212 Lover’s Quarrel
The great GMO debate – coming next week!
Also, it’s time to level with you guys. You may have noticed more insistence lately regarding the Patreon, merchandise, and all the ways you can help support Carbon Dating. We also did a big push to get the word out, with interviews on Skepticality, This Week In Pseudoscience, and with webcomics Demon Archives and The Zarf. But it wasn’t quite enough.
I regret to announce that we’re going to have to throttle back on the comics, back to two per week.
The Kickstarter was seed money for Elisa and I to begin working together on the daily, full color comic strips you’ve come to enjoy. Elisa even quit her second job to focus on Carbon Dating. This was a gamble on both of our parts, hoping that a massive effort could generate enough attention to make Carbon Dating self-sustaining before the seed money ran out – and we almost did it. Right now, the Patreon is 1/8th of our goal, sales contribute a little, and advertising on Project Wonderful makes a $.25 per day (everything helps!).
My plan is to continue drawing and publishing two comic strips per week. All donations and revenue will go directly towards paying Elisa to draw more. If we reach $200 per month, that’s will allow us to release three comic strips each week. $400 gets us to four per week. $600 gets us back to five per week, with $800 being what we need to officially break even. Regardless, our Patrons will be able to see all the additional comics in our secret Patreon feed, and join in on our regular Google Hangouts.
The decision to slow down before we ran out of comics was a tough but necessary one. If Carbon Dating was able to make you laugh, or maybe think a little, I hope you’ll consider supporting us. Be it a blog mention, guest comic, or idea for something you want to see – everything helps, and I really enjoy hearing from you.
Thank you.
Geez, the worst commenters of all are the ones against GMO's.
KATE
What's so bad about them?
ROB
They claim there's no studies about GMO safety, because they haven't bothered to read any.
KATE
We can't possibly know the environmental impact after only one decade.
CRAIG
Mitch, get over here now. -bring popcorn.
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The environmental impact of using less pesticides (including far less toxic ones) and producing more yield with the same amount of land, in addition to requiring less fertilizer to do so that all together results in the production of less greenhouse gases?
BAM! SCIENCE!
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4161/gmcr.28449#.VPklJke-2G4
I’ve got mixed feelings about GMOs, personally. On the one hand, one can do truly amazing things with the use of recombinant DNA, such as using corn protein sequences to trick tobacco cells into producing naturally occurring medicines. On the other hand, even with close to half a century of using recombinant DNA, we’re still largely in the “well, if I take this specific organism and apply this precise process to it (in a controlled laboratory setting), this happens” phase of genetic research. We’re a long way from truly trusting anything we make in a lab from being truly safe. Monsanto, for instance, still takes pains to ensure that their seeds produce sterile (or nearly so) crops–though that being a part of their business model is certainly a possibility, too.
Mind, as an engineer, this isn’t exactly my field of expertise, so I have to admit that my opinions on the matter are skewed by the opinions of professionals in the field whom I trust–but even if I didn’t trust the opinions of my parents, I’ve certainly read enough of the articles written in scientific journals on the matter.
Monsanto actually doesn’t use the terminator gene in their products. Farmers never use seeds from their old crops anyways- it propagates inferior stock in their fields http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top-five-myths-of-genetically-modified-seeds-busted
I could nit-pick at the details of your attached link (barley used in the production of beers, for instance, is a crop neglected from the list of GMO food sources), but that’d be no different than what you had done with me. My point remains the same: while I’m impressed with what we’ve accomplished with recombinant DNA so far, I have reservations over the fact that it’s still by and far a fledgeling science.
The i-squared debate on this was a good one. Bill Nye jumped in unexpectedly (though he has since reversed his position and is now in support of GMOs) http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1161-genetically-modify-food
Genetically modified popcorn?
Can they breed the cheese into it yet?
I ate some genetically modified popcord and I wondered if it had any dangerous effect on me or modified my dna in some way. So I devised a simple tst. I put my head inside a microwave for 3minutes and it popped after 2m28s, proving my DNA had been modified by the popcorn.
It also messed up the inside of the microwave, but to be honest I don’t think you can blaim that on the genetic modification. It was already pretty messed up before that from when I tested whether you could dry wet feet inside a microwave (you can, but make sure you do both or you end up walking round in circles after).
One of the things that makes me roll my eyes about the anti-GMO arguments is that the things they often point to as caused buy GMO crops existed and were practiced long before GMO’s came along. Monoculture and “corporate” farming, heavy pesticide use are just the beginning. Where they get totally ridiculous is when there are no “foreign” genes, it’s simply a matter of turning off a couple of genes. There’s a potato which has low bruising and produces less acrylamide when fried, and an apple which resists browning which are out, and you’d have to wade through the hysterical screams to find out that there’s not a single “foreign” gene in either of them.
Monsanto does hold the patent to so-called Terminator Genes, but have never used them. If the farmer was to plant the second generation seeds they would grow no question but their would be much inconsistency regarding the GMO traits and this would also be a violation of the contract the farmer makes to grow their a seed initially.
Hmm.. well, we’re about 29 years in, and there’s been no harm found yet.
…We could just view the next generation or two (of humans) as a test run. Then we determine if GMOs are dangerous or not.
Antonio,
Just to clarify, Monsanto’s seeds do not produce sterile seeds. If you are growing a hybrid, then you won’t have great seed to plant the next year, but that is due to being a hybrid, not a GMO. For instance, the GMO soybean seed that I grow, and then retail to farmers, most certainly DOES germinate, and would in the next generation as well.
BTW, I figured I should post this, just in case, though most (if not all) of you are likely already aware:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYT7t0pcxEIMWyq9-OToGUHlCKjBqci6g
That’s the playlist for all of Mental Floss’ series on Misconceptions, figured it would be appropriate for in here.
Like I’ve said the last couple times I was able to make it to the video chat, I am not anti-GMO. I believe in the power of science. I am, however, against the idea of just blindly handing my welfare over to the corporations that drive most (if not all) GMO’s we deal with, especially since these are the same sorts of people that told the public for years that cigarettes were healthy (I am a smoker, BTW – I’m not stupid, I’m just an addict who is trying to quit) and even paid off doctors to lie about it, as well as paying off Congressmen to protect their racket for decades.
All I say is being skeptical means one should be skeptical of any claims by these companies until all the data is collected. And she’s right … how many drugs are we finding out were thought to be safe, but in fact it took 15-20 years or more before the long-term effects were known? How many such effects could be lurking in GMO’s?
I’m all for better living through science. But unless we want to end up in the world of Bioshock, we need to be skeptical about science, too, sometimes. Or at least the people funding it and what their motivations are. Know what I mean?
I can understand not wanting to outright trust companies, but how about trusting the consensus of every major scientific organization in the world that have stated that GMOs and biotechnology are safe?
You can also read this document by the European Commission, the scientific arm of the EU, on the past decade of scientific research on GMOs.
http://ec.europa.eu/research/biosociety/pdf/a_decade_of_eu-funded_gmo_research.pdf
Their main conclusion is as follows, “The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research, and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies.”
Would these be the same scientific organizations that were fully convinved that tetraethyllead was a perfectly safe additive for gasoline?
(for those who don’t know, it took 40 to 50 years for science to prove otherwise, and another 30 to completely phase it out in the US. we’re still breathing the fumes today)
So, are you saying “same organizations” are still the same 80 years later? And why would GMO investigators be the same as leaded gasoline investigators, even if they were still in the same career 80 years later? And the fact that “fully convinced” (really?) changed to something else is a plus for science. I’d argue nobody was “fully convinced,” only that nobody had looked. I call strawman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead
It’s all in there, man.
Agreed, which is why I do NOT oppose GMO’s as a class, as some of these rabid protestors do. I just don’t go the other way either and give GMO’s (or, more importantly, their producers) a blank check and go about my day.
I look at each on its own merits and decide what rewards it offers, what risks it may have (reasonably established ones, not paranoid delusions, that is), whether the balance is worth the cost. Same as we should evaluate pretty much everything in our lives. Trouble is most people don’t even realize the difference between price and cost or they’d reevaluate their shopping habits, but that’s a tangent for another day. 😀
Know? Only in retrospect, if even that. (As mentioned above, it has been much more than a decade.) Estimate based on small-scale studies? Certainly.
A really good TEDx talk about GMO misconceptions, and the benefits of GMOs:
https://youtu.be/xvFD6DRn0Cg