Originally posted by Transit To me, It was lowlife like monsanto polluting farmland with their 'roundup ready' crops
Sueing anyone who finishes up with their spreading hybrids and happily selling more poison along with the seed
I've got to agree there. I don't think all GE is created equal (full disclosure: I did some papers in genetics at university, and my little bro has an honours degree in molecular biology).
I think there are ethical issues around patenting life, and Monsanto used GE which in itself was probably fairly harmless, to allow massive increase in the use of their herbicide.
Monsanto's attitude to both GE and glyphosate are totally unethical, and risky.
Apart from engineering glyphosate resistant crops, the use of GE to introduce terminator genes that render the seeds of crops infertile is a huge risk to food security. It's not that the genetic material itself is toxic, or even the proteins it expresses - which is the suggestion I hear from a lot of anti-GE people, which annoys me, as that's usually not the case, unless the GE actually involves introducing genes for toxins.
For me, the issue is around ethics and the point of what the GE is enabling.
Our guts are a hotbed of exchange of genetic information between species with plasmids and bacterial viruses (phages), transferring bits of genetic information between bacterial species all the time, hence the ease of developing antibiotic resistance.
I'm not necessarily against glyphosate as a tool to main biosecurity, however I'd regard it like antibiotics. You try to avoid use unless absolutely necessary, complete the course, then stop using.
That of course doesn't fit Monsanto's (now Bayer's) business model which wants to keep selling as much product as possible.
Like with any chemical, there is a dose response curve, and what might be safe in low levels in the environment may not be at high levels.
Drowning food crops in herbicide is rather different to highly targeted control of noxious weeds.
I teach edible gardens at my daughter's school and I illustrated this point to much hilarity recently by pointing out that the same chemical in 1080 poison is present in tea leaves at low levels. Apparently the class' teacher was an avid tea drinker, but I quickly reassured the class that unless she was drinking hundreds of litres of tea per day, she would be quite safe.
GE to make synthetic insulin in bacteria at relatively affordable prices instead of having to kill a bunch of animals and extract at high cost, to allow a lot of diabetics to survive is an example where I think there's a strong ethical case for GE.