http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6393/is_/ai_n28866050

Geneticist David Suzuki understands that what took place was truly ominous. "The genetically engineered Klebsiella," he says, "could have ended all plant life on this continent. The implications of this single case are nothing short of terrifying."

I wouldn't be surprised if these careless GMO corporations are the end of us before we nuke each other.

The fundamental problem is that we have allowed merciless and ignorant business interests to attempt to define business markets with business rules in an environment that is everything but.

You can not contain genetic modifications in sexually reproducing species. Period. It will never, ever, ever happen.

You can not sell an "additive" because there is no space in the ecosystem -- anything you add displaces something else, as was the case here, and is the case when you pretend you can do the above and your GMO wind and insect pollinated crops end up spreading their DNA randomly into any and every nearby comingling species (as has happened in all kinds of grasses).

There was a time when governments, even our own, attempted to safeguard the public and the public commonwealth (you know, all the land, sea and air stuff) from sources of harm whether they were individuals or companies. That time has long been over, and the sooner people realize that the American business myth is a cancerous fairy tale, the better.



Monsanto has no interest at all in protecting anything but their own continued theft of public money, public resources, and public lives.

Why let corporations have all the fun when you can do it yourself at home !

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081225/ap_on_sc/do_it_yourself_dna

"Once you move to people working in their garage or other informal location, there's no safety process in place," he said.

Some also fear that terrorists might attempt do-it-yourself genetic engineering. But Patterson said: "A terrorist doesn't need to go to the DIYbio community. They can just enroll in their local community college."

I love it. It's safe in the hands of the obviously corrupt with their highly functional safety apparatus and the even handed regulation in place (cough), but we must stop the common terrorist from creating bioluminescent Jihads!

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6393/is_/ai_n28866050


Geneticist David Suzuki understands that what took place was truly ominous. "The genetically engineered Kiolbasa," he says, "could have ended all life on this continent. The implications of this single case are nothing short of terrifying."


I wouldn't be surprised if these careless GMO corporations are the end of us before we nuke each other.

OK, I think this was really blown out of proportion; I mean, look at how many attend Packers games and tail-gating sessions and consider the amount of Kiolbasa consumed and the attendant flatulism, and we have not heard of any loss of life to date.

(insert Emily Litella "Oh, never mind" here.)



Seriously though, this was a scary read. The more they fool around with stuff the closer we get to annihilating ourselves. And like Malse points out, greed trumps any notion of communal concern with these companies.


And, on a slightly off-topic tangent, still speaking of man-made catastrophes, is there any threat to the water table in your area San, from the Tennessee sludge spill?

Winona LaDuke (Former VP Candidate with Ralph Nader and Native American) has spoke on this issue at length many times in town here. One thing I know every native american tribe has is a very strictly protected seed vault with seeds for every type of food they grow which is safe from genetically modifications and dates back nearly 200 years ... for fear of genetically engineered fuck ups.

Its like Pork. One day it was decided the tasty pork should be white instead of pink. They genetically modified it to be white, it became "the other white meat" and now its tasteless on its own. So now they are trying to genetically modify pork to have taste again like it did before they screwed it up. Its a scary aspect of science that shouldn't take place outside of sealed greenhouses.

The fundamental problem is that we have allowed merciless and ignorant business interests to attempt to define business markets with business rules in an environment that is everything but.Wait, are you implying that a 100% pure capitalistic society might have flaws? For shame!

This is the underlying problem behind many of these things - I highly doubt that any of these major businesses are our to research things for the good of the world, rather it's all about profit. Maybe the individual researcher, but certainly not the group investing in their work. Looking at our history of environmental pollution, it's highly likely one of these groups will screw us over.

Just look at science fiction for the warnings. I highly recommend Oryx and Crake.

The genetically engineered Klebsiella turned out to be highly competitive with native soil micro-organisms. Plants are only able to take nitrogen and other nourishment from the soil with the help of fungi called mycorrhizae. These fungi live in the soil and help make nutrients available to plant roots. But when the genetically engineered Klebsiella was introduced into living soils, it greatly reduced the population of mycorrhizal fungi in the soil. And without healthy mycorrhizal fungi in soils, no plants can survive.


I've been on the road and just saw this thread, but it should be noted that there are multiple even scarier parts to this story, if one can believe it, which I'll get to in a second. (Pull up a chair, it's biology story time :) )

Regarding those mycorrhizal fungi, which indeed are everywhere, we've been the massive beneficiaries of these organisms not just because of their symbiotic associations with plant roots, but because of the way in which these fungi (eukaryotes, in other words, made of cells similar to ours) carve out a niche in which to live in the presence of huge numbers of faster-reproducing bacteria. They manage not to get overwhelmed partially because they produce chemical compounds lethal to the competing soil bacteria - otherwise known as antibiotics (yes, *those* antibiotics). The first commercially extracted antibiotic, penicillin, was isolated from the soil fungus Penicillium notatum after it was accidentally discovered (as a contaminant on a plate) having bactericidal effects on Klebsiella pneumoniae in 1927, and the overwhelming majority of antibiotics that have been 'discovered' since then weren't synthesized de novo (from scratch) in a laboratory, but were isolated from existing fungi and fungus-like prokaryotes and eventually modified as a means of coping with antibiotic resistance. In other words, we've taken advantage of millions of years of evolutionary tweaking by these organisms of effective antimicrobial compounds that are minimally toxic to eukaryotic cells, and our track record of doing this ourselves is decidedly less impressive than that of Streptomyces. But I digress...

There are several reasons why this story is even more frightening than it appears at face value. The first is the organism involved in the incident, a member of the genus Klebsiella. This is a member of a large group of closely related Gram-negative bacteria called the Enterobacteraceae, which include Escherichia coli, Salmonella, Shigella, and other 'enteric' bacteria - meaning they're common inhabitants of the mammalian intestine (human feces is 40-50% Enterobacteraceae, largely E. coli by mass, to give you an idea of *how* common). Why is this significant? The main reason is because these bacteria are not only everywhere, they're very promiscuous - that is to say they're readily able and willing to share genes with each other, even if they belong to different species within the group.

The second strictly *biological* reason this story is so alarming has to do with the way in which many of these custom made organisms are produced and selected for in the laboratory, and which I suspect is a likely factor in this organism overwhelming its fungal competition in a soil sample. It'd take a bit of time to explain here, but when producing a genetically engineered bacterium, it's important to be able to easily isolate it from the organisms you don't want in your population (because gene isolation, splicing, and transfer techniques are far from an exact science and not all of your target bacteria are going to take up the plasmid or chromosome you're inserting/assembling). The easiest and most common way to do this, especially in the early stages of isolation, is to put one or more genes for antibiotic resistance (Ampicillin or Erythromycin are the most common) on the plasmid or chromosome you're giving along with the genes you're trying to get them to express. Then, if you want to know if they *got* the genes (for cellulose and waste degradation in this case), what you do is grow them up on plates in the presence in that antibiotic. Voila! The survivors will have the Amp (or whatever) resistance gene, and presumably, your genes of interest as well, and you can pick them out and grow them up in pure culture. Wouldn't it be, erm, interesting if in this case the researchers produced an organism that not only could eat almost anything (see below), but couldn't be killed by the most common naturally produced antimicrobial compounds? (and let's not talk about the vast quantities of these drugs being given to our food animals and pooped out into the environment annually in the US, which is an entirely separate issue :) )...

Third, and here's the biggie, let's look at what the genes they were trying to express in this organism actually did. They took an organism that normally utilizes (is capable of eating) a limited number of carbohydrates (glucose, lactose, and sometimes sorbose and pectin), and gave it genes that would allow it to eat almost *any* carbohydrate source available in soil (notably, cellulose, which makes up the bulk of decaying plant matter and is normally not usable by all but a very few specialized bacteria and fungi). You don't have to have a PhD in microbial ecology to see why letting this monster loose in the environment would be a really, *really* bad idea in terms of what it might do competition-wise to the organisms inhabiting all of the niches that K. planticola normally *doesn't*.

Finally, as icing on the cake, let's not forget that ethanol, the final product of this metabolic miracle, is toxic to most organisms that live in the soil, including fungi, nematodes, yeasts, other bacteria, plants, oh, and us :).

Now, let's add all of this up. The biotech company in this case took an ubiquitous, promiscuous organism that reproduces very rapidly (capable of doubling every 20 minutes under ideal conditions), gave it genes that allowed it to eat almost *any* organic material, probably gave it genes for antibiotic resistance as well (so they could find it), and nearly ended up putting it to work (with the go-ahead of our EPA) in a large scale industrial application with the intent of ultimately dumping waste products it created somehow without dumping *it* into the environment. Yeah, this was a really bad one.

As a trained microbiologist, I'm not going to run screaming for the hills OMG genetic engineering is the devil! - but our regulatory agencies, which once upon a time were actually run by scientists instead of industry shills, need to recognize that they're playing with millions of years of carefully balanced microbial ecology here and had better not take the potential consequences lightly. If we think that something like kudzu or the fire ant or zebra mussel, which we can actually see in the environment and have (inadequate) control strategies for, and which are discrete species that don't share their genes with every Tom, Dick and Salmonella they find themselves cozied up to, are problems, we haven't seen anything compared to what will happen when the first truly invasive microbial species gets loose. We've been giddily patting ourselves on the back about all the wonderful things we have been able to do in our 'golden age' of biotechnology and I fear that there is going to have to be a very costly and incontrovertible 'accident' (my money tentatively is on Bt toxin and CCD in honeybees) before we take the potential risks seriously.

Sincerely,
Nydia

This is why everyone drinks the end of the world kool-aid. Shit scares the crap out of me.