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| Authored by: eric76 on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 03:39 AM EST |
Keep in mind that Congress never passed any law to extend patent protection to
sexually reproduced plants.
To the contrary, in 1970 they created a separate classification for such plants
that is something like patents, but reserves the rights to replant the seeds.
There are a couple of other rights as well. If Congress had thought that patent
protection was the way to go, they would have passed it.
The Supreme Court created law when they extended patent protection to life
including plants. That is a monstrously bad decision on their part that they
need to overturn, the sooner the better.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 04:20 AM EST |
Sadly, as a European recently landing in the USA I can clearly say that from my
point of view pretty much everything here is about greed, one way or another.
This is good for economy - and for GDP figures - but not so good for the people.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 04:43 AM EST |
"Is everything in the world now all about greed, absent all human
values?"
Isn't that the basis of Capitalism? That if everyone acts like a selfish
sociopath then everything will work out ok?[ Reply to This | # ]
|
- Greed... - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 05:44 AM EST
- Greed... - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 05:49 AM EST
- Greed... - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 06:36 AM EST
- Greed... - Authored by: rnturn on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 10:29 AM EST
- The Darwinian Angle - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 06:52 AM EST
- Not Quite - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 21 2013 @ 03:57 PM EST
- Greed... no - Authored by: YurtGuppy on Thursday, February 21 2013 @ 04:17 PM EST
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 05:41 AM EST |
Is everything in the world now all about greed, absent all human
values? It's very depressing, but maybe it's just because I'm following patent
law cases these days that makes it seem so.
I felt like this
about the world in the 1990s, when it seemed that happiness and fulfillment came
from the stock market and everyone should buy shares, speculate, become rich and
happy by not doing anything useful. We know where that led us, but then it just
didn't have anything to do with what motivates me, and I increasingly felt I
didn't belong in this world.
During that time I became aware of Linux,
and FLOSS in general, where not only enthousiasm for a subject clearly was
working as a valid motivation for doing things, but wealth wasn't expressed in
money but in sharing: it was recognised that with something as easily copied as
information you receive far more than you give. Wow, that was a relief! There
was a place for the kind of motivation that works for me. I haven't
become much of a FLOSS contributer, apart from a few bug reports and feature
requests, but I have become an enthousiasic user.
You yourself are a
prime example of someone who does things for the right reasons (at least an
important one that's visible to me). You care. You work like crazy as a
volunteer for things that matter. When you started you didn't even let people
know your name, it was not about your ego.
Both selfishness and
selflessness are important aspects of human nature. Both competition and
cooperation are forces that make society work. The problem with modern ideas
about business is that they acknowledge the value of competition, but not the
value of cooperation. Inside businesses bonus culture, social darwinism and so
on create an atmosphere where you survive by being selfish, a fighter at the
cost of your coworkers in bad cases. What they forget is that an organization
can't exist if people don't cooperate. A corporation becomes a meaningless
concept without cooperation, it just becomes a large group of competing
individuals. The same is true for society as a whole, and for the role of
businesses in society.
You can't undo human nature, including the
cooperative part of it. If its role is forgotten or denied a corporation (or any
organization) can't function properly. It takes worldwide crises for the world
to grok it, and we certainly aren't there yet, but I think a period where the
selfish, competitive side of human nature was overvalued shows signs of being
past its peak, a more balanced view seems to be slowly seeping through in places
it couldn't reach not long ago.
You can be proud of playing a real part
in that. [ Reply to This | # ]
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- Greed, depression - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 05:55 AM EST
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 05:54 AM EST |
| Consider this possibility: I have a genetically caused illness. Someone invents
a
cure and patents it, which involves changing genes in my body. I'd gladly pay
for
the cure and for the patents involved.
Now my wife and I want to
have children, who would inherit the changed genes.
Does anybody think that I
should have to pay money to a company in order to be
allowed to have children? [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 06:43 AM EST |
Better give up cotton, corn, papaya, zucchini, margarine,
vegetable oil,
almost anything with added sugar or
sweetener,
all sugar products and cheese
as well, then. Any of them
you
buy in the USA is very likely to be made from
GM plants.
Let's be clear here: GM plants are a good thing for food
supply and food cost. They make farmers and land more
productive and
therefore lower the costs of food supply.
Patents or other
monopolies on GM plants, or any
other
sort of plant, are what brings the harm.
Please don't
confuse the two.
Genetic modification is not the only way
to produce
glyphosphate-resistant plants, by the way. If you grow
thousands
of acres of corn (say) and spray it all with a
glyphosphate herbicide (such as
roundup) then eventually you
will get some plants that survive because they are
resistant
and, hey presto, you have Roundup Ready corn. Of course,
Monsanto
now own a monopoly on that, so look out. We're
already seeing this process
happening in weeds - resistant
ryegrass is a terrible problem in Australia, and
spreading
elsewhere, and the extensive use of glyphosphate to
eradicate
coca
(and so cocaine) production in Columbia has produced
naturally-occurring
resistant varieties. Kind of shows how
stupid granting a patent on it is. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: tredman on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 06:48 AM EST |
I had an opportunity to listen to an audio recording of a recent Supreme Court
hearing (I don't remember the exact case), but it was very enlightening to watch
the interactions between the justices and the attorneys. It impressed me that
everything you learn about being a trial lawyer comes into play during a visit
to the highest court in the land, and how quick on your feet you have to be to
present or defend a case there. You really have to be at the top of your game to
be effective in a venue such as that.
And for everything that gets said about judicial activism and the suitability of
a justice to be sitting on the bench in the highest court of the land, they do
ask some very enlightened questions during the process, and I believe they play
Devil's Advocate more often than the average person would give them credit for,
in an effort to understand the implications of the issue that they're having to
decide. Being on either side of that bench is not an easy job, to be sure, and
it's some fascinating stuff to watch.
If anybody here with even a cursory interest in how the law works hasn't
actually HEARD oral argument from the US Supreme Court, I'd highly recommend it.
From somebody who has no legal experience whatsoever (and admittedly, has
learned much more about the way the legal system works from Groklaw than
anyplace else), I found it highly educational.
---
Tim
"I drank what?" - Socrates, 399 BCE[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 08:42 AM EST |
Besides that I don't accept people playing dangerous games with genes and
feeding others with them I want to say my opinion about patenting life forms.
So instead of seeds imagine I buy a cow that happens to have patented genes. Now
I wouldn't be allowed to have calves? So I'm restricted from one of the main
uses of a cow. In this sense I think judges concerns are spot on.
Additionally they should not be able to have patents over the genes themselves.
They *may* (or may not) have patented the method to gather these genes but they
are not actually able to mechanically produce the genes. This would mean their
method cannot be used without a license but the genes should be free of patents.
They are abusing some existing biological process to achieve certain monstrous
genes but they are not really building them with a certain success outcome by
every try.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: macliam on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 08:51 AM EST |
From what I have read, I don't see any possibility of SCOTUS reversing CAFC
on this.
It seems that the Doctrine of Exhaustion was created by the
Supreme Court long ago. It was not written into the statute. The Federal
Circuit muddied the doctrine in Mallinckrodt v. Medipart Inc. (by
attempting to cabin the doctrine to the facts of the Supreme Court precedents).
SCOTUS reasserted the doctrine in its original purity, reversing CAFC in
Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc. Therefore the doctrine is
presumably what SCOTUS says it is. As I understand it, the doctrine states that
an authorized purchase of a patented article exhausts the rights of the patent
holder in that article, in so far as those rights derive from the
patent.
Consider the simpler case of a computer operating system. You
purchase a DVD installation disk for the Macrohard operating system and install
it on your first computer, and this should exhaust patent rights in the
purchased DVD and in the 'particular machine' which is your first computer
operating under the Macrohard operating system just installed. You use the
computer to burn a DVD to install the operating system on a second computer.
Are all patent rights exhausted with respect to the DVD you created, or with
respect to the operating system on the second computer? v My understanding of
the law as SCOTUS have stated and interpreted it is that patent rights have been
exhausted with respect to the DVD that you bought, and with respect to your use
of that DVD to install the Macrohard operating system on your first computer and
to operate your first computer under that operating system, since the only
significant use of the DVD is for installing an operating system on a computer
and subsequently operating the computer under that operating system. But the
DVD you made is a new article practicing the patents, as is the copy of the
operating system installed on the second computer. You have no authorization to
create that disk with a computer operating under an alternative unpatented
operating system, so the Doctrine of Exhaustion will not give you that
right.
When applied to agriculture with genetically-modified seeds,
there is the additional question as to whether the harvested seeds are made by
the farmer or by Nature. But, it seems to me, the benefits of patent exhaustion
will themselves be exhausted after sufficiently many generations. Monsanto
sells to the farmer generation N seeds, subject to the farmer exercising the
technology agreement. After cultivation, the farmer harvests the generation N +
1 beans (or seeds). Unauthorized uses would infringe the Monsanto patent, but
Monsanto has authorized sale of the beans to grain elevators. We suppose that
this sale exhausts the patent rights in relation to generation N + 1. We
suppose that these are cultivated and harvested to obtain generation N + 2
beans. These beans have newly materialized on the crop. There has been no
authorized sale of them that has exhausted the patent rights in them. So,
irrespective of whether or not those beans were 'made' by the farmer, or were
made by natural processes and came into the possession of the farmer, those
generation N + 2 beans practice the patent, and therefore cannot be used or sold
without a license from Monsanto. One can argue the niceties of the exhaustion
in each succeeding generation. It seems unlikely, given the direction of the
oral argument, that SCOTUS would rule that the benefits of exhaustion are
automatically inherited by each generation of a self-replicating article, once
an authorized sale has been made. And, without such a ruling, the petioner
cannot succeed. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: rnturn on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 10:25 AM EST |
And I had to read his remarks two or three times to ensure I hadn't misread
what he said.
I found myself in the extremely rare position of actually
agreeing with Scalia. He actually seems to see the situation where Monsanto can
effectively stop all soybean farmers from doing anything other than selling
their crop to grain elevators who would be prohibited from selling their seeds
to farmers because the replanted seeds would be in violation of Monsanto's
patent. In effect, we'd all be forced to pay Monsanto for anything having to do
with soybeans. Of course, if Monsanto loses this case, they could easily haul
out their line of sterile seeds that are unable to reproduce so we'll be in the
same boat.
Congress needs to make it clear that genetic patents are no
longer allowed before we wind up with a food supply that is owned by
multinationals, less likely to actually be good for us, and in danger of attack
from the insects that companies like Monsanto have been trying to protect the
plants from. (Hollywood got that one right in Jurassic Park with -- what was the
line? -- "life always finds a way"). I think we'd better hope that, somewhere,
there's a seed bank with some soybean seeds that Monsanto hasn't gotten their
greedy hands on.
Slight aside...
I was disgusted to hear the Monsanto
attorney (Waxman) make that comment about "if the farmer doesn't want Roundup
Ready technology and isn't using Roundup Ready technology to save costs and
increase productivity", etc. in his reply. Is he trying to turn the Supreme
Court proceedings into a marketing tool for Monsanto? One of the Justices should
have slammed him for that remark.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: 351-4V on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 10:36 AM EST |
Indeed. One would think that someone of Mr. Waxman's experience and stature
would certainly know the inaccuracy of the statement "but there would be no
enforcement of that." Maybe he was misled or misinformed? Ah, but just a few
breaths prior to that remark, he let fly with another beauty - "I mean, it would
take Hurricane Sandy to blow a soybean into some other farmer's field."
It is
the pollen that is spread by gentle breezes, insects, birds and even
agricultural equipment that is inadvertently cross-pollinating these fields, not
the bloody seeds. Why does he purposely conflate a seed with pollen? Me thinks
Mr. Waxman, a very, very smart person, would be better off sticking to the truth
and the facts when addressing the Supreme Court Justices.
It's not only
offensive, it's down-right embarrassing to see a person with so much talent
behave in such a fashion. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: rsteinmetz70112 on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 10:53 AM EST |
I hate selective comparisons, especially from a biased source.
If the cost of planting rose 325%, how did that effect the cost of raising
soybeans? What did the cost of planting include? Was it merely the cost of seed
and spreading it? Does the cost of planting include the cost of preparing the
field? What percentage of the the cost soybeans does planting represent.
If the Total Cost of raising soybeans went down because the yield went up and
the cost of weed control went down, then net effect of more expensive seed may
have been cheaper soybeans.
---
Rsteinmetz - IANAL therefore my opinions are illegal.
"I could be wrong now, but I don't think so."
Randy Newman - The Title Theme from Monk
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 11:39 AM EST |
If, I create a device that starts as a small package, that
in it's normal course of operation, expands to a larger
unpacked form and then repackages itself leaving 'waste
products', it is entirely unreasonable, having sold the
device, for me to then have special claim on that device or
it's waste products after it has performed one cycle and
returned to it's original form factor.
Actually, in the mechanical side of things, is there
anything in patent law preventing me from purchasing a large
integrated device, disassembling it and then reselling the
components?
Or to put it clearly, the soy bean plant device _is_ the
original seed that was sold, as are all of it's components,
including the seed components.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 12:47 PM EST |
The more I think about it, the more I believe that all
farmers that grow
Monsanto seeds are all violating
Monsanto's patents. That is, they (really
Nature is) are
making exact copies of Monsanto's invention and
selling
it. So they only way (and I have not read the
license) is that the license when
buying seed allows them to
make copies of said invention. Of course,
that also
means what scope and timeframe is covered by that license
also needs
to clearly said.
It is a shame that the real biology is being totally
ignored here! Most of this story is just laws of nature as
it does not involve
any patent by Monsanto or anyone else
(most belief are older than the US laws).
One specific
problem here is what is the actual item invented. It
is
critical to understand that the gene does not confer
tolerance to the chemical.
Rather it is the protein encoded
by that gene which the plant itself, not
Monsanto, creates
tolerance to the chemical. So as other comments, Monsanto is
suing the wrong party.
Genetics is very not same as manufacturing some
piece of
metal or chemical. All Monsanto did was introduce a non-
soybean gene
into the soybean. So technically all Monsanto's
patent should only be
about the gene and the
introduction of the gene into the soybean.
It is
very hard to envision copying in biology the
same way. Unlike a computer
copy of a file, copying in
Nature is a destructive process. There is just no
way that
the original seed survives the copying process as
used here.
Due to nature, once the plant starts to grow then
all the cells start changing
and multiplying until it stops
after producing seeds. Very soon after a plant
grows those
original cells that were present in the seed when the seed
was
obtained are no longer present in the plant. Further,
during the plant's life,
those genes are duplicated but not
guaranteed to be exact copies and numerous
errors can be
tolerated without changing the desired product (the function
of
a protein). So at no stage are there ever both the
original seed and a
copied seed and there is
no guarantee that gene sequence is exactly the
same as
the original (whatever that really means here).
Really I have a
hard time accepting Monsanto's position
because anyone should not have been
allowed to buy the seeds
in the first place. Yes, Monsanto should be buying all
the
new seeds back from growers. [ Reply to This | # ]
|
- Monsanto Technology Agreement - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 02:04 PM EST
- Make? - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 04:41 PM EST
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 01:05 PM EST |
Monsanto could grow the Soybeans themselves. I think the
appellant was covering this tangentially (with the "Farmer
takes all the risk" argument), but it seems like Apple selling
instructions to build your own iPhone with a 3D printer, but
then telling you you can only build one. Where an easy remedy
is for Monsanto to grow their own soybeans and sell them
directly to consumers in an infertile state. It satisfies
exhaustion as consumers can do whatever they want, and it
maintains control for Monsanto.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: artp on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 01:18 PM EST |
"Eror" -> "Error" in the Title Block, please.
---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: artp on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 01:19 PM EST |
But really, since we are talking about patenting life-forms,
this thread should be empty.
---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 02:39 PM EST |
Sorry, not from SCOTUS, but I think still on-topic.
Monsanto exchanges
Roundup-Ready™ royalties
for payments on a new seed patent not yet on
sale.
Bloomberg
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: rsteinmetz70112 on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 03:01 PM EST |
It seem these seed were introduced in 1996 so the patents should be about ready
to expire. Once that happens anyone can produce these seed with out an
agreement.
I understand Monsanto is introducing new insect resistant version of their seed,
but these older version would still be out there and anyone could use them and
continue to plant them.
These older un-patented seed would continue to be mixed with new still patented
seed with little way to tell them apart.
---
Rsteinmetz - IANAL therefore my opinions are illegal.
"I could be wrong now, but I don't think so."
Randy Newman - The Title Theme from Monk
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 03:59 PM EST |
And that brings me finally to Monsanto's
argument that it spends
millions on research and development
of these seeds and it needs to recover
that expense, I'd ask
them to please stop. Seriously. I don't want genetically
modified food, and I don't know anyone who does, except
companies that sell
it. According to USA Today, the end
result of these seed monopolies is higher
prices.
Like it or not, genetically modified food is the
future.
Far too many human beings go hungry, there is not enough
food for
everyone, and the food we do have is frequently
wasted. Enhanced food products
are our short-term solution
to world hunger.
Also, nobody seems to
challenge the assertion that this
important research would not be possible
without patents.
This is crap. Humans eat food. Lots of food. If selfish
jerks
like Monsanto were not doing this research, then the
farmers and/or governments
of the world would be instead.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 11:43 PM EST |
It appears to me that many of the posters here are basically against GM foods...
that's fine if that is your position, but if that IS your position you ought to
be in Monsanto's corner. If they lose this case it will make it cheaper for
farmers to use their product. In this particular case, your best option to
control the spread of GM products is for Monsanto to keep the price high.
For those of you who believe at least SOME GM foods are or could be beneficial,
then how do you propose the (expensive) funding of the necessary research take
place to invent new product(s)? If creators like Monsanto can only expect to
sell one bean, after which everybody else gets a free copy, then what motivation
do they have to do the research/development?
This is not something someone can bang out on a laptop in their spare time, this
is not a one person project; there is massive investment in equipment needed and
regulatory processes to jump through: to suggest that greed is the motivation to
recoup the investment required to create new GM products is at best ill thought
out, or at worst disingenuous. Nobody is going to do this for free, and only
corporations (or the government) appear to have the requisite capital to do
this.
Whether or not patent law is up to the task of preserving a revenue stream that
will support the necessary expense to develop GM products is an entirely
different topic (like whether GM food is a good or bad thing to being with); not
going there.
The question is: IF these are considered beneficial, WHAT is the funding model
to allow for their creation. I see nobody directly addressing that issue.
... side comment: somebody somewhere in these comments commented that in spite
of products like this, food prices were going up... I suggest one consider the
fact that quite a bit of our nation's farmland is now producing corn for
ethanol, a fact which has a direct impact on food prices (and water usage). [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: jsoulejr on Thursday, February 21 2013 @ 09:40 AM EST |
Don't they get spread when the plant flowers? I think it's in the wild now. As
far as we know there wasn't any "monsanto" seed involved.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 21 2013 @ 10:04 AM EST |
> "The Nature" produces about enough food to support one adult
human per square mile
You must be crazy?! One square mile? On one square mile I can grow enough
organic wheat to feed a small village.
It is another story that one human exhausts this much land for himself. But
that's not required, we just do it for fun.
Wrt efficiency of planting you must know about agriculture only from some
encyclopedia. Heard about permaculture? You can also see what Sepp Holzer has
done (and still doing).
P.S. I must create an account so I can track my replies..[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: YurtGuppy on Thursday, February 21 2013 @ 01:31 PM EST |
Justice Kagan: "...So again, we are back to the Chief Justice's problem,
that Monsanto would have no incentive to create a product like this one. "
Motivation is that they sell more RoundUp!
The work that Monsanto has done is only useful in the world where RoundUp does
it's job too.
Didn't anyone point that out?
---
a small fish in an even smaller pond[ Reply to This | # ]
|
- It's worse - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 21 2013 @ 03:11 PM EST
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 21 2013 @ 03:25 PM EST |
So, lets assume monsanto argument does have grounds (although it does not) and
take for granted that the new gown seeds are a copy of the patented seeds.
Now whoever copies the seeds, needs to pay monsanto. The farmer seeds them. But
is it the farmer doing the copy? Not at all! It might be the seeds themselves,
the nature or God. But in no way the farmer does any copy of the seeds or the
genes.
Now God gives the farmer good little copies of monsanto's patented seeds. This
means monsanto need to sue God for stealing their IP. Looking at them I wouldn't
be surprised if they actually do :)
P.S. It would be best if court forces monsanto to limit their seeds abilities to
cross-breed and pay fees to farmers affected by their genes.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Kevin on Thursday, February 21 2013 @ 09:14 PM EST |
I just took a look at the patent claims - and found something interesting.
Neither the soybean vine nor the seed is the article of manufacture, composition
of matter, or process claimed by the patent. Rather, the claims
cover:
(1, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17) A chimeric gene....
(5) A
plant cell which comprises a chimeric gene...
(7) An
intermediate plant transformation plasmid...
(8) A plant
transformation vector...
(13) A DNA construct
comprising...
Nowhere - nowhere - does the patent lay claim specifically
to the bean or the vine. It lays claim to chemicals which make it up - the gene,
the plasmid, the retroviral transformation vector - but not the plant that
incorporates them.
The sale of the seed, qua seed, can, as the
judges understand, be for no other purpose than to plant it. In growing the
seed, it makes trillions of copies of the foreign gene that was incorporated in
the plasmid and introduced into a parent plant cell by the transformation
vector. Every one of the trillions of cells in the plant is an article of
independent claim 5. Every one of those cells contains two (or four, or six -
what is the usual ploidy of Roundup Ready soybeans?) copies of the
gene.
The process of replicating the gene in the seed and the process of
replicating the gene at an ordinary cell division are the same: the same DNA
polymerases spring in to action, duplicating the double helix of DNA. The
difference between mitosis - asexual cell division - and meiosis - the formation
of gametes - is in how the resulting chromosome pairs are sorted, not how the
DNA is made.
Monsanto is arguing that the patent is exhausted for the
trillions of daughter cells created by the replication of cells in the seed, but
suddenly, magically, returns from exhaustion as soon as the patented gene is
recombined sexually. It has to be some such argument - because the plant and the
seed are not the patented articles. The fact that neither side has mentioned
this is indicative of some very fuzzy thinking. ---
73 de ke9tv/2,
Kevin (P.S. My surname is not McBride!) [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2013 @ 06:21 AM EST |
Every living thing is "genetically modified". It's called evolution.
In addition, every domestic crop and domesticated animal has been genetically
modified even more than by just evolution, by humans over thousands of years
through selective breeding, which produces organisms with DNA sequences that
would not have occurred "naturally" through evolution.
The only way to feed the 6+ billion people (and growing) on this planet is to
find ways to produce more food on smaller and smaller available patches of land.
The only way to do that is to somehow modify the crops to not only produce
higher yields per acre, but to also resist the intrusion of harmful insects and
invasive plant species, or to use pesticides to thwart the invasive plant
species and harmful insects and somehow modify the crops themselves to be
resistant to the pesticides so we don't kill off the crops we are trying to
protect. If there is not enough food available to feed everyone, then the law of
supply and demand will make the price of food go through the roof compared to
the prices that we pay now, even including the"surtax" that we are
paying for these patents.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that patents on DNA should not exist, and
eliminating them would bring down the price of food some, but eliminating
genetically modified food altogether will result in food shortages so vast that
there will be region wide famines and those areas that do have enough food will
be paying exorbitant prices for it, or else the producers will ship it off to
other regions of the world where the starving people will be willing to pay more
for it. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, February 26 2013 @ 01:28 PM EST |
| It's not like this is the first time they have tried this. Or will be the first
time they will use bribes to get the verdict they want. The New Food Wars: Globalization GMOs and
Biofuels
Scientist and activist Vandana Shiva explores whether the
future will be one of food wars or food peace. She argues that the creation of
food peace demands a major shift in the way food is produced and distributed,
and the way in which we manage and use the soil, water and biodiversity, which
makes food production possible. 17th Annual Margolis lecture at UC Irvine.
[7/2008] [ Reply to This | # ]
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