Senate GMOs - Now discussing: Seed Ownership and Intellectual Property

GMOs (Genetically modified organisms) are a big topic, so to give this a bit of direction, we'll be breaking it up into some subtopics, so if there's a different element of GMOs that you'd like to discuss, please PM me and we'll try to incorporate that as we move on to different areas of discussion over GMOs. Please keep it to the subtopic we're currently on, and while external links and sources are great, posts should stand on their own if the links, videos, and block quotes are removed. Don't expect peopel to go somewhere else to read the argument you want to make, present it here, yourself.



We're jumping into this at the 64,000 dollar question, which is the concerns over the health risks of GMOs (Genetically modified organisms). This is certainly one of the biggest driving forces of the opposition against GMOs, and has been handled differently in different countries.

Briefly, a genetically modified food is any food that comes from a genetically modified organism, which is an organism that has had it's genetic material altered using modern genetic engineering, rather than conventional methods. This can be either isolating DNA from another organism or creating it separately, then inserting it into a host organism.

For use in food, the resultant GMOs are then evaluated to see what proteins are added into the food, and how those proteins might change the food. The consensus of these evaluations from several bodies have been that there is no general risk from eating GMOs. Looking at the body of research, the conclusion that no risk is present in the published materials has been made by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Medical Association, National Academies of Sciences, Royal Society of Medicine, and the European Commission Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. That said, activist groups continue to question the overall safety.

From there, the floor is open (lets keep this just to the direct health effects of genetically modified crops for now)

 

Genetically Modified....what?

 

Point taken, I've added that in to the first line of the post.

 

i would like to try a gmo apple. i wonder if the gmo apple will not be all mealy and gross when you get to the center of it? i would be really happy if that were the case.

 

So last year a French scientist claimed to have discovered a link between Monsanto's genetically modified corn. His research was dismantled by the EU and shown to not meet acceptable standards.

Today, the EU has released the data they used to dismiss his claims.

Seralini refused to release his data until the EU released theirs. The ball is in his court now.

 

So, to try this with a different angle since apparently the science is viewed universally settled...
One of the issues increasingly coming up in the implementation of GMOs is how to handle the ownership and treatment of the seeds, primarily as some of the companies, like Monsanto, require that the strains that they produce can't be kept to reseed the fields, but that every year fresh seeds have to be bought directly to be used for planting. This is a shift from farming in the past, where farmers would keep a portion of the seeds to use the following year to not have that dependence on buying seeds each year. With some companies claiming the ownership of particular strains, it's challenging that model and making the farmers more dependent on seed companies.

The matter is now going to be coming to a head in the Supreme Court. Monsanto has routinely reached settlements with farmers who have replanted their seeds, but more recently, they attempted to reach a settlement from a farmer that had bought some leftover seeds for planting, some of which may have been seeds produced by plants grown from Monsanto seeds. However, when Monsanto showed up to settle, he'd recently filed bankruptcy for another matter, and so he's decided to fight Monsanto over this. It's worked its way all the way up to the Supreme Court now.

The article of the farmer who's currently in this legal battle with Monsanto can be found here
SCOTUSblog puts the date for argument as February 19.

 

Do you mean intellectual property?

In any case it's difficult since this is a brand new area, but I find the general idea of forcing people to not use property they have purchased in a logical way like that a bit repugnant. However it's interesting because this is such a new area of intellectual property law. Perhaps some idea of a license might be better?

 

I really, really shouldn't post on the weekends. Brain checks out.

There are definitely also royalties that are paid for it, although there is also that Monsanto has pursued this not just with original seeds, but any crop that contains portions of the GM strains they've developed, even if this is due simply to genetic contamination from other areas that have the GM crops. So there seems to be an unwillingness to account for that.

 

A link between their GM corn and what? You only named one thing.

 

Jabba, if I remember correctly it was cancer although I forgot specifically which kind of cancer. I took a look at one of the papers and I found it odd that he did not show what the control rats looked like at the end of one of the treatments.

 

Personally I don't really care about genetically modified crops. Corn and soybeans that bear a genetic resistance to certain herbicides and pesticides? More power to you.

What I do have a problem with is how Monsanto Corp resorts to mafia-style intimidation tactics against farmers. One soybean farmer is taking his case against them to the Supreme Court to overrule a prior ruling because of their harassment tactics. Hopefully it will work.

Monsanto also filed suit against a local dairy....because Kleinpeter Farms specifically advertises their milk "From Cows Not Treated With rBGH" (recombinant bovine growth hormone). Even though Kleinpeter's ad simply states the truth about their product and makes no allusion to any possible dangers of rBGH consumption to humans, Monsanto sued claiming that the ad specifically mentioning rGBH was a scare tactic. Not coincidentally, Monsanto is the company that actually produces the hormone and sells it to farmers.


That kind of wanton thuggery makes me wish that someone would give Monsanto's corporate HQ the McVeigh Treatment.

 

I don't think anyone should be able to use anything that comes out of a guy's head without his permission.

 

Obviously, I finished the sentence without writing the whole thought. But you can easily figure out the second part by clicking the link.

 

Just a reminder to keep posts on the specific topic of seed ownership and intellectual property concerns of GMOs

 

Thanks to Point Given for unlocking this and taking it out of the pre - move archives.

So the FDA has decided to approve genetically modified Salmon today, thoughts? I myself have some mixed feelings, but then again, I'm not as 'up on it' as I know some others here are.

 

A few years ago I read a series called the Grand Tour. In it, among other plotlines, had nanotechnology be banned by religious fundamentalists who rose to power in many governments. I chuckle to myself now, as the anti science hysteria that actually grips the 21st century is anti genetic engineering, perpetuated mainly by the left. Oh Ben Bova, how you got it so wrong.

Sign me up to eat the first meal of frankenfish