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Re:Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions by bluGill on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @11:39AM (#14970272)
Given the above, why do you think anything is safe? Common grapefruit was created by putting a radiation source in an orchard and seeing what happened - most of it was bad (as in trees died), but one grapefruit turns out to taste good. That grapefruit was grafted again and again until it is dominate. We have no idea which genes were changed and never did any study to see if the mutations were safe, we just eat it.

For hundreds of years farmers have been saving seeds from the plants that produced better. As a result the random mutations that farmers like have been selected for with no study on if those are safe mutations.

By Contrast with GMO we know which gene we change and why, and have done studies to prove safety. Maybe biases studies, and maybe not enough of them, but we have done them. That is more than you can say about anything not GMO.

Re:Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions by BuckRogers on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @12:12PM (#14970709)
This. We've been creating GMOs since the dawn of agriculture. Doing it in a petrie dish changes nothing. I'm less concerned about GMOs than I am about them changing them to spray worse and worse weedkiller on them before I eat it.
Re:Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions by coldtea on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @12:29PM (#14970918)
>We've been creating GMOs since the dawn of agriculture. Doing it in a petrie dish changes nothing.

Yeah, if breadth and scale doesn't mean anything.

It's like saying: "We have been blowing things up since the advent of gunpowder by the Chinese a millennium ago. Doing it with atomic bombs changes nothing".

Traditional "GMOs" were already closely related, and the modifications that could emerge were very constrained. Not so much with GMOs that allow for arbitrary outputs.

Re:Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions by bluGill on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @03:03PM (#14972503)
The breadth and scale is much smaller with GMO and random chance. A farmer several thousand years ago is responsible for as much genetic mutation of the human race as all the genetic manipulation that has made it to market. (though this will change quickly if we start making approval for GMO easy)
Re:Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions by bluGill on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @12:31PM (#14970934)
A radiation source constrains the modifications?