Hello,

It’s not a new topic to discuss but it is a remaining… no, not a problem, rather a topic to clarify. Answer to yourself to these questions:

1. Do you eat DNA at your breakfast?

2. Can scientist make a transgenic water?

3. What does GMO mean?

4. Does GM adjective apply only to food products?

5. Where can you find GMO? Name two “things”?

Was it easy? I know that if I weren’t close to biotechnology or biology at all I would hesitate or simply didn’t know the answers to the above questions.

The problem in my opinion isn’t that people aren’t smart enough but that people are not educated enough. This I think is a fault of several factors. Firstly, science is being shown in too complicated way to the people which often discourages them from gaining more information. If we don’t know something it is natural that we are suspicious and afraid of it.

Moreover public discussion about GMOs has involved ecologists, huge companies and politicians to engage in more a fight then a talk. Because there are big money behind it, because it is something which can help in your campaign, because there are some unanswered questions etc. This brings a huge mess and makes it almost impossible to find any objective information. So forth we stay un-enlightened and afraid 🙁

I don’t want to tell everything about GMO as this is impossible and any attempt would make this post gigantic. If you are interested to read more please see an article on our InfoPool.

What I think people usually miss discussing GMOs and is worth to say is that, agree, we are not sure certain of the very long term effect of eating GM food, but we already know what is the effect of pesticides and herbicides used to protect natural plants, whereas not needed for GM crops. Pesticides and herbicides stay in ground and are turned to xenobiotics, a chemical substances that are not degradable in environment but stay there and go into plants, animals and finally to us. And we know what they do. Cancer is least to say…

I almost forgot about my questions…
1. YES, DNA is present in all living organisms, including fruits, vegetables, crops, coffee grains, meat etc. Moreover we need to eat it as after we digest it we use it’s particles to build our own DNA.
2. NO, water is dead ;), H2O plus some minerals mixed in it to make the water we drink from bottles or tap.
3. It’s an abbreviation of Genetically Modified Organisms.
4. NO, for example huge world’s plantations of cotton are also transgenic, so technically a T-shirt made of it is also a GM product.
5. Currently, most of world soya crops are transgenic so forth you can be 90% positive that anything with soya you buy is GM; a large variety of food additions comes from GM plants, i.e. sucrose which is added to sorts of candies like bars which comes from plants modified to produce more sucrose of better quality; mentioned imported T-shirts etc.

Anyway, I encourage you to gather information and wider your knowledge and make your decisions on your own and not as a result of what someone scaring you or blinding you with science. BTW – my intention was not to do the last mentioned thing so if you have any questions I encourage you to contact me so that I can answer all your doubts or questions 🙂

Regards,
Piotrek