Pesticides also had a similar narrative and ended up being used in large quantities. Their effects on environment and human health are only discovered today and were unimaginable before.
It was insanely unscientific to allow massive pesticide use and it would be insanely unscientific to allow RNAi-based pesticides without testing them for decades if not more.
The status quo is we keep doing what we are currently doing for decades. The risks of doing that are far greater in my opinion.
You simply cannot give any guarantee whatsoever that the dsRNA-based poison that you consider safe, really is safe or has unforeseen fatal effects.
You should read more about agriculture and look at the many success stories of farmers who produce in large scale without using poisons. Then you might understand that there is no need for poisons.
I don't know of any modern production system that's free of poisons (if you want to refer to poisons as anything that kills an insect, which seems to be the case), but willing to be educated.
As an example without soap, a friend has a garden. Call it holistic, permaculture or whatever. The same plants grow twice as big in his garden compared to neighbor's, because he tends to the plants, the soil and the garden using modern knowledge. No spraying. Lots of mulch, diversity, planning...
Still a hard no.
It's precisely this attitude that got us where we are today. 50 years ago, the response would have been 'the status quo is we're headed towards mass starvation as we become unable to feed the giant post-war population boom using traditional agricultural techniques'.
Now we're faced with the possibility of widespread ecological collapse of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Species are going extinct at thousands to millions of times the background rate. Even if we merely survive, the loss of genetic diversity will reverberate through millions of years and likely result in heavily degraded, less productive ecosystems that will require heavy human intervention in perpetuity to continue to function. We're basically cutting a huge hole in the boat underneath us, and signing ourselves up to bail out the water ... forever.
Let's be honest: we don't know the long-term ecological consequences of what we do. We didn't know 100 years ago, we didn't know 50 years ago, and we still don't know today. We do not have the ability to determine the long -term negative boomerang effect of mass application of so-called 'targeted' intervention.
> It's chemically identical to what you consume every day.
And how do you know drastically increasing the amount has no effect over the long term? Note that snippets of dsRNA floating around are potent immune system inducers, because it's what viruses create [1]. Does it have a long term pro-inflammatory effect? So let's assume you're correct, the dsRNA degrades quickly before humans eat it.
What about the transient immune responses of all flora and fauna in the sprayed area? What effect on the soil microbiome?
> no genetic modification
Literally modifying the genomes of fauna in the environment en masse in a highly selective way, putting enormous selective pressure in particular species. Do we even have any idea what that selective pressure will do? Will targeted species undergo rapid mutation and speciate? Will the descendant species become both more aggressive and harder to target, due to there being an empty ecological niche? Do those targeted species take on critical ecosystem roles that we're not yet aware of?
Note that this isn't idle speculation - just look at the enormous rise of MDR bacterial infections in hospitals, precisely the result of applying selective pressure for just a couple of generations.
The crux of all our problems is a chronic inability to admit that we don't know, and perhaps cannot safely know, the ecological consequences of our actions. But sure, kill away. If we're lucky, we won't be around when the boomerang hits.
For me (and this is only my opinion), a highly targeted dsRNA, which is completely organic (it's not synthesised), has no synthetic modifications, is present in massive quantities in nature, is consumed every day by every person on earth if they're had fruit or vegetables, does not persist in the environment, is likely much safer than any existing pesticide, synthetic or organic.
As for selective pressure, current broad spectrum pesticides, synthetic or organic, would cause greater ecological disruption I would think. Again, my point is that this is an attempt to remove that pressure, not add to it.
Saying it's all too hard to predict, so let's do nothing, just doesn't seem sensible to me. The risks of not acting seem clear and obvious. Have a look at the talks in the OECD link I provided, and you'll see there's a pretty precautionary approach being taken. It's not a case of 'let's have a go and see if it works. What could go wrong?'
https://grist.org/industrial-agriculture/2011-04-13-big-ag-w...
Pesticides are mostly used for crops that humans do not eat directly. Food safety was never about beans or sweet potato or other efficient plant sources of protein and calories, it was about wheat, soybean and corn.
Their introduction, just like the introduction of GMOs is a result of a livestock agriculture lobbyists that made sure to increase yield of meat and other animal based products by promoting the use of aggressive compounds. These products are not a strategy for food safety but for luxurious and wasteful eating.
Pretending that biotic stresses simply don't exist is....umm..novel.
Trying to find a "smarter" way to poison things is exactly the status quo and it will lead nowhere good.
discovery of the pesticide's active ingredient might be in the domain of science, but massive use of unknown chemical in agriculture was a risk analysis that said, "it won't be our problem"
(does not directly answer your Q2)
A poorly designed dsRNA that has too much homology to a gene of a related beneficial species could impact it if it took up the dsRNA. dsRNA doesn't hang around in the environment, so the beneficial organism would have to be there at the time of spraying. For these reason, frameworks are being put in place to ensure due diligence is done in the design phase.
Like any pesticide, what the active ingredient is applied with may not be terribly nice (surfactants and the like). That's a case-by-case thing, which is hard to generalize.
Roundup is a synthetic herbicide - that they both could be used in agriculture is when the similarity ends.
At some point, you take calculated risks, because there is no action in life that comes without risk. Even your preferred solution of eliminating all chemicals and switching to alternative farming practices comes with substantial risk: it’s very likely it won’t scale. Millions would starve.
Organisms may be able to handle everyday quantities of dsRNA, but beyond a certain concentration, you may suddenly see unexpected problems, which then cause domino effects throughout the ecosystem. These kinds of relationships are unknown unknowns, and they rarely behave linearly.
I really like the RNA-based approach, don't get me wrong, but the other commenters here are right to point out that hubris is dangerous.
Which chemical company has not sold their product primarily with the “safer” headline?
Do you really believe it? Can you not just see that’s the umbrella justification under which all new generations of poison products are developed?
The safe poison is no poison.
Why are we so intent on killing things on the planet?
“Our new product the Silent Spring Spray 9000 sets safety totally aside to give the farmer total apocalypse over all six legged creatures!!!!” said no chemical company or poisons chemist since DDT.
Insecticides are usually applied pretty indiscriminately.
I think that's quite a difference.
[1] At least that's how they are supposed to be used. In agriculture (again agriculture, is this a pattern?) they are used indiscriminately in many parts of the world because it enables animals to be kept in insanely crowded conditions.
There is no way of convincingly demonstrating this.
We’ll all soon see how critical insects are to crops.
Specifically, is there anything that stops the technology from being used against ethnicities, say by targeting the RNA of Jews (id guess very specific due to matrilineal inheritance of Judaism)?
In my opinion, if these kinds of products are successful, they'll massively reduce a major adverse environmental impact of farming. They also offer a non-GM approach to combating viruses, and are far safer than broad-spectrum insecticides, synthetic and organic alike.