two primary reasons: hubris and greed.
The hubris to think we know which varietals are the best and will continue to be the best. We may go all in on one species or variant and then turns out an unknown bacteria we have previously no clue about wipes out all of them. You never know, you need variety. Bacteria outnumber us all.
number two: greed. You worried about tech being consolidated into the big 5? how about this scientific research? you want our food, something we actually depend on, to be consolidated into 2-3 chemical companies? I don't.
Smaller reasons include: the power of being able to still survive on pure nature's means, and the freedom to do so. We don't realize it, but these things we do out here in the more advanced nations greatly impact the developing world, where a large portion of the world's population exists.
If they don't grow GMO Cavendish, they will pick some other variety and grow that everywhere, like they did after the Gros Michel went under. GMO doesn't seem to be a prerequisite for monoculture at all.
> the power of being able to still survive on pure nature's means
We haven't been able to do that since the dawn of agriculture. If modern agriculture disappeared tomorrow, the Cavendish plantations would not resemble Cavendish plantations very long, Panama disease or not.
The only problem I have with a "GMO Cavendish" is that it would likely be patented, which could create a company with some extraordinarily powerful IP, which is very dangerous. But that's a problem with the law, not GMOs per se.
https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080507/full/453145b.html
GMO is tangentially related but few of the biggest overreaches in agricultural IP are directly tied to them.
As far as genetic modification in the lab being indistinguishable from genetic modification the way farmers have always done it (cross-breeding), here's the difference, in a nutshell: farmers have no method for cross-breeding a potato with a jellyfish (or adding genes from bacteria, or whatever). That is, the lab technique permits technicians to effectively create new species.
Now I'm OK (in principle) with new species appearing on the shelves; but I don't want to eat them myself, until they have been tested with the same rigour as if they were novel medicines. My choice, you see. If the GMO products are smuggled onto the shelves in disguise, then what happened to my choice?
Not really. The difference is that selective breeding takes a lot of time and for the species that we eat today we've had hundreds to thousands of years to observe if it harms us or not.
When new drugs or foods get approved for consumption, the tests being made are for how our body affect the eaten food, and the assessment being made is for how safe acute short term exposure is.
But we are not doing long term studies on safety, because those are super expensive. We basically don't know what happens with chronic exposure over decades. And plants in particular have toxins, as a natural defense against pests, and most of those toxins are harmless to humans, or removed via cooking (like what happens with legumes), however some toxins can have an effect on mammals and we won't notice it until we've had decades to consume that plant and maybe come up with cooking methods to deal with it.
Personally I'm not interested in being a lab rat.
> The lack of science education.
I think this goes on in both camps ;-)
It seems a little silly to outright dismiss GMO foods as long as they do not deviate too far from their parents
> We know what chemical structures are deeply harmful to the body and what are digestible
Implying that nutrition is by and large a solved problem instead of a hugely moving target that is upended every ten years for knowledge of a completely different direction is very incorrect and harms the rest of that you are saying by proximity. Nutrition is not solved. We know what things will kill you for sure (and generally how fast), but things that kill you very slowly or that might very subtly be good for you are hard to measure and therefore not well documented.
No we don't, we only really start looking at new kinds of toxins when they start affecting us.
GMO have one or many gene flipped, as a result many things are affected at once but genetic engineers/companies will look at optimising what interests them and ignoring the rest of the effect for the sake of cost cutting/simplification/shorter time to market. (These things have affected civil engineering companies too, which make your bridges dangerous but bridges are much simpler to reason compared to a multicellular organism like plants and bridges don't reproduce or evolve on their own. The seeds will not be picked by intercontinental birds and dropped somewhere where they start displacing local varieties or evolve into something dangerous (toxic?) for humans. While bridges have small life, genetic modification can survive for a very long time.
Some changes induced by GMO process will take long time test.
By that time it would have spread to billions of humans, thanks to modern industrial process and globalization.
Heck, we can't reliably alter genes in humans which makes them taller then how can you be sure of GMO crops?
Genetic engineers look at correlations in genes then they try to flip some of them randomly and if they observe positive change in the feature they are optimizing, they call it success if it doesn't produce immediate negative effects.
GMO variety also isn't sterile, so it might evolve into something dangerous. Why it shouldn't? The genetic history of the plant which stopped it from being toxic to humans, encoded in its genes has now been edited out by genetic engineers.
GMO come from flawed understanding of how genes work. Most GMO supporters claim that the nutations we are inducing through GMO process are also capable of happening in nature on its own.
Sure, but genes not just carry info of function but genetic history too that's how we remember how to fight viruses/backterias. A person who has been burned by keep their hand on flame will not try the same second time, same way a planet which has mutated in past in favour of something which made it resistant and survive in nature will select against the feature which made it survive.
GMO people think mutations happen at random, without any peeking at past mutations (genetic history) which is incorrect assumption.
Pardon my ignorance, but how is this different from GMO? Sure, it took a while to get to that particular cultivar with selective breeding, but at some point we got there and started to scale up the production. Where's the guarantee that the last few mutations before scaling up were not harmful on the very long term? It's not that they ran long experimental trials before marketing the tangelo...
Whereas with GMO we can be assured it's a very small set of edits that we can more readily assess the safety of.
It's not perfect, since the selective breeding we've been doing has been for diluting the proteins and increasing the energy per acre. And there are still plenty of concerns with various seeds we've been eating, like wheat, corn or soy, but interestingly these are also the playground for GMO research and that research hasn't been about making them safer for humans, but rather for increasing the yield, protecting patents and for reduced pesticide use ... which should raise further concerns about their safety ;-)
When I'll see GMOs meant for making consumption by humans safer, those are the GMOs I'm ready to buy into, but not until then.
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> with GMO we can be assured it's a very small set of edits that we can more readily assess the safety of
I don't believe that we can readily assess their safety, because I've been interested in and studying nutrition and I know how science in this field works.
But if you know more on this subject, please provide details.
Compare to someone making a CRISPR edit to alter a Cavendish protein to the form in other bananas that people have already been consuming in quantity for hundreds of years.
Why do you assess the former probability of harm to be so much lower than the latter?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCPtDVnaQ1w
So no GMO does not equal selective breeding.
It's not "GMO" and isn't labeled as such, because it doesn't involve the same technical steps as inserting a fish gene into a tomato, or whatever, but you end up with an organism with de novo mutations that do... well, something, probably many things, and if you're lucky, something you want, that you can then use selective breeding to amplify. Voila, you've introduced a brand new, never-before-seen mutation, without any GMO.
Except it's stupid. It's an incredible amount of work, just to be able to produce something that isn't technically GMO, when you could reach in with CRISPR or whatever the new hot genetic tools are and do it much more close to exactly.
Humans have always had confidence of mastery over nature and more often than not we screw it up.
We switched the entire planet over from Gros Michel to Cavendish with basically no studies of nutritional impact or whatever, and it was fine. They're both bananas, bananas are basically similar to each other, they taste a bit different but they're fine.
Why be more afraid of a GMO Cavendish than whichever other varietal gets pulled out this time? A GMO Cavendish would be less change.
There is in fact a large, obvious population of people who are emotionally scared of GMOs. Unfortunately, that group has given anybody who question GMOs a bad name.
This kind of thing is unfortunately true for many things in life.
And ironically, if what I am saying is true, it is the grandparent who, while accusing of irrational reasoning, has not reasoned this out.
Just because it is convenient and it works well in the areas that we can measure well does not mean it is actually safe or that we should embrace it uncritically.
The sly move is to try to apply this "don't do it" principle to only GMOs (or some limited set of hot button topics that includes GMOs). This selective application is where the unreason slips in.
Frankly from your response I cannot find a reason to change my mind on this, because you have mostly avoided the subject by attacking my reasoning with your own flawed logic. I find it ironic that you are saying that people who advocate a more conservative stance on GMO are unreasoning or spouting "obvious bullshit" when what is in fact happening is that you are doing exactly what I already addressed: Being upset that this reasoning stops progress in a field you don't understand well, because it is inconvenient.
Why? Because there is something stopping the production of varietals.
Patents are stopping advancements from happening. Just like with corn, except things are worse with bananas.
That's the real problem. Not GMO or whatever other straw man. Mono-species fail in the end, and then we create new technologies to cover for it, instead of simply breeding new variants within the species - because patents and profitable monocultures.
How can the patents not have already expired? Bananas have been the same roughly all of my life, unless I'm wildly misremembering. Surely there is no way the Cavendish is still protected by patents.
But how new is it? As I've alluded (it would take a full article to really get into this), even this new cultivar is... Cavendish. And it's patented. Just like all the other Cavendish bananas that comprise the only bananas you can ever find unless you happen to live in Southeast Asia and can find them in the wild.
BTW: Bananas you remember are not the bananas your grandparents would remember. There's a long history. The monoculture of bananas is fairly recent in terms of history, but for you and I, we've only ever known Cavendish.
And bananas, because we want seedless varieties, favor cloning which favors monocultures (both directly because they're, you know, clones; through slow propagation which in turn makes scaling a variety pretty capital intensive, etc.)
Sure, they're more expensive than cavendish so i only take them when regular bananas are unavailable. But they're functionally non-cavendish bananas available in a place they aren't native.
Similarly they are expensive, and people mainly opt for the larger/cheaper Cavendish. I always thought the mini Ladyfingers are more child friendly both for size and for sweetness, but rarely see them outside of fancy fruit salads. It's still very much a mono-culture, even when there are outliers.
So yes, my black/white statement should have been more of a 90/10 fuzzy grey one.
There is very little (financial) incentive to go up against Cavendish in an attempt to compete, because anything you need to do to find a tasty cultivar with thicker skins and stable shipping/handling will continually run into Cavendish related patents in the process.
BTW: Sadly, even though the Ladyfinger bananas are distinct from Cavendish, they are equally susceptible to the same deadly plant diseases. If one disappears, so probably does the other. Our temporary diversion is back on track with the subject at hand.
Most citrus, most apple varieties, anything "seedless"
Science seeks to test new theories about the nature of reality, to improve human knowledge. It often relies on engineering to conduct experiment.
Engineering is for solving human problems at scale. Often based on scientific discovery, but not necessarily. Humans were selectively breeding food for years with no scientific theory of plant genetics.
And we kind of do not have the best track record with engineering things we can’t be sure of in the lab. Generally we do ok with tech, but bio engineering is much different.
What’s more the food industry has lied about what’s healthy for profit in the past. We have a habit of passing the buck to the next generation to cash out now.
Human avarice is enough for me to be against GMO given the plain track record (global warming, aforementioned lies by food producers, etc) of bullshit that was only found to be bullshit later.
That and I hate bananas.
Which is probably good, or we'd all probably get weird cases of allergies from strange plant mutations.
Which took a million years. But now watch out - we can do it in 4 hours. That's the difference.
I'm open too but careful regarding GMO. It's clear the agricultural practices used in the US and China and in particular by the corporate giants are totally unsustainable and exploitative, often catching farmers in unexpected dependencies to buy new seeds or fertilizer/insecticide products each year. Not to speak of the monoculture, the negative impact on overall flora and fauna, etc. Often.the GMO crops are rather sensitive to specific conditions, leading to more such monocultures and the adaptation of agricultural lands to their specific cultivation (eliminating everything else in the process).
As much as you like to think you're scientific, science should be careful and jumping on every new plant that comes from a lab (no matter how promising) is not scientific but rather each plant should be field tested for several generations. Elwr don't understand genetics well. It's simply a lie to think we know the effects - we don't know what inserting genes from one plant into another does in the long term. Specifically, CRISPR & co are very imprecise and pretty much a matter of lucky shots, i.e. they normally insert much more than the intended genes. Moreover natural processes continue, so you get those plants pollinating other non-GMO strains. It's not like a website you can shut off - you introduce something into the environment and there's no way back.
See e.g. insect apocalypse and the nightmares Monsanto and it's likes have brought to smallholder farmers across the globe (promised big harvests but the seeds are castrated so that the farmers have to buy new ones each year), or the patent (!) lawsuits against farmers that have fields adjacent to GMO crops.
I would consider myself pro GMO, but only under the right conditions. There are plenty of other ways forward than just GMO - and we should try and use each path with care, not bet just on what is easiest. Moving away from the monocultures that caused these issues to begin with - rather than to go all in on mass-monoculture of new GMO crops - is a better way forward.
The majority of the people 'afraid' of GMO are thinking of transgenics, not selective pressure. Some of the people thinking about selective breeding also have a point about loss of diversity (see corn and cutworms). You have to go all the way to the far end of the spectrum to find people like you're describing, which essentially makes it a strawman.
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/genetically-modifi...
I've logged in just to say that this comment is so quintessentially HN, and it particularly entertains me to see these two sentences juxtaposed because of the lack of domain expertise that it belies.
There is indeed a material difference between genome engineering and breeding. In the former case, you might introduce a gene that expresses any arbitrary protein. For instance, you could introduce a gene that expresses a highly potent toxin, like ricin. That would surely be very bad! In the latter case -- when breeding for variants -- you would be hard pressed to get a castor bean to cross-breed with a banana. So the capabilities of molecular biology allow for a much wider range of possibilities than breeding, hence the importance of regulatory oversight and caution.
P.S. There has been a lot of talk recently about what's wrong with the culture on HN. I'll tell you exactly what it is: people write overly confident and flippant things far outside their areas of expertise. Many of you run websites and phone apps: you do not know much of anything about other areas. Why are you therefore writing about those topics on the internet with such feigned authority?
At this point anti-GMO == anti-science
People may have philosophical objections, but young earth creationists, climate change deniers, and anti-vaccine advocates all believe what they do primarily because of philosophical objections.
This is the problem right here. The lack of science education. A banana modified in a lab and one that is bred through selective breeding are both "GMO", it's just that one is done in a targeted manner and the other relies on random luck in the mutations.
If people weren't so afraid of science this problem would already be solved.
The two main producers refuse to even consider the "GMO" bananas because they are afraid they won't sell. If they would just take up the cause, they could put enough money behind this to solve the problem in a year.