Agricultural Biotechnology Quotes

Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?

I support GMOs. And we should label them. We should label them because that is the very best thing we can do for public acceptance of agricultural biotech. And we should label them because there's absolutely nothing to hide.

So GMOs, who knows? Maybe GMOs will come, they will get maize that produces double. But who knows what else may happen to the maize?

All the food we eat, whether Brussels sprouts or pork bellies, has been modified by mankind. Genetic engineering is only one particularly powerful way to do what we have been doing for eleven thousand years.

Middle-income countries are the biggest users of GMOs. Places like Brazil.

The fact is that humans have been shaping the genetics of what they eat for thousands of years. Genetic engineering simply speeds up the process that used to take generations. Preventing people from getting things like golden rice or disease-resistant cassava destroys human life, and does not spare the environment in any way.

If the Americans like to eat GMO products, let them eat it then. We don't need to do that; we have enough space and opportunities to produce organic food.

In future, lots of things will be made from beans and fibres grown on the farmers' fields. This new science is called chemurgy. Plastics, for industry, will come from the soil.

Unless there is one master gene for yield, which I'm guessing there is not, engineering for yield will be very complex. It may happen eventually, but through the coming decades, we must assume that gene engineering will not be the answer to the world's food problems.

When the correct tests are done, GM products are as safe as their non-GM counterparts.

Europe believes that providing clear labelling for genetically modified food is a consumer right, but such practice is absolutely opposed by the vast majority of states in the U.S.

What gets me pretty pissed off is the whole Monsanto engineered foods issue.

If you read Wall Street’s reports, they don’t talk of soya bean as originating in China. They don’t talk of soya bean as soya bean. They talk of Monsanto soya. Monsanto soya is protected by a patent. It has a patent number. It is therefore treated as a creation of Monsanto, a product of Monsanto’s intelligence and innovation.

We manipulate nature as if we were stuffing an Alsatian goose. We create new forms of energy; we make new elements; we kill crops; we wash brains. I can hear them in the dark sharpening their lasers.

If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can pray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn.

The corn that is B something 5 corn thats been genetically altered in the United States, it cant reproduce but it has huge kernels, its very sweet and its wonderful but the winds have blown this across into Mexico. And so the Mexican corn is being infected with the inability to reproduce.