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The 1840s were a bleak time in Irish history. Imagine one in every

six people you know slowly painfully dying of starvation or disease. Then in

the next few years, as many people leave the country and never come back. And over

the next few decades the number of people in your town is half of what it

used to be. During the Irish Famine, 1 million people, or about 15% of the

population died. Another 1.5 million people fled the country in its

immediate aftermath leading to a permanent decline in the Irish

population. Ireland and the whole world was changed forever

due to one persistent devastating fungus. The late blight or phytopthora

infestans is a fungus that attacks the potato plant leaving the potatoes

inedible. The fungus spores spread easily in the wind

and quickly infect neighboring plants. It was particularly disastrous to Ireland

due to the potato being hugely relied on for food by the rural poor. By the 1850s

the widespread blight eventually ran its course

but it did not disappear entirely. To this day blight remains a significant

problem for potato and tomato growers that has to be battled year after year.

160 years after the famine, late blight is still a five billion dollar problem

for the global potato industry. Some potatoes can be bred to have some

resistance to the fungus but this can take decades. So the reality is that

farmers need to spray their crops with lots of fungicide every week

indefinitely. But in 2015 a breakthrough occurred - a new variety of GMO potato was

developed that can resist the very blight that killed so many. Using blight

resistant genes from wild potato plants, scientists precisely adapted a version

of the common potato to withstand the fungal disease. This GM potato, called the

Innate Potato, can save farmers huge amounts of time and money and can reduce

the amount of environmentally damaging pesticide that gets sprayed on the

fields - up to eighty or ninety percent. And so naturally Ireland with its

history of massive crop failure killing a million people and its commitment to

green agriculture says - nope let's ban it and in fact let's try to ban all GMOs.

Okay so what is going on? "so it's made in a laboratory and more often than not

they're inserting viruses or bacteria into these plants" "what you need to know

is that the process itself is flawed." We've all probably seen debate like this.

GMOs are bad, they're bad for you, they'll give you cancer, they'll give the world

cancer, and that they are literally the devil. Yet others say GMOs will end world

hunger, stop climate change, and that they're completely harmless. There are so

many videos articles and interviews on both sides of this and the amount of

unresearched unscientific claims out there to sift through is infinite.

There's an ever-present sense of hysteria when discussing anything to do

with GMOs and this public sentiment informs government decisions for better

or for worse...usually for worse. But like most things, the issue of GMOs is not as

black and white as many people would lead you to believe. GMOs are not what

will save the world nor are they what will destroy it. Before we get into

whether or not GMOs are good or bad, let's first understand what they even

are. Genetically modified organisms are organisms that have been altered using

genetic engineering methods. The key steps involved in genetic engineering

are first to identify a trait of interest. Then isolate that trait, insert that

trait into a desired organism, and then propagate or breed that organism. Most of

the GMOs on the market today have been given genetic traits to improve their

quality, provide tolerance to drought, or to provide protection from pests like

the GM potato I mentioned before being resistant to fungal infection. Another

big example of this in the world of GM foods is insect resistance. BT maize for

example is a strain of insect resistant corn. Corn farmers are challenged with a

number of pests, but the most damaging are caterpillars that are stalk borers,

ear or leaf eaters, and beetle grubs that eat the roots. The European corn borer

for example was nicknamed with the billion dollar bug because it costs

growers over a billion dollars annually in insecticides and lost crop yields. For

years farmers have largely relied on chemical insecticides to protect their

crops, but in 1996 farmers were introduced to genetically engineered

corn with resistance to the European corn borer.

These genetically modified plants produce proteins derived from the soil

bacterium bacillus thuringiensis, hence the name BT maize. The proteins that are

produced by the bacteria are crystal proteins which are toxic to caterpillars

like the corn borer, and are introduced into the corn through

a process called transgenesis. The first step in this process is identifying an

organism with the desired trait - in this case something that is toxic to

caterpillars. Around a hundred years ago silkworm farmers noticed that

populations of silkworms were dying and scientists discovered that a naturally

occurring soil bacteria was causing the deaths. Scientists now know that these

soil bacteria that are toxic to silkworms are also toxic to the European

corn borer. The next step in the transgenesis process is to extract the

desired DNA out of the bacteria. This is accomplished by taking a sample of

bacteria containing the gene of interest and taking it through a series of steps

that separate the DNA from the other parts of the cell and isolate the gene

of interest, usually using cloning vectors. The next step is gene insertion,

in our case getting the BT gene into the corn. Since plants have millions of cells

it would be impossible to insert a copy of the transgene into every cell.

Therefore tissue culture is used to propagate masses of undifferentiated

plant cells called callus, which are kind of like stem cells in humans. These are

the cells where the transgene will be added. The transgene is inserted into

some of the cells using various techniques, such as with a gene gun or by

electroporation. The main goal of these methods is to deliver the transgene into

the nucleus of a cell without killing the cell. The cells can then be treated

with a series of plant hormones allowing it to grow into an entire plant. You now

have corn crops that contain their very own insect resistance. The huge benefit

of this is that one, the corn crops don't get destroyed by these caterpillars and

two, that less insecticide is needed to combat them. Studies have shown a pretty

indisputable decrease in insecticide use when BT or similar crops are planted. GMO

crops can also stave off malnutrition in many parts of the world. Vitamin A

deficiency has been recognized as a significant public health problem

continuously for more than 30 years. The problem is particularly severe in

populations where rice is the staple food and diversity of diet is limited, as

white rice contains no micronutrients. Vitamin A deficiency is the leading

cause of preventable blindness in children and increases the risk of

disease and death. Mirroring our Irish Famine example from before, these deaths

are caused by diseases which thrive in malnourished people. To combat this,

scientists engineered what is called Golden Rice. This rice produces

beta-carotene which is the precursor of vitamin A. It's the same pigment found in

carrots and just one cup of golden rice per day per person can prevent vitamin A

deficiency and has the potential to save thousands of lives. It's never possible

to prove a food is completely a hundred percent safe .We can only say that no

hazard has ever been found to exist. And there have now been over 500 scientific

studies looking for and failing to find conclusive risk to human health from GM

crops. Take the example of crops containing insect resistance - many

studies have confirmed that BT toxins can only work in alkaline environments

and require specific enzymes and receptors in the insect gut to cause

toxicity. Humans have very acidic stomachs and lack these enzymes and

receptors and so are not affected by the BT crystal protein. Other ways scientists

test GM foods before releasing them to the public

are by simulating the behavior of GM proteins in the human gut to see whether

the proteins degrade during digestion, or more conclusively, to test the GM crop on

animal models like lab rats. The rats are first fed a single meal of the GM crop

or protein to test for acute toxicity. Then the rats are fed repeated meals of

GM food for 90 days and sometimes up to a year to test for chronic toxicity,

which is the type of harm that only appears with repeated use. Despite many

studies like this failing to find anything harmful about GMOs there is

still radical opposition. In 2013 anti-gmo activists, heavy air quotes

there, invaded and destroyed a field trial for Golden Rice in the Philippines

setting the study back months and jeopardizing the technology's

implementation. Ireland as we mentioned before is trying to approve blanket

restrictions on GMOs citing the need to maintain their international reputation

as a green sustainable food producer. So all this leaves many of us thinking why

are people so opposed to something that seems to be so good for the world? Is

there any basis for this? While the misinformation that spread seems endless

and the number of bogus claims that circulate are frustrating it would be

disingenuous to pretend that the rise of GMOs has only been a good thing, but not

because of the reasons most anti GMO groups on Facebook and Irish politicians

are claiming. While things like BT crops do reduce insecticide use there is another

side to the coin. One of the most common types of GMO crop around the world are

ones that are resistant to herbicide, specifically glyphosate. Roundup Ready is

the Monsanto trademark for its patented line of genetically modified crop seeds

that are resistant to its glyphosate based herbicide Roundup. So in an

opposite way to the BT crops we discussed before Roundup Ready crops

mean farmers can use more herbicide on their crops. One study shows that on

average adopters of GE glyphosate tolerant soybeans used 28% more

herbicide than non-adopters. Another study says that globally glyphosate use

has risen almost 15 fold since Roundup Ready crops were introduced in 1996. And

roundup is not exactly good for people or the environment.

Glyphosate can leak into soil and surrounding water affecting wild plants

and animals, which ultimately can hurt the food chain. And recently the World

Health Organization has declared roundup to be probably carcinogenic, after years

of debate around this point. Other research points to its possible effect

on mitochondrial and brain function and animal models. This research is still

being carried out and there's increasing concern about the chemical combinations

used in commercial weed killers and their long-term impacts especially for

the people using it every day. And right now Monsanto is embroiled in lawsuits

with people alleging that Roundup caused their cancer. A jury in California just

awarded a couple two billion dollars in a verdict against Monsanto which is the

third in a string of recent court decisions involving claims that the

company's Roundup weedkiller caused their cancer. And while a jury is not a

scientific panel of experts and there's much debate around the truth of these

cancer claims, the money was awarded on the basis that Monsanto manipulated its

own research, colluded with regulators, and

intimidated scientists to keep secret the cancer risks of glyphosate. We could

make a whole video just about the shady business practices of Monsanto, so it is

not implausible to think that Monsanto is capable of something like this. So as

we can see this is a nuanced conversation and any doubt people may

have about this hugely complicated subject can easily be exploited. Pew Polls

have found that some 49% of US adults surveyed said that foods with GM

ingredients were worse for one's health up from 39% just two years ago. Another

Pew poll published in 2015 found the biggest gap between the public

and the experts on the GMO issue that on any other area of science controversy,

including vaccines, climate change, and nuclear power. And to make things worse

evidence has emerged that Russian bots and trolls have been making great

efforts to spread anti GMO memes among Western audiences in order to undermine

public trust in science. Yes we should criticize Monsanto and similar large

corporations for shady and damaging business practices of which there are

many. Yes we should question what role GMOs should play in our world and study

the effects rigorously. But to say GMOs are harmful is like saying the Internet

is harmful. Yes it can be used in harmful ways but it also has the potential to do

absolutely wonderful things for millions of people. To oppose GMOs unequivocally

as so many do is simplistic and misguided. Ireland's push to prohibit the

cultivation of genetically modified crops for example is completely at odds

with the country's ambitions for climate action, and it is deceitful to equate GMO

cultivation free status with green and sustainable. Gene edited crops have the

potential to cut climate emissions in agriculture and reduce harmful chemicals

in the environment as long as they are regulated properly. A recent report

highlighted how Ireland is ranked second worst in the EU for tackling climate

change and will not meet its EU 2020 commitments. Yet the push to blanket ban

GMOs continues as Ireland turns away from a major tool in the toolbox to help

tackle this problem. And if such politicians had any sense of irony they

might take a look at the people across the world

from vitamin A deficiency or the crops failing year after year because of

drought in East Africa and see the parallels between what is happening

there and their own country's history. But instead their moral posturing will

add to the increasing tide of voices drowning out sensible conversation about

this technology. Like plant geneticist Pamela Ronald has said, what scares me

most with the loud arguments and misinformation about plant genetics is