Because they didn't know about prions.

A prion is just a protein. If you denature that protein via heat, it no longer works.

The problem is you have to heat it enough to denature the protein. "Rare" and "very Rare" isn't hot enough.

Incineration is also handling other problems, and thus requires a higher temperature. ETA: For example, a cooked carcass still attracts disease-causing organisms once it cools. That's why you can't leave a cooked hamburger on the counter for a day and safely eat it.

Think about cooking an egg. Egg white is protein and water. It goes from semi-clear liquid to solid white thanks to heat denaturing the proteins. There isn't a way to get it to go from solid white back to semi-clear liquid.

Similarly, beef changes drastically when it's cooked. A raw steak is nothing like a medium steak. That's due to the denaturing of the proteins in the steak (along with some water loss). But a raw steak and the center of a rare steak are somewhat similar.

If you get the prion hot enough, it unfolds just like every other protein. "Hot enough" depends on the protein involved. Rare isn't hot enough to denature the "Mad cow disease" prion.

A 2010 paper points out "only recently has this once heretical hypothesis been widely accepted by the scientific community":

A prion re-folds the "natural" protein to make a new prion.

Destroy the prion, and it can't re-fold the natural protein.

First, you'd have to come up with a mechanism for that to happen. While you can get GMO corn to reproduce with non-GMO corn without human intervention, you can't get those genes into other species without human intervention. For a gene to "spread through global ecosystems", you'd have to have a mechanism to do that.


The lack of a mechanism by which such a thing can happen.


Actually, we do know. Because no one has found a way for horizontal gene transfer to work in species more advanced than bacteria.

In bacteria, there are things such as the F plasmid, which is a virus-like hunk of DNA. When it infects a bacteria, it causes that bacteria to replicate the plasmid, and then attempt to inject it into other bacteria. This works in bacteria because their cells do not have a nucleus like eukaryotes (everything that isn't a bacteria, virus or prion).

That separation in eukaryotes means the F plasmid's reproductive mechanism doesn't work. Just getting into the cell isn't enough, you have to get into the right part of the cell and there's a membrane in the way. Some viruses are able to get into the nucleus, but they turn around and destroy the cell by making more viruses.

But that's just getting into the cell. You next have to get the inserted genes back out of the GMO cell. And that's not gonna happen. Even in viruses like influenza, which is notorious for their frequency of picking up host DNA, they don't extract functional genes from the host.


Your lack of understanding is not the same as scientists having a lack of understanding.

What it comes down to is the people talking about dangers of GMOs haven't managed to come up with a mechanism by which their predictions could work. They've skipped over that part and start with the assumption that such a mechanism exists, and then look at what could happen!

It's a little like saying astronomers need to be more worried about gamma ray bursts wiping out life on Earth when none of the stars close enough for a GRB to be dangerous can produce a GRB. "But what if everything we know about physics is wrong?!?!" isn't a good argument. Come up with a way that those stars could produce one first. You'll win a Nobel prize and go down in history next to Watson and Crick.

The corporate-centered interpretation of biology (organisms are machines with specific/predictable buttons you can press at will) belongs on the trash heap with Lysenko-ism. Biotech is much more about engineering and finance than actual science.

The actual science Ecology, not the "throw up your hands and say mother nature is impossible to understand" version that is so common here.

Those self-regulating darlings.

The only "unintended consequences" their bosses and financiers are worried about are the economic kind market fundamentalists inveigh against. And its why researchers working in biotech use terms like biodiversity and biosphere so infrequently.

Those evil biotech bastards think there's only 4 nucleotides in DNA. And they're daring to teach that to our children!!!!!

You also won't find them referring to "cells" either. They'll not talk about ribosomes when they talk about a gene being expressed by a protein. They won't explain that a genome is made from DNA either. Some terms are so basic that they are assumed to be understood by the people reading your paper.

Crossbreeding. The virus that caused the great Irish potato famine is also the same one that causes blight in tomatoes today. My tomatillos can sometimes cross pollinate with my tomatoes and vice versa. My chard contaminated my beet seeds one year. And many a squash seed has given me odd looking fruit. Then there are the hybrids I keep seeds from and plant to find they breed true.

I could go on and on. Each plant attracts a different bug which is eaten by a different animal. There are so many different ways things in nature, on farms and in gardens interact and mingle. One change in one creature causes changes in others. To believe that the mass planting of a new organism would not modify the patterns in nature is to believe in the impossible.

Your tomatillos and tomatoes are either the same species (different subspecies) or a different but closely-related species (depends on who's drawing the "family tree&quot . That's why they can cross-pollinate.

Your tomatillos can't cross-pollinate with corn. So how would you get GMO genes from corn into your tomatillos?

I'll trust the scientists over the hysterical Luddites.

Mark Buchanan, a physicist and Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of the book "Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics." A former editor of Nature and now a columnist for Nature Physics...

Of course, he didn't make Monsanto rich so what does he know?