Well come on, its just rice/corn/etc that needs less insecticide and grows faster!! How different can corn get? Its still corn!

It is because the DNA are changed and that may produce proteins that originally will not be present in that type of food. The proteins may cause allergies.:)

Growing GM food may also cause problems in ecosystems!:)

I heard of this:
Also harmful proteins may produced, is this right?:)

As I remember there are also news that people died of allergies after eating GM food.:(
Anyone know about this?:)

As I remember there are also news that people died of allergies after eating GM food

Growing GM food may also cause problems in ecosystems!

It is because the DNA are changed and that may produce proteins that originally will not be present in that type of food. The proteins may cause allergies

Also harmful proteins may produced, is this right?

The truth is that we have been genetically engineering food for some time. 500 years ago corn looked very different. Through selective breeding corn sizes have dramatically increased.

I have not heard any of these lies. It seems a shame that such ignorance can prevail. The truth is that GM foods can be engineered to carry special immunity building enzymes. They can be more nutritional. They are often superior, but like every experiment they can have flaws. Just like we would test a product before release, so too do they insure against any harmful outcomes.

Dreamsa I have not heard of any of the problems you have stated. I think others can confirm that whatever your source, these are invalid arguments.

This site seems to cover some of the points raised

http://www.biotechanalytics.com/Topics/gm_main_text.htm

Docking the URL to

http://www.biotechanalytics.com

Gives the home page where you can go to the "About us" and check out who they are.

And an Aussie site on myths. CSIRO is a well respected science organization.

http://www.biotechnology.gov.au/Community_Issues/Fact_Sheets/myths/myths.asp#13

Growing GM food may also cause problems in ecosystems!
This is true:
GM food- Environmental risks (http://environment.about.com/library/weekly/blbiotech1.htm)
:cool:

While not exactly-up-to snuff on GM, I can say that we have bought ourselves a whole lot of problems already by introducing plants and animals to places that they normally do not inhabit. Things like the zebra mussel, the armaddilo, killer bees, fire ants, kudzoo, love bug, and are examples of such. No natural pedator exists to help control the spread of these items.

The same would exist if one of our tailor made plants should have a side effect, such as uncontrolled growth, or resistance to pesticides or foliage killers. Already GM corn is so prevasive in the farmer's produced crops that it is hard to keep it out of the food market. Take the Taco Bell incident as an example.

While there are places where this is proving to be a boon, places like Africa, where the modified sweet potato is providing a food supply where food supplies are needed desperately. I am very uneasy about it.

Shhhhh, be quiet.
Join our group of scientists who are doing a research on GM food.
We also think tht there is quite enough food in US so we are making a deadly geneticly modified virus affecting only GM food.
We only hope it has no side effects. If it does we will sell it as a chemical weapon and get our cash anyway.:D

But serious I think tht we won't run away from GM food nomatter how we want. Take space exploration and moon bases for instance. About problems in Africa. It is all matter of unequally distributed food. In US and Europe we have it far more we can consume. HEY!, don't take away my cerial:mad:! OK, OK, OK I agree we must have GM food. I love my cerial breakfast!, but don't count on me that I will buy GM food.

We have smth of second hand food here.
SHfood=GMfood. All what is natural is better, thus costs more.

:D :cool:

It's just an engineered mutation. Mutations can be good or bad. Without mutation we would be unable to adapt. Also remember that survival of the fittest goes both ways. Any system has the potential to correct itself. I think people are more affraid of change.


Here is a little bit of info.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question148.htm

Something about allergies caused by Gm food:
Information about GM food (http://www.watchtower.org/library/g/2000/4/22/article_01.htm)
:)

I know that many people on this forum have computer programming experience. To explain at least some of the reticence involving GM foodstuffs let's make a little comparison between the two fields.

Computers are complex tools. To write a good program you have to take into account not only the problem at hand but any changes in the original parameters that my affect your solution to the problem at hand. I personally have had bugs show up in programs that were almost unbelievable. One bug in particular showed up in a routine that I had beat my head against the wall for a good month trying to see all the possible problems before they could occur. Nevertheless, 1.5 years later I was called to repair the program for a bug that only showed up for one month, 3 months prior to the change of a decade.

Computer programming and computer programming languages are simple in comparison to the complexity of genetic programming and protein synthesis. We have very little idea of how proteins fold and shape themselves or of how the individual chemistry of the proteins affects this folding and shaping.

Now think about Mad Cow Disease, Scrapie, and other prionic infections. These are long term, absolutely devastating conditions caused by a misshaped protein. Is there any reason the be afraid of people playing with proteins and genetics in order to maximize yield and profit in the short term.

I strongly believe so. It doesn't take much of an error to cause incredible destruction when dealing with self-replicating systems like lifeforms. Be afraid, be very afraid. And most of all be cautious. If I had my way all experimentation of this sort would take place somewhere other than on earth to help eliminate some of the danger involved in playing with such complex systems.

All what is natural is better, thus costs more.

Are you Amish or Yanimama? Natural means no clothing, cooking, and living on a bed of grass. I remember hearing about how all the same set of lies were spread about electricity, dynamite, and cars. This is no different; people always fear what they do not understand.

Now think about Mad Cow Disease, Scrapie, and other prionic infections.

None of these are plant or animal. You can't screw up and make a bacteria from animal DNA. There is no precedence.

Remember that little corn fiasco. How many died from that, oh yeah 0. How many will benifit from yellow rice? The entire continent of Africa. Debilitating diseases that cause blindness in third world countries are a bad thing, right?

Now think about the actual causes for the mentioned diseases. Mad Cow was the result of a food shortage. Not enough food for the animals, so feed them to each other. Diseases are ussually made stronger from bad habits, not some mistake in the lab. I cannot remember ever hearing about a disease made in a lab through unnintentional practices. Of course Anthrax and other diseases have been purposefully manipulated. It is more likely that we could make animals resistant to such diseases or plants that impart such immunities.

Blame GM foods when you have evidence. Right now I can't see any negative impacts, only benificial boons.

None of these are plant or animal. You can't screw up and make a bacteria from animal DNA. There is no precedence.

You are abolutely correct. You cannot make a bacteria from animal DNA. Prions are not bacteria. They are proteins closely related to proteins already in use in the infected animal. Once and animal (or human) is infected the prionic protein causes the normal proteins in the creature in question to reshape themselves to also become infectious prionic proteins. The effect snowballs leading to extreme brain damage and death. MY point in the post above was that since we do not really understand how a protein shapes itself. How very minor changes in the chemical formula ( or no changes in the formula at all) can result in proteins with different shapes and therefore properties. With this limited understand shotgun approaches to genetic engineering could be extremely dangerous.

The other very dangerous thing about these types of diseases is their extremely long incubation period in most people. It takes years or decades for most people to show symptoms. That gives a mistake in a new miracle food an awfully long time to cause damage before that damage is recognized.

This type of disease was unthought of 40 years ago. I remember the first article or word of this type of infection I ever read about was in 1975. That was when the first parallels between scrapie in sheep and a degenerative disease identified in the Aboriginal cannibals of New Guinea were noticed. It is also when the first thought that these disease could be entirely protein based. Effectively making it an infectious chemical.

Yes, work on creating new foods. Yes, work on understanding protein synthesis, developmental genetics, and all of the other potentially extremely useful and valuable areas of study this science opens up to us, but do it in a responsible way. Don't do it the way that it is being done today. Now companies profits are tied into this and are much more important to the people involved than future damage to us or the worlds various ecosystems could ever be. I know that may people believe that organizations whose only drive is greed should be in charge of things (corps.).

I feel that some things are much to dangerous to be left to the profit motive until safety is insured. Genetic engineering could very well be one of them.

Once and animal (or human) is infected the prionic protein causes the normal proteins in the creature in question to reshape themselves to also become infectious prionic proteins.

Scrapie, Mad cow, they are both isolated incdents of a phenomena brought about by feeding infected animals to each other. No such occurences have come about resulting from engineering. This means that some stupid farmer with an insufficient amount of food has more potential to cause harm than any scientist. This engineering has been an ongoing process, yet no problem has surfaced. Your claims are unsubstantiated. Explaining prions in not enough. Long incubation in people? Certainly not Mad Cow. How many were actually infected before the outbreak? A handful. How many after the quarantine? None as far as I can remember. Mad Cow was only a threat to the cows. Of course I will not deny their pain or the farmers loss, but people have been doing GM for decades and no problems have yet occurred. I have seen many misrepresentations and slanderings of genetic manipulation since the film Gremlins 2. These claims are unsubstantiated.

Originally posted by Teg
...people have been doing... for decades and no problems have yet occurred.

I cannot add directly to to either side of this debate, as I am very much behind the general knowledge curve on this subject. But I will say that the above type of quote in any discussion always throws a flag up for me.

The histories of medicine and public health contain many examples of substances initially assumed to be safe and later found otherwise. These range from specific drugs, such as IC antiarrhythmic agents (eg, flecainide), which turned out to be proarrhythmic in certain circumstances, to more general environmental conditions, such as low level air pollution, once thought harmless but now correlated with mortality rates.

Peace.

Are you Amish or Yanimama? Natural means no clothing, cooking, and living on a bed of grass. I remember hearing about how all the same set of lies were spread about electricity, dynamite, and cars. This is no different; people always fear what they do not understand.

I'm no Amsih. No need to insult me[sorry if offended smbd:)]
With natural in this context I mean't food tht is made without genetical interference. GM foods cost less in long term. They grow faster, they are bigger, more resistant to ilnesses. Some of the modifications may show theire bad parts too.
I do not fear about GM food. and we also have no chice-it is here. smday we will GM ourselves to be more efficient. I'm for progress in all directions, but I do not run blindly in a wall. We have to be very careful about genetics, because one slight mistake or one mad scientist could make a genetical virii tht lets say destroys all corn on earth[tht could be humans too].
So we must be careful not to screw smth up. Advance, but with coution and strict control. I do not speak of moral aspects here-only about our evolution and existance which may be stopped by some by some stupid mistake in gentical code of some bacteria, virii, food or smth lke tht.