What I don't like is a company patenting something just to keep anyone from using it.

I don't think it should be legal to buy a competing technology for instance and then license it so high or refuse to license it such that the technology is dead until the patent has expired. Too many technologies related to battery technology have been slowed down that way.

What I would be looking for is a serious effort to sell the patented product and actual people paying for it. if it is determined that you don't hold the patent in good faith then it should be invalid. Remember a patent is something that society grants in exchange for what we get from the patent. At least in the USA a patent is not some kind of natural right.

That should be true of all patents. Society gives up something so that a patent can exist. If the agreement is not held up it should be invalid and the invalid state is the information is generally available.

That toxin was already sprayed on plants and is still being sprayed on plants. The GMO version has not changed the usage by much at all. What is HAS changed is the amount that runs off into the environment.

There is poison in everything you eat. The skins of potatoes are naturally poisonous, the seeds on strawberries are naturally poisonous. However, the health benefits in these items outweigh the damage the poison does. Like everything how a poison impacts you depends on the dosage.

Lots of poisons are safe for humans at the levels we ingest them. There is no way you could eat any food without dealing with some level of poison.

The rat study you mentioned has LONG since been discredited and not been replicable by other experts in the field. The scientist that did the work is largely considered to be a fraud in the field and at this point articles published under his name are no longer accepted by reputable journals and he has resorted to destroying students reputations in the field instead by getting them to submit his articles under their names.

The paper in question was retracted http://www.scientificamerican.... and is widely considered to be fraudulent.

I would say that scientist B is guilty of patent infringement and should probably be prosecuted for it but only if the therapy was for sale on the market at a reasonable price (based on cost to develop etc).

However, any children that resulted from that patent would be completely free and clear in my view. They had no part in it. I would even extend that to other animals and plants so long as profit is not being made from the patent violation.

If you violate the patent and create a plain strain that you then sell then I think that normal patent law would apply.

I do want to do more research on this and actually confirm it. The whole thing seems pretty strange compared to other source I have looked at and I want to be as accurate as possible on this issue since it is closely related to some of the work I do.

This I agree 100% with.

This is why I can't support the GMO labeling laws I keep seeing. So many just want to label something as GMO which is just based on fear and does not lead to any understanding.

For ALL kinds of food (organic, gmo, etc) I want to know exactly what is in the food. I want to know the DNA sequence so I can search it or write an app to test it against things i don't want. That is true for GMO and Organic foods. Remember that pink grapefruit was a random mutation. There was no guarantee it would be safe. Same with organic certified chemical mutagens used on organic foods.

I want all food help to the same high standard. Not this fear based approach that thinks that GMO is different.

Sterile plants are almost never used.

Monsanto developed that system and last I checked they had NEVER used it for any regular seeds. It was only used in test fields to prevent genes escaping into the wild during testing.

My view on gene patenting is that any natural gene should not be patent able but the process for insertion should be. However, for any custom developed gene that should be patent able.

Why do you think that GMO foods have more pesticides sprayed on them?

GMOs usually need far fewer pesticides sprayed on them, that is pretty much the point of them most of the time. They also wash off far fewer pesticides to the environment.

Large scale growing tends to use a lot of pesticides regardless of the type of growing that is used. Organic has the image of being all natural and no chemicals etc. That is completely and utter BS.

Now for your home garden that is easy to do organic and without using a lot of pesticides but that does not scale up.

I am a Chemical and Biological Engineer and overall I think that GMO food is safe. I would also like us to use more nuclear power. My views on nuclear power are less informed than my knowledge of GMO is. However, my views on nuclear power are still FAR more informed than the average person.

I think that is where the major difference comes in.

Many normal people don't research anything and have very strong opinions. Most scientists and engineers I know do tend to do research before holding a viewpoint.

Most scientists and engineers I know also find other scientists and engineers they trust in other fields and will accept the more qualified persons viewpoint if it seems reasonable. Most mechanical engineers trust my viewpoint more on chemical and biological stuff and I trust theirs more on aerodynamics.

It makes sense to listen to more qualified people.

Do you mean Bacillus thuringiensis toxin?

You mean the toxin that is classified as organic and can and is sprayed on plants as an organic pesticide?

You know the one where the only way to harm a human with it is to inhale it as a powder and in that form it causes the same damage as inhaling almost any other powder. Even inhaling sugar as a powder is bad for you.

That toxin is COMPLETELY inert inside humans. However insects and some fish can cleave the protein and can then be killed by the toxin.

The organic version is sprayed on plants, washes off and damages local aquatic life. The GMO version does not wash off and has no impact on local aquatic life. The GMO version also concentrates in the parts of the plant we don't eat.

The organic way of using BT toxin is worse in ALL WAYS than the GMO version.

The problem I have is that when we use chemical mutagens on Organic food it has many of the same dangers and some different ones. The same when we use radiation to mutate foods.

I can't find any scientific reason to single GMO out. I want them ALL labeled. Anything that makes sense to label for GMO we should label for any other food also.

At this point we can fully type out a DNA sequence for a few thousand dollars. I think that should just be standard practice for food and made available online.

Look at all the pink grapefruit around. Those where a random mutation that we kept alive. However, some mutations end up being harmful to us or harmful to some of us. Many food allergens we can match based on DNA sequence. Imagine food items put into a database and then ever food item could be checked against every know allergy or problem DNA sequence. You would immediately know who should not eat the food, who should be warned etc.

I want actually safe food and labeling just GMO is a fear response and it is based on not understanding the actual genetics.

GMO also encompasses things like genetically engineered bacteria that we use to make most modern drugs. There are also other companies that do GMO than Monsanto. GMO is even correct when we look at modifying humans to cure diseases.

Are you saying that Golden rice is bad and that we should not have it and that instead we should have millions of people go blind? what about the work being done to engineer potatoes to be non-carcinogenic when fried? It looks like soon we are going to be modifying beef to remove the protein in it that causes inflammation in humans and is a major source of cancer.

However I guess all of that does not matter and we should just say GMO is bad and there can be no discussion about it. Pros and cons can't be discussed. We can't study it and make rational decisions. The whole issue must boil down to a soundbyte and that ends it.

The problem is that it is not a sane choice. This is ENTIRELY based on fear. If all you do is label something as GMO that tells you nothing at all. This does not help you make any kind of informed decision at all.

Was the GMO done to make the plant drought resistance? does it resist cold? was it modified to be less carcinogenic? was it modified to make a certain companies fertilizer more profitable? etc

Just saying something is GMO is worthless.

It should also be pointed out that Organic foods can be grown with heavy metals, modified with radiation or treated with chemical mutagens. However all of those are FAR more dangerous than GMO techniques and they are all just labeled as Organic.

If you want to know what is in your food then that is the kind of law you should pass. Have something that tells you exactly what is in your food so you can make an informed decision if you want.

Thank you.

The reason I came here was to learn how to use computer simulations to manufacture drugs. There are so many cures for diseases we know of that we just can't figure out how to manufacture and using computer simulations to figure out how to manufacture the drugs is an extremely new area for drug development.

I ended up here because I solved a problem that was considered impossible for doing drug development in computers.

It is very cool to do and the classes are very difficult but I am learning a lot at least. It is just sad that I will have to go back to the USA after I am done so I can actually do the drug development since protein, DNA, RNA etc type drugs are basically forbidden for development in Europe.

So hopefully in about 4 years I will be back in the USA and working on bringing drugs to market that we can't manufacture right now.

The problem is that while they say do no harm that is not what they actually do.

In Ireland a scientist figured out how to make regular potatoes immune to blight by taking some genes from wild potatoes and inserting them in the kind we eat. The atni GMO crowd managed to kill any kind of testing of that and instead potatoes are still done using the "normal organic methods" of killing blight on potatoes which is to put heavy metals on them. So safety is clearly not the issue and can't even be studied.

Actually the whole cross breading thing overall is pretty screwed up in many cases. Farmers discovered natural thing they could put on plants to increase the chance of cross breeds working. It turns that that nearly all of them are chemical mutagens and are FAR more dangerous than precise genetic engineering is.

I am not saying that we should blindly trust GMO or Organic stuff. What we need to do is fully allow the scientific development and analysis to see what truly works for us for safety, nutrition and environmental damage. Right now though that is not what is happening and decisions are made based on fear.

What I do want to see is all products on the market should have their full DNA mapped out and put online in a searchable data base (BLAST) and that includes all the ingredients that go into your product along with any other chemical species in there we know of. Then you would have an app on your phone and could select what you are allergic to, what you don't want in your food etc and then scan a tag on the food and your phone would tell you if it is safe for you. Right now there are thousands of food allergies and we only list about 20 or so on food. This anti-GMO stance I see now does not help knowledge or safety in any way it is just fear.

I want to see actual information on food and people able to make real choices. So long as this is just fear based that will not happen.