Posts by Bart Janssen
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Some people don't get that the word experiment means some uncertainty about the outcome
More than some people. It's something I remind students of quite frequently...
If you know what is going to happen why are you bothering to do the experiment? The most interesting experiments are those where you don't know what is going to happen :). Sadly it's quite hard to get accountants to believe that. -
BTW I sound like a cheerleader but believe me I am not. I detest unethical treatment of animals. If I believed for a second that the work being done by AgResearch was unethical I would happily condemn it.
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well aware of the risks
You are misreading context. The quote you are reading
found deformities and respiratory problems among animals at the facility - something AgResearch had been open about - but said that was a foreseeable by-product of the project.
Refers to the fact that all genetically engineered animals have health issues. It is a result of the technology itself and the issues are usually minor. As we learn more about animal cloning and engineering those issues are becoming less frequent. Those health issues disappear after one generation.
The researchers did not know that the gene in question would cause the deaths when introduced into the cows
a problem that did not show up in trials on mice
As for Jimmy Suttie's comment it may not have been politically correct but it is still true. Deaths of animals that are part of breeding programs is nothing new nor unusual.
You probably are not aware that conventional animal breeding results in birth defects, abnormalities and deaths of animals. That is ignoring the culling of animals that showed no improvement in the trait of interest.
You are certainly welcome to believe that animal deaths at the hands of humans is wrong. But to portray this research as particularly inhumane is not fair. I believe that the animals in this research program are better cared for than most farm animals in New Zealand.
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The results do speak for themselves, your interpretation of them as evidence of lack of care however is what I disagree with. The cows died because the experiment had an unexpected result. Everything leading up to the experiment indicated that they should not have died. In short the researchers expected the best for those animals, if they had expected anything else the trial would not have been done.
The researchers are not heartless at all and the animals in those research trials receive veterinary care well above any care that is possible on normal farms. Portraying the researchers as without care and heartless is simply unfair.
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Sofie
for all the reasons of solving starvation in the world, the poor and starving, wont reap the benefits
There is a perception that GM crops are only grown by big (American) companies. That used to be true but there a 14 million farmers growing GM crops, most of those a small holders. It isn’t there yet but increasingly GM crops are for the poor.
although there are drought resistant strains being looked at surely??
Hell yeah. But water is difficult, as you’d expect plants manage water very carefully so changing the way plant manages water is tricky and it changes as you shift from lab to greenhouse to field trial. Which is why we need to do trials in the field. But short answer is yes it’s a huge priority and progress is being made.
Joe
the claims that such mishaps are outside of the realms of probability
The point I’ve been trying to get across is that we know that when we try things we will see unexpected results. Most of those will show up in the lab, some will only show up in the greenhouse and some will only show up in field trial.
It’s not that we don’t see the unexpected, it’s that we no longer simply do an experiment in the lab and then ship it to the grocer. We know we need to do trials. And we are certain that after doing those trials that the products will be safer than any product of conventional breeding (or MAS) has been over the previous centuries.
The problem in New Zealand is that we are not allowed to do trials because our current regulations make that effectively impossible. Note technically possible but horrendously restrictive and with horrendously expensive bureaucracy.The careless approach shown at Ruakura should
Bollocks and you know better than that Joe. There is no way you could describe the research done with those cows in Ruakura as careless. Quite the reverse. Those cows are cared for much better than any farmer in new Zealand could afford to do. Yes the results were unexpected but don’t mistake that for lack of care, that is unfair Joe.
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Fair enough Joe, smarter is the wrong word. More knowledgeable is better. We know why previous mistakes were made and we know enough to avoid those. That doesn't prevent us making new mistakes.
But one of the most important things we know is to expect unexpected things as we make transitions to larger scale trials. As a result we (the scientists in this field) now ensure we do things in stages. Lab bench to greenhouse to small field plots to large field plots and finally to wide release - and even then we don't stop studying what happens.
supine acceptance of Monsanto's business
Please, please if you take anything from this (assuming anyone is still reading after the copyright bomb) take that GM does not not equal Monsanto. This is a myth and has been pushed very hard by opponents of GM because they can then argue because Monsanto is bad that GM is bad.
Monsanto started the commercialization of GM. But now they are just another player. Far far more GM research is being done outside Monsanto than inside. Monsanto is the major commercial business in this field mostly because they started first. Probably the biggest player is GM research now is China and has nothing to do with Monsanto or the multinational big business model.
Even if you believed all the GM research in the world was being done by the Monsanto monster, then surely the logical thing to do is to fund trusted researchers in your own government research institutes to do competing work so that Monsanto isn't the only (immoral) research entity studying GM.
one of the objections to GE/GM of crops is that we are potentially limiting the full spectrum of variety that nature, uh...naturally provides
Huh? Wow really people think that? Ok my best understanding is that GM is much more likely to result in vastly more diversity in crop plants than exists now. Modern crops are the tiny fraction of edible plants that can be grown and are selected because you can manage them large scale, million of hectares scale. GM is very likely, er no make that absolutely certain to allow crops we can't grow large scale now to become part of the diet as we use the technology to overcome limitations that prevent small scale food crops from becoming large scale.
Simply GM will increase diversity in our food supply.
I bet someone will say that's a bad thing now because it will expose us to new food we aren't adapted to ... sigh.
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We need a PSA equivalent of Godwin's law to describe the point at which all PSA threads become copyright threads.
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The Canadian farmer who took Monsanto to court and lost was an organic producer whose organic crop and reputation went down the gurgler because of pollen straying from nearby GE crops.
So here's the wiki entry and this is what I've heard about the story from folks who have very good contacts in the industry.
Canola isn't a good crop in the sense that it tends to spread pollen and seed 10s of meters beyond the field. The farmer in question knew this and sprayed a strip of land next to a GM canola field with Roundup. As expected by everyone some of the plants next to the GM field were GM canola and resistant to Roundup. Note there was no plausible reason to spray roundup along that strip of land, he claimed he was spraying weeds - I personally find this hard to believe. He then went to the expense of harvesting those GM canola and storing them so that he could plant 4 square kilometers of GM canola!!!!!
IMO this is not the action of a poor organic farmer struggling with a contamination. To portray this as a poor farmer versus big business story is disingenuous.
Don I believe this is theft and so did the Canadian courts. If you want to argue that people should be able to take food when they want from people who have food then that is a different cultural model.
There are also instances of traditional Mexican indian corn varieties grown in fairly isolated areas being contaminated by pollenation from GE crops many miles away.
This one is definitely more of an issue. Mexico is the place where maize originated and hence has all the wild varieties of maize. It's a valuable resource for science and maize breeding. Because of that GM corn was meant to only be grown in specific areas of Mexico so that the wild varieties would retain their genetic distinctiveness.
Some plots of those maize can now be shown to have genes from the commercial maize, including the transgenes. No-one really is sure how it happened. What it highlights is more a problem with separation of modern high yield crops from the wild varieties. It is not clear how long these ancestral strains have been being contaminated since it was only because of the GM issue that people looked.
Note the actual farmers don't care at all because they kind of want to grow the high yield varieties and mostly aren't clear on why they should only grow the low yield ancestral strains even though they get extra money to do just that.
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FWIW gorse doesn't over-run forests
Gah that's my ignorance showing, I thought the problem was that it was a better pioneer than the natives and once established it didn't let the native second growth establish.
the majority of funding for science in NZ is only available to proposals that can demonstrate a likelihood of providing a profit
Jo is dead right here guys.
What she doesn't say is that the "likelyhood of providing profit" is judged by business/sector input and generally doesn't favour quality of science. In short your tax dollars are going into science which is given the big tick by businessmen not by scientists.
I totally get that science for profit is unnerving. 99% of the scientists hate it as well. And in my opinion science for profit produces less economic benefit in the long term and in the short term reduces the amount of actual funding that gets into science.
If the Greens want my vote (and every other scientist's vote in NZ) they should look at a research funding model that ignores profit/benefit to NZ/outcomes/milestones etc and instead simply demands excellent science.
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RBentley makes some good points.
Yeah I know he does. I kind of didn't want to go there because it brings out my deeply cynical side.
I short (s)he is right. There are other things that reduce methane production and AgResearch scientists actually are working on mundane stuff that leads to boring advice for farmers. None of which makes for a splashy press release.
And yes the press release was "timed" and yes this press release about this science could have come any time in the last couple of years or a few years in the future without changing anything about the actual results presented.
BUT
For all the caveats I was very very happy to see a real science story leading the news. The reporting was as good as you could ever hope for given the time restraints. And damnit those folks at AG have done some really nice work that really is worth being proud of, simply because they are good scientists working in New Zealand on a problem that will have application worldwide.