Usual lies/half truth: Genetic engineering involves manipulating the genes of an organism to achieve a desired result. To a degree, it is like the long-time farming process of creating hybrid plants.
----Phew, now we can relax
In 2011, 88 percent of all corn and 94 percent of all soybeans produced in the U.S. were grown from genetically-engineered seeds, according to the non-partisan Legislative Analyst's Office.
Reality: This is GM plants technology
Roundup ready:
Roundup Ready crops are crops genetically modified to be resistant to the herbicide Roundup. Roundup is the brand-name of a herbicide produced by Monsanto. Its active ingredient glyphosate was patented in the 1970s. Roundup is widely used by both people in their backyards and farmers in their fields. Roundup Ready plants are resistant to Roundup, so farmers that plant these seeds must use Roundup to keep other weeds from growing in their fields.
Roundup Ready crop seeds have notoriously been referred to as "terminator seeds." This is because the crops produced from Roundup Ready seeds are sterile. Each year, farmers must purchase the most recent strain of seed from Monsanto. This means that farmers cannot reuse their best seed. Read more about terminator seeds.
Built-in insecticide:
Organic farmers have used solutions containing the natural bacteria Bt for years as a method of insect control. Genetic engineers simply remove the gene that produces the Bt in bacteria and then insert it into the DNA of corn and cotton plants so that the plant does the work, not the farmer.
Moreover, they say that Bt-toxin is quickly destroyed in our stomach... and even if it survived, since humans and other mammals have no receptors for the toxin, it would not interact with us anyway..
However, mice fed Bt-toxin showed significant immune responses-as potent as cholera toxin. In addition, Bt caused their immune systems to become sensitive to formerly harmless compounds, suggesting that exposure might make a person allergic to a wide range of substances.
Insect resistance has also grown to bt-toxin owing to the introduction of bt-crops
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Food derived from GMOs is not tested in humans before it is marketed. While such food could be tested in clinical trials, similar to the way that drugs are tested, food derived from GMOs is not a single chemical, nor is it intended to be ingested in specific doses and times. This makes it difficult to design a meaningful clinical study.[42] Instead, regulators carefully examine the genetic modification, its protein products, and any intended changes that those proteins make to the food,[43] and also check to see whether the food derived from a GMO is "substantially equivalent" to its non-GM-derived counterpart, which provides a way to detect any negative non-intended consequences of the genetic engineering.[42] If the newly incorporated protein is not similar to that of other proteins found in our foods or if anomalies arise in the substantial equivalence comparison, further toxicological testing is required.[42]
"I’m a geneticist, so I’m very excited by what's going on in terms of genetic engineering... What bothers me is we have governments that are supposed to be looking out for our health, for the safety of our environment, and they’re acting like cheerleaders for this technology, which... is in its infancy and we have no idea what the technology is going to do.
"Anyone that says, 'Oh, we know that this is perfectly safe,' I say is either unbelievably stupid or deliberately lying. The reality is we don’t know. The experiments simply haven’t been done and we now have become the guinea pigs."Dr David Suzuki, geneticist and broadcaster, quoted in Angela Hall, “Suzuki warns against hastily accepting GMOs”, The Leader-Post (Canada), 26 April 2005
"The ubiquitous argument that "since there is no evidence that GM products make people sick, they are safe" is both illogical and false. There are, again, simply no data or even valid assays to support this contention. Without proper epidemiological studies, most types of harm will not be detected, and no such studies have been conducted."David R. Schubert, professor and head of the Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, “The Problem with Nutritionally Enhanced Plants”, Journal of Medicinal Food, Vol. 11, No. 4, 2008
2012 September French study - tumors found in rats fed Roundup Ready corn
Opponents say the sample size was too small (200 rats) to be meaningful
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