Many Pirates are likely to start with a pro-GE position, heavily influenced by the PR spending of biotech corporations, whose massive pro-GE spending rivals that of the companies and individuals funding climate "skeptics", and other anti-environmentalist organisations. I strongly advice listening to and reading the work of a couple of women of colour whose connection to our movement isn't obvious, until you consider that creating GMOs so you can patent life forms is the food equivalent of the move to proprietary software, and needs to be resisted for the same reasons.
* Dr Vandana Shiva speaking speaking at TEDxMasala on 'Solutions to the food and ecological crisis facing us today': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER5ZZk5atlE
* Dr Vijaya Venkat speaking speaking at TEDxMasala on 'Exploring the concept of growth & how women will reshape our future ': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml4Oqa0pMgQ

I suggest that it should be Pirate policy to revoke all life patents, including gene patents, as well as drug patents on the molecular structure of active ingredients. If we allow patents at all (and I think there are good arguments for abolishing them entirely), medical patents should cover only specific methods of manufacturing drugs, medical equipment etc not over bits of chemistry, and be enforceable only against manufacturers, not medical clinics and professionals using drugs or equipment to heal people and save lives. If neither life forms nor molecules were patentable, I think it's self-evident that most biotech corporations would quickly lose interest in pushing GE research, since monopolizing food and drug supply chains is their main motive for being involved with it.

Given that there is a current movement to develop GMO vaccines for diseases such as Diabetes and various cancers, along with other uses such as GMO sterile mosquitos to stop malaria and eventually Zika...
I'm in favour of reasonable progress on open source biology, with of course all life patents becoming invalid.

Speaking of "heavily influenced by the PR spending of biotech corporations"...

Can you supply me with links to any positions statements from vendor-neutral public health organisations saying that GMO is actually a useful and necessary solution to these problems? Any peer-reviewed papers? Any information about any of these projects that does not consist of PR and marketing claims by biotech corporations? If not, I tend to assume that like the RoundUp Ready soya bean, and the BT corn, this is a classic case of a profitable solution (thanks to the patent monopolies currently involved) looking for a problem.

I take a neutral view on Diabetes, well as much as I can with pre-diabetes, in that I view a vaccine for Diabetes as useful and necessary regardless of how it is made.
Of course there are ethical bonus points to be awarded if these are open source research projects, however it maybe that some would prefer the vaccine come from xeno-transplantation from pigs, others may cite religious reasons to go with GMOs.

I would probably be inclined to go with an "all of the above" approach to research and not gamble entirely on one type of project.

I'll take the pro GE position in that I think it is valuable technology and an anti patent position on existing life forms, however support limited patents on created life, as vaccines etc need funding. GE has many variations and links to existing gene science, it isn't in my view a dividing line in knowledge.

GE crops which are the coal face of GE in the marketplace have had mixed success, some have decreased pesticide usage and are successful in their own right, if they fail because farmers are not convinced as to their profitability then that is only par for the course.

I wouldn't watch any videos of Dr Vandana Shiva as she lies constantly and is a shill for the organics industry, she gets paid big time to scaremonger.

Dr Vijaya Venkat, I don't know of but doing a Google search shows another natural health cancer cure promoter and not someone to take seriously.
edited to include Vijaya Venkat name instead of Vandana's name twice.

however support limited patents on created life, as vaccines etc need funding. vaccines etc need funding

This argument rests on the assumption that the money gained through patent monopolies is spend on medical research. In fact, the corporations who hold the lion's share of drug patents and other health-related patents spend more money on marketing than on research. One paper on this is Pharmaceutical Patents: Incentives for Research and Development or Marketing?.

Besides, there are many other ways to provide the resources needed for medical research, including both traditional forms of public funding, governmental and philanthropic funding, as well as more experimental forms like citizen science ([[email protected]]) and crowdfunding (including equity crowdfunding). Arguably, these methods are more likely to serve the public interest than corporate driven research, because they can investigate any aspect of human health and illness, rather than limiting their scope to patentable inventions that could make people better once they're already sick, as corporations that make their money from patent monopolies will logically do.

Free code software serves the public interest better than proprietary software, and public health research serves the public better than corporate health research for similar reasons. For one thing, publicly funded research is always peer-reviewed and published, and this can be made a condition of receiving the funding. As Dr Ben Goldacre explains in his TED Talks and (I presume) in his books, corporations only publish papers on research that helps them shift product, and as the tobacco companies did, will conceal research that shows their products might be ineffective or even dangerous. Second, the full datasets from publicly-funded research are also released as open data, or if not the experience of open access advocates like the Public Library of Science is that it's a lot easier to successfully lobby for data to be made open access if the research is publicly-funded.

Again, speaking of "heavily influenced by the PR spending of biotech corporations"...

GE crops... have decreased pesticide usage and are successful in their own right,

Credible references please (ie not propaganda from biotech corporations or the front groups and shills they fund).

I wouldn't watch any videos of Dr Vandana Shiva as she lies constantly and is a shill for the organics industry, she gets paid big time to scaremonger.

You have made three potentially libelous claims here. Please provide some credible evidence for all three (ie not propaganda from biotech corporations or the front groups and shils they fund). Even if your claims are true though, you don't deal with shills by ignoring them, you debunk their claims with evidence.

Libel insinuates that Vindana would be able to sue me which I doubt. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/10/23/rich-allure-vandana-shiva/#.VG7vKfmUeSo
Vijaya Venkat like I say seems to be on the net spouting off about solving cancer with raw foods.

Neither of these two people are credible, they are the paid shills.

"GE crops... have decreased pesticide usage and are successful in their own right." Strangely yes the source is industry based.. these are the people selling less pesticides and now selling BT GMO cotton seeds instead. GMO crops have been going for around 20 years now we are starting to see several trends, increased usage of Roundup and decreased usage of the nastier herbicides that were being used.

The consensus is that GMO is safe.
"No reports of ill effects have been documented in the human population from genetically modified food.[12][13][14] There is general scientific agreement that food on the market derived from these crops poses no greater risk to human health than conventional food, but should be tested on a case-by-case basis.[15][16][17] Scientists tend to be more concerned about the potential for genetically modified organisms to cause ecological damage.[18]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_controversies

Good luck with the open source vaccinations.

Libel insinuates that Vindana would be able to sue me which I doubt.

Publishing a claim that attacks a person's reputation without sufficient evidence is libel. If you cannot provide evidence to back up your claim that Dr Vandana Shiva and Dr Vijaya Venkat are "paid shills", then your claim is libelous.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/10/23/rich-allure-vandana-shiva/#.VG7vKfmUeSo

I asked for a credible source. Keith Kloor is a known shill for pro-GE industry groups, as well as being a climate change "skeptic". I'm still waiting for your evidence of being paid by industry group(s).

Vijaya Venkat like I say seems to be on the net spouting off about solving cancer with raw foods.

Even if Venkat is totally wrong about this, it doesn't prove she's being paid by anyone. I'm still waiting for your evidence of being paid by industry group(s).

Quoting Wikipedia is not evidence. Anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, including shills hired by the biotech industry. What I'm asking for is peer-reviewed scientific evidence or at least statements from credible vendor-neutral groups.

Good luck with the open source vaccinations.

My point is that while publicly-funded health research might discover that there are other ways to reduce the incidence of diseases that are safer, better, and cheaper than vaccination, corporate-controlled research funded by the profits from vaccine patents will always public results that support the sale of new vaccines.

Good luck with the open source vaccinations.

Another real world example. The Open Malaria Consortium:

"invites scientists from around the around to freely share their research on anti-malaria drugs through a transparent, online platform. The hope is to accelerate discovery of new drug candidates to be entered into pre-clinical development. All data and ideas are shared openly. There are no patents."

Where are your real world examples of successful GE and GMO use arising from life patents?

@robueberfeldt It should be apparent by now to anyone participating that the truth is not appreciated by the other side, so I am forced to apologise and withdraw from the original comment here.

In the natural world, genetic modification is everywhere and constantly happening. So worrying about the difference between virus initiated change and human initiated change is moot. Human created GMOs will be ubiquitous soon as the cost of the tech has plummeted with the advent of CRSPR/cas9 However, as people have concerns there is no reason why, in the name of transparency, all GMOs that have had a human input should be clearly labeled. It is then a matter of personal choice. Communities should also have the ability to decide if they want such products in their environment.

In the natural world, genetic modification is everywhere and constantly happening. So worrying about the difference between virus initiated change and human initiated change is moot.

There are a number of real world differences between selective breeding and genetic engineering, which is why the latter term has existed for only a few decades. The most obvious one is that the goal of selective breeding can never be to make the resulting plant sterile. Sterile hybrids do occur in nature, but since they can't spread their genes, people doing selective breeding most be actively looking to create "open pollination" varieties of plants, and they end up with the best library of varieties for their bioregion (where they grow) if they actively share with other breeders growing in similar conditions.

If a plant or animal has been genetically engineered, and can be patented, the whole point is to make sure the consumer or farmer has to pay royalties to the patent owner for seed/ stock, so selling only sterile hybrids and keeping the fertile source organisms proprietary becomes viable. Just as with overzealous copyright enforcement, the number of potential "copies" people can make and benefit from, can be artificially limited in order to maximize profit, but in this case for the biotech rather than the entertainment corporations.

The same issues apply to the use of GE and GMOs in medical research, and this is summed up nicely in this quote from MIT geneticist Jonathan Kind, which I found in Lawrence Lessig's 2008 book 'Remix', quoting him from 'The Gift' by Lewis Hyde:

“’In the past one of the strengths of American bio-medical science was the free exchange of materials, strains of organisms and information…But now, if you sanction and institutionalize private gain and parenting of microorganisms, then you don’t send out your strains because you don’t want them in the public sector. That’s already happening now. People are no longer sharing their strains of bacteria and their results as freely as they did in the past.’”

Andrew R again:

Human created GMOs will be ubiquitous soon as the cost of the tech has plummeted with the advent of CRSPR/cas9

Just making them physically possible doesn't mean they must be widely used. Nuclear technology, DDT, commercialization of tobacco, massive carbon emissions from fossil fuel technology, widespread use of mercury, arsenic, lead, and other toxic metals in mining and industry, all of these are more physically possible, thanks to cheaper tech. But we are more and more choosing not to use them, because the health costs to our environments and consequently to us outweigh any benefit they might offer.

However, as people have concerns there is no reason why, in the name of transparency, all GMOs that have had a human input should be clearly labeled. It is then a matter of personal choice. Communities should also have the ability to decide if they want such products in their environment.

I agree with these two points. However, like the organisms used in virological and bacterial research, GMOs are self-replicating and self-distributing, so the only way to keep them from spreading throughout the environment is to keep them out of it altogether. This is why, after significant public debate in the late 90s and early 2000s, the majority of the NZ public believed that GMOs should be kept isolated in a controlled lab. I've yet to see convincing evidence that anything has changed, but I'm open to being convinced, with real world evidence, from the lab or the environment.

EDIT: filled in missing words and fixed typos

Note that the comment has been edited to please the demands made offtopic on the meta-thread about health.
I am volunteering to no longer participate in any further conversation on PPNZ loomio until Sunday at least, as this is starting to become beyond reasonable demands on my time.

@andrewmcpherson What does your proposal have to do with GMO?
What does your proposal actually mean? How does the outcome you formulated relate to the proposal, the comments being made by those participating or the discussion in this thread?

And most importantly: on what grounds do you postulate that "no policy is to be made regarding GM technology by the party"?

@hubatmcjuhes while I appreciate that the proposal maybe more clear to you if phrased in my inadequate German with the assistance of Google translate, I will expand the concise conclusion as follows :

As the proposal doesn't exceed a 50% threshold, and in fact is deadlocked in the result, the reasonable conclusion is that the members are neutral on the proposal.
Therefore, I propose that this is an indication that the membership is happy to continue it's existing policies of rejection of all patents on life, and to seek guidance from overseas pirates who have had more debate on the matter, for PPNZ to import policies for debate and eventual adoption.

This should be considered a better diplomatic result than adoption of an outcome which could be perceived as biased, hence the party is neutral at this particular round of proposals, and no change is made yet.

Please feel free to make your own proposal should you wish to do so.

" the membership is happy to continue it's existing policies of rejection of all patents on life"

The fact that this is already policy, while important, wasn't mentioned in the proposal, nor at any time during the whole discussion, which is a pretty shocking omission! I accept shared responsibility for that though, because I could have re-read the existing patents policy before starting a patent-related GE discussion (where are our canonical policy documents kept, stewarded by whom?). To be fair though, I only started this GE thread to prevent that topic hijacking another thread where it had come up. I didn't expect it to become so contentious :)

"to seek guidance from overseas pirates who have had more debate on the matter, for PPNZ to import policies for debate and eventual adoption."

Indeed, it seems like sound practice to have a mechanism (eg the proposed SunStone policy think tank) for efficient policy sharing between different Pirate parties. As long as we keep in mind that our local context will often require adaption and sometime total rejection of what other parties have agreed on for their local context (and vice versa). For instance, European and US Pirates might consider a ban on environmental release of GMOs to be impractical in the short term because there is already so much GMO contamination. Whereas Aotearoa has almost no known GMO contamination (putting aside the revelations made by Nicky Hagar in 'Seeds of Distrust'), and already has tight restrictions on outdoor experimentation with GMOs and a public mostly opposed to even them, so a ban on environmental release would be much more politically feasible here (if party members were to consider that wise policy).

I deleted the comment I just made here relating to drug patents. We have another thread where we can discuss the related patent issues in more detail, and I think it's best to keep this thead focused on discussing and developing policy on genetic engineering, and maybe biotech in general. We may also need a thread on farming and/or food, because an ecologically-informed understanding of the future of food production without dependence on fossil fuels is essential for fully understanding this issue.