Easily wound up!!
I'm don't consider myself anti GM but when I hear of comapanies such as Monstano and their "Terminator gene" added to crops or the suing of farmers for breaches of their intellectual property rights due potentially to cross-contamination; alarm bells do start to ring!
"There must be a one-to-one correspondence between left and right parentheses, with each left parenthesis to the left of its corresponding right parenthesis."
e mare libertas
Am I the only one who thinks that 'Terminator gene' sounds totally rad?Originally Posted by Clockwork
kiwibiker is full of love, an disrespect.
- mikey
Hardcore Biker
My daughter is in final stages of a physiology PhD at Liggins Institute (where Bob likes to visit). There is v little chance she will stay unfortunately. Partly because science is international, and scientists move to wherever their specialist interests take them. NZ has always been low brow wrt higher education, our heroes are basic down to earth role models (Sir Ed, Pinetree etc). I agree its the fault of short sighted politicians who still see our future on the farm. New $ has been allocated for science, but its gotta be agriculture related.
Get your motor runnin, head out on the Highway ....
http://geoffjames.blogspot.com
Yes indeed. It's absolutely healthy to criticise things that need criticising, whether it be Lord Winston or posters on this thread. As always however, things are rarely black and white. I didn't see the interview so I'm not sure whether Lord Winston gave an example of a country which he holds in high esteem. Take the UK and Germany for instance. Both are regularly lauded as "commercial powerhouses", "high standard of living", ya de ya. Whilst this may be true on whatever KPI scale they use, this doesn't measure that elusive "quality of life" to which Tank alludes. There have been recent international surveys in the UK and Germany where greater than 50% of the population wished they lived somewhere else because of problems in their own countries.
All I'm saying is that is that the total measure of a country's economic and "quality" well-being is bloody complicated and not the same for everyone. For my personal circumstances, I couldn't think of a better place to live than NZ, even with the politicians and and other knuckle-draggers doing their best to fuck it up.
Hardcore Biker
What about shifting to somewhere like the Cook Islands? Even more "quality of life". And we lean more to this as we recognise that we are falling behind the rest of the developed world
Get your motor runnin, head out on the Highway ....
e mare libertas
Y'know, just pondering this, it strikes me that it's easy to sit in one's armchair and splutter indignantly in agreement with Lord Winston and his very respectable moustache, but that it's rather less easy to:
(a) identify work that can be done to create this valuable potential knowledge that's spoken of so glibly; and/or
(b) STFU and get that work done.
One might, from a certain perspective, wonder whether many of those who bang on about such topics hold the moral authority to do so.
Should our Government spend more of its budget on general academic research funding? Quite possibly.
But bombastic hand-waving and dire pronouncements of non-specific doom are quite unlikely to lead to useful outcomes.
kiwibiker is full of love, an disrespect.
- mikey
Homo Sapiens Vulgaris
Well, if everybody who realise that there is a problem leaves, the problem 'sorta' goes away I guess.
It is preferential to refrain from the utilisation of grandiose verbiage in the circumstance that your intellectualisation can be expressed using comparatively simplistic lexicological entities. (...such as the word fuck.)
Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. - Joseph Rotblat
Deus ex ukulele
Because these foods have been tested to death in exhaustive clinical trials before commercial release. That's how.
"Standing on your mother's corpse you told me that you'd wait forever." [Bryan Adams: Summer of 69]
Deus ex ukulele
Dear oh dear oh dear. Where to start.
1. A terminator sequence is what is found at the end of the slice of genetic code that has been spliced into an organism's DNA. At the other end of the added slice is what is known as the promoter sequence. DNA is like a zip. Genetic modification adds a series of extra teeth to the zip.
2. I am not an apologist for Monsanto and other large businesses in the GM seed business. But there is a big difference between the business ethics of a multinational corporation looking to protect its considerable investment in intellectual property (albeit heavyhandedly) and the science of genetic modification.
"Standing on your mother's corpse you told me that you'd wait forever." [Bryan Adams: Summer of 69]
Deus ex ukulele
But this is Kiwi Biker! Few raves here ever contribute to useful outcomes. Or have I missed something?
"Standing on your mother's corpse you told me that you'd wait forever." [Bryan Adams: Summer of 69]
Forum whore
Ah - THAT Lord Winston.......
For a horrible second, I thought Brett had embraced Winston Peters.....
“- He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
http://geoffjames.blogspot.com
Cook Islands quality of life - by what measure??? I hope you had your tongue planted in your cheek.
Easily wound up!!
I think we are talking about different things. The terminator gene to which I refer effectivley renders a seed sterile thus ensuring that each year the farmer needs to come back to Monsanto and buy some more seeds.
GM science without ethics seems a dangerous cocktail to my mind.
"There must be a one-to-one correspondence between left and right parentheses, with each left parenthesis to the left of its corresponding right parenthesis."
Hardcore Biker
As we sink lower in OECD rankings, we borrow more and more on our "quality of life" as self justification, helps to ignore things like dwindling quality of infrastructure, poor telecoms (broadband speed for instance), lower wages. We are about as close (above) to the balance point as Cook Islands are (below). (acknowledge partial pt)
Get your motor runnin, head out on the Highway ....
Deus ex ukulele
The reason that farmers have to come back to Monsanto is largely due to the seeds being infertile hybrids or because the addition of GM material makes them incapable of "normal" reproduction. This is nothing sinister on Monsanto's part, it's just an outcome of the GM process.
Again, without being an apologist for Monsanto and others of their ilk, much of this bad press is fuelled by people with a bee in their bonnet about what they believe to be the evils of GM who are just looking for every possible opportunity to have a crack at an easy multinational target.
Multinational companies are not going to foist their products unwittingly on the world. They've spent too much on R&D to give this stuff away. And if GM spread as easily as some believe -- through "adventitious genes" and other bunkum theories -- then the multinationals wouldn't have spent as much on international patent protections as they have.
Conspiracy theorists may beg to differ.
"Standing on your mother's corpse you told me that you'd wait forever." [Bryan Adams: Summer of 69]
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