I'm really not a fan of Round-Up Ready GMOs, but breeding plants already alters their genes and gene expression. Horticulture has radically altered every food we eat. The natural world already can't sustain 7 billion people, there simply isn't enough nitrogen in the soil. Fertilizer is the reason you and I are alive right now, and its a huge source of greenhouse gasses, so yes, we do need to take such risks.

A better coding analogy would be genetic algorithms versus intelligent fuzzing and manually patching.