[extropy-chat] GM Food

Lifespan Pharma/Morris Johnson CTO megao at sasktel.net
Tue Dec 6 23:41:55 UTC 2005


My argument to balance off economics with GMO policies is that good GMO 
would indeed increase
basic food volumes but control over the IP of medicinal and  complex 
bioproducts would create a cash
value which would replace farm subsidies as GM farmers using HACCP , 
GPS, automated equipment and
on-farm GMO germplasm production would be given by the market sufficient 
resources and profit margin
as to guarantee TQM.  The basic food would be a worthless by-product 
which could be given away
to every person in the world so as to generate the healthy warm bodies 
needed to maufacture the consumer goods
based upon natural resources and bio-products.  The energy in and out 
part of agriculture however must
be signifiantly modified before this entire scheme has long term 
sustainability.

I remember a fellow in 1975 who developed a wheat that manufacured 85% 
of its own Nitrogen fertilizer
requirements.  He was employed by Agriculture Canada at the time.  
Within a year of publishing this work
he was hired by Esso/Imperial Oil and no further published work ever 
came accross my path.

This was before "peak oil" and all that stuff but demonstrates that 
there is much dormant work out there
that could be revived if the economics and players with the power to 
fund projects decided it was
a priority.

So I  ust beg to differ and say that indweed it is the 3.3 trillion 
dollar health economy that has the money
to pay for GMO bioreactors. 
The strategy is to use food crop non-food relatives though.
I have seen for example rather than use medicago-alfalfa, a feed crop as 
a bioreactor the close relative medicago-medics is targeted.
Same biochemistry without cross-contamination of gene pools.  I'm also 
in favor of converting numerous tree
species to bioreactors as they are perennials.
With environment, water and inputs poplars grow 110 ft mature trees in 
4-5 years. 
A GMO tree that can grow without as many inputs and much less water 
could revolutionize biomass production
and yield extractable high value bio-products.

As well, converting certain ruminants like sheep to bioreactors and 
extracting rumen manufactured bioproducts
is a totally novel  meshing of food and GMO industrial products.

Just put a PHD in every farmyard and you won't believe your eyes what 
will happen next.

MFJ


Robert Bradbury wrote:

> I've changed the subject because this isn't really related to human 
> stem cell engineering.
>
> It relates to arguably one of the most significant extropic problems 
> we currently face and its solutions.
>
> First, hunger and starvation are significant causes of entropy -- 
> every year killing from 10 to 36 million people [6].  This is highly 
> unextropic because all of the energy, matter and time that went into 
> creating, growing and teaching those human beings is completely lost! 
>
> For references see [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
>
> For comparison purposes this is approximately equal to crashing a 747 
> full of people (more than 70% children) into the side of a mountain 
> every 30 minutes.  Another way of looking at it is that the death toll 
> is equivalent to more than 6 911's every day. This goes on day after 
> day every year.
>
> Now one use for GMO is to enhance the nutritional value of the foods.  
> This has been achieved (and scientifically proven) with iron-enhanced 
> rice recently [7,8].  Previous developments included "golden rice" 
> enhanced for vitamin A.  Researchers are working on zinc and vitamin-E 
> enhanced rice as well.  If you read [6] carefully you will find that 
> the people who funded the development are unlikely to be filing 
> patents which would prevent it from being used by people in poorer 
> nations.  (Not that many "less-developed" nations respect the patent 
> (or copyright) laws of many "developed" nations anyway... but that's 
> another discussion.)  In the case of "golden rice" the Rockefeller 
> Foundation funded much of the development research [9] and Monsanto 
> gave away its patent rights [10].
>
> Part of the global problem is one of basic nutrition (which can in 
> part be solved by GMOs as the previous paragraph shows).  This is one 
> of the things which makes accurate numbers of deaths caused by poor 
> nutrition difficult.  One might die from cholera but the actual cause 
> could well be a poor immune system due to nutritional deficiencies.
>
> Another use of GMO is to increase the production of and shelf life of 
> those foods which are produced.  Estimates of food production lost to 
> non-human consumption (mostly insects) and spoilage (in part fungi or 
> bacterial consumption) range from 10-45% (more authoritative estimates 
> seem to be from 15-25%). More food translates into cheaper food (if 
> the basic principles of economics are applied).  Cheaper food means 
> people are more likely to consume sufficient vitamins, minerals, amino 
> acids, carbohydrates and fats which prevent starvation, promote brain 
> development, allow the maintenance of a robust immune system, etc.  
> I.e. More (cheaper) food is a highly extropic goal.
>
> Now, in the developed countries the use of GMO could certainly be 
> questioned since we don't really need more food (obesity is 
> significantly contributing to premature deaths).  But this gets into 
> the politics of agricultural production, farm subsidies (which I 
> believe are as bad or worse in Europe than they are in the U.S., 
> etc.).  I strongly doubt that one could present an argument that 
> engineering organisms to produce compounds/materials which are more 
> efficient energy sources (esp. since they take their carbon out of the 
> atmosphere) is a bad thing.  The anti-GMO backlash was in part fueled 
> by farmers (esp. those in Europe) who did not want increased 
> production as that would lower crop prices still further and drive the 
> smaller (less efficient [family]?) farms out of business.  As many 
> U.S. farms are largely industrialized "businesses" there was much less 
> resistance in the U.S. than there was in Europe to GMOs.  The 
> governments did not want GMOs either as that would result in pressure 
> to increase subsidies to the farmers.  This tended to be more balanced 
> in the U.S. because agricultural products are a significant source of 
> export revenues.
>
> The "health" value of non-GMO (organic) foods have little or no 
> scientific standing (and should not be promoted by Extropians who 
> believe in "rational thought").  You can justify preferring them on 
> the basis of wanting to support small family farms which is an 
> personal choice argument.  You might justify them on the basis of the 
> environmental reasons but the debate is quite complex.  Just don't try 
> to justify them on a "health" basis.  Bottom line is that sometime in 
> the next 10-15 years we are going to be able to engineer "bio-gruel" 
> which can be grown in solar ponds, makes highly efficient use of solar 
> energy, has a completely balanced and healthy mixture of vitamins, 
> minerals, amino-acids, fats and carbohydrates, is relatively resistant 
> to other organisms which might consume it and is based on GMOs 
> (consider it to be a highly engineered form of the lactobacillis found 
> in "live" yogurt crossed with spirulina).  This will be significantly 
> "healthier" than any "natural" food now found on the planet.
>
> Regarding corporations & patents -- I've seen programs that the 
> genetic engineering of crops used in Africa *is* taking place in 
> Africa.  The idea that all GMOs are being produced by Monsanto, ADM or 
> other corporations and being withheld from the third world derives 
> from  debates of the mid-90's and isn't a valid argument anymore.  The 
> rice genome started out with a private effort but was rapidly 
> transcended by public efforts [11].  The rate at which information is 
> becoming available is too fast to be concerned with corporations 
> locking down significant fractions of it.  Nature has evolved 
> different solutions for many problems and locking down one of them 
> doesn't give you a 20 year exclusive on any of them anymore.
>
> Regarding growing crops that manufacture drugs in addition to their 
> natural mixture of compounds (many of which are probably "poisons" to 
> prevent consumption by insects) the probability is low for this.  To 
> efficiently engineer GMOs to produce most drugs there has to already 
> be an enzymatic process somewhere in nature that produces that 
> molecule.  Aspirin and most antibiotics are examples of this.  But if 
> it is a "novel" drug which doesn't closely resemble molecules which 
> can be found in nature then the engineering of the enzymes to produce 
> it in plants or animals is likely to be prohibitively expensive.  It 
> also isn't likely to lower the drug costs much as one still has to 
> deal with things like purification and manufacturing  specific doses.
>
> Supporting GMOs to reduce deaths due to starvation or poor nutrition 
> [12] is probably the second most extropic thing one can do -- after 
> supporting the correction of the human genetic program to eliminate 
> deaths due to aging (and age related diseases).
>
> Robert
>
> 1. http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present/stats.htm
> 2. http://www.bread.org/hungerbasics/international.html
> 3. http://www.thp.org/
> 4. http://www.napsoc.org/
> 5. http://www.starvation.net/
> 6. 
> http://old.developmentgateway.org/node/130622/bboard/message?message%5fid=497640&forum%5fid=139988&mode=m 
> <http://old.developmentgateway.org/node/130622/bboard/message?message%5fid=497640&forum%5fid=139988&mode=m>
>   (good discussion of conflicts in the quoted numbers)
> http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/overview/famine.pdf
>   (another good discussion)
> 7. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Nov05/rice.iron.ssl.html
> 8. http://www.irri.org/media/press/press.asp?id=115
> 9. http://www.developments.org.uk/data/09/goldeneye.htm
> 10. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/865946.stm
> 11. 
> http://www.genoscope.cns.fr/externe/English/Projets/Projet_CC/organisme_CC.html
> 12. One could argue that there are lots of political activities that 
> could reduce these categories (famine, starvation & poor nutrition) of 
> deaths as well but the arguments quickly become complex due to trade 
> offs between benefits to oneself, benefits to ones family, benefits to 
> ones "tribe", benefits to humanity, etc. so I'm not including them here.
>
>

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