The Eyes of Nye - Genetically Modified Foods

of Sperry H Goodman about 10,000 years ago people found that they didn't have to chase their food around all that they could grow it right there where they were it's called farming never since then we've been trying to control plants and animals for three good reasons breakfast lunch and dinner now how many cows do you think you'd see if they've never been domesticated by humans you ever seen a cow out in the wild fighting for its life you think chickens will one day rise up and take over the world no I don't think so somewhere back in time thousands and thousands of years ago beating ourselves change from a little luck a lot of science we've been trying to improve that science ever since haven't we ladies in the United States grocery shelves are filled with genetically modified food take a look at this corn no blemishes not a kernel out of place only in America right well not exactly in Europe if a food is genetically modified it has to be labeled as such now why is that is there something to be afraid of well that's a good question and one that's probably not asked often enough we're getting more and more genetically modified food faster and faster what is it do we need it is it safe well let's have a look [Music] the eye do you eat genetically modified food I don't know do I you read corn yeah corns on the US now it's almost all my farm I just thought corn girls if they can eat it what if I told you we could put a gene from a fish into a tomato and it keeps them from freezing would you eat that tomato probably not no why do you say that cuz it's fishy to me fishings feels kind of weird but if I didn't know I would probably eat it anyway does it bother you I think it bothers me that were accepted beyond normal boundaries but I guess the food content and stuff that you're eating is probably the same I'm hoping that they're doing it for the better of the you know for my health or for for it to be edible for me if it's gonna affect me as a human my body my system then it's bad as hell every living thing contains DNA which includes chromosomes and genes now genes provide the instructions to build a living thing if you change one of the genes you rewrite one of the instructions so instead of Bill Nye the brown-eyed guy you'd get Bill Nye with blue eyes some people think that would be a distinct improvement but when we genetically modify our food say by taking a gene from a fish and putting it in a tomato we're creating a whole new species one that's never existed on earth before so some would say you've created a monster a frankenfood others would say no it's still a fruit or a vegetable I'm just making my lunch [Music] we're outside of Pullman Washington in wheat fields that we use for breeding [Music] breeding wheat breeding wheat wheat has been grown in an organized way for probably about 10,000 years and the farmers in those 10,000 years improved the weed a little bit each generation are you trying to make wheat that that will grow every year wheat has a large gene base that we can work with so a lot of wild relatives of wheat are available many of those are perennials so they don't die each year and we can make a cross between these perennial wild relatives and normal or domestically the annual weeds and produce lines that don't die each year so how do we make a hybrid the first step in making a hybrid or a cross is to emasculate and and what we mean by emasculate is to pull out the male parts of the flower owch owch and we're taking the male parts out of the wheat flour and turning it into a female so with then do you do dozens or hundreds of plants at a time over a year we do hundreds or thousands of crosses all gone you buy here all done by hand manually go in with tweezers pull out the anthers introduce pollen from another plant you have a hybrid seed you grow that and you produce a new variety of weed it takes years and years takes many years so it takes a season just to get the hybrid because you'll take that seed and plant that out the next year it'll take a year to get that progeny and it'll take 15 years or so to get a variety do you domesticated we take this wild week to be your lawfully-wedded hybrid see breeding food crops is a lot like a marriage or a wedding a shotgun wedding cuz the wheat doesn't have much say in the matter but traditional breeding of food crops takes plenty of human intervention agricultural scientists have been tinkering with our food for centuries that's why most of the food you eat cannot be found in nature so watermelon tomatoes plums and corn bear little resemblance to their original natural species but now scientists can take it another step they can get rid of this wedding ceremony all together and mix genes from species that are hardly related at all so how does that go something old something new something borrowed and something there's nothing blue hey kids how about some broccoli for dinner yes you heard right it used to be broccoli with always left on the plate that's before I discover to Santos new it has all the vitamin and mineral goodness of regular broccoli but now it's been genetically engineered to taste like cherry Kiwi a new Cola flavor and it stays fresh in your refrigerator for months because they've added the gene of a special mushroom a mushroom that has a vital nutrient what kind of mushroom new broccoli all of the goodness none of the broccoli this is an organically grown papaya a tropical fruit this particular one is infected with the very common ringspot virus now people eat papayas like this all the time this is a papaya that's been genetically modified so it has a tiny piece of the DNA from that very same ringspot virus embedded in its DNA it's immune or resistant to ringspot infection so which one do you want to eat the natural one with lots of ringspot virus DNA or the modified one with just a little bit of that very same DNA it's a classic dilemma of natural versus modified is it good versus evil or is it just another step in the mark of agricultural progress [Music] so what exactly do you mean by transgenic transgenic is a term that also means genetically engineered across the genes transgenic transgenic it means you could take a gene from another organism and put it into this organism we're gonna go right in here here I look Richards on yeah so this is rice - rice you're transferring genes from one rice plant to another right how is that different from what a conventional rice farmer would do trying to hybridize rice we take a naturally occurring bacteria that normally in nature what it does is it infects plants and it injects DNA into the plan what molecular biologists have done has taken that bacteria and they take the genes out that this bacteria uses to cause disease and they put their genes of interest in that gene of interest can be anything it could be a many organisms and then what we would do we grow it to the dole flat stage and we would inoculate it and see if it's resistant to the bacteria if we make rice that is resistant to a certain naturally occurring bacteria aren't you just gonna eventually say in a few decades have new bacteria that are gonna attack this different rice there's no way we can stop disease and humans or plants so the way traditionally we have faced the challenge of developing resistance to genetic modification everything we eat has been genetically modified so that it carries a gene or genes for resistance I think that people should pay close attention to genetic engineering and although there are some fears and some legitimate risks with certain aspects of genetically engineered food I think the benefits far far outweigh the risk especially in third-world countries where there is tremendous poverty and disease and malnutrition vitamin A deficiency is a very serious disease there's 500,000 children a year go blind due to their lack of vitamin A and in fact there's something like 1 to 2 million deaths every single year I'm due to vitamin A deficiency and rice it turns out has part of the pathway the biochemical pathway for producing vitamin A but it lacked three or four genes so what this group did in Switzerland is they took these genes from other organisms daffodil and bacteria and they put those genes into rice and this allowed rice now to make this Pro vitamin A [Music] welcome to food forum I'm Chuck Chaplin and our guest tonight is Wayne Hancock president genetically enhanced food association a research group funded by a number of companies working in this field mr. Hancock can you tell us why the corporation's you represent have made such a major investment in altering food at the genetic level to help people Chuck plain and simple we want to help people you've heard of Golden Rice haven't you yes you seem to work it into every one of your advertisements but that because we're proud of it did you know that a half a million children in the third world go blind each year because of vitamin deficiencies if they ate our rice we could save all those children so it's about helping children that's right Chuck one of your companies also put the gene from an Arctic fish into tomatoes those fish don't freeze you put that gene in tomatoes and they don't freeze but isn't that kind of creepy a fish gene in a tomato oh well it's not creepy when those tomatoes make it to the third world so the children have something to eat and they can see those tomatoes you know why because they're not blind it's just that it seems this technology is very dangerous when we run out of food if we don't do this we'll run out of food is that what you want no no I just think that what we need who's that what we told you to keep him away from Oh [Music] imagine being the farmer who grows corn that has been genetically engineered so that insects don't eat it he doesn't have to spray as much pesticide he saves money and his crop is nearly chemical free if you were that farmer you might want to grow that corn but what about the effect of that crop when its environmental it can take years for a new organism to have an impact on an ecosystem not exactly the pace of business now corporations are developing more specialized more complex strains of species species that may be resistant to more diseases and more insects it all sounds too good to be true is it what exactly is BT what jean was it's the named after bacterium right that's correct when you hear bt corner refers to the bacteria bacillus thuringiensis which is a common soil bacteria and it produces a protein that a certain type of insect doesn't like and BT crops have been developed using biotechnology to take that single protein and put it into the plant so the plants that'll have a natural built-in protection against these insect pests in addition to insect protected corn there is another technology called herbicide tolerant crops and these are crops that have had a single gene inserted into them that allow those crops to withstand an application of a herbicide and the value of those crops is that a farmer can now spray our herbicide over the top of those crops and control all the weeds that compete with that crop kill the weeds but leave the crop healthy and growing so how do we know that these products are safe that's a real area that's been investigated very very extensively and in fact in the case of something like a herbicide tolerant soybeans it has been studied by 31 different regulatory agencies in 17 different countries around the world and all of them have come to the same conclusion that these new crops are as safe as the conventional version of those crops one small gene to feed a man one giant feast for mankind at least that's the idea behind genetically modified food but the questions consumers are asking now is when am i eating genetically modified food the answer probably more often than you think these fruits and vegetables are organically grown so is this cantaloupe but the list of genetically modified versions of all of these foods is growing every day most soybean crops today are genetically modified and soy derivatives appear in hundreds of food products so you're probably serving genetically modified soy to your old family your dog as well as your kids see baby food formulas commonly contain soy [Music] Konoe was used in lots of foods like making margarine and cooking oil so it's in dozens and dozens of processed foods especially snacks genetically modified corn shows up on your breakfast table and your cereal at lunch in your soup at dinner and your tacos and even a dessert your cookies there are scientists working to genetically modify coffee plants so they only produce decaffeinated beans it wouldn't be the Swiss process of the water process there'd be no process so genetically modified foods are probably here to stay but you won't always know what you're eating just by looking at the label the label may give you nutritional information how many calories there are and so on but you probably won't see the words genetically modified in the fine print [Music] so do you think we should have labeling on genetically engineered foods what you know if we label genetically engineered then we probably want a label that it was sprayed with pesticides I think that it's important to know what it is that you're eating and I think that it's a mistake to lump it all into one category one could actually have a transgenic plant that that didn't include the part that you eat so maybe it's transgenic just in the leaves and you don't eat the corn leaf or it's transgenic in the roots because you have root worms that you know hurt the plant or the roots I find it upsetting that it's all one big category and it's all bad in many people's eyes when in effect they don't know what they don't like if we are what we eat what are we eating it's not so easy to tell when scientists throw words around like hybrid transgenic GMO and genetic engineering they're not always talking about the same thing there are different techniques using different organisms in different parts of the DNA we end up with different kinds of food if we want labels where should we start should label show up on all food that's been grown with pesticides on all food that's been hybridized or genetically modified it's worth thinking about because we all of us are the consumers and we can demand but we need to know what we're talking about so please take a moment to digest it's quite a mouthful so your cornfields were burned by one they weren't burned they were vandalized and somebody came through and chopped them down with a second or something why did they do this well they might have thought they were transgenic even though they weren't and I think the person who did it it's just upset about genetic research in general and and that's another lumping together of there's GMOs there's genetics and it all sounds very bad to people who don't know what it is you see genetically engineered food can provide vitamins such as vitamin A and also help reduce disease but Mr Sanders what about allergic responses to these new substances being placed in our food and I read the genetic engineering could permanently alter ecosystems and even endanger certain species yes children but who under writes the science stuff this was incorporated makers of genetically engineered food yes so they've really got us by the shorts on this final rooster same belongs to why it's just a little deception berry like how your mother pretends to be a natural blonde she mr. Sanders here's to admire you what happened you'll see come to life game you buy the shorts mr. Sanders yes it did Tommy the turd [Music] so what's wrong we're introducing a new line of food crops is it gonna upset the environmental applecart well in nature everything's connected so farm ecosystems are complex if we introduce a new species one thing you can count on is that the other species are gonna respond modifying organisms is a way of modifying the world there hasn't been a case that it's been won against nature in terms of breeders breeding in some type of resistance that doesn't break down there's tremendous pressure on the insects and the plants to adapt biotechnology will need some time for people to get comfortable there are valid concerns being raised but there are some excellent science being done to show that these crops are safe and that they're providing some tremendous benefits to large farmers in North America and Europe and to some small farmers around the world corporations say that genetically modified foods the greatest thing if I may since sliced bread right right I'm not saying that there couldn't be benefits from genetic modification what I'm saying is there's a tremendous rush again just based on all-out greed to get these things to market to recoup their scientific investments in them the problem with biotechnology and genetic modification is they're forcing this technology on problems that don't need technological solutions starvation is a great one we hear that genetically modified crops are going to cure starvation on the planet the real answer to curing starvation is reducing poverty increasing infrastructure and straightening down politics so starvation is a great example they're the ones that brought it up not me but they should be ashamed for bringing it up because we have enough food right there's one and a half times the amount of food on the planet today that we need [Music] she looked at any advances in any science the main ones came through the free thought free exchange of ideas things like that the ownership issues bother me how can you own a weak plant how can you patent a wheat plant how can you take something that's existed for 10,000 years that farmers have approved for ten thousand years stick a single gene into it and you own it so what I'd like to develops a new farming system called genetically engineered organically grown so we take advantage of this new technology and this tremendous amount of information we have now from sequencing of multiple genomes take that information develop genetic tools that we can use to generate a new variety that can be grown in an integrated sort of management system using organic techniques I know what you're saying you're saying look we've been genetically modifying crops for years and we're fine what's the worst that could happen alright try this let's say we genetically modify this corn so that when insects eat it they die okay then the wind blows some of the pollen from that corn over here into these weeds well they're really wildflowers and they're butterflies that rely on these flowers and they've some of that pollen and all the butterflies die okay so there's a whole summer without very many butterflies now these are the rare butterflies that fly at night so the bats that would normally feed on those butterflies can't get enough to eat for a whole summer so you don't have nearly as much success at making bat babies so that next summer there aren't nearly as many bats around eat the mosquitoes ah so these are the mosquitoes that carry a deadly disease and they feed on your blood and they give you that disease and then we all die see that would be bad now I admit I made this up but our scenarios like this possible or is this just alarmist hype now we've been farming for 15,000 years carefully breeding species at the pace of the season but now it's possible to introduce a new species into the earth's ecosystem never before seen practically overnight and what's the hurry it's not a race or the human race so let's farm responsibly but require labels on our foods and let's carefully test these foods case by case that's the way I see it and I'll see you next time on the eyes of Nod we've covered a lot of ground but it's just the tip of the iceberg check out eyes of 900 RG for more cool science [Music] [Music] major

Channel: Zain Husain

Views: 277,028

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Keywords: eyes, of nye, bill nye, genetically modified foods, gmo

Id: GKm2Ch3-Myg

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 21 2012