Everything that you read on /. about intellectual property applies to the IP that Monsanto et al apply to their products and research. In fact, it's worse, because the wind doesn't blow proprietary software from nearby windows and OS X boxes onto your linux systems, causing you to owe the IP owners money and disabling your ability to build your own software.
But you would neither say that operating systems are therefore bad, or that Linux does not exist. This is why we need more publicly funded research, like the Rainbow papaya.
GMO seeds are also highly optimized to solve certain problems, and can fail miserably in other climates where local strains have been bred to adapt to local conditions.
That point has more to do with widely sold hybrid lines than GE. GE just adds on one or two traits, the rest of the breeding (which is conventional, non-biotech) is what determines the vast majority of the plants characteristics. That highlights the importance of locally adapted varieties and biodiversity, but is more an argument against the seed industry than genetic engineering. If you wanted to blame any technique for that, it would be conventional breeding and hybridization, not the cry protein for insect resistance or epsps or bar gene for herbicide tolerance, as neither of those are going to mean anything with respect to climatic interactions. The best thing to do would be to improve local varieties, and that is what some projects seek to do, for example, that's what the Golden Rice people plan to do, and I know there's some people at Cornell doing that with Bt eggplant. I know Monsanto does that in the US and Europe, and I'd have to assume they do it to a degree in other parts of the world.
The farmers in India who are committing suicide en masse because their crops have failed are not just phobic about science. They got fucked in the ass.
Here's a good piece on that I highly recommend reading for what the actual numbers say. It's a bit different than it is often made out to be. And when crops do fail, again, it is not the transgene responsible.
I agree with you all down the line that genetic engineering and GMO agriculture are not intrinsically bad. And I agree about diversity, and think my post could have been worded more clearly...the problem is not the new traits, but the absence of traits that have been bred for the local environment. I don't have knee-jerk anti-capitalist or anti-corporate politics--at least not any more--but the seed business seems to have been consistently evil and deceitful. So I don't think the problem is the idea of genetic engineering, just the monopoly by the people who are actually implementing the idea. And it's a pretty intractable problem.
Thanks for the pointer to the study on suicide. I will stop repeating the suicide factoid. But the farmers still got fucked in the ass, imo.
Publicly funded research sounds great. But I live in a country where evolution and climate change are political footballs. So it is a little hard to believe that publicly funded research can take place free of corporate influence. But I am a cynic.
The GMO salmon that are safe to eat are so big because they never stop growing, so they never stop eating. Is that a species that you think would have no ecological impact if accidentally released into the wild?
From what I hear (and keep in mind that I know a lot more about agronomy and horticulture than aquaculture, so this is hardly my area of knowledge here) the fish will be kept in tropical waters (well, in the mountains of Panama, so that if they do escape they will end up in tropical waters), which should prevent them from getting to wild populations even if they do escape (since salmon don't do well int tropical water), and the fish are all sterile females. I think they might be triploid too. Will this be enough? I personally don't know enough to say, like I said, not my field, I don't know anything about Panamanian aquaculture, but there are precautionary measures in place.
Again, where I live influences my thinking, since I am near Lake Michigan, listening to radio stories about Asian Carp resisting all efforts to contain them. The press release that I read, about farming in Canada, said "most were sterile" and "very few will escape." That sounded very weasel worded to me. I don't think it's impossible to raise fish (or anything else) in a way that is safe. I just think that safety is expensive, and there will always be people who are willing to take risks to save money.