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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Greenpeace, as usual, argues against GM by jesting towards a nebulous cabal of shady globalist BigAg companies. They are endlessly malicious and no amount of benefit can ever be a convincing reason to take even one step back on this issue. This is a classic case of paranoia and it cannot be reasoned with.

    A quick reality check on some of those points. Many of them are based on a paranoid belief that the Golden Rice will somehow invade and take over. We are discussing introducing a new variety, not erasing any - farmers will continue to grow other varieties. Thus, many of the arguments about monoculture and control over seed fall apart. Syngenta have excluded smallholder farmers from paying licensing fees, so they’d get the seeds are a reasonable price. Lastly, countries which grow GM also grow organic crops - the farmers fearing losing their licenses are swept up in the paranoia. There is also no evidence of GM genes finding their way into other varieties in any meaningful amount. If this was a common occurrence, maintaining any discrete variety would be impossible (and we’ve been doing it for over a century).


  • Introgresion of the beta carotene-giving T-DNA locus into local varieties would take a decade before we can obtain a cultivar that resembles local varieties, and this is only if said local varieties are highly homozygous. If they are not, what you are suggesting is simply not possible with 2024 technology and I don’t see it becoming possible soon. Such a delay would mean large numbers of children dying and many more suffering. The Monsanto boogeyman’s profit desires are not relevant, unless you’d like to give them some credit for making the damn thing, and I’m not even sure they were involved? A company called Syngenta made Golden Rice 2, maybe you’re referring to that?



  • I don’t see how these claims are supported by the research in question?

    The main reason is that the article is paywalled (disappointed to see the authors chose to publish in a non-open access journal in 2024) but judging purely by the abstract it seems like this is just a study showing an association between being a black woman in Georgia and signs of stress-induced health issues? Also, they didn’t seem to have a control group?

    The negative effects of chronic stress are well-known but in the linked article this is spun into a weird narrative about microaggressions with seemingly no evidence for it? I am surprised to see the first author of the scientific article deviate so much from the published findings in her journalistic article.