power point!
Visuals are good, and they can help keep you on track. You look at the picture and go...oh yeah, I'm supposed to be saying THIS now.
Throw in some humor. Like I pass a sign for a cow crossing and it has been modified by the anti GMO poeple to have 2 heads!!! Something like that would evoke humor, and show how silly this issue is.
That's a good idea, thanks. I'll see if there's a projector I can use, but I wouldn't want to "demand" too much for just a short lecture.
Hopefully I'll get to show some of those activists dressed up as rabid vampire corn holding up "FRANKENFOOD!!!" signs. I never know whether to laugh or cry when I see those.
Did you see the Penn and Teller show about GMOs? Or food in general I think? They did the whole thing on the man that modified food and has saved millions of lives (less starvation). Good points, and kept your interest.
Yep. I think I'm going to talk a lot about this, since I hope to eventually do some Norman Borlaug-esque work.
The best point I can make is that rich nations can afford organic food (which costs a LOT). Poor, it's better to have a GM food that requires less expensive and environmentally bad fertilizers and pesticides, than to go organic!
Then again, GMOs generally result in a significant decrease in pesticide use, and the Bt crops use (surprise) Bt, an organic pesticide which is harmless to humans.
So you should present it not just as science...but as a social issue also. It doesn't have to be pure scienc does it? Good discussion point there!
I'm actually supposed to present it only as a social issue, since it's a humanities course. Of course, I'm going to try to back up the things I say with scientific studies, since undoubtedly, a lot of the concerns involve the science behind it.
This sounds cynical, but sex sells. And if you can't work sex into a biology talk, you may be in the wrong business.
Ultimately, the organism likely to be genetically modified most is mankind.
That may be too future fictionish for the talk though.
Hmm...I could talk about cross-pollination...
I don't think I'll end up talking about modifying humans, though...it's not my area of knowledge, and I doubt it's what the teacher is hoping for.
I don't think he "modified food" as much as he went to the places (Mexico, India and some place in Africa was it?), looked at how farming was done there and found ways to improve it (in fact, IIRC, he didn't use any molecular recombinant techniques as the technology was not available at the time). That the guy was in favor of GM food (as one more tool to help alleviate world hunger) was Penn & Teller's point.
His main contribution was to present people with higher-yielding crops. He didn't make them through recombinant techniques; he just used hybridisation and various other methods. However, the main point of the story is that he was able to save up to a billion lives by increasing the yield of farms. This is exactly what most GM crops are doing, but it's a much more efficient way of doing it. (When I say GM crops are higher yielding, I'm talking mostly about Bt crops - Roundup Ready crops, and other herbicide tolerant crops are generally meant to lower the input costs).
I think that was P&T's main point in bringing him up, though I think they could have explained it a bit better.
Well, that's just the standard sales pitch. One of the contention about GM food is that it is usually (there are a few exceptions) developped in rich nations with the local agricultural industry in mind. Those "improvements" are not necessarily of any use for other starving countries where agriculture is not heavily subsidized or mechanized. Roundup ready wheat and strawberries that are resistent to freeze aren't of much use in Sub-Saharan Africa.
I know you're not trying to start an argument here, but refuting these claims will help me.
The varieties of GM crops produced are generally specific to the targetted buyers. The Roundup Ready (RR) crops that go to a farmer in Kansas won't go to farmers in Ghana. But the most important thing to realize is that regardless of what crops they get, they certainly seem to be making a difference.
In Africa, pests and diseases have accounted for about 30% of the yield losses (Vasil, I.K. (1998). Plant biotechnology: achievements and opportunities at the threshold of the 21st century. Paper presented at the
IX International Congress on Plant Tissue and Cell Culture, Jerusalem, Israel). Bt crops provide a clear solution to this, and we can see the results. A recent trial in India found average yields up to 80% higher than conventional breeds in 2002 (Quaim. M., Zilberman, D. 2003. Yield effects of genetically modified crops in developing countries. Science (U.S.), 299, 900-902. In a 2004 ISAAA study of Bt corn, some of the results included a 10% yield gain in Argentina and South Africa, 24% in Brazil, 9 to 23% in China, and 41% in the Philippines. Compare that to the 5% increase in the US. (James, C. 2004. Wider adoption of biotech corn in developing world could boost yields. ISAAA (U.S./Philippines).
I'm not cherry-picking reports, either. These were the first few reports I came across when I looked up yield studies, and there are plenty more I can list.
Another standard argument against the effectiveness of GM food as a way to alleviate world hunger is that the problem is not of quantity of food but distribution and hence not an issue of agriculture as much as of world politics and economy.
This is true at the moment, though I usually counter that by pointing out the projected population of 9 billion in the near future, and the fact that almost all of that growth is expected to occur in the poorest countries.
And that is without going into the ecological issues. Everyone agrees less pesticides and less fertilizers is a good thing. But techniques that only address these issues might not be enough to offset the detrimental effects of, say, large scale monocultures and megasized hog farms on the environment.
That's true, though I don't think GMOs contribute much to the possibility of large scale monoculture and megasized hog farms.
Now, I'm certainly not saying that molecular recombinant technology is a bad thing in an of itself, but just that it might just not live up to all of its promises. You have to look into what's actually being done and how it's done, rather than reject of accept it wholesale. That being said, I can't find good ham around here. Ontario doesn't know anything about good food.
Yeah. One of the things I try to advocate is a case-by-case analysis of GM crops, rather than a complete dismissal based on a few examples. Even if contamination of the wild turns out to be a major threat, it doesn't limit crops like wheat, which can't grow in the wild, or banana trees, which are infertile.
Anyway, thanks for your concerns; it's helpful to know what people disapprove of.
