I support labeling ALL food for EVERYTHING in it. The cost to do a very DNA, protein and chemical assay for a food product is pretty cheap to do now and could easily be made available online for all foods. Organic foods, especially ones that have been radiation mutated, have more potential to be dangerous than GMO foods. We have people that are against BT toxin genetically engineered into things like corn but have no idea that BT is a certified organic insecticide and it is sprayed on organic crops is LARGE amounts. It then washes into water ways and it is not good for the aquatic life. In the BT GMO foods the BT is in the plant itself and concentrates in leaves and stems and we eat neither of those for corn. We have also tested BT extensively and it has ZERO risk to humans.

The only way you can harm yourself with BT is turning it into a powder and inhaling it. However if you turn anything into a powder and inhale it then you are screwed up exactly the same way because our lungs don't handle particulates very well.

We don't do genetic engineering the way you seem to think we do. When it comes right down to it the engineers and scientists involved are essentially very lazy and that is a GREAT thing. We don't engineer new proteins. We find a protein that does what we want and that people already eat and put that gene in. For instance in some parts of the USA it is hard to grow tomatoes (which are very good for you) because of frost problems. A variety of tomato has been made that splices in a gene from an arctic fish to prevent freezing. We have eaten fish with that gene since before we even had language. We know that protein is safe universally.

Don't you think it is good that more people would have access to fresh vegetables in a completely safe way? Many people today would not even survive without GMO. Effectively ALL INSULIN used is GMO. ALL modern biotech drugs (protein, monoclonal antibodies etc) are GMO. We have proteins your body already makes but certain sicknesses cause it to stop making them and then your immune system, red blood cell production etc start shutting down. We can now fix that. Do you think we should stop doing that also?

Genetic engineering sounds dangerous only because you don't know how it works and what is involved. It is safe and actually pretty simple. When it comes right down to it editing DNA is not very hard to do.

You do realize that lots of Americans would die also right? Nukes on that scale have large consequences. We also have the problem that Germany makes nearly all biotech equipment world wide. I am sure all those American's in need of daily insulin shots would like to keep getting it and it would take us a while to gear up to make that equipment ourselves. There is engineering training you can't even get in the USA. For what I need to learn for more advanced biotech work it looks like I am heading to Germany for a masters and phd because the education is simply not available here in the USA.

Actually from a genetic perspective splice is VASTLY more dangerous and unpredictable. It doesn't matter what we have done it for a long time. Most of the genetic engineering we do is inserting only a couple genes into a genome of about 32,000 genes for corn. Genetic engineering is far less likely to have problematic outcomes. The problem is that most people have NO idea how genetic engineering is done and they just think scary scientists but they have NO knowledge at all to make a rational decision on.

We lose more people ever year from contaminated organic crops that we have lost from all GMOs ever (which is basically zero for the GMOs)

We have been studying health impacts of GMOs for over 20 years now and so far we can find absolutely none. If you can find some actual real evidence that can be verified then there are many that would love to actually see it.

Meanwhile radiation and chemical mutagens still qualify as organic and that is about the most dangerous method I can think of.

I don't have any reference for the pipet issue because it was covered in my class on tissue engineering. It is something the professor in my class had ran into when trying to replicate an experiment that someone else had done. They used different sized pipet tips and that changes the shear forces on the cells.

It sounds really screwed up to me but possible. The problem is that nobody thinks to put that kind of stuff down in a notebook.

Biology is insanely complex. So complex that even a .1% impurity of a drug with a dimer form can leave you with a permanent autoimmune disease or outright kill you. There have been experiments before that nobody else could replicate and it turned out to be a batch of pipet tips being used.

It is not good that they publish without being able to replicate but the incentive system does not encourage that. Nature doesn't publish articles that replicate results or show a negative result on something. How you do as a scientists in today's climate is based on getting in high impact journals. This means as soon as someone gets a working result they immediately try to public it in a major journal to avoid being scooped. They later find out they can't replicate the experiment which means something random made it work that they don't understand and probably did not write down.

You get what you incentivize regardless of the field. This is true in politics, education etc and it is why we have so many unintended consequences. We have poor incentive systems and refuse to change them.

I don't see how you can be a chemical engineering without differential equations and that is after calculus 3. You can forget how to solve them because the computer can do that part but you HAVE to know how to set them up to be solved. I have worked with some models for reducing experiment time to bring new drugs to market and so far those have been nasty coupled differential equations with nice highly non-linear coupled equations.

Granted if you want to not do any of that stuff you can get an easier engineering job but you won't be paid as well or treated as well and one day you will probably be replaced by a computer the same way many other jobs are going.

In my engineering classes we actually gave some professors VERY bad reviews that had very easy classes. We just did not learn enough from the class and in the end lives depend on our understand of this material. I know my friends in humanities classes loved easy classes and I think the honor society requirements for most humanities degrees was a 3.95 or higher. For my degree it was 3.0 and above to qualify for the honor society and not many made it.

At least the engineering program I was in did not seem to suffer from any grade inflation. I am already working on stuff where if I screw up it could lead to serious harm in the future.

You soulless creature! Just wait till Cartmen deals with you! :)

Respect my authority! :)

I disagree entirely!

Demon girls, angel girls and many others can look very cute also and they are definitely viable options to look at.

They don't build up over generations because they are part of a single cell. When you make a new person you make new cells for them and so this stuff does not spread between generations. I just ends up as a kind of finite cap on how long a single cell can survive because of these problems.

This would work but it would take millions of years. Natural selection is very slow and it is likely the consequences would be a LOT of genetic problems in the mean time. Things like down syndrome are caused by a nondisjunction during chromosome separation. There become more common as eggs age. By making everyone have babies later it would very slowly select against it but the consequences would be severe.

Lets just go the genetic engineering route. It is much faster and far less brutal.

If you live long enough most of your cells end up dieing or critically damaged by the formation of inclusion bodies caused from misfolded proteins. As far as we can tell the cells are otherwise fine they are just slowly accumulating that damage over time. This is also what alzheimer's is. The problem is that misfolded proteins are kind of contagious to other proteins in the cell and that is what leads to the inclusion bodies.

We are making progress though on being able to clean out the inclusion bodies. Your cells do have the ability to take them apart but somehow they end up not doing it. Give us some time though and we will fix this problem also and clean out these inclusion bodies in all of your cells and then your cells will work much better.

The other issue we need to fix is activating telomerase to extend our telomeres. The basic issue is that natural selection does not really select for anything after reproductive age so humans are filled with a bunch of small defects and we are getting better at repairing the damage. I really look forward to what can be done with CRISPR-CAS9 to repair DNA damage and replaced damaged genes.

There is plenty of blame to go around. We have republicans killing some projects they object to and democrats kill either and both claim the other is anti-science.

I wish we could run this country on facts and science. There are many policies that are good for the country regardless of it they are liberal or conservative ideas. The problem is that when you point out ideas that could be used someone immediately paints it with liberal or conservative and then they fight it based on that label.

I actually think that ALL food should be labeled. Many organic foods where also modified using radiation or mutagenic compounds. The old style hybridization techniques are at least as dangerous and often more dangerous than genetic engineering. Just because something was done with an antique method of mixing traits between plants does NOT make it safe and free of side effects.

One of the simplest ones I like is BT toxin. BT toxin is classified as organic and safe (which it is). Organic farmers spray it on their crops and that is considered fine. However it also washes off pretty quickly. It is not very good for amphibians and some other aquatic life forms. However when that SAME thing is inserted in corn suddenly it is seen as evil. The one inserted in corn is actually better because it does not just wash off. It is part of the plant and provides much better resistance and BT does nothing to us at all at any remotely reasonable level. Sure if you ate half your body weight of it you would probably die but the same would happen with any other substance including water.

The ONLY problem I have with GMO crops is that most of them are engineered incompetently using gene gun approaches instead of restriction enzyme approaches. The current way most GMOs are done is reckless and leads to errors that are about the same kind of problems you get with hybridization techniques but still better than radiation. If monsanto and others started doing insertion with restriction enzymes or something like CRISPR-cas9 I would have no issues with what they are doing at all.

In the end the companies making GMOs are extremely lazy and that is a GREAT thing. They are not trying to make new proteins for insertion, instead they look for proteins that already exist and do what they want and they tend to only use proteins that we already normally consume from a different organism. Putting a gene that prevent ice crystallization in fish and putting it in tomatoes is a great idea. It doesn't harm you in any way but it allows tomatoes to be grown in colder climates and also for them to survive freak freezes.

If you want to label then label everything. Make a website for every food product that is run by the government that all food producers must fill out before they can sell their product. I want the full DNA sequence of all items along with all other chemicals in the food. If you genetically engineered something I want to know what method you used, what you inserted etc. If you mutated something with radiation I want to know what level of radiation was used, what type etc. Just labeling something as GMO or Organic is idiotic and definitely anti-science. It is just a convenient label for people to use that distilled down a very complex issue to some kind of bullet point. Organic is not safe or unsafe, it depends on what it is and how it was made and the exact same thing is true of GMOs. In the end we are going to use genetic engineering to make this world better and all of these stupid objections are only going to slow things down and increase accidents. There are some real objections to GMOs and also to organic farming but as long as the issues are only looked at in a very shallow way there is no real chance that we will look at the real problems with these techniques and address them.