Synthetic yeast

[quote=“pashusa”]synthetic and genetically modified are not the same thing
and frankly I dont think we could feed the population with out geneticall modified grains and meats. we could never grow enough…[/quote]

I just think that genetically modified foods need to be labeled as such. That’s my only beef with GM foods. It’s almost beyond comprehension that there is presently no such requirement.
A fast growing segment of the population wants such labeling, and ‘big agri’ is spending millions of dollars to fight labeling (and using disinformation campaigns as well). So agin, I have to wonder: what are these companies afraid of???

Many countries have banned GM food products altogether.

I have no problem with labeling.
You’re right the beef and pork industries as well as many vegetable groers are afraid the public will not be educated enough to know exactly what that means. they are afraid the food companies are trying to feed them something that will hurt them. they have good reason to believe the public is misinformed. And they are.

http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages ... otato.aspx

“In 1995, Monsanto completed U.S. regulatory authorizations for NewLeaf™ potato, a Russet Burbank potato improved using biotechnology to provide protection from the Colorado potato beetle. Canadian authorization was completed in 1996. The NewLeaf™ potato used naturally-occurring bacteria found in the soil known as Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) to provide in-plant protection from the yield-robbing Colorado potato beetle”
these potatoes were going to be used by mcdonalds and other large french fry producers in the united states. The Organic Consumers Association, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace used the ignorance of the public knowledege about what GM foods are to raise such a stir the fast food groups pulled their money and purchases out of the new brand. this new technology that could feed many people at a cheaper overal cost became to expensive for the small farmer to afford to plant. http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/gepotatoban.cfm

Bt works by puncturing tiny holes in the guts of insects that eat it. There seems to be evidence that the Bt can affect humans this way too, leaving us with “leaky guts”, which result in food substances entering the blood stream before they’re fully digested. This sets off a whole slew of problems, mostly inflammation of the gut and blood vessels. Heart doctors are pointing to chronic inflammation as the main problem they’re seeing in surgery. Leaky gut also seems to have links to a gamut of behavioral problems, including autism and ADHD.

A valid documentary to watch regarding GMO crops is “Genetic Roulette

.”

Personally, I am amazed and concerned that so many GMO crops have entered our food chain with such a complete lack of study. That’s why I work so hard in the summer to grow a huge organic garden. We raise as much of our own food as we can, and find local grass-fed sources for our meat.

Life’s too short to gamble with your health, especially with something like your food.

Did you all hear about the “Monsanto Protection Act” that was recently passed into law? How is it that a law can be passed, exempting a corporation’s products from scientific study. That’s essentially putting a corporation above the law. Scary stuff. Really disappointing and SCARY how fully-embedded the large corporations are in the higher levels of government. The American government is for sale to the highest bidder. Lawmakers aren’t protecting the American public’s best interest, they’re looking out for their wealthy corporate donors.

I only hope that more and more people wake up to the real problems of our industrial food system and start making educated choices about the food they purchase and eat. Great discussion here.

My whole point is that people need to be educated not just fed a bunch of non-sense by this group or that. A study can be made to favor any side of a debate, it’s a mater of who is paying for it and how you present the evIdence. Education IS the key, only then can educated decisions can be made.

Do you know any more about what kinds of studies were done? It’s kind of amazing how easy it is to produce a medical study that can be used to say “X is poison”, given that literally every chemical is poison if you take enough of it.

Out of the box, I’d imagine Bt is safer to humans than most other ways of dealing with pests because it’s so much more specific. Different strains of Bt will only attack certain species of insect, because they need to be able to bind to receptors that those species have and others don’t. That’s actually part of why organic farmers are huge fans of Bt, because it means they can target harmful insects without doing any harm to the beneficial ones. As far as effects on humans goes, our biochemistry is even more different, so the Bt proteins should be even less able to mount an effective attack on our cells. And the studies I’ve heard about seem to confirm that - they show humans practically eating the stuff by the spoonful without harm. On the animal model side, LD50 studies have had rats eating a tenth their body weight of the stuff (single dose) without adverse reaction. Try doing that with table salt.

What’s nice about the Bt crops is that they’re theoretically even safer than that. The traditional approach to applying Bt is to blast it over the field with a crop duster. That takes a lot of it, and the stuff ends up everywhere. By engineering the plants to produce Bt proteins endogenously, you can get away with a whole lot less Bt overall. So even if you are still worried about Bt, from that perspective the GM crop is still better because it involves less Bt than what tends to happen otherwise. . . especially if you, ironically enough, choose to eat organic food because of fears about Bt.

Sounds to me that this syntheic yeast genome study is in fact a study designed to bring to light the differances between synthetic and natural genome. If they are going to mess around with synthetics they should know this.

Also, that’s not at all what that bit of law does.

What the provision is really about is allowing the regulatory authorities to override temporary injunctions the a court might place on a crop while litigation is pending. The law doesn’t even come into effect until well after the point where all the necessary hurdles around scientific scrutiny had been passed.

Whether that legislation is necessary or not is an interesting question; from industry perspective I can definitely see why they’d want it. It’s common for people to try to use the courts to make an end-run around the scientific and regulatory review process whenever that process finds that the weight of the evidence does not agree with their own opinion on the subject. And I’m sure I don’t need to point out to anyone who’s heard the phrase “tort reform” how getting the courts involved can become problematic. If the authority in charge of deciding whether to exercise this power were one with more solid credentials I’d think this is a very good idea, because the burden of proof (and level of expertise of the people evaluating it) that most scientific regulatory bodies require is usually much heavier than what you see in the courts. Too bad in this case the body in charge is the USDA. I suspect their mandate sets up something of a conflict of interest as far as this type of situation is concerned.

I can also see why anti-GMO groups are mad about it. . . though I have to point out that if the above synopsis is how they’ve chosen to characterize it, that is a rather ironic illustration of why a law like this might be desirable. It doesn’t really say great things about the level of intellectual integrity they’re maintaining, or the extent to which they may or may not think it’s important to be scrupulous about the facts when presenting information to their audience.

It’s old old news, but I still have respect for Anheuser-Bush (largest purchaser of rice in US) for boycotting genetically modified US grown rice, and bringing awareness to the issue when it was desperately needed.

http://www.amberwaves.org/mediaPages/me ... erWars.pdf

I hope BMC will reject synthetic yeasts as well.

[quote=“JMcK”]
Steve Jobs was an everything natural health nut his whole life; dead at 56. (There’s some evidence that his all-fruit diet increases the risk of certain cancers, including pancreas.) My father was a 3-pack a day smoker, and borderline alcoholic; dead at 60.[/quote]

My dad only made it to 50, his dad a non smoker and non drinker made it to 67. My dad’s mom, also a non, made it to 77.
My grandmother wasn’t a big drinker, but a very heavy smoker who made it well into her 80s. A lot of how long you live is in your genes.
My mother is still going strong at 88, which truly proves that only the good die young.