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Genetic Modification
Plants, Animals, Food Chain,
Crops, Stock Feed, Monsanto, Seed Collection, Patents, Genes, No to GMO,
Definition
On Genetic Modification, Agriculture and Patenting
Genetically engineered products are
alive, so they're inherently more unpredictable. Because they are alive,
they can reproduce. And they can mutate. They can proliferate. They can
spread quickly across the world. How can you recall a virus, a bacterium
or even a transgenic plant or insect [ which carries genes of another species]
back to the laboratory? Even if a small percentage of these transgenic
creatures become pests, we're talking about enormous genetic pollution.
(Rifkin)(Suzuki, Naked Ape to Superspecies)
Rabbits in Australia, zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, cats on tropical
islands, purple loosestrife spreading across North AMerican waterways -
all these species were benign or useful in the places in the world where
they belonged, but out of the surroundings in which they evolved, where
they existed along with other organisms to keep them in check, they have
become pests that are devastating native wildlife and costing billions
of dollars a year in lost crops, eradication programs and restoration.
If that's what wild creatures that are displaced from their natural habitats
can do, what can be expected from life forms with genes spanning species
barriers, life forms that are therefore exotic anywhere on Earth? (Suzuki, Naked
Ape to Superspecies)
We are destabilizing nature's balance to accommodate a sophisticated but,
one can argue, largely unnecessary technology. There are simpler mechanical
ways to deal with weeds, including no-till farming, mulching and companion
cropping. But none of these Earth-friendly methods can be patented to make
big money. They are not splashy, high-tech, instant fixes. They evolve
over years and generations because methods have to be developed at a local
level by individuals who care about and observe the crops, soils and wild
plants of each locality. (Suzuki, Naked
Ape to Superspecies)
Herbicides and pesticides are powerful metabolic inhibitors- that's why
they are used. And most have been shown to be carcinogenic. Roundup is
supposed to be a relatively mild compound, but it has been shown to be
associated with illness, poisonings, and serious allergic reactions, and
is highly toxic to fish. In fact, it's rated the third most poisonous agrochemical
in California. The crops engineered to be resistant to this herbicide are
repeatedly dosed with it throughout their growing period; conventional
plants would die if they were sprayed with such chemicals. So we are now
eating, in our soy and canola, season-long residues of this herbicide,
and no tests have ever been performed to find out if that's safe. (Suzuki, Naked
Ape to Superspecies)
The testing systems are inadequate. It's a conflict of interest. We are
expecting the people who are going to gain profit from these organisms
to be honest about the dangers and the difficulties of those products.
If they do want to make a huge, enormous profit, it's an immense conflict
of interest to expect they are going to be honest about it. (Elaine Ingham,
Soil Pathologist)(Suzuki, Naked
Ape to Superspecies)
Farmers who find that stray GM seeds have blown onto their land from neighbours'
fields could face massive fines if the agrochemical giant Monsanto wins
a test case in a Canadian court. Percy Schmeiser, a farmer in Saskatchewan,
is being pursued by Monsanto for damages and the profits from his fields
because the company claims that the patent on its genetically modified
seeds has been violated.
(Marie Woolf, The Independent, March 14 1999)(Suzuki, Naked
Ape to Superspecies)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American seed company Delta
and Pine, an affiliate of Monsanto, were granted a patent on a genetic
technique that sterilizes seeds for all time. Sterile seeds produce only
one generation of plants. The new seeds are sterile because the patent
holders want to be sure that farmers have to pay for new ones each year.
(Suzuki, Naked
Ape to Superspecies)
Patenting
When a private or public
biotechnology company isolates a gene then inserts it into another organism,
it can then claim ownership of the resulting "new" gene and start making money. That means all life - every bird and dog and bee,
every bit of tissue in our bodies - is up for sale. Genetically modified
mice, sheep, fish, insects, plants and bacteria have already been patented,
and companies are claiming royalties on them whenever they are used.
Even people are fair game - the government of Iceland recently sold the
DNA sequences of all 70 000 Icelanders to a private company. (Suzuki, Naked Ape to Superspecies)
In 1980 the United States Supreme Court, by a ruling of 5 to 4, said the
General Electric could claim a micro-organism that had been created in
a laboratory as a patented invention. That set the precedent for companies
all over the world to begin to control the entire genetic commons in the
twenty-first century. Only seven years later, in 1987, the US Patent and
Trademark Office issued a chilling policy statement in which they said,
'Any organism on this planet, any gene, any cell-line, any organ, any tissue,
is potentially patentable as a human invention'. Here in one regulatory
stroke, the U.S. patent office reduced the entire living kingdom, the genetic
commons, to the possibility of private property owned and controlled by
a handful of multinational corporations. (Rifkin)(Suzuki, Naked
Ape to Superspecies)
The notion that you can patent life has now gone global. In 1995, the World
Trade Organisation passed sweeping new rules under the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that have changed lives around the world. Under
these rules, countries can not use national laws to prevent anyone from
patenting living organisms within their territories. (Suzuki, Naked
Ape to Superspecies)
Patents are a wonderful mechanism of collecting incomes from things that
nature does freely, that people do freely. [ They force ] people to make
payments for what has been theirs, and their right: the public commons.
In the 1920's the British placed a tax on salt, salt-making, as a way to
finance their armies. And Gandhi went out and said, "No,
this has been given freely to us by nature. We make it with our intelligence,
we need it for our survival. We will not pay you the taxes you want, because
you have not created the salt, and we must have it to live". In a way, life patents are 5 000 times worse than salt taxes of the British
regime of those days. It's like patenting air! Because, after all, it's
the biodiversity in life forms that make all life possible. It's as vital
to life as air itself. It's a condition of our life process. And when our
life process and elements of our life process start to get patented, and
someone can make money every time we try to use them, it is really the
ultimate of organised greed. It has [not only] generated.. an ethical crisis,
but is really threatening to generate a crisis of survival.
(Vandana Shiva, Physicist and expert on food issues in the 3rd World) (Suzuki, Naked
Ape to Superspecies)
As things stand, the responsibility
for any damages that biologically engineered products may cause falls upon
the human victims or their governments. In fact, the current wording of
the unfinished international Biosafety Protocol, which is being negotiated
under the auspices of the UN's Biodiversity Convention, specifies that
the importing country, not the patent holder or even the exporter, is liable
for any problems that may arise. And if those problems affect nature or
wild creatures- well, no one is responsible at all.
Some of the reasons for this situation are those familiar concerns: free
trade and global competitiveness. Countries that have become signatories
to GATT and the WTO are forced to reduce trade barriers and open themselves
to new products in order to remain involved in international trade. One
example of what can happen involves the hormones used widely in Canada
and the US to make cattle beef bulk up faster. A European Union wants to
keep the hormones out of its citizens' diets. The case was taken back before
the WTO, which found against the EU. In June of 1999 the EU said they would
not accept the hormones, so they are subject to sanctions. The EU will
lose about $128 million in trade concessions each and every year these
hormones are kept out. If this cost proves too much, and the EU does allow
the products in, and it then discovers that in fact they are dangerous
after all, the manufacturers won't be liable. The regulatory agencies
that tried to keep the products out in the first place will be held responsible
for having allowed them in. (Suzuki, Naked Ape to Superspecies)
..we need to see nature as the true capital on which our lives and economy
depend. And if we learn to value nature, our real wealth, we will take
better care of it. Our economic system works for no one, except maybe the
one percent at the very top. Our system wastes the environment. It wastes
people. And it's very, very expensive. We need a radical change in how
we relate to resources and people and the environment. (Hawken,
The Ecology of Commerce)(Suzuki, Naked Ape to Superspecies)
Our disconnection from the Earth
is epitomized by our relationship to food. Most urban people associate
food with supermarkets but fail to connect it with the land.
(Suzuki, Naked Ape to
Superspecies)
Biotech Companies Concentrate on First-World Problems
Most people in the developed world
can afford to pay for expensive drugs like insulin. Adult-onset diabetes,
which is tied to obesity, a lack of exercise and diets high in sugar, is
a common disease in the industrialized world. Biotechnology is also heavily
involved in developing in vitro fertilization and other means of making
babies available to the infertile. Infertility too, tends to be a problem
that only the richer people of the world can pay to fix. But the diseases
that destroy young lives by the millions, like schistosomiasis, malaria
and dysentery, are largely ignored by science. Their victims are poor,
so there's little money to be made in finding a cure. (Suzuki, Naked Ape to Superspecies)
Who in the corporations determines the design criteria for what form of
genetic engineering they're going to have? It's the money boys.. it's the
guys who are dealing with the bottom line. The projects that they are likely
to make them the most money are the projects that are going to be developed,
not the projects that correspond to some authentic ordering of human needs.
(Phil Bereano, Engineer) (Suzuki, Naked
Ape to Superspecies)
Specialisation
Biological education
has been getting more specialized over the years, but with the introduction
of recombinant DNA technology, the situation has worsened. Industrialized
countries have put a lot of money into training scientists in this area
because it is seen as the technology of the twenty-first century.
'The scientists are extremely creative and very competent within an extraordinarily
narrow range .. but often they do not know about organismic physiology.
They don't know about whole organisms. And they certainly don't know about
the ecosystems they are potentially threatening'.(Goodwin)
So the problem for science is that even though these are "good" scientists, they have become more like technicians. Their training is so specialized that they really are, as Goodwin says, ' simply unable to see the potential consequences of the sorts of products they're producing. And they are not required, within the conventions of science, to take responsibility for their actions'. (Suzuki, Naked Ape to Superspecies)
See also;
https://www.truefoodnow.org/ - True Food Network. Learn the facts behind Greenpeace's True Food campaign, with fact sheets on genetically modified foods and details on how to shop for True Food.
Health
https://www.spaceandmotion.com/health/gmo-genetic-modification.htm
Genetic Modification of
Food, Plants, Animals: NO to GMO, Crops, Stock Feed, Seed, Genes, Monsanto,
Definition
Help Humanity
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
(Mohandas Gandhi)
"When forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence:
Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter. ... Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended. In this way the concept 'empty space' loses its meaning. ... The particle can only appear as a limited region in space in which
the field strength or the energy density are particularly high. ...
The free, unhampered exchange of ideas and scientific conclusions is necessary for the sound development of science, as it is in all spheres
of cultural life. ... We must not conceal from ourselves that no improvement in the present depressing situation is possible without
a severe struggle; for the handful of those who are really determined to do something is minute in comparison with the mass of the lukewarm
and the misguided. ...
Humanity is going to need a substantially new way of thinking if it is to survive!" (Albert Einstein)
Our world is in great trouble due to human behaviour founded on myths and customs that are causing the destruction of Nature and climate change. We can now deduce the most simple science theory of reality - the wave structure of matter in space. By understanding how we and everything around us are interconnected
in Space we can then deduce solutions to the fundamental problems of human knowledge in physics, philosophy, metaphysics, theology, education, health, evolution and ecology, politics and society.
This is the profound new way of thinking that Einstein
realised, that we exist as spatially extended structures of the universe - the discrete and separate body an illusion. This simply confirms the
intuitions of the ancient philosophers and mystics.
Given the current censorship in physics / philosophy of science journals (based on the standard model of particle physics / big bang cosmology) the internet is the best hope for getting new knowledge
known to the world. But that depends on you, the people who care about science and society, realise the importance of truth and reality.
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A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. (Max Planck, 1920)
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