Double-quotes removed to shorten things up.
Birrofilo wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 2:48 pm
You seem to have a fideistic attitude toward that human product that we call science, and which is fallible as all human endeavours. Often good or very good, but always prone to mistakes and re-evaluation.
I am a scientist by profession, so yes, I am quite confident in how it works and am also familiar with the standards we use to evaluate (and reevaluate) evidence. No other human endevor has worked as well.
Birrofilo wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 2:48 pmPharmacology ends up re-weighing side effects in pharmaceutical compounds many years after those are on sale (Vioxx comes to mind at the moment, or Aulin).
Bad examples. Vioxx wasn't re-evaluated, it was a deliberate attempt by Merck to hide cardiovascular effects that they knew about before the drug ever hit the market. And despite spending millions on the fraud - including paying people to write ghost-authored articles, and even creating fake journals to publish supportive articles - epidemiologists uncovered the fraud within a few years.
That's how well epidemiology works. Even well-funded, highly motivated attempts at fraud (by a very wealthy and powerful company, I'd add) are quickly found out.
Birrofilo wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 2:48 pmToxicology, epidemiology lack reliable data because they cannot use men the way rats or dogs can be used in a laboratory. It's all statistics, and I know statistics enough to think like Disraeli about it.
Sadly, we have a lot of human exposure data. Not in the lab (thankfully, that's Nazi-level evil), but due to things like industrial accidents and suicide attempts. Sadly, suicide is a major issue among farmers, and suicide by ingestion of farm chemicals
is a not-uncommon way its done. It's a tragedy, but it also means we have a lot of human-derived data on toxicity and pharmcodynamics of these compounds.
As for stats, they're just mathematical equations that are as good as the data you put into them. Stat's don't lie, they just spit out a number. Put in good data, you get good stats. Put in garbage...well we have a term for that in science, GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). A big part of scientific education is learning how to separate the good from the bad.
Birrofilo wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 2:48 pm
Again, our ability to study the "toxicology" of a product is also based on the statistical base. We have much more data for natural cultures than for modified cultures or for chemical substances that don't exist in nature. It's an inescapable problem, whenever something "new" arrives on our field, plate etc. we can only begin collecting "data" (scientific, empirical, statistic) from that moment. Things don't always work as expected and this is shown only after a large number of person is exposed to a substance for a large number of years in a large number of circumstances.
None of the above is correct.
Toxicology is not an actuarial (statistical) science, its a prospective/observational/retrospective (human exposure) & experimental (animal/cultured cell exposure) science.
How much we know about a substance is merely a product of how much effort has been put into collecting the data regarding that substance. Being old does not mean we know more - in many cases, what is old is ignored in studies, as it is familiar. To use your tomato example, there are 234 toxicology
studies on glyphosate, but only 150
on tomatoes, of which a third are on other pesticides and not the tomato's themselves.
So no, we do not know more about the toxicology of "old" tomatoes than we do about "new" glyphosate - the opposite is the case. And the toxocology we do know about tomatoes shows that in some circumstances,
they are less safe than you may assume
Birrofilo wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 2:48 pm
This seem to show again a fideistic approach to science. If the world was as easy as you suppose, we would have foreseen the mad-cow disease, and we would have foreseen that, given a certain food, cows react by producing strange badly-formed proteins which, in turn, are harmful in the long run and not only to the cow, but also to the human eating the cow (which was shocking to me to discover because I would expect a protein to be just digested by my organism). But the fact is, we don't know exactly how a substance will interact with a body. Our models did not foresee cows to be poisoned by "scientifically safe" cattle feed.
We did foresee mad cow disease. The first disease shown to be cause by a prion (kuru) was discovered in the 1950's (the discoverer received a nobel award for this). By the 1960 prions were shown to be the cause of a large range of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in animals and humans. And that the consumption of neurological tissue was the cause of transmission of most of those was also discovered at that time. Ever since then, scientists were ringing the warning bell about the risk of transmission to humans. Carleton Gajdusek's speech when he received the nobel prize in 1974 was pretty much an hour long screed on why it was critical action be taken. We (royal we, I'm not that old) were ignored because it wasn't politically expedient for politicians to upend the food system to prevent the problem.
So science did pretty good with prion disease (and smoking/cancer - scientific warningsfor that date back to the mid-1800's - and fatty diets, and sugars, and acid rain, and global warming, etc). Sadly, policy tends to lag science by decades.
Birrofilo wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 2:48 pmI don't know how familiar you are with diseases like the Corea of Huntington. This is an illness which is produced by a toxic protein which is produced by certain persons, who have a certain genetical "modification", or "trait", and which damages your nervous system many decades into your adult life. This is something which begins to be better understood only in recent years. It's a deadly poison produced by your own body if you have a certain sequence of genes (let' say, 39 repetitions you are OK, 40 repetitions you could be ill or not, 41 repetitions you will develop the illness in your adult or old life).
I'm very familiar with it, its a classical example of a genetic disease. It also has a well-known genetic mechanisms that causes it to arise (duplication of repetitive regions during DNA replication), and we've (again, royal we, this is far from my own field of work) have made gene therapies for these patients that reverse the defect, and replace the defective gene with a version incapable of undergoing the duplication process that results in disease. They're currently in phase II trials.
So the cure for the disease is literally to GMO the patient.
Birrofilo wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 2:48 pmAn OGM might, in hypothesis, produce some kind of strange proteins which we cannot see now and which will cause harm to our organisms some decades in the future of regular consumption. We cannot "model" exactly, given the huge amount of genes of a creature, the exact consequence of each gene.
Except that this is a non-issue, at multiple levels:
- We can control where in a plant (or other GMO'd organism) the inserted gene is expressed, and it is trivial to prevent genes from being expressed in the portion we consume.
- Regulatory bodies do not allow genes not commonly encountered via normal exposures to be used on GMO's destined for human consumption. So, for example, the genes used to make crops roundup-ready or insecticidal (Bt), both use genes from soil bacteria that we are exposed to frequently - with every breath you inhale both of these bacteria, as they are commonly found in airborne dust. To use your own terms, the genes in these GMO's are very old to humanity - we've been exposed to them in every meal, and in every breath, since before we even thought to come down out of the trees.
- Proteins which are toxic, like the one causing huntingtons - are easy to identify. They have very specific structural characteristics which are easily identified (to the point where, in my course, I teach 3rd year undergrads how to do it). Proteins such as these would not be of interest for GMO's, for the simple reason that the same thing that makes it potentially hazardous to you would also make it an issue in the GMO'd organism.
Birrofilo wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 2:48 pmBesides, it is to be seen whether, when you modify an organism, you can exactly hit only that genes that you think you hit and modify them exactly the way you want. "Errors of copy" are always possible and actually happen continuously (as in nature, one might say, but with different mechanism and therefore maybe more unpredictable).
Again, no, this is wrong. You cannot even start the regulatory process without providing a full genome sequence of the organism. Where its inserted, and what other effects the insertion had on the genome, are even disclosed in public documents. Once in an organism, the mutation rate will be the same as the basal mutation rate of that organism. GMO'd DNA isn't magical - its just DNA, and the organism treats it all the same.
Birrofilo wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 2:48 pm
I fully agree, but in this as in other realms of life, in order to balance risks one must be first aware of them. And after being aware, the way I balance my risks will be different from the way you balance yours. It's a personal choice. "Science" does not exclude risks and does not exclude the underestimation of risks.
Yeah, but your "balance" has been achieved on the back of a lot of misconceptions and falsehoods of how science, GMOs and genetic engineering works.
Birrofilo wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 2:48 pmAnd let's not dwell inside the can of worms of whether science is really positive, neutral, objective, or is instead heavily influenced by ideological, religious or cultural beliefs, or economical interests. You can find "scientific proofs" in the '50 that marijuana pushes people to commit homicides, and you can find "scientific studies" in Nazi Germany about the superiority of certain races, and you can find "scientific proof" in our age that, if you have an antibody of a certain unknown and never-seen virus, you will certainly get the illness in the next 5, or 15, or 25, or 50 years. You can find tons of scientific studies about coffee being good for you and coffee being bad for you, etc. You are being fed, now, the "science" that is also the result of present-moment cultural structures, need, fears, prejudices etc.
Which is why science is built upon multiple studies and the formation of a scientific consensus (which is always amendable when new data comes along). So yes, you will find contrary studies in almost any field. But that doesn't mean that the science isn't settled, or that it is wrong. Science advances incrementally, and mis-steps are made along the way. But at the end of the day there are more than 30,000 studies into the safety of GMO's and this has lead to a very clear scientific consensus on their safety.
Brewer for decades, dabbler in distilling trying to get better at the craft.