GMO Tobacco/No Nicotine

[Sgetz]

Genesis 1:29​

My brain and common sense tells me God knew what he was doing and genetically modified plants are not natural. I stay away from GMO foods as much as I can. If I see it on a lable I avoid it. I would not smoke GMO tobacco if I knew it was GMO.

The bible is a human modified virus infecting civilization. Quoted when it suits. Ignored when it doesn't suit

 

[blueeyedogre]

I want the nicotine, but if they could remove the tars and carcinogenic stuff, I would try it.

That's exactly where my head went. Why remove the nicotine and not the tar which I always thought was the harmful stuff?

 

[Epip Oc'Cabot]

In regards to GMO food items, while much of the fear is due to the lack of knowing how and why the GMO process is being used, and while it is also true we as a species have been altering genetics through selective breeding of crops for hundreds and hundreds of years…. IMO there is actual value in GMO crops regarding producing food for the masses of folks we have. It does improve efficiency significantly.

However, there are TWO aspects of the GMO debate that I do find quite troublesome:

1) Many (most) commercial applications of the GMO process are designed to improve a crops ability to grow and flourish in an environment that is heavily saturated with pesticides/herbicides that kill virtually all other competitive plants. This improves success and yield….. BUT it also increases the amount of pesticides/herbicides in the environment and also IN THE FOOD we eat relative to these crops. We ARE NOT genetically modified to safely consume these pesticide and herbicide residues and they impact our health and wellness in terms of endocrine health and also many pesticides and herbicides are carcinogenic.

2) Modern techniques to produce many GMO crops involves CRISPR technologies and other methods of gene splicing. While these processes are scientifically remarkable….. they have two troublesome aspects….a) they are moving genes around in ways not really possible through selective breeding and may exert impacts on the genome of a crop in ways we do not understand or anticipate….. and b) a gene sequence that is spliced in has a KNOWN role that was discovered through science…. BUT, a truism of biology is that a gene sequence can AND usually DOES exert multiple effects on a cell. Whatever we splice into the genome of a GMO plant will have the KNOWN effect but there can and likely will be OTHER effects that happen as well, many of which we may not discover until a significant amount of time has passed.

The THALIDOMIDE medication tragedy (if you do not know it, it is easy to find with using that word in a search engine) is a CHEMISTRY based correlate to the GMO issue. Thalidomide was chemically developed in the lab and became a medication to help pregnant women who were having “difficult” pregnancies. It was presumed safe, but unfortunately it resulted in thousands of children being born with severe limb anomalies and a variety of other developmental issues…. never anticipated by the chemists who developed the medication.

 

[elvishrunes]

One more reason to boost your cellar.

 

[FLDRD]

No.
But not because I have to have nicotine.
Like others have said, I don't trust the unintended consequences of those trying to play god.

 

[Epip Oc'Cabot]

I replied earlier about my opinions broadly about GMO life forms.

But in regards to no nicotine pipe tobacco….. I might try it at least one time, but I tend to think it would be rather dull or uninspired for me. I do enjoy pipe tobacco flavors, but I also do enjoy nicotine. Pipe tobacco without nicotine would be akin to me of a cherry pie minus the crust, or a hotdog without the bun, or a non-alcoholic beer….. each can be “acceptable” but, for me would be incomplete….. hot cherry pie filling, just a plain sausage, or fuzzy, rather bland soda. The same would be the same for me with nicotine free pipe tobacco….. incomplete…. perhaps “acceptable” but now what it can and could be.

 

[andrew]

If it tasted exactly like how it is, same feel, like you could not tell the difference yes I would smoke it. I enjoy the ritual of smoking and i don't do it that often anymore. Probably as my child gets older I'll have time, but I get a bowl in maybe twice a week now, used to be daily

 

[Old_Newby]

All I know is that changes made to crops are not for taste but to make them productive, resistant to disease and pests, or to grow faster. This has resulted in a tomato being as crunchy as a apple and a sweet potato tasting like a plantain. This is why the government has saved heirloom seeds and non GMO seeds for the future if needed. I understand the need to feed the world at lower cost but we have lost flavor in many of or foods. My dad talked about it a lot. I can remember foods tasting better when I was younger (70’s). Natural modifications by nature are for survival but are usually moving the crop towards tasting better so animals will better propagate and spread the plant. Only human modifications make the food taste worse. Populations have accepted the taste changes and younger people have no idea what the original food actually tasted like. It is similar but dulled or weaker flavor.

I hear all the time about how McClellan was so good and they went out of business because if they could not acquire the high quality tobacco for a quality product they wont do it. I know nothing of tobacco history, but I bet some of the reason our blends sweetness have trended down, or flavor was better 20+ years ago, is because of genetic modifications, along with greed (mixing the good stuff to sell the bad stuff), and thus we are all destined to accept less flavor or start our own non-GMO organic farm, which is happening more today.

 

[stearmandriver]

I'm sorry but you're simply incorrect.

This is an old resurrected thread, so a context review is in order before I respond: I was explaining that almost nothing humans eat today is a result of natural selection, but it has in fact all been genetically modified by us, via hybridization / selective breeding, mutagenesis, now transgenic processes etc. FL said I was simply incorrect about that. Let me offer one simple, visual example.

Both of these photos show corncobs. One is in my palm, for scale. You'll note that these cobs are quite small compared to what we know as corn today. That's because they're almost 1,000 years old, found in an ancient Ancestral Puebloan granary on a cliff in northern Arizona.

These folks were farmers. This tradition of cultivating maize had moved up from Central America over the previous few thousand years, and naturally they were always working towards bigger yields.

Compare these cobs to the corn we have 1,000 years later. Then, compare it to the head of a mountain varietal teosinte plant - the grass that corn came from.

These cobs are roughly halfway in size between teosinte and modern corn. That's genetic modification in action; hard to think of a clearer example.

Basically ALL of our food chain today has been genetically modified, one way or another.

 

[Pipe_Guard]

look, if GMO crops were so wonderful for the environment, why have they been linked as the biggest cause of the massive decline in the homely honey bee?

 

[stearmandriver]

look, if GMO crops were so wonderful for the environment, why have they been linked as the biggest cause of the massive decline in the homely honey bee?

They definitely aren't. I've been keeping bees for a while.

The problem that they CAN create is over spray of gluphosate on Roundup ready crops tends to kill roadside weeds. This affects the butterflies more than the honey bees. It also doesn't happen all that often because, well, do you know anyone who actually makes a living as a farmer? It's not the easiest life and wasting any resource is not that helpful, so they tend not to.

The honey bee struggles are all about varroa mites and the diseases they spread. There's no data linking anything to do with agriculture to honey bee decline.

 

[FLDRD]

This is an old resurrected thread, so a context review is in order before I respond: I was explaining that almost nothing humans eat today is a result of natural selection, but it has in fact all been genetically modified by us, via hybridization / selective breeding, mutagenesis, now transgenic processes etc. FL said I was simply incorrect about that. Let me offer one simple, visual example.

Both of these photos show corncobs. One is in my palm, for scale. You'll note that these cobs are quite small compared to what we know as corn today. That's because they're almost 1,000 years old, found in an ancient Ancestral Puebloan granary on a cliff in northern Arizona.

These folks were farmers. This tradition of cultivating maize had moved up from Central America over the previous few thousand years, and naturally they were always working towards bigger yields.

Compare these cobs to the corn we have 1,000 years later. Then, compare it to the head of a mountain varietal teosinte plant - the grass that corn came from.

These cobs are roughly halfway in size between teosinte and modern corn. That's genetic modification in action; hard to think of a clearer example.

Basically ALL of our food chain today has been genetically modified, one way or another.

Genetic modification is far different than selective breeding.
My definition of "genetic modification" is inclusive of only very modern technologies.
Genetic modification utilizing technologies such as CRISPR is very new.
Thankfully, I do NOT eat mostly genetically modified food.
It is still relative easy to do so if you pay attention.
If I find a food product that doesn't produce in the manner I prefer, I choose a different variety.
That creates a very interesting selective bias for any particular region.

 

[stearmandriver]

My definition of "genetic modification" is inclusive of only very modern technologies.

That's an inaccurate definition, is the point. Any technique for modifying the traits of an organism is genetic modification, because the genetic material is where all these traits are encoded. Take corn again: whether you selectively breed it over thousands of generations for bigger cobs, or you transgenically modify it using CRISPR or similar technology, the resulting organism is exactly the same, with the exact same genetic structure. You've gotten your larger cobs and that trait is encoded in the genome. No one studying the corn afterwards would have any way to tell what technique had been used to produce it.

Genetic modification is far different than selective breeding.

Nossir. Selective breeding is a TYPE of genetic modification; one way of many to do it. There are vegetable varietals that can even be grown and labeled as organic that were developed using mutagenesis - bombarding the plants with ionizing radiation to induce genetic mutations at a much faster rate than average, just to speed the process up. Keep making mutants and eventually you'll get one you want; say, a corn with much larger cobs. Obviously that's genetic modification as well, and it will not be labeled "GMO" and can even be labeled organic. You've eaten plenty of these varieties of vegetables (you don't eat the actual irradiated plant of course, just its offspring).

Transgenic tech has basically been labeled a boogeyman due to a lack of understanding.

 

[fireground_piper]

That's an inaccurate definition, is the point. Any technique for modifying the traits of an organism is genetic modification, because the genetic material is where all these traits are encoded. Take corn again: whether you selectively breed it over thousands of generations for bigger cobs, or you transgenically modify it using CRISPR or similar technology, the resulting organism is exactly the same, with the exact same genetic structure. You've gotten your larger cobs and that trait is encoded in the genome. No one studying the corn afterwards would have any way to tell what technique had been used to produce it.

An odd hill to hold firm on. I think it's pretty fair use to consider the term "GMO" in a popular setting to be discussing lab intervention. At least in the USA, from the FDA:

The National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard defines bioengineered foods as those that contain detectable genetic material that has been modified through certain lab techniques and cannot be created through conventional breeding or found in nature.

 

[Epip Oc'Cabot]

That's an inaccurate definition, is the point. Any technique for modifying the traits of an organism is genetic modification, because the genetic material is where all these traits are encoded. Take corn again: whether you selectively breed it over thousands of generations for bigger cobs, or you transgenically modify it using CRISPR or similar technology, the resulting organism is exactly the same, with the exact same genetic structure. You've gotten your larger cobs and that trait is encoded in the genome. No one studying the corn afterwards would have any way to tell what technique had been used to produce it.



Nossir. Selective breeding is a TYPE of genetic modification; one way of many to do it. There are vegetable varietals that can even be grown and labeled as organic that were developed using mutagenesis - bombarding the plants with ionizing radiation to induce genetic mutations at a much faster rate than average, just to speed the process up. Keep making mutants and eventually you'll get one you want; say, a corn with much larger cobs. Obviously that's genetic modification as well, and it will not be labeled "GMO" and can even be labeled organic. You've eaten plenty of these varieties of vegetables (you don't eat the actual irradiated plant of course, just its offspring).

Transgenic tech has basically been labeled a boogeyman due to a lack of understanding.

“Transgenic tech has basically been labeled a boogeyman…”

What you have said is true, but it is incomplete. Selective breeding and even mutagenesis through irradiation both retain the original organism’s DNA (albeit modified in the irradiation example). What transgenic tech does, however, is to introduce new genes from some other source (typically another species) and with current CRISPR technology, not ONLY a “desired” gene is transferred, but nearby genes as well. The risk is a) the neighboring genes may exert impact on the newly created genome that can be unpredictable, and b) even the “desired” gene can exert MULTIPLE effects, some of which may not yet be known and may potentially be undesirable.

IMO, the state of CRISPR technology is great in the LABORATORY for study and understanding to learn more about how genes function, but the “boogeyman” association of the technology when applied to real world applications (typically mostly to increase commercial profits) IS apt, because it is indeed rather risky and needs to be applied IMO much more cautiously and REGULATED than the use we currently have.

Right now commercial CRISPR use is akin to close to a “no laws - wild, wild West” scenario…. which I believe could end badly. IMO, the biotech use commercially needs to be carefully regulated and monitored for human safety.

 

[Boko_Fittleworth]

@Epip Oc'Cabot
Agreed. The law of unintended consquences is harsh and I think we are seeing the effects of it with respect to transgenic foods (genes from different species spliced in) all the time. It would explain the exponential rise of food allergies that i have seen in my 50 odd years.

 

[Pipe_Guard]

@Epip Oc'Cabot
Agreed. The law of unintended consquences is harsh and I think we are seeing the effects of it with respect to transgenic foods (genes from different species spliced in) all the time. It would explain the exponential rise of food allergies that i have seen in my 50 odd years.

And it will also result in major devestation.

We have become inundated with food crops that are only grown because they are resistant to a specific pesticide, that has actual been becoming ineffective in the last 20 years.

We dont want to fuck with tobacco, as its part of a major plant family that includes the POTATO. Look what would happen if you kill the potato off.

 

[Briarcutter]

No way would I smoke it.

 

[stearmandriver]

“Transgenic tech has basically been labeled a boogeyman…”

What you have said is true, but it is incomplete. Selective breeding and even mutagenesis through irradiation both retain the original organism’s DNA (albeit modified in the irradiation example). What transgenic tech does, however, is to introduce new genes from some other source (typically another species) and with current CRISPR technology, not ONLY a “desired” gene is transferred, but nearby genes as well. The risk is a) the neighboring genes may exert impact on the newly created genome that can be unpredictable, and b) even the “desired” gene can exert MULTIPLE effects, some of which may not yet be known and may potentially be undesirable.

IMO, the state of CRISPR technology is great in the LABORATORY for study and understanding to learn more about how genes function, but the “boogeyman” association of the technology when applied to real world applications (typically mostly to increase commercial profits) IS apt, because it is indeed rather risky and needs to be applied IMO much more cautiously and REGULATED than the use we currently have.

Right now commercial CRISPR use is akin to close to a “no laws - wild, wild West” scenario…. which I believe could end badly. IMO, the biotech use commercially needs to be carefully regulated and monitored for human safety.

But the resulting organism, if it has the desired traits, has the very same genetic structure as if that trait were achieved via hybridization. Right?

There is no fundamental difference in genetic material between a human being and a potato, is there? Just the order in which it's put together. It's all the same nucleotides.

So what difference does it make where they come from? It's like saying distilled water from the Pacific is different than distilled water from lake Superior. Same water .

That's what I mean about a lack of understanding. People have this *feeling* that an organism modified in one way is somehow different than an organism modified in another, when the results are exactly the same.

 

[elvishrunes]

That's an inaccurate definition, is the point. Any technique for modifying the traits of an organism is genetic modification, because the genetic material is where all these traits are encoded. Take corn again: whether you selectively breed it over thousands of generations for bigger cobs, or you transgenically modify it using CRISPR or similar technology, the resulting organism is exactly the same, with the exact same genetic structure. You've gotten your larger cobs and that trait is encoded in the genome. No one studying the corn afterwards would have any way to tell what technique had been used to produce it.



Nossir. Selective breeding is a TYPE of genetic modification; one way of many to do it. There are vegetable varietals that can even be grown and labeled as organic that were developed using mutagenesis - bombarding the plants with ionizing radiation to induce genetic mutations at a much faster rate than average, just to speed the process up. Keep making mutants and eventually you'll get one you want; say, a corn with much larger cobs. Obviously that's genetic modification as well, and it will not be labeled "GMO" and can even be labeled organic. You've eaten plenty of these varieties of vegetables (you don't eat the actual irradiated plant of course, just its offspring).

Transgenic tech has basically been labeled a boogeyman due to a lack of understanding.

Not trying to pile on, but you’re just repeating standard industry talking points, and bad ones too….

To think you get the same results selectively breeding for 1000s of generations with all the different weather, sunlight, climate and soil adaptations as altering the genes in a lab is just plain lacking common sense. You probably think fake flavours taste as good as real, or you can just add a chemical to whisky instead of aging it in wood in warehouses with different weather for years, and it will taste the same. They are trying to find this chemical btw, that’s why I mentioned it.

Also selective breeding happens naturally when cops are combined, GMOs do not are inserted in labs.

As for roundup a quick google search will tell you it’s up 300X in the last 50 years and most of that is the last 25yrs. GMO resistant crops like beets, corn, and soy can take huge doses of it, guess where it ends up, in their tissue our food or killing soil biology. It’s funny Bayer/Monsanto owns the patents(not all anymore but some) and also sells the seed?

hmm…