> Also, out of curiosity - what sort of "devastating effects" could you realistically imagine?
Hard to say. We have a pretty lousy track record of thinking certain foods/drugs are safe, and then finding out years later that actually, they're quite bad for us.
Anything is possible. What if our change results in the plant becoming susceptible to a new bacteria that devastates entire crops? What if it undergoes a change in the wild, thanks to our editing, that starts producing huge amounts of amygdalin? What if we find out that a side-change that doesn't affect humans was actually contributing to something like bee colony collapse? What if something like this happens, and the plant spreads out of control in the wild?
But like I said, I'm not arguing for a ban on GMOs, either. I just think it's a situation where both solutions have their risks and rewards. I'm not prepared to give science a total pass, nor pass off people with GMO concerns in the same light as anti-vaxxers or climate change deniers.
GMO can of course be applied in many different contexts. One for me seemingly benign application of GMO is when a gene in a particular crop variety is desired in another variety - instead of doing a messy and expensive breeding process to get an offspring with the desired gene, transfer the desired gene directly between the crops using gene technology.
As in all research, there are rightful concerns and less rightful concerns. What concerns me is when unscientific concerns dictates how science should be done.
Its the same thing. One is relying on nature to do it randomly until the desired effect is achieved, the other is being more specific.
But as a species, we've been "playing god with the building blocks of plant life itself" for several thousand years - in far more dramatic and riskier fashion than any current modern biotechnologies would be capable of. Selective and cross breeding of plants has brought about all modern vegetables and fruits we eat today, and has dramatically altered their genetics, biochemistry, and phenotypes in ways that at the time we never understood and certainly could never control. Yet, nothing inherently disastrous happened - some scary mega plant of our design never took over the world out of our control. With modern biotechnology, scientists are not only able to be a LOT more sure of what the heck they're doing when they're editing a plant by specifically targeting understood and characterized genes, they are also far better able to characterize and test the nutritional and safety profile and ecological impact of a genetic modification.
We've been playing God with plants for thousands of years, and there has been no disastrous implications, and it seems like now that we have technologies that make that safer than ever, people are suddenly crying alarm.
Also, out of curiosity - what sort of "devastating effects" could you realistically imagine? As a biologist, it's hard to imagine anything "devastating" that sounds realistic. I could imagine critical biological impacts - such as perhaps the impact of bt-corn on Monarch butterflies - but nothing that we wouldn't be able to recognize and swiftly respond to. Of course, if there's some malevolent people who seek to hide or discredit such findings, or disrupt such a response (as we see today with fossil fuel funded climate change denial), then that's a whole different, but entirely political, apple.