> Almost every crop and livestock has been genetically modified through selective breeding (domestication).
I agree with your broader point that much of what we eat is GMO. But isn't selective breeding a categorically different process of modifying an organism? My understanding is that selective breeding starts with two things that we already are familiar with, and tries to maximize or minimize some characteristic in the next generation via traditional reproduction. On the other hand, a modern definition of GMO includes genetic engineering -- manipulating DNA directly using technology.
Is it naive to worry that the latter process might introduce unexpected and potentially harmful characteristics, in ways that the former wouldn't? Additionally, if selective breeding happens slowly over generations, it seems to me that it would allow us to more carefully track how the modification of particular traits affects the surrounding ecology of the organism.
It seems they are primarily concerned about two types of issue; one is why I’d call “safety”: gene transfer/escape into wild species, unintended ecological consequences, human safety of consuming GM plants. Tho other group is around “licensing”: essentially a deep concern about going down a path where plant seeds are licensed instead of bought, and all the “Monsanto is evil” concerns.
I think on the safety point there is some FUD about what kind of gene transfer is actually biologically possible, but you can make a more general rebuttal that selective breeding has the same risks, it’s just harder to get positive changes into your genotype. Maybe Greenpeace would argue that we’re already endangering the biosphere a bit with selective breeding, and going any faster would dramatically increase the danger.
On the licensing point, I’m very sympathetic, but I think that is an argument for IP law reform or public investment in GM, not an argument against GM itself. But of course if you believe the safety concerns then you don’t want public or private research to happen because you think it’s prima facie harmful.
This is an interesting point. The practice of using GMOs, including the broad category of selective breeding, could ultimately lead to much less biodiversity which is, at best, not fully understood by us, but seems to be quite bad for life.
Unfortunately I am not optimistic that this is an inevitable outcome, at least not in the short-to-medium term; if you look at the software ecosystem or even just corporate structure in general, you see a strong pressure towards consolidation and monoculture rather than an emphasis on robustness to systemic risks.
However I think it's encouraging that advances in GM technology provide us with a potential long-term solution to the problem of monoculture, without asking us to give up the benefits that the market selected for in our current state. Of course we could solve monoculture in our current system by giving up the cultivars that the market prefers, and instead switching to more-localized and less-productive cultivars, but this doesn't seem like a realistic way of feeding 7-8B people.
Can you name a single commercially available GMO that has this property, aside from being a hybrid (hybrids don't breed true, but that's because they're hybrids, not because they're GMOs)? It is my understanding that there's no real need for any such technology anyway, as legal protection suffices.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/dupont-to-pick-up-wher... suggests that roundup-ready soy seeds are viable. So perhaps they rely solely on IP for protection.
I'm sincerely curious why this seems so far fetched to you. If I were the CEO of a company having the option to nudge my researchers into this, I probably would, seen from a ethics-detached point of view.
By the way, I'm not anti-GMO; in fact I think it's the only way to sustain the whole of humanity until we've passed the next great filter. Still I don't buy into that line of thought.
Not the person you're responding to, but there are three main responses I can give:
1. By and large, for most of the food crops that we eat, what we are eating is itself the seed of the crop. Tinkering with the reproductive elements of the crop has a higher chance of screwing up desirable properties of the food part of the crop than, say, introducing resistance to glyphosate.
2. In a related topic, genetic engineering is rarely so competent as being able to do something like "prevent reproduction." Seeing genetic manipulation as being basically like designer babies is pure science fiction; the more complex the demand is, the further in the realm of speculative nonsense it is.
3. On a related topic, there's the impact it has on the production costs of seedcorn. The easiest (cheapest) way to make anything biological is to use natural biology to make it, not try to create it in vitro. If I'm designing seeds, I'd rather make a couple of seeds using the expensive in vitro steps, plant them in a plot for a few generations, and sell their offspring, instead of trying to sell all the seed designing it in vitro. Inhibiting natural reproduction inhibits this method of making the product.
So, the scenario you seem to be thinking of is that GMOs will drive down the price of agricultural commodities, so that farmers who don't avail themselves of them will be unable to compete. But this argument "proves too much": it's an argument not against GMOs, but against ANY agricultural technology that boosts yields and reduces costs. Presumably the Green Revolution is not something we should object to because food prices declined.
I think you are on to something in understanding the anti-GMO motivation in Europe, though. Farmers don't want to have to compete against the more efficient large scale farmers in the US. Anti-GMOism is a kind of camouflaged protectionism.
Not saying that's the concern just my impression.
Your argument there does apply to non-Mendelian inheritance ("gene drive"), so banning modifications to crops that would be engineered to cause that seems prudent (although I'm not sure why anyone would want to do that). Modifications to pests, on the other hand...
I’m all for free markets for most markets, but things get very bad if people don’t have food. So I think there is a good case for the government funding research and open-sourcing the work here, and also potentially restricting eligibility of patents in this area too.
I think your argument is sound in a free-market maximalist / small-government libertarian framework, I’m just less convinced that the current IP framework produces good results in this case.
It would be problematic if that's the case. That is not the case however. What you're probably thinking of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise..., where the farmer originally claimed to have had accidental contamination of the Monsanto seeds (this defense was dropped before the actual trial itself, and if you read the actual depositions, it's really hard to actually believe this claim). It's difficult to find any other case that comes close to falling under the claimed situation here (due to the notoriety of this one case), but I don't think that any of them actually do.
Incidentally, I should point out that the underlying issues of plant patents are actually far older than GMO cases (early-mid 20th century). It's not anything actually new.
What Monsanto DID do was sue someone whose field was contaminated, and who then repeatedly sprayed the field with glyphosate to kill all but the GMO plants, so he could selectively concentrate the interlopers to continue to propagate. It's this last step that got the farmer in trouble.
> but things get very bad if people don’t have food
GMO IP protection does nothing to prevent farmers from continuing to grow previously existing varieties. So this is another scare argument without foundation.
> I think your argument is sound in a free-market maximalist / small-government libertarian framework, I’m just less convinced that the current IP framework produces good results in this case.
I think the anti-IP argument is an underhanded way to try to ban GMOs without actually saying you want to do that.
> GMO IP protection does nothing to prevent farmers from continuing to grow previously existing varieties.
If they buy seed from grain elevator which comingles GMO and non-GMO seed (which is what happened in the Bowman case) the farmer can't sell what they've grown from that seed.
https://decisions.fct-cf.gc.ca/fc-cf/decisions/en/item/38991...
As for Bowman
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-796_c07d.pdf
Bowman didn't just do that. He applied glyphosate to the field. So, he bought seeds without a license to grow them, with the intent to exploit the fact they were resistant to glyphosate. This violated the patent.
I’ll tap out here. Have a nice day.
Every variation of life today including poisonous and deadly plants and animals came from random mutation over time.
For example tomatoes and eggplants and peppers are closely related to tobacco and to deadly nightshade. How likely would a random mutation create a poisonous version, or one that is just poison to some people. Many people are allergic to them already.
Artificial selection with artificial mutation speed that process up greatly, targeted gene editing even further but in a more controlled way.
Which process is more likely to produce harmful side effects? Is there data to warrant engineered organisms are more likely or is it just unwarranted fear?
Right, I would put mutagenesis in my second category of "modern GMO". (Edit: I interpreted your use of mutagenesis as the controlled use, as in the original topic of this post. Maybe that's not what you meant?)
> Which process is more likely to produce harmful side effects? Is there data to warrant engineered organisms are more likely or is it just unwarranted fear?
That's essentially what my question was, for traditional artificial selection (selective breeding) versus genetic engineering. I wasn't making a point one way or another; it was a genuine question.
The point about random mutations occurring naturally is fair. Perhaps part of what scares people is simply the speed of the process, combined with not really knowing or understanding what technology is being used in the labs.
What I find problematic about many "anti-progress" stances is the (very false) mythos around a return to a purer past when we didn't do things in such supposedly "corrupt" ways. That stance is certainly prevalent in much of the anti-GMO following but I would hesitate to tar over it all with the same brush.
The second falsity is that the primary concern with GMO is individual human health.
Much of the more informed anti-GMO stances consist of the following two views:
1. The view that the past practices you mention in your comment were damaging to ecosystems and while the horse has bolted with many of the products of those packages (and reaping the fruits of those now is not too problematic) the negative impacts of those practices can be learned from to avoid future damage.
2. That it's a nuanced topic fundamentally about making informed decisions about the lifecycle impact of GMO based on current scientific knowledge rather than a blanket dogmatic opposition to the concept as a whole.
The second point in particular is absolutely not taken into consideration in current GMO practices: widespread corruption and disregard for impact analyses is well documented.
Given the food industry don't give a shit about nutrition and have spent decades pushing sugar and fat and 101 similar things, why would you trust them with tools 1000 times more powerful than they already have?
I'm opposed to gmo not because I think it will magically make me grow another head or something. I'm opposed to it when it doesn't offer anything good for me as a consumer.
So I would love to know what plants are GMO and specifically what strain is used and why. This would help me avoid GMOs that are used to damage farm ecosystems. This is also why I look for certified regenerative organic products - I want the food I eat to regenerate the soil, not destroy it.
Not anymore. The lawsuits challenging its safety ended to the tune of a 10 Billion dollar loss.
Anyway, good ol' paleo food was whatever nature provided, most of what was happy to kill you. Humans tamed 1000's of plants over 50,000 years changing them beyond recognition so they wouldn't hurt us with alkalis and poisons. And so the tasty bits were bigger and easier to get at. All by genetics.
Sure we can do it faster now. But we're aware of what we're doing. Grandparents with crossbred tomato didn't have any idea if she was reintroducing a poison or raising the acidity to dangerous levels. They were blundering in the dark.
I see no problem with turning on the light, and moving confidently.
If properly chosen, it could certainly have a beneficial effect. But DNA is also a much more complex system than a book.
Using the same reasoning we could pick some pieces from an apple computer, mount it in a PC and expect that will fit in place and work flawlessly because, well... plastic is plastic. Right?.
It does not work like that. Organisms has been designed and polished for millions of years to work as a whole, all expensive useless stuff has been pruned for good reasons, and yes, this salmon gene -most probably- will not belong to a tomato... because is part of a salmon.
Would be pretty interesting if that weren't the case though; quite literally "you are what you eat."
Not, is because is a different technique. Hybridizing two closely related species is a thing. Introducing the gen of a fish into a tomato is another totally different, and mutating the gen of one species (often with poor results) is a third thing. GMO mix the genetic code of species that can be even in different kingdoms.
There is also an international consensus into not including selective breeding in the same category as genetically modified, for similar reasons. Would be confusing.
The so called atomic gardening had produced several fancy and really ugly cacti, but not much more really. Plays in a much lower league than hybridization.
Genes aren’t inherently kingdom specific, and mutagenesis can produce genes that don’t even exist in nature; moreover, it produces changes all over the genome; when you then select for a desired trait, you still have unrelated changes all over, whereas there is a whole lot more control and knowledge of what you have with transgenics.
Yeah, they are different techniques, but it is insane that mutagenesis (especially in its modern forms) is not treated as even a moderate concern by the same people who hold up transgenics as an existential threat.
To blend all those different techniques under the same term would be useless and confusing to both science and consumers.
That's true if most mutations produced through and then artificially selected for in modern mutagenesis based techniques, as well as most of the mutations irrelevant to the targeted trait that come along for the ride.
> We know it because hasn't happened often in the last 3000 years
3,000 years isn’t all that long and we don’t know that, what we do know is that no mutation that does that has occurred where it has been in net of cost to the organism useful enough to be selected for an retained, which is a very different thing.
> To blend all those different techniques under the same term would be useless and confusing to both science and consumers
So? The post you respond to acknowledges that they are different but notes “it is insane that mutagenesis (especially in its modern forms) is not treated as even a moderate concern by the same people who hold up transgenics as an existential threat.”
That it is comparatively easy to do a precise, targeted change where you know exactly what new thing will be expressed and change little else through transgenics isn’t in dispute, its the whole reason for that statement.
Some not. We share common mechanisms with other life beings, but most of the time, Yes, they are. You will not find a single animal able to photosynthesize by its own means.
> mutagenesis can produce genes that don’t even exist in nature
Because they are broken. DNA "per se" is useless unless it can be read and used to build something useful. Mutated genes are like changing a paragraph from a book to a language that does not exist and can't be translated. Most of the times the result will not made any sense. Evolution will eventually clean the mess, as usual.
I think that
GMO plants are designed to take much higher doses. That is a concern both environmentally and as a potential health issue.
Another use is to engineer plants that produce insecticides themselves, which raises the concern if those insecticides affect other organisms as well.
How does GMO mean pesticides? I thought that was more under "organic" which is again a very ambiguous and problematic label.
Mutations occur naturally, and overtime nature has evolved methods to withstand this. Like the one thing that all organisms share, DNA-wise, is the code to faithfully copy DNA. You literally never see mutations in this code because nothing survives. Beyond that we do see random mutations all the times, but they’re usually harmful or at best don’t do much. Then occasionally there are beneficial mutations but they’re very rare and they happen over long periods of time. Atomic gardening is using this exact process albeit speeding it up bu increasing the speed that mutations occur.
On the other hand, genetic engineering is selective in a way that there is no natural precedent for. We literally have no idea if it’s not harmful or not. I’m not trying to say this to sound alarmist I just mean philosophically speaking you can’t prove that.
I’ll add as an aside that I don’t think the condescension that you see all the time regarding GMO is a food faith argument. There are plenty of scientific reasons to give pause to testing this stuff out in production.
As to concrete, practical reasons why we should give pause before engineering life with such wild abandon, I’d say recombinant DNA is one, but also so is the danger of just good ok’ mono-crops.
Now let me explain that I’m not personally and categorically anti-GMO. I think it’s wonderful technology that we can do so much with. I just think it’s dumb for people who don’t have degrees in genetics to go on the internet and say that people who have any concerns are “amusing” or stupid or whatever because science. The truth is it all depends abd there’s absolutely zero reason to think the GMO can’t go horribly wrong as some kind of rule.
I’m on my phone so some of this may read weird but I hope my point comes across as I meant it. Basically science is a philosophical branch rooted in skepticism.
One last thing I’ll say is there’s a bit of selection bias happening. You never hear from scientist who raise legitimate concerns because industry has a huge influence in people’s ability to do research and this their careers.
So in summary, mutations happen all the time in nature. Some “good” some “bad”. There are dangers but there’s been billions or years of evolution to buffer against it. Targeted genetic engineering like CRISPR is only the same un that there’s mutations but that’s where the similarities end. Like natural mutations they can be good or bad. There’s nothing unscientific or amusing about giving a second thought if maybe there are additional differences yet to be seen downstream. To say otherwise is categorically unscientific. We should absolutely proceed with caution and there are absolutely problems like the ones I listed. I mean, many of the people here are programmers. How many of us trust any code?
It’s a spirit of temperance and skepticism that im putting fourth, and I actually think the burden of proof should lie on a case by case basis.
Does that make sense?
These sorts of scattershot incoherent arguments are a red flag that the position being defended wasn't arrived at by honest reasoning.
Almost every crop and livestock has been genetically modified through selective breeding (domestication).
Mutagenesis, which atomic gardening falls under, has been around since the 1920's using x-rays and chemicals and currently doesn't normally fall under most GMO definitions because its "traditional".
There is also profile guided selection, which is just selective breeding while using modern DNA profiling to make it more effective by watching genetic outcomes directly.
Then there is genetically engineered targeted gene insertion which is what most people consider "GMO" but hasn't been shown to cause any health issues, its just scary because it's done in a modern lab.
It's not that I'm against being cautious with genetically engineered organism (testing etc), but what issue are we solving by labeling an GE organism "GMO" vs a mutagenic one, or a selectively bred one? Is there any data to suggest one is more dangerous than the other? I seem to have a hard time finding it.