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Canada grow genetically modified purple tomatoes for sale in the UK but ban Irn Bru from sale in Canada. The medicinal and restorative effects of Irn Bru are well documented but GM tomatoes?? I reckon they should feed them to the geneticists for twenty years and only then release them to the market if those guy haven't grown six fingers or a third eye!
 
We have been genetically modifying plants and animals to help them survive diseases and pests for hundreds of years through selective breeding.
This is exactly the same principle but the name implies illicit goings on in a lab which scares many people who don't look beyond the name of it and do no research.
In 20 years of GM foods being on the market and over 30 years of experimentation and research there has not been a single case of any ill effects.
Can the same be said for the additives and colourings in Irn Bru? Probably not considering the specific chemical in it that the Canadians banned is considered carcinogenic, can intensify asthma and also may cause hyperactivity.
 
As Rob said,

GM only fears people because of the media, you would be surprised at how much is modified, it's even pollinated with organic and wild species of plants and veg / fruit over the years and we've seen no ill effects from it. If you want to worry about something, contact Mr Kipling about their yellow colouring for the lemon fondant fancies - when I worked as a QC auditor, we used it to strip paint and sticker glue from equipment ;)
 
I have no issue with GM crops at all. Loada green hippie scaremongering nonsense.

That said I have no issues with Irn Bru either. I no longer drink fizzy juice but if I did I'd guzzle Irn Bru (diet) by the pail load.:D
 
A bucket load of Irn Bru would have a greater IQ than you.
 
fracster said:
A bucket load of Irn Bru would have a greater IQ than you.
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That's rich coming from a genetically modified freak like you!!!
 
Irn Bru isn't banned from sale in Canada. An individual had some impounded/confiscated that he'd tried to import from the UK because it contains a dye (Ponceua 4R) that is banned in Canada. The Irn Bru company export a version to Canada that doesn't contain the dye. They don't mind poisoning their home market but they don't want to upset the Canadians.
 
Surely there is a difference between cross breeding / cross pollination and taking genes from an animal to put into a plant to make it resistant to freezing?
One extreme example I know but most traits are affected by more than 1 gene and most genes affect more than 1 trait.
They have had GM maize in USA for some time and obesity has soared maybe no link but is anyone looking?
 
Suvv said:
Surely there is a difference between cross breeding / cross pollination and taking genes from an animal to put into a plant to make it resistant to freezing?
One extreme example I know but most traits are affected by more than 1 gene and most genes affect more than 1 trait.
They have had GM maize in USA for some time and obesity has soared maybe no link but is anyone looking?
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Yup, a little digging brings up masses of information. But then, I'm "one of those weirdo hippy types" ;) Google Agenda21 for example, makes some interesting reading.
 
robhooley167 said:
We have been genetically modifying plants and animals to help them survive diseases and pests for hundreds of years through selective breeding.
This is exactly the same principle but the name implies illicit goings on in a lab which scares many people who don't look beyond the name of it and do no research.
Click to expand...

Splicing genes from a snapdragon flower into a Tomato plant isn't selective breeding, it's Scientists having a fiddle then crossing their fingers that they haven't broken anything else........
 
Steep said:
Canada grow genetically modified purple tomatoes for sale in the UK but ban Irn Bru from sale in Canada. The medicinal and restorative effects of Irn Bru are well documented but GM tomatoes?? I reckon they should feed them to the geneticists for twenty years and only then release them to the market if those guy haven't grown six fingers or a third eye!
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whats wrong with purple tomatoes - the irn bru thing is down to additives that Canada bans as far as I'm aware.

mrgubby said:
Splicing genes from a snapdragon flower into a Tomato plant isn't selective breeding, it's Scientists having a fiddle then crossing their fingers that they haven't broken anything else........
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see this is why people get all scared about GM - people with absolutely no knowledge of how GM is carried out making comments like these.


Suvv said:
Surely there is a difference between cross breeding / cross pollination and taking genes from an animal to put into a plant to make it resistant to freezing?
One extreme example I know but most traits are affected by more than 1 gene and most genes affect more than 1 trait.
They have had GM maize in USA for some time and obesity has soared maybe no link but is anyone looking?
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americans are obese because they eat far too much and don't exercise got nothing to do with GM maize.
 
POAH said:
see this is why people get all scared about GM - people with absolutely no knowledge of how GM is carried out making comments like these.
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I do know how GM is carried out, what I'm trying to get at is that no study / tests / trials can be 100% concrete.

Not GM but you can ask Thalidomide victims about 100% safety....
 
neil_g said:
I'd like to think that our scientific minds and the tests/test equipment available to them have moved on somewhat since the 50s
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So would I ! but mapping genomes & playing lego with the bits has so much scope for a right royal **** up I'll let people eat purple tomatoes for a few years to see if the go purple / grow extra heads ;)


(I should point out that I'm a Diabetic kept alive thanks to Insulin produced by GM bacteria..........)
 
mrgubby said:
I do know how GM is carried out, what I'm trying to get at is that no study / tests / trials can be 100% concrete.

Not GM but you can ask Thalidomide victims about 100% safety....
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how is GM carried out then?

Pretty sure extra anthocyanin ain't going to harm people as its already added to foods

Thalidomide is not the same thing - at the time of development use of medications during pregnancy was not strictly controlled, and drugs were not thoroughly tested for potential harm to the foetus. It would be unlikely to happen today.
 
mrgubby said:
I'll let people eat purple tomatoes for a few years to see if the go purple / grow extra heads ;)
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or turning orange from drinking too much sunny D or eating too much many carrots or turning red from eating too many red tomatoes ;)
 
In my day job I carry out genetic modification all the time. I don't do it with food; what we do is to clone and/or alter human genes and express them in E. coli bacteria so we can study the resultant proteins. But the broad idea is the same.

So I understand the tech, and I have absolutely no concerns whatsoever about how GM food may impact on health. I'm convinced most people who are scared that GM food may harm their health know nothing about the tech and simply hear the words "genetic modification" and it conjures up in their mind some freakish sci-fi nonsense. I mean, you consume masses of animal and plant genetic material all the time. From a material, chemical, perspective, an altered tomato is absolutely no different to a standard tomato. It's just carrying different information; information from blueberries (in this case).

The legitimate worry about GM crops is nothing whatsoever to do with the health of consumers. It's the ecological problem of what happens if we release super-fit organisms into an ecosystem.
 
MagicMynx said:
Yup, a little digging brings up masses of information. But then, I'm "one of those weirdo hippy types" ;) Google Agenda21 for example, makes some interesting reading.
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Agenda 21 is a fairly sensible, humanitarian and unremarkable policy for sustainable development.

Unless you choose to fill your head with the kind of nonsense promoted by the likes of David Icke and Prison Planet; then it's all about teh evul NWO wanting to kill us all mwahahahaha. Or some such.

Google should not be used as a research tool unless you can confidently distinguish good sources of information from bad.
 
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ghoti said:
In my day job I carry out genetic modification all the time. I don't do it with food; what we do is to clone and/or alter human genes and express them in E. coli bacteria so we can study the resultant proteins. But the broad idea is the same.
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your day job sounds an awful lot like mine
 
POAH said:
your day job sounds an awful lot like mine
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I work on innate immunity. Specifically, the inflammasome and its regulation. Lots of characterising of proteins and their polymorphic variants; or messing up bits of them with site-directed mutagenesis and seeing what happens. Also lots of fluorescent tagging and looking at what happens to the variants inside cells.
 
ghoti said:
I work on innate immunity. Specifically, the inflammasome and its regulation. Lots of characterising of proteins and their polymorphic variants; or messing up bits of them with site-directed mutagenesis and seeing what happens. Also lots of fluorescent tagging and looking at what happens to the variants inside cells.
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structure function of chromatin binding proteins primarily using NMR but also other biophysical technics.
 
If they use the same purple dyd for the tomatoes as they do in Parma Violets then people are likely to turn purple if they eat a lot. When we were kids my brother had a real penchant for the aforesaid Parma Violets and ate packets of them day after day for a few days until he completely overdosed. He complained of feeling ill a while later and my mum called the doctor as he'd literally turned a pale purple colour. The doctors advice was to break his addiction asap.

As for GM, I'd be surprised if most of what they do will be harmful to humans unless they consume the product to excess but adding animal genes to crops is going to play havoc with vegitarians, or more specifically vegans, as they wont want to be eating pulses with piggy noses will they.
 
modchild said:
If they use the same purple dyd for the tomatoes as they do in Parma Violets then people are likely to turn purple if they eat a lot. When we were kids my brother had a real penchant for the aforesaid Parma Violets and ate packets of them day after day for a few days until he completely overdosed. He complained of feeling ill a while later and my mum called the doctor as he'd literally turned a pale purple colour. The doctors advice was to break his addiction asap.

As for GM, I'd be surprised if most of what they do will be harmful to humans unless they consume the product to excess but adding animal genes to crops is going to play havoc with vegitarians, or more specifically vegans, as they wont want to be eating pulses with piggy noses will they.
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It's interesting to consider how it might affect vegan ethics, actually. The genetic material will be cloned and recombinant, so it will never have been inside an animal. It will likely have been cloned and amplified in bacteria before introduced into the food-plant systems.
 
POAH said:
structure function of chromatin binding proteins primarily using NMR but also other biophysical technics.
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I know absolutely nothing about chromatin beyond the basics of what it is.
 
modchild said:
As for GM, I'd be surprised if most of what they do will be harmful to humans unless they consume the product to excess but adding animal genes to crops is going to play havoc with vegitarians, or more specifically vegans, as they wont want to be eating pulses with piggy noses will they.
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its not an animal gene in the tomatoes - however, a lot of genes have homologues that are found in plants and animals but like ghoti says above it won't ever have been near an animal or extract from.

ghoti said:
I know absolutely nothing about chromatin beyond the basics of what it is.
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me too lol - where do you work?
 
POAH said:
me too lol - where do you work?
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In a university's department of cellular physiology. I prefer not to go into more details than that, I don't want to be rude but I value my privacy and anonymity online and it would be extremely easy to track me down if I said where I worked given that I've already revealed the specific nature of our research!
 
ghoti said:
In a university's department of cellular physiology. I prefer not to go into more details than that, I don't want to be rude but I value my privacy and anonymity online and it would be extremely easy to track me down if I said where I worked given that I've already revealed the specific nature of our research!
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you're very odd if you think I would want to track you down.
 
POAH said:
you're very odd if you think I would want to track you down.
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I don't think you necessarily would. I just don't feel comfortable leaving identifying material publically available online. It's not you or any other specific person that worries me. Just the idea of leaving an indelible digital footprint that could, now or in future, link my personal online activity with my professional life.
For example, you and I obviously work in similar fields and have stumbled into one another on here so it's not unfeasible that I may at some point in the future find myself working with someone who could independently make a link between me and my personal & professionally irrelevant online activity. I'm not fully comfortable with that and would prefer to keep control of access to information about me.
 
It sounds as if I'm being a bit prissy about this. I'm really not trying to be, just explaining myself and trying not to sound like I'm being unreasonable! Probably unsuccessfully.
 
mid_gen said:
What evidence do you have that GM maize is causing obesity in the US? The burden is on you to provide evidence to support your hypothesis, not the other way round.
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What hypothesis?
 
ghoti said:
It's interesting to consider how it might affect vegan ethics, actually.
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This is what they decided on the issue 15 years ago

"In keeping with its vegan ethic, the Vegan Society is totally against the use of animal genes or animal substances in the development and production of GMOs. The Vegan Society believes that all foods that contain, may contain, or have involved GMOs should be clearly labelled.

In addition any product must also meet the Society's Criteria for Vegan Food. Products carrying the Society's trademark can contain GMOs, but must be clearly labelled and comply with the definition above."
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So GMO food can be vegan (in the strictest sense - it can apply to use the vegan society's trademark) but not if the genes are of animal origin. It's up to individual vegans to determine how animal origin GMO would sit with their ethics - I'm guessing most would be against it.

The good news is that Marmite and Irn Bru are both vegan (the colour that's getting the Canadians worked up is synthetic cochineal - not the real stuff)
 
ghoti said:
The hypothesis that GM maize is causing obesity in the USA...
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I did not make any hypothesis. I said maybe no link and asked if anyone is looking. I do not have to provide evidence to ask a question.

Suvv said:
Surely there is a difference between cross breeding / cross pollination and taking genes from an animal to put into a plant to make it resistant to freezing?
One extreme example I know but most traits are affected by more than 1 gene and most genes affect more than 1 trait.
They have had GM maize in USA for some time and obesity has soared maybe no link but is anyone looking?
Click to expand...
 
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