was that a deliberate metaphor for the possible side effects of cross-pollination from GM crops, tones? Top stuff .

 

Tones,

Perhaps you could by a nice set of interconnect cables with the proceeds

 

Do I detect a contradiction in terms in there?

 

I guess there were two cross-pollinations in there - the crossing of Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy to form Novartis and the subsequent crossing of Zeneca Agro and Novartis Agro to form Syngenta. On the other hand, the seeds business was, if I recall correctly, just about 100% Sandoz. It always prided itself in being second in the world (if 'way behind the leader - which is NOT Monsanto but Pioneer in the USA, which makes all its money from corn. Isn't that amaizing?). :duck:

 

Don't hide, tones - it wasn't that bad a joke.

 

Nice idea, but in practise it rarely (if ever) happens. AIDS drugs have been around for long enough yet look at the trouble that 3rd World countries have gone through to get affordable drugs for their populations. Most Africans with AIDS still don't have access to any anti-retroviral drugs at all.

Instead, Brazil and some African countries have been sued for making generic (replica) AIDS drugs so they can get them to their populations at affordable prices. I call that letting people die in order to earn a few extra pennies.

Michael.

 

And, in addition, AIDS is still seen by the pharma companies as a Third-World disease - that's where the vast majority of the sufferers are (primarily in the ongoing disaster called Africa). I am aware of no company that has gone looking for a specific AIDS cure, because there's no money in it to justify the enormous cost (AIDS will be a very tricky problem to crack - how do you cure something that turns the body's own defence mechanism on itself?). Sad to say, more money to be made in "lifestyle" anti-obesity, anti-baldness and anti-erectile dysfunction drugs - and you can bet your life that the guy who finds a cure for AIDS won't have been looking for it.

 

Not to mention that a cure for AIDS would suddenly cause the revenue stream from anti-retroviral drugs to dry up... . It's not in any company's interest to find a cure.

Michael.

 

michael,
finding one instance where the 'system' has failed to work when in the majority of cases it does is hardly proof of total failure of that system, just that the system is not perfect - which i whole heartedly agree with. altruism isn't profitable so perhaps the thing to do would be to make it so.
also if your last post was true we wouldn't have any cures at all just drugs to ease symptoms.
cheers


julian

 

In the latest "Guardian Weekly" to come my way, I see that Monsanto has abandoned its idea to sell GM wheat. It did this under pressure from US and Canadian growers, who could see their European markets collapsing completely. Some good news anyway.

 

This is my bone of contention too.

Do people actually know how new crops are developed at the moment? Are they aware of the processes used by the farming industry etc to produce new strains for increased yeild, resistance to disease etc? If they did they'd welcome GM with open arms as being the safe way to modify the genome of the crops we grow. To put it bluntly...

The way it's done now is basically like throwing various pots of paint in to a big barrel and hoping the colour you get is the right one !! There is NO control of the genetic variations or mutations that can and DO occur and they are planted en mass in the environment with no worries about the potential genetic polution of the environment.

It is as basic as saying.. that plant strain is hardy.. and that strain gives a good yeild.. we want a plant that is both ... so we will just cross pollinate them and hope for the best. It is exactly like taking a Sheep and a Cow and attempting to get the two breeds to produce offspring just because you want an animal that produces wool and milk. People rightly would be up in arms about such things, because of the terribly low success rate and the high rate of unwanted mutations , yet glibly accept the current farming practices as being good, harmless and eco freindly !! We don't accept such things amongst farm animals so why do we accept EXACTLY the same thing when it comes to producing new strains of crop for us to eat??

To say that taking plant genomes and modifying them using very specific and controlled mechanisms is bad JUST BECAUSE it happens in a laboritory is, to put it mildly, naive !!

Would you rather a nurse put a little antiseptic and a plaster on your cut finger or that some butcher took your arm off at the elbow?? That is the closest analogy I can think of to put the different techniques in to perspective.

This anti science stance really annoys me.


GTM

 

Some very dubious analogies there, GTM!

I could never be accused of being anti-science (I hope!), as I've worked in it for the last 30-odd (very) years. I'm also not anti-GM, but I'd like it to be more thoroughly tested before it's set loose in the natural environment. With regard to traditional cross-breeding, at least the variants are all naturally arrived at and some may work and some not. This is very different to the insertion of what is sometimes a completely foreign gene into a plant. We don't know the long-term ramifications of such modifications in the wild. I'm not a biotechnologist, but I once did a short, introductory course, which I realise does not make me an expert. However, I do remember the DNA that joins the genes being described as "junk". This was because nobody has any idea what it does, or even if it does. There's such a lot that we don't know. And yet, having made a relatively crude change, we're all ready to exploit it on a large scale and the devil take the hindmost.

The thing that bothers me is that the driving force behind this is not a desire to improve agriculture, but pure profit motive. We humans are not good at waiting. I am forever grateful that the Victorians never had nuclear power, because if they had, England would now be a radioactive wasteland. They did their worst with coal (and it was quite a good worst). In a sense, we have come back to the Victorian ideas of untrammelled capitalism. I am not against a good bottom line (I depend on them to make my living), but in matters such as this, I think caution is called for. Let there first be adequate testing and then let there be commercialisation of GM. The promise is there - let's just make sure that the promise doesn't have a nastier side.

 

Tones,

I agree 100%, the process needs careful and properly derived testing before we can let it in to the environment and our food chain. I have no problem with this attitude. I'm just worried about the general knee jerk reaction of the public and the media to something that they (and I include myself here) don't fully understand. It's just plain fear of the unknown. They are not making informed choices and even worse genetic science is being tarnished with the horrors of science-fiction/horror films & literature. I can't think of a more inappropriate response to be perfectly honest. The public at large is being led to believe that there really is a group of "mad scientists" out to generate some mutant plants that will ravish the world we know. It preposterous in the extreme and couldn't be further from the truth IMO.

Sure there are concerns to do with the commercial and political aspects, and for this reason I'm glad it isn't being implimented at this time.

As for the normal process being ok, just becuase the starting points are two seemingly inoccuous plants. Well to the best of my knowlege gene mutations don't work that way. The resultant genome of two perfectly healthy and harmless genomes is not neccessarily the same. That's not even taking in to account such things as retroviruses which (again to the best of my knowlege) are an unknown quantity in any genome, who knows what may trigger them. Basically what I'm driving at is that messing around with the DNA in any way is a potentially dangerous affair. Personally, if humans are going to be doing it, I'd much rather they were doing it in a controlled and scientific manner rather than just throwing a few genomes that just happen to have one or two usefull traits together and crossing our fingers that it all turns out ok.

GTM

 

You've lost me there, GTM. What have retroviruses to do with genetic engineering in plants? Viruses of whatever variety are separate entities, rather bizarre independent bits of complex chemistry that aren't even alive. Their trick is to enter a host cell and force the cell to reproduce the virus rather than what it should be producing. The only difference with retroviruses is the use of reverse transcriptase to go from RNA to DNA (I think). I don't think that either cross-breeding or genetic engineering is going to produce new retroviruses - I hope; we really don't need more AIDS or Ebolas.