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Many GMO studies have financial conflicts of interest


Darnok

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"The most important point was how we also showed there is a statistical link between the presence of conflicts of interest and a study that comes to a favorable conclusion for GMO crops,"

Which means some people were right that companies making GMO are paying for "favorable" studies and good ratings.

http://phys.org/news/2016-12-gmo-financial-conflicts.html

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It isn't just studies they are influencing:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-08/monsanto-contributed-to-michael-baxters-legal-costs/6377526

Case background:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-03/organic-farmer-steve-marsh-loses-gm-appeal/6746108

Quote

The High Court has rejected a bid for leave to appeal against a ruling in the genetic modification contamination case of West Australian farmer Steve Marsh.

Mr Marsh lost organic certification over most of his land at Kojonup after genetically modified canola blew over from his neighbour's farm in 2010.

He went to court, seeking more than $80,000 in compensation, but the Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2014.

 

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Well, this is going to be locked soon but one thing I'll say, do people think GMO companies have more money than the fossil fuel companies? How can the scientific consensus on climate change be more trustworthy than the consensus on GMOs if money can buy you a consensus on something? From tobacco to oil, scientists have shown you can't buy everyone and the studies will come out. But main stream scientists continue to eat GMO food.

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1 hour ago, todofwar said:

Well, this is going to be locked soon but one thing I'll say, do people think GMO companies have more money than the fossil fuel companies? How can the scientific consensus on climate change be more trustworthy than the consensus on GMOs if money can buy you a consensus on something? From tobacco to oil, scientists have shown you can't buy everyone and the studies will come out. But main stream scientists continue to eat GMO food.

Its pretty hard not to eat GMO food, even if you are wanting to avoid it, in the U.S. anyways. For example, most of our corn is GMO and I think most of our soy beans (just to name 2).  Packaging only says somehting has corn in it, but unless it specifically says its "GMO free", then you don't know if it has GMO products in it.  Probably the safe bet is that it does, but my point is that it isn't specifically tagged as GMO.

Edited by stellargeli
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20 minutes ago, stellargeli said:

Its pretty hard not to eat GMO food, even if you are wanting to avoid it, in the U.S. anyways. For example, most of our corn is GMO and I think most of are soy beans.  Packaging only says somehting has corn in it, but unless it specifically says its "GMO free", then you don't know if it has GMO products in it.  Probably the safe bet is that it does, but my point is that it isn't specifically tagged as GMO.

And people are just fine. Even Bill Nye did a 180 on it after talking to the people who work on GMOs. I'm not even clear on the mechanism people think GMOs are supposed to be harmful by. The modifications affect proteins in the cells, affect certain plant hormone levels, maybe a few other things. But all that gets broken down during digestion. The problem with corn comes from the issues with high fructose corn syrup, which is distinct from sugar contrary to what is advertised 

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36 minutes ago, todofwar said:

And people are just fine. Even Bill Nye did a 180 on it after talking to the people who work on GMOs. I'm not even clear on the mechanism people think GMOs are supposed to be harmful by. The modifications affect proteins in the cells, affect certain plant hormone levels, maybe a few other things. But all that gets broken down during digestion. The problem with corn comes from the issues with high fructose corn syrup, which is distinct from sugar contrary to what is advertised 

I've heard Bill Nye's explanation, and while I get it, his reasons had more to do with what the benefits he saw were, but he did not actually address safety and medical concerns.  Also, Bill Nye is not the Holy Grail of wisdom, so be careful about putting him on pedestals.  The truth is that we DON'T know what the impacts are down the line, and each specific modification probably has different impacts.  BT corn kills other organisms other than the ones intended, which is an impact not directly related to health, but may in fact have consequences on ecosystems.  To me, the issues are more a matter of what we don't know and won't know for a decent amount of time.  Funny that rather than addressing things like population, which are the need for GMO in the first place we are instead wandering into unknown territory putting a bandaid on the problem.  And yes, corn syrup is a HUGE issue.  Corn is incredibly stupid to be growing anyways, as its nutritional value isn't that good.  Massive amounts of land are being used to produce corn syrup and fuel, basically, not food.  GMO is a bandaid to the issues of runaway population and unsustainable farming methods that negatively impact the environment.  THAT is my issue against GMO more than health concerns.

Then on top of that, GMO has been used as a way to FORCE farmers to have to continue their relationships with the seed providers indefinitely.  This I am very concerned about.  This is just a few specific implementations of GMO I'm talking about, but it illustrates that there are issues and some of the issues are political and economic.  Some are environmental, like Roundup resistant crops which create ecosystem problems because now fields are being sprayed with Roundup which kills all plants that aren't resistant.

And "protein" does not equal "safe".  Prions are proteins too, and they will kill you.  Your cells and everything they do involves proteins, which can go awry and kill you.  There is no way you can say that just because something is only creating odd proteins that it can't be harmful.  That is scientifically absurd.

Now, I'm not saying all GMO is bad.  In reality, just crossbreeding plants is actually a form of GMO.  My position is that each specific GMO implementation needs to be evaluated for health impacts, environmental impacts, genomic impacts, etc.  And if we rigorously did that, we would likely find that some GMO implementations are perfectly safe and others have negative impacts.  GMO is a pretty broad term.

The way we farm industrially is actually quite unwise and GMO tends to be a way to just keep on doing unwise things.  That, I think is a huge downside.  Using GMO to stall impacts from other problems, like population, is simply kicking the can down the road so we have monstrously huge problems later to address, like population, ecosystem collapse, environmental damage, etc.  It doesn't HAVE to be that way, GMO could be part of solving issues, but the ways it tends to be implemented these days is more focused on making lots of money, being able to keep on engaging in unsustainable farming practices and keeping farmers tied to the companies that are making tons of money from them, rather than addressing root issues.

Edited by stellargeli
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Money and science make for interesting bedfellows.

I remember doing some research regarding this when my wife was pregnant and worried about food.  There are risks from unplanned allergic reactions.  The use of GMO monoculture in fields has some economic risks, too.  That said, there will be 10 billion people to feed soon.  Should we eschew GMOs and consume valuable freshwater, use more nitrate fertilizer, etc?  Risks need to be taken in context.  In Zimbabwe a group of American and Europeans successfully got the Mugabe govt. to ban GMO imports for a short time.  The result was that a country with 2000% rate of inflation had food prices rise faster again due to scarcity.  The Westerners that lobbied for the ban weren't the ones that went hungry.  

Perhaps, rather than a ban, better oversight and some labeling system of genetic properties would be appropriate?

GMOs may be necessary for spaceflight, too.  

I don't think the choices around these things are binary and the information available is heavily politicized.

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Funny how the OP's linked article left out this part from the source article (or a link to the source article at all), which cautions about mistaking correlation for causation):

Quote

Part of the observed COIs may be due to the favorable outcomes. For instance, authorship or funding statements may be modified after the results of a study have been obtained. GM crop companies may prefer not to be listed as having provided support for studies leading to unfavorable outcomes. Alternatively, academics might be more inclined to propose researchers from GM crop companies as co-authors on publications presenting results favorable to the interests of the company.

Conversely, COIs may be partly responsible for the favorable outcomes, for at least two reasons: (i) GM crop companies may promote research on efficacy rather than durability, thereby indirectly increasing the frequency of favorable outcomes for papers with COI. The interests of the scientific community at large seem to be different, as studies without COI focused mostly on durability, and on average, peer scientists cited durability papers more frequently than efficacy papers (between +23% and +51%, p = 9.7x10-3, depending on the number of authors, the leading author and the year of publication, Fig 4). (ii) Data against the interests of GM crop companies may be less likely to be published in the presence than in the absence of COI. 

Or this, which explicitly explains the limitations of the study:

 

Quote

 

This study has several limitations. First, we explored only two characteristics of Bt crops: efficacy and durability. Other characteristics and consequences of these transgenic plants, including all those relating to the environment (e.g. the impact of Bt crops on non-target insects) or health, merit a similar analysis. As a demonstration of the absence of such effects, rather than their presence, is clearly in the GM crop companies’ interests, an association between COIs and the outcomes of studies studying environmental or health impacts is also a testable hypothesis. Sanchez [1] and Diels et al. [2] focused on studies on health impacts, in which they found COIs to be very frequent, and Diels et al. [2] found an association between financial or professional COIs and research outcomes.

Second, as we used the addresses of authors to identify their affiliations, only one type of affiliation, that relating to employment, was considered. However, authors may have affiliations to GM crop companies of other types, such as being members of advisory boards, consultants, or co-holders of patents [13], and this could also have a significant impact on the outcomes of studies on GM crops. We did not consider these affiliations as they are not usually reported in articles (COI statements became obligatory in some journals only recently and, as revealed here, they remain very rare). The consideration of other types of affiliation would require a survey that would be difficult to perform given that more than 1,500 authors were considered in this study.

Third, we have considered only the links between authors and GM crop companies. Other stakeholders (e.g. Greenpeace, The Non-GMO Project, The Organic Consumers Association, The Network of European GMO-free Regions) oppose GM crop companies in being openly against the use of GM crops. An inverse relationship might therefore be expected between the outcomes of studies on GM crops and the presence of COIs relating to these stakeholders. We were unable to test this hypothesis because we identified no financial interests connected with anti-GMO stakeholders, in terms of the professional affiliation of the authors or their declared funding sources.

Finally, this study focused exclusively on financial COIs. Non-financial COIs, also known as intrinsic or intellectual COIs — due to personal, political, academic, ideological, or religious interests — might also have a significant impact on the outcomes of research studies [4]. It is difficult to decipher intellectual COIs and, as for the detection of non-professional affiliations with GM crop companies, it would be a major challenge to perform such an analysis given the large number of authors considered.

 

But I guess that doesn't make for such a click-baity "GMO companies are doing bad science" narrative. 

Stay skeptical, as always. :) 

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I can certainly understand ecological concerns, but medical concerns seem incredibly unlikely, and are easy to test. Analyze GMO food. Analyze the same veggie/whatever that was genetically modified the old-fashioned way (pretty much everything we eat). Is it made of the same components as food that was genetically modified over longer time periods? Then it's the same. Unless there are novel components to the final product, there's no there there.

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1 hour ago, stellargeli said:

I've heard Bill Nye's explanation, and while I get it, his reasons had more to do with what the benefits he saw were, but he did not actually address safety and medical concerns.  Also, Bill Nye is not the Holy Grail of wisdom, so be careful about putting him on pedestals.  The truth is that we DON'T know what the impacts are down the line, and each specific modification probably has different impacts.  BT corn kills other organisms other than the ones intended, which is an impact not directly related to health, but may in fact have consequences on ecosystems.  To me, the issues are more a matter of what we don't know and won't know for a decent amount of time.  Funny that rather than addressing things like population, which are the need for GMO in the first place we are instead wandering into unknown territory putting a bandaid on the problem.  And yes, corn syrup is a HUGE issue.  Corn is incredibly stupid to be growing anyways, as its nutritional value isn't that good.  Massive amounts of land are being used to produce corn syrup and fuel, basically, not food.  GMO is a bandaid to the issues of runaway population and unsustainable farming methods that negatively impact the environment.  THAT is my issue against GMO more than health concerns.

Then on top of that, GMO has been used as a way to FORCE farmers to have to continue their relationships with the seed providers indefinitely.  This I am very concerned about.  This is just a few specific implementations of GMO I'm talking about, but it illustrates that there are issues and some of the issues are political and economic.  Some are environmental, like Roundup resistant crops which create ecosystem problems because now fields are being sprayed with Roundup which kills all plants that aren't resistant.

And "protein" does not equal "safe".  Prions are proteins too, and they will kill you.  Your cells and everything they do involves proteins, which can go awry and kill you.  There is no way you can say that just because something is only creating odd proteins that it can't be harmful.  That is scientifically absurd.

Now, I'm not saying all GMO is bad.  In reality, just crossbreeding plants is actually a form of GMO.  My position is that each specific GMO implementation needs to be evaluated for health impacts, environmental impacts, genomic impacts, etc.  And if we rigorously did that, we would likely find that some GMO implementations are perfectly safe and others have negative impacts.  GMO is a pretty broad term.

The way we farm industrially is actually quite unwise and GMO tends to be a way to just keep on doing unwise things.  That, I think is a huge downside.  Using GMO to stall impacts from other problems, like population, is simply kicking the can down the road so we have monstrously huge problems later to address, like population, ecosystem collapse, environmental damage, etc.  It doesn't HAVE to be that way, GMO could be part of solving issues, but the ways it tends to be implemented these days is more focused on making lots of money, being able to keep on engaging in unsustainable farming practices and keeping farmers tied to the companies that are making tons of money from them, rather than addressing root issues.

First any farmer can use legacy seeds, this give lower yield so it make more economical sense to buy high yield seed from providers. 
And yes you will get perhaps 0.2% second year growth if you switch grain type, this is pretty easy to see in fields if the previous year plants was higher. 

The safety part is vastly overblown, plants mutates all the time, people has used radiation on seeds to increase the mutation rate in hope on getting something useful, probably the origin of many of the superhero creation stories like spiderman. Now the old shotgun type GM would have an chance of adding weird stuff, it was basically an more targeted version of the radiation, you had to breed the plants true afterwards. 
Modern GM eliminates this. In short its way more likely to get bad stuff out of plants because of random mutations who is an hanger on in the breeding stock than GM itself.
This has never been an serious problem as I know, yes you have the green spots on potatoes. Some plants are poisonous before cooking but they are not major crops. 

An real problem is if you get one version of an plant who is very popular and everybody uses its an huge single point failure if its weak to some disease. 
Probably the main danger of an very successful gm plant. 
Now you could GM an plant into providing useful chemicals. Here it would be very stupid to use common plants who give grain for food then you just as well could use other plants where its no danger the product could get mixed up and breed with others. 

As for the population issue, that part don't need GM, its also mostly solved. Now more efficient plants would probably increase the amount of wilderness as less farmland is needed. 
This is an real effect in the west today, plenty of marginal farmland has returned to forests as its too labor intensive to use. 

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Pretend I'm a farmer growing legacy canola on my farm.  My neighbour decides to plan roundup ready canola on the paddock next to mine.  Cross pollination and seed distribution mix GM stock (that includes a terminator gene) into my crop and sooner or later I have no choice but to buy my seeds yearly like everyone else.  Compounding this the crops are concentrated in the most fertile areas with suitable climate - given enough time everyone will have to use GM.

I don't want a for profit company to have that much power over world food stocks.

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7 minutes ago, James Kerman said:

Pretend I'm a farmer growing legacy canola on my farm.  My neighbour decides to plan roundup ready canola on the paddock next to mine.  Cross pollination and seed distribution mix GM stock (that includes a terminator gene) into my crop and sooner or later I have no choice but to buy my seeds yearly like everyone else.  Compounding this the crops are concentrated in the most fertile areas with suitable climate - given enough time everyone will have to use GM.

I don't want a for profit company to have that much power over world food stocks.

Seeds with the terminator gene would not reproduce. this has an downside in that you would have to use more seeds then planting to compensate for the defect seeds.  
Now after some generations you could try to spray an small patch with roundup, some of the plants would survive, they have the roundup ready gene but not the terminator one. 
More breeding would be needed to keep the species stable but it should be possible to get an stable stock. Now sell this to your neighbor 

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17 minutes ago, James Kerman said:

My issue is that nature has created a great way to propagate plants for free but a company has profited by disrupting a process that has kept humans and animals fed for at least 200 000 years.

I agree, note that an terminator gene is probably not needed with an contract and cheap genetic testing. The terminator gene sounds expensive anyway. 
Downside is that this will increase the numbers of hybrids a lot, especially if it carry genes who is good for the plant, the terminator gene will restrict this.
Not an major issue for the company as it would be decades before someone could breed something they could sell legally.

My father was an farmer then I was young, he switched between using his own grain and bought one, main issue was mixing with second growth then swapping species on field. 
This would pile up after some years so he had to buy new. 

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10 hours ago, Darnok said:

"The most important point was how we also showed there is a statistical link between the presence of conflicts of interest and a study that comes to a favorable conclusion for GMO crops,"

Which means some people were right that companies making GMO are paying for "favorable" studies and good ratings.

http://phys.org/news/2016-12-gmo-financial-conflicts.html

The correlation proves nothing. The presence of a conflict of interest does not imply the study was paid for by the corporation of interest, it means one or more of their employees was involved with the study. There may be the potential for dishonesty, but it does not imply anything shady occurred, simply that one of the authors had a financial tie to the subject of interest.

Meanwhile, over in Organics Happy-Fun-Land, there is probably even worse corruption going on, as many of the studies and anecdotes published are coming from people with a direct financial tie to organic crops.

The clearest-cut cases of this sort of anti-intellectual, hypocritical dishonesty come from alternative medicine, where your typical M.D. does not stand to gain a penny from prescribing you a drug (that's why you go to a separate pharmacy), whereas oftentimes in alternative medicine, the person recommending a treatment has direct financial stake in said treatment.

I have not seen any good, third-party evidence suggesting transgenic crops (GMOs) are unsafe to humans; while I do have concerns about the business practices of some of the companies involved, there's really no evidence to suggest transgenic crops are anything but safe, effective, and sometimes sold using bad, abusive business practices.

1 hour ago, James Kerman said:

My issue is that nature has created a great way to propagate plants for free but a company has profited by disrupting a process that has kept humans and animals fed for at least 200 000 years.

Yeah, and the first agriculturalists disrupted a process that has kept humans and animals fed for hundreds of millions of years: i.e. hunting/gathering. The changes introduced by typical transgenic methods are miniscule compared to what's happened over millenia of selectively breeding crops; you have things like hexaploid wheat, infertile bannanas that have to be propagated via cuttings, etc.

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Farming practices and GMOs are two completely separate arguments. GMO food might be more or less healthy than non GMO food. The way it was grown may or may not be more ecologically friendly than the non GMO variety. It's sort of like the leaded gas issue, people wanted better octane ratings so chemists came up with leaded gas. That caused other problems, so chemists figured out how to solve those. Science is a tool, it fixes the issues you want it to fix but without providing parameters it may cause unwanted side effects. So, if you tell scientists you want crops that are more effective at taking up fertilizer and use less water, they might be able to GM some crops to fit that criteria but then something else you never mentioned was important might go wrong. So I am all in favor of being careful with GMO technology, but I get frustrated by people who insist against all evidence that GMO foods are inherently bad. And it causes real problems, like when golden rice faced strong resistance because it was a GMO product.

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34 minutes ago, Starman4308 said:

The correlation proves nothing. The presence of a conflict of interest does not imply the study was paid for by the corporation of interest, it means one or more of their employees was involved with the study. There may be the potential for dishonesty, but it does not imply anything shady occurred, simply that one of the authors had a financial tie to the subject of interest.

Meanwhile, over in Organics Happy-Fun-Land, there is probably even worse corruption going on, as many of the studies and anecdotes published are coming from people with a direct financial tie to organic crops.

The clearest-cut cases of this sort of anti-intellectual, hypocritical dishonesty come from alternative medicine, where your typical M.D. does not stand to gain a penny from prescribing you a drug (that's why you go to a separate pharmacy), whereas oftentimes in alternative medicine, the person recommending a treatment has direct financial stake in said treatment.

I have not seen any good, third-party evidence suggesting transgenic crops (GMOs) are unsafe to humans; while I do have concerns about the business practices of some of the companies involved, there's really no evidence to suggest transgenic crops are anything but safe, effective, and sometimes sold using bad, abusive business practices.

Yeah, and the first agriculturalists disrupted a process that has kept humans and animals fed for hundreds of millions of years: i.e. hunting/gathering. The changes introduced by typical transgenic methods are miniscule compared to what's happened over millenia of selectively breeding crops; you have things like hexaploid wheat, infertile bannanas that have to be propagated via cuttings, etc.

Its an good reason the M.D. don't get an cut in the drug sale.

And yes organic corn is so natural :)
bf6c118adbba77d445c58187dbb652dc.jpg

 

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My main issue with GMO crops is the litigation allowing companies to patent genes for profit, which leads to them strong arming small farmers out of business when seed blows off trucks or across property lines.  Also, I'm leery of monocropping and the potential for a disease to wipe out the world's food supply.

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I won't be commenting on their health effects (because health studies are very, very complicated and more prone to inducted errors) but I suppose the biggest problem with GMO will be ecological, either from some "terminating" genes (their gen. 2 seeds are unplantable or such) or from the monoculture itself. I like having different varieties to choose from rather than having a single superior product.

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I know various universities and even FFA groups are discussing the risks of monoculture in crops.  It made it into casual conversation in corn country, even when I was growing up.  I seem to remember a current problem with global banana that touches on this.  Let me see if I can find the article I was thinking of.

Here it is: The sad story of the Gros Michele and Cavendish bananas.  Monoculture's risks.

Also, this is relevant to spaceflight since it is likely that ten astronauts living off of what they grow in a greenhouse will only have monocultures of various crops.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35131751

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21 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Its an good reason the M.D. don't get an cut in the drug sale.

 

The rules in the US no longer allow docs to even be given a PEN (they were cheap pens, back in the day, BTW) with their logo on it, because the government thinks this somehow compromises them. As if my wife would proscribe more I'm a spambot, report me. to guys because she finds the pens comical. Meanwhile, of course, the guys passing the laws altering the practice won't let you schedule an appointment with a 20-something year old staffer without a check in hand, and if you want to actually talk to your Senator/Congressman you better have a steamer truck full of money.

 

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14 minutes ago, tater said:

 

The rules in the US no longer allow docs to even be given a PEN (they were cheap pens, back in the day, BTW) with their logo on it, because the government thinks this somehow compromises them. As if my wife would proscribe more I'm a spambot, report me. to guys because she finds the pens comical. Meanwhile, of course, the guys passing the laws altering the practice won't let you schedule an appointment with a 20-something year old staffer without a check in hand, and if you want to actually talk to your Senator/Congressman you better have a steamer truck full of money.

 

Haha, I love that the forum automatically replaces the name of a certain branded medication with a warning that the poster is a spambot!

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