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Industrial Safety


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Is there a percentage estimate for safety in which a biotech product, such as a crop, is automatically stopped from going into application?

 

For instance with single nucleotide polymorphisms and biotech crops. Is there a timeline in which the natural occurrence of such would render controls over such a crop impossible to maintain? What about any other variable, such as what do insect populations do if they can no longer feed on a percentage of the crop?

 

I mean crops that used far less water and were far less intensive for pesticides and fertilizers would be great, but are there sure standards to make sure biotech crops themselves do not become massive problems. More if you consider resource issues, how many people need to eat, population growth, and other factors like global warming. Biotech may be one of the only options in all reality to support human life.

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The main goal as you say is to assure human health, but there also is some issues related to environmentally safe practices. Through biotechnology you can achieve extraordinary results in terms of production, but if it damages an echologically safe environment in the long term it could also produce damage to the whole system. Maybe that is what is being refered here by this thread. I`m not sure if this is what its meant.

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Just that if the bulk introduction of various traits will impact ecology in ways. If a population of insects is no longer being able to obtain X amount of crop, what do they do? Do they just starve to death, do other phenotypes do better, I mean what happens.

 

Then you have the traits themselves, open up to a multitude of ways to get different. How giving biological systems could a trait be looked at as under control really? All of those crops, could you lock all of that out of horizontal gene transfer, and I think that form of heredity is more common in plants also.

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I believe that there are far less safeguards for any industrial impact on ecology. Of course the EPA (in the US) and related agencies have that on their agenda, though again mostly through the lense of human health rather than purely ecological impact. Compared to what general pollution (and deforestation etc.) has already done the the environment I doubt that biotechnology (except in scifi novels) will have such a large impact to begin with.

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I believe that there are far less safeguards for any industrial impact on ecology. Of course the EPA (in the US) and related agencies have that on their agenda, though again mostly through the lense of human health rather than purely ecological impact. Compared to what general pollution (and deforestation etc.) has already done the the environment I doubt that biotechnology (except in scifi novels) will have such a large impact to begin with.

 

I've long been a proponent of using property rights to deal with polluters in courts.

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Although the kind of advancement in the latest past years in biotechnology have been really huge, its practical application in terms of production and relationship with health and ecological issues is still in "diapers". Its not much what we really know about its effects on the long term on any of those two areas.

 

Through experimentation, some great achievements have resulted, specially in genetic modified (GM) corns in terms of productive figures, but also some issues related to the health of future consumers, have also appeared, which were not in the original plans. Probably this could be a reason to be cautiouss in relation to biotech products.

 

Also with GM corn, some experiments have been done in order to produce corns with some sort of pesticides, in order to kill the insects that ussually prey on them, but since there is no certainty that it will affect future human consumers or the development of evolved insects who adquire resistance against pesticides, the "final solution" can end up as being the "initial problem". More studies are still needed before it being completely safe.

:)

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This is true, btw. for many chemicals that are in common use. For many organohalogens, which are virtually everywhere only relatively recently concerns have been raised due to their potential as endocrine disruptors. Same could be said for most chemical that have been eventually banned. It is a rather rare case when safety limits have been explored in much detail before release.

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