The Independent – 17 February 2007:
Campaigners against genetically modified crops in Britain last are calling for trials of GM potatoes this spring to be halted after releasing more evidence of links with cancers in laboratory rats.
UK Greenpeace activists said the findings, obtained from Russian trials after an eight-year court battle with the biotech industry, vindicated research by Dr Arpad Pusztai, whose work was criticised by the Royal Society and the Netherlands State Institute for Quality Control.
Brian John of GM Free Cymru, who released the findings, said the research was conducted in 1998 by the Institute of Nutrition of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences and has been suppressed for eight years.
It showed that the potatoes did considerable damage to the rats’ organs. Those in the “control groups” that were fed non-GM potatoes suffered ill-effects, but those fed GM potatoes suffered more serious organ and tissue damage.
The potatoes contained an antibiotic resistance marker gene. The institute that carried out the studies refused to release all the information. However, Greenpeace and other consumer groups mounted a protracted legal battle campaign to obtain the report. In May 2004 the Nikulinski District Court in Russia ruled that information relating to the safety of GM food should be open to the public.
Normally, I wouldn’t trust anything these green-freaks say… Is there any credibility to this story?
Ugh, if this one turns out to be true… We are in serious trouble. We have all read about the pollination of these GM crops spreading from test sites. Although, the honeybee decimation referred to earlier may just turn out to be handy!
Yeah, I’m sorry…not going to take the word of a questionable source as Greenpeace. Sure, they’ve come out with good research sometimes, but other times they’re just whackos.
I’d rather read the research directly. Was it peer-reviewed? Is it online anywhere?
Uh-huh. Russia. That wouldn’t by any chance be the Russia that “researches” perpetual-motion machines, ZPE, telekinesis, necromancy, astrology, telepathy, and countless other cutting-edge scientific topics, would it?
As I went through the capsule summary there, I couldn’t help but take notice of this innocuous little aside: “Those in the “control groups” that were fed non-GM potatoes suffered ill-effects,”
Yes, that would happen when you force-feed the li’l buggers half their body mass in potatoes around the clock. And the ones that “ingested” GM spuds were even worse off, huh? Wadda shocker!
“Ill effects,” indeed. Anybody remember the girl who died from drinking too much water a while back? Guess what – it wasn’t genetically-modified water. It was waaaaay too much water. As per what is slipped all too often into “research” that seeks only to validate a political viewpoint instead of seeking the truth, I’m reasonably certain that the rats’ consumption, when scaled to human equivalents, would entail a something like a person eating a 20-pound bag every day for a couple years. Do that, and you might develop cancer.
Sounds real risky. Ya.
While it is far too easy to dismiss this item, it does give us pause to examine what we are doing with gene-modified crops. I am a big advocate of GM food myself, specifically the vitamin- and (beneficial) drug-enhanced varieties. However, there are real issues that need to be addressed.
Obviously, the act of changing a plant’s genome is not the culprit. We have been using natural means to acheive the very same ends for centuries. However, the technologies and methods used to acheive those ends may have catastophic side effects that we may not be taking into account.
Why doesn’t the FDA or the CDC have their own data on this? Why doesn’t Greenpeace hire an independent laboratory to examine the concerns directly?
To all you people who think this is green hippie bullsh.t; let’s see what happens to your precious little children in 10 or 15 years and then get back to me. Are you all the same retarded folk who think global warming is a myth?
Note that the report was written by the paper’s Deputy Political Editor, I guess because it’s political, and has little to do with science
I never said it was “green hippie bullshit”. I just said I’d like to read the study directly and not filtered through anything. I’m kinda silly in that respect…I like to form my own opinions myself instead of being spoon-fed them from a third party. Though one can’t always have that luxury.
Still no sign of the original study anywhere though. If anyone finds it, provide the link via tinyurl.
I’ve been saying for years that there is something up with all the genetically modified and super-chemicalized foods we’re consuming. What else could explain the gastro-intestinal disorders that EVERYone has been getting over the past few years (I don’t know a single person who doesn’t have a problem with reflux, and most people I know are lactose intolerant).
It’s like the steroids in the meat…I mean, LOOK at kids these days, they’re HUGE (9 month olds wearing 2T clothes, etc.) and they are developing earlier.
I’m not a scientist, so I don’t have the tools to do any empiracal research on this…but there is a LOT of anecdotal evidence.
Think about it…
Os.
#7 – BillBC
“Note that the report was written by the paper’s Deputy Political Editor, I guess because it’s political, and has little to do with science”
Exactly so. While not proof of anything, it certainly constitutes evidence of what I contend is quite possible – “…“research” that seeks only to validate a political viewpoint…”
#6 – richard davis
“Are you all the same retarded folk who think global warming is a myth?”
Nothing like stereotyping and the old ad hominem, is there?
I happen to be a dope-smoking sandal-wearing aging hippie. I also happen to be a scientist. And I can recognize the sentiments of people who espouse a party line, be it liberal or conservative, by the fact that they project their own blind, simplistic loyalty to a particular ideology on everyone else, instead of realizing that some of us know full well that neither side has a monopoly on truth – or untruth.
The right wing stooges who question global warming out of slavish devotion to ‘profits at any cost’ greed have an ideological aversion to scientific truth – but that doesn’t validate in any way the scientifically illiterate throwbacks to the ’60s who still follow a cartoonishly simplistic ideal of “natural” v. “chemical,” the sort who thinks that water made from combining H with O2 in a (cue evil organ music here) “laboratory” is bad for you, and inferior to that fetched from a mountain stream, with all it’s not-always-healthy “natural” impurities.
As Smartalix noted, we have been genetically modifying food for centuries, but by a crude, brute-force method of controlled breeding. While it’s sensible to be suspicious – especially given their track record on other issues – of chemical companies’ honesty in dealing with the possible problems with GM, resorting to dishonest tactics such as appealing to the average citizen’s incompetence in assessing scietific matters lowers the ethical level of the anti-GM side to that of the ones who would sell the stuff even if it were demonstrably lethal.
I don’t need any neo-Luddite humbug and piffle, thanks anyway. I want to see some objective, not ideology-driven, science. And so far, I haven’t seen any.
So, in recap, keep your bigoted stereotypes out of it. I don’t drink anyone’s Kool-Aid.
5- Why the political editor? It’s a political issue, so that’s not too inappropriate.
Silly Russian science did get them up into space, after all. And some Russian reports that got sneered at for years seem to be confirmed when repeated with finer instrumentation. (I’ll search for a citation if anyone’s interested.)
Trust this particular research? No – not if, as Lauren put it, they force-fed the li’l buggers their own body mass in potatoes. Too many side issues introduced there to draw any serious conclusions about the specific effects of this particular GM (which, even if confirmed, could not be generalized to all GM edibles, fer gawd’s sake). But don’t rejected the report just because it was Greenpeace that dragged it out into the light. Making it public should not have required law suits.
The research might or might not expose a genuine risk. At the very least, I hope someone tries to replicate the experiment with better controls and fewer introduced effects (like force-feeding).
Somebody saw something. Let’s find out what it was. You know?
#10
Your response is dead-on (Although I’m not a dope smoking, sandal-wearing hippie). While we cannot rule out that there some problems with genetically modified potatoes, what we are not hearing is the specifics. Is it a specific batch of genetically modified potatoes? Is it a single source of the genetic modification? Is it a specific type of modification? To throw out all genetically modified food because of one extreme case or even one set of foods is ridiculous.
Once I saw the word ‘Greenpeace’ in that article, I pretty much stopped reading. They’ll never lend any credibility to anything they do.
Just keep eating your genetically modified snack food people; all the studies about it being bad for you are just a hoax written by those who lost money on their Monsanto stocks. Your hunches and disbelief due to ignorance and laziness are much more credible than -gasp- Greenpeace. Enjoy your future cancer; it will give you something to talk about between sh..ts in your colostomy bags. This story is ridiculous.
I discuss the issue of activist animal rights in my book Cyberchild. You can read a preview at http://www.smartalix.com/cyberchild.
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Eating organic food and going vegan is not worth the effort. One big example is Paul MacCartney’s vegan wife, she developed cancer AND died from it.