Kind of picking a nit, I know, but if you give credence to Thoreau’s theory of civil disobedience, it’s not justified even then. You don’t protest a deprivation of rights by going and doing something you’d have no right to do even in a liberal democracy; you protest a deprivation of rights by exercising the rights anyway.

        drbuzz0 said:

The problem is that the laws regarding IP, patents and that kind of thing are really not intended for things like genetically modified organisms and they’re not very good at regulating them.

In fact, you can’t even really patent a genetic modification but have to work around it by patenting the “method” for producing it.

Being able to hold a patent on a specific modification actually doesn’t seem all that unreasonable, I suspect you’d just need a modification of pharmaceuticals patents to get something usable. Also might be worth looking at something more like a design patent.

Keep copyright away from GMOs, patents at least expire eventually (the US congress seems to be doing as much as they can to prevent copyright from ever expiring and Mickey Mouse from ever entering the public domain where he belongs).

Not just that, but a lot of those who already make GMOs are likely to get involved and help screw it up (the original proposal for GMO safety regulations in the US was actually somewhat reasonable until Monsanto came along).

Most likely what would really happen is that such a new regulatory system would end up biased towards the big companies that can spend a lot of money and hire a lot of lawyers while small companies and non-profit organisations wouldn’t be able to afford to get a product through it.

Realistically all that’d probably end up changed if you did change the regulations is adding something requiring indigenous groups get a cut if any of the genes came from a plant that grew on their traditional land. The current system is quite safe (there’s never been a public health or environmental problem caused by GMOs) so no room for improvement there (not that the activist groups would really care even if you did improve safety).

Maybe a third world country or group of third world countries could upon realising that no one is getting the full benefit from GMOs might be able to create their own sensible regulations (but I’d expect a lot of pressure from the first world against that).

        Anon said:

Fixing the over-regulation problem so that you don’t need to be a big multinational corporation to bring a GMO to market could also help by making it possible for non-profit organisations to fund the development of useful GMO strains that wouldn’t be able to make a profit.

Though it does raise the question of how do you get that bigger issue to be discussed if it’s undiscussable and also whether it would help with the irrational fear.

The problem is that the laws regarding IP, patents and that kind of thing are really not intended for things like genetically modified organisms and they’re not very good at regulating them. In fact, you can’t even really patent a genetic modification but have to work around it by patenting the “method” for producing it.

It’s simply shoe-horning a new concept into the old patent framework and it doesn’t fit very well.

What is needed is a completely new regulatory framework that would be able to address GMO – both the regulatory and safety aspects and the patent and copyright issues involved.

I do see a problem though: creating such legislation would be an invitation for every scaremongering group to try to influence it and force ridiculous restrictions into it.

        ebohlman said:

A lot of this involves demographic differences or local concerns. I’m going to speculate (this is just speculation, but I think it’s plausible) that a lot of European opposition to GMOs comes from worries that US based multinational agribusiness concerns might gain control over European agriculture. In fact, to my mind the legitimate concerns about GMOs are not ones of safety or biodiversity, but rather about the extension of intellectual-property law considerations into fields that have heretofore been free of them.

In Japan IIRC it is illegal for corporations of any kind to engage in agriculture. I believe it was one of Douglas McArthur’s reforms, designed to eliminate the class of impoverished and exploited tenant farmers (whose desire for a better life was blamed for fuelling Japanese militarism) and replace them with small farmers who owned the land on which they worked.

Incidentally, although the aristocratic samurai are most often taken to be the representative soldiers of pre-modern Japan, there were also the ashigaru, who were of peasant origin, and who were just as atrocity-prone as the Imperial Japanese Army was during World War II.

Though patents are where any problems other than over-regulation exist (but at least patents actually run out eventually and there probably does need to be the option of a monopoly for a time to recoup investment costs, if it were under copyright though…).

Fixing the over-regulation problem so that you don’t need to be a big multinational corporation to bring a GMO to market could also help by making it possible for non-profit organisations to fund the development of useful GMO strains that wouldn’t be able to make a profit.

Though it does raise the question of how do you get that bigger issue to be discussed if it’s undiscussable and also whether it would help with the irrational fear.

A lot of this involves demographic differences or local concerns. I’m going to speculate (this is just speculation, but I think it’s plausible) that a lot of European opposition to GMOs comes from worries that US based multinational agribusiness concerns might gain control over European agriculture. In fact, to my mind the legitimate concerns about GMOs are not ones of safety or biodiversity, but rather about the extension of intellectual-property law considerations into fields that have heretofore been free of them.

It’s well-known in organizational and social psychology that prima-facie irrational concerns are often a sign that there’s some bigger issue which is somehow treated as “undiscussable.”

        drbuzz0 said:

Yeah, and probably wouldn’t have the satisfying crsip greasiness either.

Probably, though they said it wasn’t distinguishable from the natural stuff (or at least I think they did).

        Anon said:

I heard that they created a potato that won’t absorb as much fat from the oil it’s cooked in.

Yeah, and probably wouldn’t have the satisfying crsip greasiness either.

        drbuzz0 said:

Well potato chips are not fatty from the potato but from the oil it’s cooked in.

Making fat free oil presents problems.

They have actually created a cooking oil that will pass through the body without being absorbed as fat and that caused other problems.

I heard that they created a potato that won’t absorb as much fat from the oil it’s cooked in.

There was an attempt to transfer genes from the Brazil Nut to something else which resulted in allergy problems (of course they didn’t end up introducing it, something about actually caring about safety).

        Anon said:

Maybe low fat potato chips or hypo-allergenic peanuts would do the job (though on the first one someone could just use conventional breeding or even all natural colours to make a potato appear lighter and then put “potato chip lite” on the packaging and have all the idiots buy it, just as they do with lite cooking oil).

Well potato chips are not fatty from the potato but from the oil it’s cooked in. Making fat free oil presents problems. They have actually created a cooking oil that will pass through the body without being absorbed as fat and that caused other problems.

As for the hypoallergenic peanut – there is active research on that one. I think they’ll probably have one in a few years, but it will be more time before it’s approved for human consumption and more time still before it becomes commonplace.

The proteins responsible for triggering allergies are now known and the genes that produce them are largely understood. There’s no theoretical reason this won’t be solved.