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As a computer programmer, I'm very familiar with the trade-offs between optimization for a narrow range of circumstances, and robustness across a wide range of circumstances. That is, you can make your program very efficient on one type of hardware with one pattern of input, or you can make your program not crash (but probably run more slowly) in a wide range of situations. I suspect that agriculture, like many other problem areas, has the same sort of tradeoffs. You can make crops very efficient, but fragile, or you can make them more robust, but a little more expensive for a given amount harvested.

The story of agriculture in Argentina is the same as the story where the the US exported the "Green Revolution".

The resistance problem is one that is well-known to plant breeders. It works in chemical companies' favor to have weeds become more resistant, because farmers must buy more and newer, most expensive herbicides.

This happens in seed production too, where the companies breed seed with single-gene resistance to a disease or pest. They do this because in 3-5 years it fails, and farmers have to buy new seed stock with a different single-gene resistance. Potatoes are currently in trouble because of this.

Gengineered crops aren't going to help. Increased in-field diversity instead of monocultures, and multi-variety planting and less herbicides are a more likely solution.

Edited by author 04-30-2003 10:44 AM
I'm a molecular biologist. My research area is Chagas' disease. I work in Argentina so I deal a lot with rural poverty, and have been travelling across the country quite a lot.

I'm a member of the "Grupo de Reflexion Rural" (Rural Reflection Group, which has been dealing with the causes of the economical catastrophe in Argentina.

I think everybody has heard of Argentine beef as being the best in the world. Argentina’s dairy production, as well as honing production was of the best kind. Herbicides and fertilisers were not used until not so long ago. Argentina produced food enough for the people in the country and for export too. I was brought up in the belief that Argentina's soil was of the kind where any seed you planted could grow. And it was true until some years ago, when the biotech corporations took over Argentina’s agronomic politics. During the 90' Argentina has gone over to GMO production and over 14000000 hectares of the land are now gone to RRsoja. Open field GMO experiments can be found all over, performed legally or illegally by the biotech companies.

Peasants and thousands and thousands of smaller producers have been expelled from their land to engross the marginal city populations, with the consequences that the whole world has been able to see in TV this last months. People starving to death in a country where huge land extensions are a desert of RRsoja.

Bushes and native forests are being devastated in order to grow Monsanto's RRsoya. Argentina has lost the phytogenetic patrimony which has been given to the biotech companies. Peasants and people in the rural areas are constantly denouncing abortion and death in animals, as well as human intoxication, due to the use of herbicides that has increased many times (gliphosate, 2,4D, etc). This increase in herbicide use is due to the emergent resistance in weed. This resistance should have been foreseen by evolutionary biologists, when thinking of adding the RR gene. Studying a bit about directional selection should have been of help to prevent these logical effects of RRsoy and Bt maize. I understand that Wall Street employees defend GMOs. It is logical from their point of view and their ignorance of biological facts. But biologists should be cleverer. It is about a bit knowledge and common sense. Even if Argentina wants to go back to their own production of food variety, People don’t have the seeds anymore. And the animals that have been selected for Argentina’s people economical reality, have now become almost extinct due to the biotech and tech hysteria that has governed our agronomy and animal production during the past decade. Producers have contracted so many debts due to a pro-biotech agronomic model which does not correlate to people’s economy. They have either lost their land or they are about to loose it, if they do not go over to RRsoy production, forced by an economical system that decides for them what they have to grow in their land.

Argentina has started to import milk, since over 15000 dairy production units have been forced to close and go to RRsoy. Argentina is importing lentils from Canada, since it is not producing it anymore, though it has been part of the average argentine daily cost.

Is it to be a luddit, wanting to eat what you like and what you were grown up with? Is it to be a luddit wanting to defend your own culture and independence?

I’m sorry, but I'm very angry. I love this country and I love the people. It breaks my heart when I travel around the countryside and see how the landscape has been devastated and impoverished. Only soy everywhere can be seen. No more huts with people in them. No more gauchos and smaller towns. Only an agriculture without agriculturers.

Is that what is so good about GMOs? GMOs is simple a tool for some few transnational companies to rein the agricultural politics in their own benefit, of course with the internal support of corrupted politicians and scientists. Scientists who instead of doing research for the benefit of increasing human knowledge, they research in how to add genes to commercial plants in order to make more profit for the companies that support financially their research.

I'm sorry that Richard Dawkins supports these way of doing science. I really have enjoyed reading the “Selfish Gene”, “The blind watchmaker”, “The extended phenotype” and other of his books. I fear that the way molecular biology fundamentalism has taken over science around the world, the kind of basic research that let Richard Dawkins get information about different survival strategies in nature, will be lost with time. I fear this will happen, since it seems like there only will be money to support the kind of science that is in the big biotech companies interest. And GMO research is, for sure, the place where these companies put all their effort, doesn’t matter how bad the effects on ,f.ex., Argentina has proved to be.

Argentina should be an example of how bad it can go with the GMO politics. I know about Argentina's corruptive capacity. But who pays the bribes that support corruption in our country, so that this country can be used as a huge experimental in vivo lab. Argentina's experiment has proved to be a failure. Anyway, scientists go on discussing if GMOs are good or bad in itself.

Please, be serious and care a bit about the people who cannot defend themselves. Agriculture is not only about making money and paying external debt in under developed countries. It is about culture and peoples right to the land and about food sovereignty and security. And GMOs work strongly against these fundamental human rights.

This is about human rights. Please, understand this. It is very important for this country to recover its dignity and right to produce food for their people. The food that is in peace with their own cultural heritage.

This is not about being a luddit, please. I am a molecular biologist and I think of transforming DNA as a powerful and useful tool in the lab, when it works. I enjoy using it also in the lab, under very controlled conditions, when it does not complicate my experimental work. But any molecular biologist knows that in too many cases, DNA modifications are not controllable and DNA associates with other molecular chums and does what it wants. I love DNA for that. But people have rights, and GMOs are working against their right to make their own food.

Argentina needs to recover the land from the biotech companies allies. (From Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont, Aventis, Novartis, INTA’s fundamentalist scientists, etc, etc). Argentinean people need to recover their production for their own benefit.

And Argentina’s scientists should be supported to perform the research that benefits their own peoples interests, not Monsanto’s and Cargill’s and other transnational companies, that today can use Argentina’s land for huge field trials, for tomorrow go away and leave a sterile deserted country. People in the future might ask, what has happened to this once so rich land. Well, evolution has gone by. But a sort of evolution that has been manipulated by business minded scientists. Maybe they will survive, but selective pressure is working very hardly on the poorest of this country.

Biotech scientists might be the extended phenotype to help glyphosate resistance and Bt genes survive through evolution. I think Dr. Dawkins could support this idea and enrich it quite a lot with his wits and lovely way of telling evolution to people. I’m only sorry that he does not understand the facts behind GMO politics. Biotech scientists are only humans and they might not know what they do to their own kind. Do they really believe they are helping human kind? I truly doubt it, since the consequences are so obvious by now in Argentina, that I can't understand some scientists blindness.

Sorry, but try to understand. This is about life and death of people and we should all care.

Lilian Joensen PhD.
Grupo de Reflexión Rural
Argentina

Sorry to return late to this debate, but the problem of there not being enough genes to code for human complexity is well known in the literature.

Steven Venter of Celera is the chief proponent, google has plenty of links.

e.g. http://www.math.gatech.edu/~lacey/courses/3012/genome.html to pick a random example

Maybe proteins have something to do with it, maybe it IS aliens, but genes are not the whole story.

Another random thought - you could probably replace the tenth chapter of "The Blind Watchmaker" with the same chapter from the large print edition, and what you have is ostensibly a perfectly usable copy of the book, unless you happen to one day need to use the index to look up something in chapter ten, then you're screwed because the page numbers are all different.

Edited by author 02-14-2003 01:19 PM
In the second half of the article Dawkins seems to compare transgenic engineering to DNA typing. That's very much like saying a liver transplant is just as safe as a doctor's exam. Smells like FUD to me.

I say that if Dawkins has so much faith in the biotech food industry, why not put him on a diet of GM foods for a couple of years and see what happens? Remember Monty Burns and Blinky the Three Eyed Fish:

Don't take my word for it. Let's ask an actor portraying Charles Darwin what he thinks.

"Genes work just like computer software, says this writer - which is why the luddites don't get it, but their children probably will."

I thought Dawkins would be capable of producing reasonable arguments but this argument is a very silly one. The kind of remark that a biotechnology PR firm would spit out. Is Dawkins understanding of software so ingenuous?

On another point, if GM foods are wantonly produced and consumed on a wide scale and uncontrolled basis, I have no doubt whatsoever our children will get 'it', whether they like 'it' or not.

Yeah, just pop in a routine from another appluication - but make sure you're using the same units (Mars Climate Orbiter; pounds & kilograms anyone?)..

Maybe the problem is not so much with swapping genes in and out, but with the long-term effects that exposure to these novel genes that we wouldn't normally experience in such quantities implies to our health.

Stuff that no-one, not even the big bio-techs can predict; and lets face it, we trust them to tell us the whole story about as much as we trust the tobacco companies.

Lets say the anti-freeze gene end up being put into every fruit and vegetable we eat; how the hell will our bodies deal with that? Honestly - would anyone know until our kids' kids started dropping grades because their brains were soaking up the bi-products of these genes, like DDT?

I'm not against it, but after the Mad Cow fiaso in this country (UK), I wouldn't trust governments and pharmas on their own with my health.

"Genes work just like computer software, says this writer - which is why the luddites don't get it, but their children probably will."

As a software developer, I'm intimately familiar with how hard it is to make a small change to a large pre-existing piece of software, and be certain even _after_ extensive testing, that you haven't broken anything vital.

The idea that Dawkins is saying "genes are like software; it's easy and safe to make changes to software; therefor, let's make changes to genes" makes me cringe more than I can describe.

Interestingly, the actual article is much more thoughtful than I expected, the only problem is that Dawkins doesn't seem to be aware of just how hard it is to test to prove the _absence_ of problems.

Edited by author 02-13-2003 05:59 PM
That whole conceptualization of genes as code is just fine, as long as you acknowledge that we're talking about an app where:

• it has been around so long that no one remembers when it was written or how it really works
• we are all totally dependant on it. we have nothing to eat except "our own dog food"
• there is no documentation for it
• noboby knows the exact syntax for the language
• reverse engineering is slow going
• the interactions between objects are not yet well understood
• it seem like every ingnorant hack with a "revolutionary idea" and a modicum of funding wants CVS commit priveleges to the kernel code.
  

Oh, yeah -- Dawkins is absolutely right: Nothing to gripe about when people tinker with your mission critical apps.

Edited by author 02-13-2003 06:32 PM
At $16,000 a pop, you patent and clone them, silly.
A square root is a square root is a square root, but that's a very expensive, kinky root.

Sure, but what happens when you get carrots with vaginas? Huh? Huh?

A big problem with GMs- closed source behavior because the development model requires that sort of profit margin.

It'd be one thing if an 'OpenPotato.org' came to the Andes and said "Here is an anti-rust / blight / scourge-of-the-potato gene [not necessarily transgenic, by the way], currently embedded in this type of potato. Here is how to add it into any of your *2000+* types of potatoes."
[As I recall, the average potato farmer there would grow over 50 types of potatoes: varieties differed by taste, climate tolerance or shade tolerance, seasonal bug resistance, etc]

Instead the method is "Here is a bland white potato with one new anti-pest / blight / etc property. You must buy the seed each year from us. You cannot save the seed. You cannot add the characteristic into your other potatoes. Your other potatoes will have to compete with our massive advertising campaign in the big cities to promote "Big Bland Potato" as the "Potato Choice for the Modern Age."

The square root analogy isn't quite right. Square roots in spreadsheets are often done using the machines native numeric representation, which is fine for government work, but not quite so good if you're trying to deal with more precise measurements. The NASA engineer would most likely use a square root function with a much higher level of precision than that of a spreadsheet. If you have Excel, try this
cell 1) 99999999999999999999 * 99999999999999999999
cell 2) sqrt(cell1)
Now go back and look at the value in cell 1 (click on it, so you see the actual value, not the scientific notation). It's 99999999999999900000

Not to mention that 1E+40 ain't the right answer for the square anyway.

Just my 2c. In re genes, as in the rest of science, the devil is in the details. The folks with the MBA's have a nasty tendancy of not paying attention to this :-(

The analogy to replacement of code in software is not only bad, it's not even true for software. Anybody who's experienced a "Heisenbug" knows that even changes which should be semantically identical can dramatically change program behavior. A software routine from one environment might depend on "environmental" factors (like automatic garbage collection) that cause it to behave badly in another.

Where does the other data come from, aliens?

I love this argument. "You can't provide me with a complete solution, so I will stick with my own bizarre idea". Most religions are founded on the same principle; can't explain why we are here? Then it must be God!

As I understand it, the most powerful anti-GM argument is not that GM foods are unsafe; it is that our food sources will be patented, controlled, and quite likely manipulated by large corporations. Furthermore, if GM plants corrupt the organic farms, where do we turn? Take the TIA logo and replace the eye with a sheaf of wheat to see how spooky this would look.

I need another nicotine burger.

Edited by author 02-13-2003 01:41 PM
AN Skeptic:Aren't enough genes to constuct a human? How many do we have then, half? Where does the other data come from, aliens?

similarly horrified by Dawkins naively mechanistic view. He really should know better. It is the unknown interactions between "molecules" and "genes" that add up to generate the large scale macroscopic behaviour - to understand the effect of a single change, one needs to understand the whole system. Nature achieves systemic change by a slow process of 'parallel processing' of point mutations, randomly reshuffled throughout a breeding population - it is the diversity which creates stability. Industrial processes are monocultures - highly unstable by comparison. Fish farms in BC have nearly wiped out the wild salmon by breeding parasites and diseases which have spread to wild stocks. unintended consequences are the name of the game. the invention of the airplane was also the invention of the plane crash...

As Keefy says, the only gating issue with the heavily-protested use of GMs at the moment, is profitability. Those GMOs are driven entirely by big commercial companies, who are looking entirely towards ways it can be used to make a buck -- hence terminator genes, weedkiller resistance, etc.

That's not what I want driving the make-up of what I eat. That way led to BSE in the UK. I want the right to choose my food by *my* criteria, not have it chosen for me based on how much cheaper it is for the BigCos to produce. Hence the european insistence on *labelling* GM food; let me use my own, informed preference.

Unfortunately the BigCos don't want GM food labelled, since they feel people will avoid them out of uninformed fear. But the only legit way to avoid that, is to persuade them somehow. But if the only reason those foods are GM is so the company can make more money, that's not persuading anyone. ;)

BTW, my SO has worked with Monsanto people in the field. They really are *not* thinking of the good of humanity here ;)

Some of the GM organisms being engineered by researchers for the developing world are astounding. I support those BTW. But the stuff that's causing a ruckus in Europe is not driven by those criteria...

--j. (pro-GM in the abstract, anti-GM foods in their current deployed form)

Dawkins is an intellectual fascist, and whilst I have a lot of respect for his intelligence, in this case he's plain wrong.

People gave the same argument for feeding nasty stuff like sewage and ground up animal remains to factory-reared animals (a molecule is a molecule is a molecule) before realizing that that wasn't the whole picture (for a start there turned out to be these things called prions that no-one had even realized existed).

We're not simply the mathematical sum of our genes, there is emergent complexity that we haven't even begun to understand. For a start, there simply aren't enough genes to encode all the information needed to construct a human, without other mechanisms coming into play.

So, one gene can improve anti-freeze qualities? OK, so is it logical to assume the other genes can cause really nasty illnesses to be inflicked upon those eating the food?

I'm all for research, but I ain't eating the crap until I know it's safe. Right now, the only gating issue is whether it is more profitable or not. Think of the savings made when we stated using asbestos in building. Did anyone check to see if it actually caused any health risks? And look what happened there...

"He is not entitled to naysay others' preferences." How silly. It's the old "everybody is entitled to his own opinion" routine. Maybe with taste- but when your opinion is on safety, or science, it has to be an informed opinion. Anti-GM feelings are just that- feelings- unsupported by any evidence, or any logic.

I don't insist that anybody eat GMOs- just that they do not have the right to get laws passed that foolishly restrict them, based on scaremongering.

"Dawkins explains why transgenic imports don't deserve the bad rap they've been getting." Which bad rap is he talking about?

Biological?--he may have a point. Or not. Time and more experimentation will tell. He can't expect people just to take his speculation for it.

Cultural?--he has no point at all. He is not entitled to naysay others' preferences. Many Europeans feel about what they put in their bodies as strongly as Americans feel about what they drive, and certainly food is more personal. No one would insist that Jews consume pork just because it's safe. Why do American companies insist that Europeans eat GMOs?

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