Drop the Money Bomb on Monsanto

[smurff]

BTW, if ever there can be a "sociopathic corporation," Monsanto is IT.

[Storm]

You can ally yourself with the anti-vaccine people if you want, but seriously, look at the facts.  Influenza kills between 250,000 and 500,000 per year.  I'm not sure what the rate of side effects from the vaccine is, but I'm pretty sure it's not as bad as half a million people dying.

We have diseases that were almost completely eradicated in the 1940s like whooping cough becoming epidemics now because some parents bought into this anti-vaccine hysteria and didn't get their kids vaccinated:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/healt ... state.html

So, perhaps a few people had strange side effects from vaccines.  Society is conclusively better as a result of vaccination compared to 100 years ago.  You could, of course, be an edge case where your child had a severe side effect from a vaccine.  But, you should be thankful because without vaccines being available you might not have even been here today as your parents might have died from polio or any number of other horrible diseases.

This is why vaccine manufacturers need immunity.  Because they save millions of lives, yet a small number of people have side effects.  Do we really want to go back to a day and time of no vaccination?  I sure don't.

Besides, the anti-vaccine crowd gets caught up in a lot of the same BS that kills other people - you don't need surgery for that life threatening medical condition, just take these questionable herbs and let your body heal itself.

[smurff]

You can ally yourself with the anti-vaccine people if you want, but seriously, look at the facts.  Influenza kills between 250,000 and 500,000 per year.  I'm not sure what the rate of side effects from the vaccine is, but I'm pretty sure it's not as bad as half a million people dying.

There is a lot of emphasis on DEATH as the only negative outcome worth worrying about.  Death is a sad outcome.  But there are sometimes fates worse than death.  On the road to dying, there can be horrible, miserable diseases that people suffer with, where the only thing that keeps them from taking their own lives is religious belief (and the illegality of having someone help them if they cannot do it themselves).

We have diseases that were almost completely eradicated in the 1940s like whooping cough becoming epidemics now because some parents bought into this anti-vaccine hysteria and didn't get their kids vaccinated:

Infectious diseases as a focus of misery have been replaced with long-term, chronic diseases like various cancers, lupus, multiple sclerosis, allergies, asthma, diabetes, a list as long as the list of infections diseases allegedly eradicated.  There are also new diseases that did not exist before the vaccination era (HIV, autism, ADD/ADHD, MS, ME, etc.) with no way to determine whether neuro-immune changes brought by vaccination contributed to them.

This is why vaccine manufacturers need immunity.  Because they save millions of lives, yet a small number of people have side effects.  Do we really want to go back to a day and time of no vaccination?  I sure don't.

I'm struggling to think of a line of business in the USA that is immune from liability for the damage caused by their products.  I can't think of one.  Maybe other PP'ers on this list can give some insight.  This kind of blanket immunity is one of the worst forms of socialism, particularly since people are compelled to give their children the vaccines under all sorts of threats.  Lawsuits serve a function.  They keep manufacturers on their toes.  If vaccine manufacturers knew that if they unleashed foul products on the public they'd be sued into oblivion, they'd clean up their acts.  The list of companies and lines of business who cleaned up their acts after being sued is a long one; why should vaccine manufacturers be exempt from capitalism?

Lawsuits might also spur stodgy vaccination manufacturers toward enough R&D to enter the next stage.  Vaccination is old technology, little changed since the 1800s.  Maybe it's time for something new.

Most of the so-called "anti-vaccine" people are not really anti-vaccine.  What they want is research on vaccines, tests to determine who should or who should not take a particular vaccine in its common form (and what vaccination the affected person may be able to take in modified form), and reasonable schedules for vaccination.  They want an end to the proliferation of mandatory vaccines for minor infections that are added to the schedule simply so some politically connected scientist can make a buck.  They also want honesty and acknowledgement of side effects when they occur.  (After all, what drug or treatment does NOT have side effects?  Why would vaccines be any different?)  And they want an end to the process of threatening and humiliating the parents whose children mysteriously develop a serious illness immediately after a specific change that enters their lives--the introduction of a vaccine the parents believed would help them.

[Storm]

I'm kind of in disbelief that there is any question that vaccination has not been a huge breakthrough in preventing serious, chronic disease.  Think about polio.  This disease caused thousands of deaths and many tens of thousands of people with severe deformity and paralysis every year until Salk invented the vaccine:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_poliomyelitis

On Saturday, June 17, 1916 an official announcement of the existence of an epidemic polio infection was made in Brooklyn, New York. That year, there were over 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States, with over 2,000 deaths in New York City alone.[12] The names and addresses of individuals with confirmed polio cases were published daily in the press, their houses were identified with placards, and their families were quarantined.[13] Dr. Hiram M. Hiller, Jr., was one of the physicians in several cities who realized what they were dealing with, but the nature of the disease remained largely a mystery. The 1916 epidemic caused widespread panic and thousands fled the city to nearby mountain resorts; movie theaters were closed, meetings were canceled, public gatherings were almost nonexistent, and children were warned not to drink from water fountains, and told to avoid amusement parks, swimming pools, and beaches.[12] From 1916 onward, a polio epidemic appeared each summer in at least one part of the country, with the most serious occurring in the 1940s and 1950s.[1] In the epidemic of 1949 2,720 deaths from the disease occurred in the United States and 42,173 cases were reported and Canada and the United Kingdom were also affected.[14][15]

I'll take asthma, allergies or even autism any day over being hideously deformed and in a wheelchair for life.

What is insidious about the anti-vaccine movement is that they ignore the overwhelming research that proves the efficacy of such vaccines, and focus instead on pseudo-scientific research that is not done properly.

Also, the reason for immunity to lawsuits is pretty obvious.  Vaccines are not a huge profit center for a pharma company.  They are often administered only once or twice in the lifetime of an individual, and require literally years if not decades of testing and FDA approval before they can even reach the marketplace.  If there was no immunity, pharma companies would probably stick to known money makers like statins that people will actually continue to buy for years, rather than something as simple as a polio vaccine only gives them a few dollars of profit per person.

[TBV]

Vaccines are not a huge profit center for a pharma company.  They are often administered only once or twice in the lifetime of an individual, and require literally years if not decades of testing and FDA approval before they can even reach the marketplace.

Not trying to come down on either side of this yet, but....the "not a huge profit center" label may be in need of updating.  Also, from a purely business perspective, the one-off nature of vaccines may be their best feature.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/big-busi ... id=8820642

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site ... ewsLang=en

http://www.spiegel.de/international/bus ... 63357.html

[MachineGhost]

I'm kind of in disbelief that there is any question that vaccination has not been a huge breakthrough in preventing serious, chronic disease.  Think about polio.  This disease caused thousands of deaths and many tens of thousands of people with severe deformity and paralysis every year until Salk invented the vaccine:

No one is contesting the belief that vaccination has been a breakthrough in reducing child mortality.  The problem is on the callous institutional disregard for individual adverse effects vs group public polcy.  1% seems small; but when it happens to you, its 100%.

Anyway, I just want to point out that the polio epidemic was a direct consequence of the widespread medical fad of removing tonsils in the 1930's and 1940's.  A typical unintended consequence.  When profit or reputation is involved, it seems to take decades before a small minority will finally own up and admit they royally fucked up.  Do we have to go through that again with GE food, adverse vaccine reactions and brain cancer from cell phone radiation?  Apparantly so.

What does Canada know that the U.S. doesn't?

[MachineGhost]

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider how patent rules apply to self-replicating technologies, accepting an appeal from a farmer seeking to circumvent Monsanto Co. (MON)’s planting restrictions on its genetically modified seeds.

The justices today said they will review a federal appeals court decision that Vernon Hugh Bowman infringed Monsanto’s patents when he planted soybeans he had bought from a grain elevator. Those beans were the product of seeds covered by Monsanto’s patents, and the St. Louis-based company says its rights extend to the second-generation beans.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-1 ... urt-review

[smurff]

Whenever I think about the reasons it's better to invest in total stock market index funds rather than individual stocks, this agribusiness company comes to mind.  Whatever market cap or popularity Monsanto may have, there's always a whiff of death surrounding it.  There's an ever-present "if" about it, as in "if California passes the GMO labeling act" or "if the Supreme Court disagrees with the Obama Administration and overturns the ruling that affirmed Monsanto's prohibition on seed saving."  If either of these were to happen, there's the possibility of a near-death spiral for Monsanto.

[stone]

I think fossil fuels are a MUCH greater threat than GMOs.

[MachineGhost]

I think fossil fuels are a MUCH greater threat than GMOs.

How the heck do you figure?  You don't eat or drink oil and trigger unintended epigenomic consequences.

GMO hasn't been proven safe in humans.  The technological level is just too primitive to monitor all variables, nor has there been enough time to suss out long-term health consequences.  The short-term generational effects in lower mammals is already grosteque and scary.

The anti-GMO label proposition proponents (all the Big Farma conglomerates) are being unrelentless in their anti-proposition advertising.  The best they can do is what I presume is fear-exploit the loophole that fresh food won't be required to be GMO labeled if it contains GMO.  I hope CA voters are smarter than that.

[stone]

I think fossil fuels are a MUCH greater threat than GMOs.

How the heck do you figure?  You don't eat or drink oil and trigger unintended epigenomic consequences.
GMO hasn't been proven safe in humans.  The technological level is just too primitive to monitor all variables, nor has there been enough time to suss out long-term health consequences.  The short-term generational effects in lower mammals is already grosteque and scary.

I'm sorry by I don't understand your objections. Once you have chewed up, swallowed and stomach churned your wheat and peas or whatever, what difference does it make whether proteins encoded by ancestral pea DNA were expressed in the wheat? If a GMO crop contains dangerous levels of some anti-pest toxin, then that is something that needs to be checked out on a case by case basis.

[MachineGhost]

I'm sorry by I don't understand your objections. Once you have chewed up, swallowed and stomach churned your wheat and peas or whatever, what difference does it make whether proteins encoded by ancestral pea DNA were expressed in the wheat? If a GMO crop contains dangerous levels of some anti-pest toxin, then that is something that needs to be checked out on a case by case basis.

Because we're going far beyond providing what could be considered food in the most extreme cases and starting to introduce new Frankensteinian lifeforms that don't occur in nature.  How is the body supposed to deal with what it hasn't encounted over millions of years of evolution?  How are we even supposed to know what all of the consequences are?  Do you want to assimilate biologically active di- or tripeptides of a "space alien" that you've never eaten before?

Its not just the negative consequences to human health but the negative consequences to the environment as well.  The more we make crops resistant to toxic pesticides, the higher and higher the cumulative doses that can be used and the more and more co-dependent the farmer is on Big Pharma in a vicious never-ending cycle.  And this highly pesticided food gets into the food chain because cows and pigs eat virtually all of this GE corn and soybeans.  You think mad cow disease is a problem?  Just wait.

All the proposition proposes is to give consumers a choice of not eating this GE garbage.  Forcing it upon us through subterfuge is immoral.  If there was nothing wrong with GE food, why is Big Farma so against it?  The implementation cost is trivial.

[stone]

Machine Ghost

Do you want to assimilate biologically active di- or tripeptides of a "space alien" that you've never eaten before?

I'm sorry but I don't understand how GMOs are going to contain novel tripeptides. There are only 8000 possible tripeptides that could be encoded and we get all of them from proteins we eat as it is

[smurff]

Stone, if it were something simple, like trading genes from one pea with those from another pea, maybe (a big maybe) I'd agree. But that's not what happens.  What happens is that unrelated species are combined at the germ level--so any dangerous combination will go on to reproduce itself. Using the example MachineGhost cited, making soya superresistant to pesticides means more pesticides will be needed, exposing the humans and animals working in agriculture to even more dangerous compounds. More of the stuff will be left as residue on food, and the consequences, which may not show up until those eating the stuff have offspring and it shows up there or in their grsndchildren (epigenetics), can be dire.  Not a few researchers have wondered whether the increase (by orders of magnitude) in autism and child-onset type II diabetes might not be related to GMOs. There's no way go tell.

My understanding is that GB and Europe have laws that either restrict GMOs in the food supply and on the land, but at a minimum food has to be labeled. You then hsve a choice.  Americans don't have the right to know if GMOs are in our food, and can't make a choice.  We want the same right  that you have in the EU

[stone]

Smurff, the objection that I've understood is your objection to having high levels of chemical herbicides on food. Irrespective of whether food is GMO or not, I agree that it needs to be free of hazardous levels of chemicals. I think the way to tackle that is to have plenty of testing for hazardous chemicals in food and draconian penalties for selling contaminated food. The GMO thing seems a red-herring to me.

[smurff]

Chemical herbicides is just one of the problems, and on the scale of potential for disaster, a minor one at that. I used it as an example of one danger of GMOs.  Maybe a nonGMO example will help. Before the mid 1990s, few people would have believed that proteins could fold in lethal patterns that maintain themselves across different species consuming them. Scientists thought that it was good enough that cows be fed protein; it did not matter where that protein came from--until humans started showing symptoms of creutzfeld-jakob disease.  Then we learned about prions and how they fold and had to regain a respect for cattle and what they eat. The point is that there are serious unknowns about GMOs, an inability to turn back the clock once they're unleashed, and the "problem" the GMO was supposed to solve did not exist.

[stone]

Chemical herbicides is just one of the problems, and on the scale of potential for disaster, a minor one at that. I used it as an example of one danger of GMOs.  Maybe a nonGMO example will help. Before the mid 1990s, few people would have believed that proteins could fold in lethal patterns that maintain themselves across different species consuming them. Scientists thought that it was good enough that cows be fed protein; it did not matter where that protein came from--until humans started showing symptoms of creutzfeld-jakob disease.  Then we learned about prions and how they fold and had to regain a respect for cattle and what they eat. The point is that there are serious unknowns about GMOs, an inability to turn back the clock once they're unleashed, and the "problem" the GMO was supposed to solve did not exist.

Are you basically saying that we should only eat food produced in a purely traditional/primeaval manner? I can see a point to that but as your example shows, I don't think GMOs are a special case. Things such as short stems for grains etc (from traditional plant breeding) have massively improved agriculture. I think it would be very hard to go back to just eating wild plants and animals. IMO the world faces serious challenges. We need to have plenty of food and fuel for when oil runs out and fresh water is scarce. I think GMOs have to be a part of meeting that challenge.

[MachineGhost]

Are you basically saying that we should only eat food produced in a purely traditional/primeaval manner? I can see a point to that but as your example shows, I don't think GMOs are a special case. Things such as short stems for grains etc (from traditional plant breeding) have massively improved agriculture. I think it would be very hard to go back to just eating wild plants and animals. IMO the world faces serious challenges. We need to have plenty of food and fuel for when oil runs out and fresh water is scarce. I think GMOs have to be a part of meeting that challenge.

Except all GE's crops currently fail on the account of increasing yields.  They're actually less than non-GMO but locks the farmer, especially poor ones in India or Africa, into a forced buy-in every year because they cannot legally reuse last year's leftover seeds.  GE and selective breeding are also not the same thing.

So far, GE seems more about making a profit for Monsanto, et al. stakeholders than anything else, otherwise these firms would not be so cavalier about sweeping the health dangers under the rug.  Sometimes I wonder what the employees in these firms eat themselves.  Because either they're incredibly ignorant or they're incredibly secluded and elitist.

[stone]

Are you basically saying that we should only eat food produced in a purely traditional/primeaval manner? I can see a point to that but as your example shows, I don't think GMOs are a special case. Things such as short stems for grains etc (from traditional plant breeding) have massively improved agriculture. I think it would be very hard to go back to just eating wild plants and animals. IMO the world faces serious challenges. We need to have plenty of food and fuel for when oil runs out and fresh water is scarce. I think GMOs have to be a part of meeting that challenge.

Except all GE's crops currently fail on the account of increasing yields.  They're actually less than non-GMO but locks the farmer, especially poor ones in India or Africa, into a forced buy-in every year because they cannot legally reuse last year's leftover seeds.  GE and selective breeding are also not the same thing.

So far, GE seems more about making a profit for Monsanto, et al. stakeholders than anything else, otherwise these firms would not be so cavalier about sweeping the health dangers under the rug.  Sometimes I wonder what the employees in these firms eat themselves.  Because either they're incredibly ignorant or they're incredibly secluded and elitist.

The Gates Foundation also fund a lot of development of genetically engineered food crops. Do you also suspect those of being malign?

[MachineGhost]

The Gates Foundation also fund a lot of development of genetically engineered food crops. Do you also suspect those of being malign?

I'm a great admirer of the Gates Foundation, but in the that area it is just ignorance and the usual fetish for technology common of the technocraty, as well as the realities on the ground.  Money sure doesn't guarantee you wisdom!  There are proven, easily affordable and easily implementable non-GE approaches to solving the farming yield problem that the Gates Foundation ignores, despite being contacted about it.  Why do you think that is?

[smurff]

We need to have plenty of food and fuel for when oil runs out and fresh water is scarce. I think GMOs have to be a part of meeting that challenge.

GMOs are seriously petroleum-dependent, and require expensive, high-tech inputs that are subject to error and even tampering.  Using GMO corn for fuel costs more in petroleum inputs than one can get in output from the corn-based ethanol--an example of how techno-triumphalism supersedes common sense.  We humans are wasting our fresh water supplies on obsolete flush toilets and irrigating our "keeping-up-with-the-Joneses" type lawns.  And legitimate research has shown that the cause of famine is not simply a low quantity of food, but problems with how whatever food is available is distributed.  GMOs will solve none of these problems, and with some of them can make the situation worse.  As MachineGhost pointed out, poor farmers in India and various nations in Africa are learning about the realities of GMO farming.  And when some farmers in India come to the awful realization with GMO cotton, they commit suicide--which causes further present/future problems for their wives and children.

Assumptions about the safety of GMOs are based on humans and not other living creatures.  If we cared about others we would not use such expensive technology to do silly things, like transforming rabbits into fluorescent bunnies.  Those assumptions about safety include the notion that the macro human--the one we se--is the only one that's important.  It ignores the micro human, where human survival depends on the survival of billions of unseen microorganisms living within their human-bounded universe.  With microorganisms it is possible to watch in real time the outcomes of evolution and natural selection; their micro-metabolisms can be thrown off by a single missing gene or an altered protein that can no longer fit into the only microscopic receptor that evolved for it.  It's those microorganisms that are under the most visible threat from GMOs, and since they are part of us and what they do keep us healthy and alive, we are under threat, too.

GMOs have not been adequately tested and the findings that they are substantially equivalent to real tomatoes, corn and soya were made by political decree and not based on legitimate, independent studies.  Rather than their being part of meeting future challenges, dealing with all the aftermath of GMOs may well be the challenge of the future.

[stone]

Genetic engineering is simply a toolkit for altering crops. It can be used to create crops that are more dependent on chemicals or that are less dependent on chemicals. Farmers can choose to use GMO seeds or to use seeds that have been developed by other means. Although it is expensive to  initially create a GMO strain (largely because of the regulations), once that is done, there is no further cost. It seems to be that the objections you put forward are not specific to the genetic engineering process itself. If current GMO crops cause cotton farmers to use lots of harmful chemicals and pay too much to some exploitative company, why not create different GMO crops that don't?

Computors get used to do lots of bad things. That doesn't mean that computors are bad.

[smurff]

Why not ask, "What is supposedly wrong with real cotton (or corn or potatoes) such that it needs a GMO replacement?" 

There's a free documentary about GMOs.  I forgot to list it here, because it was only to be free until Sep 22, but apparently the producers have extended the deadline since it's online now.  It's about an hour and a half.

http://geneticroulettemovie.com/

[stone]

Your argument seems to be a general argument that could be applied against any sort of technological change. Why use wheels when we can drag stuff? Why use fire when we can eat salad? Why wear clothes when we can live in the tropics? etc etc.
What exactly is special about genetic engineering that has caused so much concern? Why isn't it regarded in a much more mundane, run of the mill, light?

Do you for instance object to this use of genetic engineering: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases ... 43672.html ?

[stone]

Why not ask, "What is supposedly wrong with real cotton (or corn or potatoes) such that it needs a GMO replacement?" 

There's a free documentary about GMOs.  I forgot to list it here, because it was only to be free until Sep 22, but apparently the producers have extended the deadline since it's online now.  It's about an hour and a half.

http://geneticroulettemovie.com/

I'm sorry but if someone guzzles cola and cheescake and takes no exersize then to my mind its daft to blame their inevitable dire health problems on the fact that the corn syrup in the cola is from a GMO In the UK we are fast catching up with the USA in terms of eating ourselves to an early grave with vast amounts of over-refined junk- irrespective of the block on GMO food over here.