Re:Atomic Gardening
by jcranmer on Sunday May 23, 2021 @10:00PM
(#27260437)
> 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.
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.
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.