Please stop accusing me and others of being paid by Monsanto just because my educated opinion differs from yours. No one involved in the publication of this article was paid in any way by anyone. We are also not speaking for Harvard University as an institution. Got your email reply. Climate change — Monsanto argues that use of pesticides will decrease and crop yield will increase to provide more food for people.

One can argue we have more corn. Per land space, there are a lot of other farming practice that is more sustainable, more productive, and less depend on greenhouse emission. Where are they? Other than typical propagandas 2. How dare you saying GMO lessens harm to the environment?

This is one of the most absurd argument. Yes if people in every county eats like us, we will have problem of ANY resources.

Not per capita data based on true world population. So typical…. But if you are who you said you are willing to examine the data, exploring true scientific validity…. Provide the real data in the open and be ready to examine the criticism and alternate view. Instead, I was thinking about GMOs that are not currently on the market, about the future of the technology.

So developing crops that have less impact on the environment could have a dramatic impact on climate change. For example, this rice doi Please also see this review by a University of Washington scientist in Science magazine Yes—but they show promise enough that to me, a broad, sweeping rejection of GMOs seems at best unwise and at worse harmful.

I am trying to invite you to a discussion about this—please send me all the data that you keep telling me I am ignoring. I honestly do not want to ignore it. Also, please stop attacking me personally by questioning my motives. Thank you for your response to the previous comment from the poster who made claims about your connections to Monsanto. That said I do take issue with the casual lumping of millennia of selective breeding under natures proven rules, with in Lab techniques of directly manipulating genomes.

In my mind they are fundamentally very different in that one does not pay heed to natural limits imposed under selective breeding. Further I see no evidence of need for such approaches other that to monopolize the human need for food. We have always been able to feed the world despite various world maladies, sadly we simply choose not to for reasons no more complex than greed. I think you can see that a for profit company like Monsanto is not going to give anything away except insofar as they attempted to in Haiti where poor hungry subsistence farmers quickly determined the real motive was to force poor Haitians into annual seed fees that would likely have bankrupted them.

Lastly, I find not evidence for your claims that prices would soar if people were given the choice to not select GMO. Your assertion is flawed in several ways. First you make the assumption that what is claimed to be a superior product would be shunned. Where is the evidence? Third, farmers costs due to waste or lower yields may be real but will also be offset by reduced seed costs and the costs of spraying RoundUp on everything in one example.

In addition a return to more local production and consumption will create more local economy, sadly at the expense of profits in big agri. If anything exposes potential bias in your argument, conscious or other wise, it is the fear generating hyperbole of claiming rising food costs with no data to actually support that position.

Thanks for your comment. I think the line between GE technology and non-GE forms of genetic manipulation is actually not as solid as it might seem. Many officially non-GMO crops have been modified by irradiating seeds to cause random mutations. Many GMO crops currently in development are using GE technology to make targeted, specific mutations. I would think that the latter is safer than the irradiated former, given that irradiating seeds can cause multiple mutations of unknown effect.

So I would argue that GE is indeed part of a spectrum of ways that our food is genetically manipulated. There are still some natural limits that one has to consider with GE as well—not every gene can be mutated or added to a given organism and still allow it to grow well.

I think the economic consequences of allowing a company like Monsanto to have total control over all of our food would probably be bad. I am merely advocating for further research into GE crops instead of a sweeping rejection of anything GMO.

This research is currently mostly taking place at government-funded university labs and smaller biotech companies. Of course it will be important for our government to regulate these crops so that corporations cannot choose greed over benefit for people of the world.

There is good that GMOs have done also. If you have any cat breed, cattle breed, horse breed. Even humans selectively breed with each other, considering US to be genetically modified. So before you freak out, do research. GMO is simply being genetically modified to make better. There is nothing harmful in placing another gene into an organism. Trying to kill the public off and obviously you believe their lies or are part of their company or a shill. This article is very misleading.

What a tremendous disappointment this article is. It is not only misleading but it really sounds like a proGMO industry article, full of outright lies. We at SITN try to be very careful about not presenting false information.

If you have identified such information in this article, please provide a contradictory peer-reviewed source, and we will be happy to correct it.

I love you. Selective breeding does not involve inter-species DNA modification but the article stated this. The article is in no way misleading.

The person who wrote the article just gave an opinion. The opinion does not have to correlate to your opinion but that does not make it wrong. Honestly the information published by gmo project is a lie and is just increasing food prices. No one truely knows anything and the fact that people think everything is being gmo-ed is stupid.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of biology, chemistry and nutrition knows these processes are radically different and the campaign to mislead and conflate as though they are not should be discredited, individual scientists and entire labs, participating in this con should be publicly called out and held accountable for their abuses. Manipulating proteins and breaking a sequence that is recognizable and bio-available is not the same as manipulating and isolating for expression in reproduction.

You know this. So yes, this article makes some comparisons between selective breeding and GE tech, but it also states that they are different. We also have other articles that support the regulation and testing of GM foods and explain some of the environmental dangers of currently available GM foods—such as the formation of superweeds.

I noticed no mention of any information regarding long term effects of ingesting food that contain these unnatural occurring ingredients. I also think, as well as others I think, that if one were to follow the money one would find Monsanto, that makes huge dollars on all this has spent huge dollars trying to down play the negative publicity.

It has happened before and will happen again. So all the individuals involved in creating this article should have gone the extra step and investigated the other side of the story a little more thoroughly.

It would have done wonders for your credibility. Hello and thank you for your comment! This article is part of a series of articles that we did on GMOs this one being specifically about the history of GMOs. I was the editor who put together this series, and I have to say that I went into it a skeptic.

I thought that there had to be something sketchy about GMOs. We have another article dedicated to health effects, and even another dedicated to the potential for allerginicity. Please check them out! Like the author of this post, I am a graduate student. We are an entirely grad-student-run organization.

The comments on this article, by majority, are proof that this is a terrible time to be intelligent. They call this article misleading for integrating two human influenced concepts, but the title of the article is clear. What a brilliantly, precise conclusion of this comment section!!

So many people attempting to disprove scientifically supported truths!! The research and insights presented in these articles are providing a great launching point, thanks to the referenced sources and measured fact based conclusions, for my own graduate project.

For that, I want to say thank you to the authors. I am still trying to narrow my focus and develop my initial research approach and methods but the information contained in all of these articles has helped me cut past the sensationalism and begin to build a good base of literature concerning the history, process, concerns, and development of GMOs.

Again, thank you. This comment is primarily aimed at Sitn Flash? I am trained as a scientist math, physics, etc. This must lead a disinterested observer to ask what they Monsanto, Dupont and their ilk are trying to hide, or at least to be receptive to even Conspiracy Theorists who claim on the basis of likewise anecdotal evidence that they cause cancer and other ills. It would not be amiss here to mention the U.

No, thank you. Even the farmer cannot use his own corn to plant a crop the following year. Now, I am just a typical skeptical scientist drawing common-sense conclusions from the facts that I think I know. That is, they should have started feeding laboratory rats their Roundup-tainted corn e. Gabriel and Sitn? But I also want to feel that I can possibly make the choices I want to in what to eat, without having to worry that some corporate giant will have bought their label-free way into the food market, which would thereby affect me.

American plant in use for literally hundreds of years or more in that continent and that can be used broken up as a sweetener. It is during the larval stage when most of the damage by European corn borer occurs. The protein is very selective, generally not harming insects in other orders such as beetles, flies, bees and wasps.

For this reason, GMOs that have the Bt gene are compatible with biological control programs because they harm insect predators and parasitoids much less than broad-spectrum insecticides. The Bt endotoxin is considered safe for humans, other mammals, fish, birds, and the environment because of its selectivity.

Bt has been available as a commercial microbial insecticide since the s and is sold under many trade names. These products have an excellent safety record and can be used on many crops until the day of harvest. To kill a susceptible insect, a part of the plant that contains the Bt protein not all parts of the plant necessarily contain the protein in equal concentrations must be ingested. Within minutes, the protein binds to the gut wall and the insect stops feeding.

Within hours, the gut wall breaks down and normal gut bacteria invade the body cavity. The insect dies of septicaemia as bacteria multiply in the blood. Even among Lepidoptera larvae, species differ in sensitivity to the Bt protein. Do Bt-corn hybrids differ only in that they possess the genetic code to produce the Bt protein?

Not exactly. To add a trait to a crop plant, the gene must be inserted along with some additional genetic material. This additional genetic material includes a promoter sequence that, in part, determines how the new trait is expressed in the plant. Genetically modified corn is engineered to be toxic to particular insects. The GM technology transforms the corn plant into a pesticide.

The toxin the soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt is expressed in every cell of the plant including the corn kernels. If certain insect pests, including the European corn borers, corn earworms, fall army worms and corn rootworm larvae, try to eat the corn, they will die. The Bt toxin attaches to receptors in the gut of some insects, rupturing the gut and killing the insect.

All of the Bt corn sold in Canada is now also herbicide tolerant. Click here for information and the unofficial translation from the US government. Is your sweet corn genetically modified? The only way to find out is to ask. You have a powerful voice when you ask your local farmer or write to the head office of your grocery chain. Click here for a factsheet on GM corn to help you take action. Your consumer actions are making a difference!

Seed sellers are saying that they sell few or no GM sweet corn. Tests of sweet corn purchased in the U.