Actually there is work on making plants more nutritious.

Golden rice is the biggest example of this. It sure is nice that the EU has worked so hard to spread disinformation about it so that tens of millions can be safe, organic and blind without the vitamin A the rice provides.

A more recent example is a tomato that has a tuna protein put in it to prevent freezing. What this allows is to go tomatoes in climates that can not normally grow tomatoes and also grow them later in the year. This is not directly more nutritious but it is indirectly more nutritious since it means more of the tomatoes are allowed to ripen on the vine. Normally many tomatoes are grown far away and ripened synthetically and currently our synthetic ripening is not very good and does not generate the same nutrition content. The local tomatoes are healthier and more environmentally friendly.

The more we learn the harder the science gets. Mostly we end up working on harder and harder problems and many things we are doing today is at the very edges of what we can do. We are at the point where we are designing systems based on atomic arrangements. We can even change the types of bonds being formed not just the atomic arrangements.

No amount of testing with ever catching everything and realistically during the development of new technology we are probably going to kill a lot of people. However, at the same time we have developed drugs to regenerate your white blood cells after chemotherapy. The lethality rates of many cancers went from 90% to 5% since most of the deaths where from infections. We have saved a HUGE number of people with that one. Right now there is work being done to target the actual mutations that cause cancer and destroy the cells that have them. We even have drugs that work for that we just can't manufacture them at scale.

It is hard to explain how brutally difficult modern manufacturing is. Imagine having to assembly a few thousand atoms in EXACTLY the right order. If you get one bond wrong the result can be lethal. Even worse these arrangements like to spontaneously hook together and those combinations are almost always lethal. If you have those combinations at greater than .001% that usually means the patient dies. Oh and you need to make on the order of 10^23 of those arrangements for a patient.

We are going to screw this up. There is no doubt about it but we also know that if we stop trying then even more people die.

GMO is NOT fundamentally different than chemical mutagens and radioactive substances to create crossbreeds or try to get specific traits except that it is MORE dangerous. Traditional ways of selective breeding are MORE dangerous from a genetic perspective than genetic engineering.

Just because they have been used for a long time does not mean that they are not dangerous. People do die from it, we just accept it as a part of life.

Just labeling something as GMO does not give you ANY information at all and is nothing to base a decision on.

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.

sulfur hexafluoride makes more sense.

It is also less environmentally dangerous than halon.

Sulfur hexafluoride is an . . . extremely potent greenhouse gas. . . . According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that it has evaluated, with a global warming potential of 23,900[19] times that of CO2 when compared over a 100-year period.

New production of halon has already been banned (for ozone depletion), anyway, so it is of course not a good choice.

Essentially, you cannot control the outcome of how the entanglement works. You just know it's the same on both sides.

Basically, a random event happens simultaneously on both sides, but it's still random. the example of Alice and Bob both pressing simulteneiously buttons, and always pressing the same one is illustrating this principal as I read it.

Note, how I read it as a layman, so not really answering from the authority you want.