Non-GMO Food is more Beneficial to Society than GMO Food

Sorry if any of this seems irrelevant to your argument. I am very rushed. I. GMOs Make Better Crops I. A. Disease Resistance While most disease-protected crops do not produce viral proteins, in cases where they do, the safety of the protein has been established. Take, for example, the crop my opponent cites, Hawaiian Papaya: "Reassuringly, we know that exposure of humans to the PRV proteins is safe because the virus is widespread and many people over many decades have eaten papaya containing PRV without ill effect. Mild variants of PRV have even been deliberately used to protect papaya against more damaging viruses, and such virus-infected fruits also have been eaten without ill effect. Similar live virus protection of citrus fruits is used in Brazil without any harm to humans. "[1][2] "Overall, there is simply no scientific reason to believe that disease-protected crops will be harmful. They expose us to fewer viral nucleic acids and proteins than would otherwise have been the case. They are assessed for safety prior to regulatory approval. They have been used in agriculture for decades with no reports of adverse effects. "[1][3] I. B. Cold Tolerance Just because the supposed link between the use of NPK1 and increased cold toleration is unclear, that is no reason to believe that inserting that gene will not work. My opponent's source even cites that it does: "To investigate the effect of NPK1 on maize plant survival at temperatures ranging from cold to sub-freezing that normally damages the maize plants Wang and her colleagues introduced a fragment of the tobacco derived NPK1 gene into maize. The tests demonstrated that maize plants containing NPK1 survived longer at low temperatures than maize plants lacking NPK1. Furthermore, introducing NPK1 in maize did not affect the growth of maize. "[4] Also, take a test done on atlantic salmon with the modifications GH and AFP. The results were: "Enhanced growth and increased tolerance to cold. " Similar tests have repeated the same conclusion. [5] I. C. Drought Tolerance Take the extreme drought in the American Midwest last year. GMOs helped increase food production at that trying time: "Last year, yields of AQUAmax corn were observed 8,000 times, with 680 of those considered to be in a stressed environment. AQUAmax yields were 7 percent higher in the stressed environments compared to conventional hybrids. "[6] Numerous other studies have indicated the same thing - that GMO crops increase crop yields in drought times. I. D. Improved Nutrition My opponent has, for this entire debate, been treating GMOs as some sort of poison. He forgets that it is just a simple change in DNA: "So if miRNAs are dangerous " guess what? " you"re already ingesting them every time you eat. And, to get a little gross, let"s be clear: when we eat something, we don"t just ingest the miRNAs from the species we intentionally eat. Did you know, for example, that foods you eat are allowed to contain mold, hair, insect parts, and even rat poop? All of those bits of organisms which we inadvertently eat have DNA, and " you guessed it! " miRNAs, too. If miRNAs are so dangerous, we would never have been able to eat anything previously alive in the first place. "[7][8] "Even though we are eating microbes, their genes, and their gene products on a grand scale, it is almost never a problem. In fact, some of these microbes go on to become part of our own bank of bacteria etc. that live within our digestive system " often to our benefit. "[9][10] In addition to this, GMOs have actually been found to be beneficial to human health. Again, GMO foods just require a simple change in miRNA. There is no major problems with GMO foods, or vitamins and minerals they are lacking. And on the arsenic, by opponent even admits that GMOs reduce arsenic poisoning, but relies on an irrelevant argument to try to refute my point. I. E. Biopharmacuticals My opponent does not refute my point here at all, but to simply reaffirm my point, here is a small sample of what biopharmacuticals can do: "Erythropoietin - Treatment of anaemia Interferon-^5; - Treatment of leukaemia Interferon-^6; - Treatment of multiple sclerosis Monoclonal antibody - Treatment of rheumatoid arthritis Colony stimulating factors - Treatment of neutropenia Glucocerebrosidase - Treatment of Gaucher's disease"[11] Overall, GMOs benefit society here because they make the transportation of vaccines and medicine easier through the transport of crops. II. GMOs Help the Environment Actually, from that very study: "Last summer a team of scientists reported in the prestigious journal, Nature, that widespread planting of Bt cotton in China drastically reduced the spraying of synthetic chemicals, [and] increased the abundance of beneficial organisms. .. "[17] "On the "weed" problem, there are several solutions. Two ways to ensure that non-target species will not receive introduced genes from GM plants are to create GM plants that are male sterile (do not produce pollen) or to modify the GM plant so that the pollen does not contain the introduced gene. Cross-pollination would not occur, and if harmless insects such as monarch caterpillars were to eat pollen from GM plants, the caterpillars would survive. Another involves creating buffer zones around areas of GMO crops. "[13][14][15] Conclusion "On balance, the positives of GM crops seem to vastly outweigh the negatives. A recent 20-year study published in Nature found that GM crops helped a beneficial insect ecosystem to thrive and migrate into surrounding fields. "[16] "It would be unwise of us not to choose genetic technologies simply because we do not have sufficient information " these technologies have the potential to contribute to meeting the challenges facing us in terms of the climate and the environment as well as in questions of sufficient food supply". "[17] Sources [1]: . http://academicsreview.org... [2]: Fuchs M and Gonsalves D (2007). Safety of virus-resistant transgenic plants two decades after their introduction: Lessons from realistic field risk assessment studies. Annu. Rev. Phytopathol. 2007. 45: pp. 173"202. [3]: Hardwick NV, Davies JML and Wright DM (1994). The incidence of three virus diseases of winter oilseed rape in England and Wales in the 1991/02 and 1992/93 growing season. Plant Pathol. 43: pp. 1045"49. Cauliflower mosaic virus is as common as cabbage. [4]: . http://www.truthabouttrade.org... [5]: . http://www.fao.org... [6]: . http://www.scientificamerican.com... [7]: . http://blogs.scientificamerican.com... [8]: . http://www.science20.com... [9]: . http://www.policymic.com... [10]: . http://www.biofortified.org... [11]: . http://en.wikipedia.org... [12]: . http://www.guardian.co.uk... [13]: . http://www.csa.com... [14]: New tools for chloroplast genetic engineering (Nature Biotechnology, Vol 17, No 9, pp 855-856, Sep 1999). [15]: . http://www.enn.com... [16]: . http://www.slate.com... [17]: . http://www.isaaa.org...