This is a pretty sensible policy. Things that are ‘natural’ typically have a much longer period of human and animal use. The amount of data that is latent in their extensive history offers much more certainty about their long term safety than a few short term studies. The real concern with GMOs is not about something like a genetic collapse but the fact that the technology is only really capable of enabling the use of more exotic pesticides and herbicides in food stocks. While I’m all for running science experiments and killing aphids, an unrestrained embrace of the chemical industry nearly cost us the bald eagle. Given that there is currently a massive food surplus and I pay taxes to prop up the at industry, I really don’t see the need to engage in a widespread experiment on pesticide use when targeted smaller scale studies would suffice.

> Things that are ‘natural’ typically have a much longer period of human and animal use.

Most of the hybrids you're consuming are nowhere to be found in nature. But since they are "natural" somehow they are absolved of most sins. And then boom and E. coli outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_o... or listeriosis outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_States_listeriosis...

> The real concern with GMOs is not about something like a genetic collapse but the fact that the technology is only really capable of enabling the use of more exotic pesticides and herbicides in food stocks.

That is not nearly the main concern. If anything, GMOs would allow us to forego most exotic pesticides and herbicides.

> I really don’t see the need to engage in a widespread experiment on pesticide use when targeted smaller scale studies would suffice.

What I "love" about discussions like this is that they immediately veer off territory that is only tenuously adjacent, at best.

This is a total false equivalence. Crossing two apples falls within the same neighborhood. Crisper blasts it to another continent. There is a reason you don’t need to harden classic seeds produced from fruit for 6+ generations. This is like comparing a jetliner to a bicycle. Sure they both travel - great. same thing, same speed limits, same regulations.

As for GMO’s letting us forgo pesticides? When is that going to happen? Currently that is their main application in ag (synth bio for chemical precursors is more interesting but totally different). The more fanciful dreams of geneticists have not yielded a panacea of new options.

And this is a purely political issue over agricultural policy. Farm subsidies are directly related to this discussion. If it were just a science project it would not concern me in the slightest. The fact that there are a large number of unwitting subjects has clear ethical implications and pretending that this is not a political issue is just obtuse.

> This is a total false equivalence. Crossing two apples falls within the same neighborhood. Crisper blasts it to another continent.

Of course it doesn't. There's a reason I picked corn specifically. Because it's such a mutant, scientists still struggle to unravel all the mixed stff that eneded up there.

And, of course, none of the stuff you eat would ever evolve naturally in nature.

> As for GMO’s letting us forgo pesticides? When is that going to happen?

I didn't said forego entirely.

Some studies suggest that even with the very few crops that are allowed to be modified, farmers already use less pesticides: https://allianceforscience.org/blog/2020/07/new-study-gmo-cr...

> This is the same "reasoning" that ultimately led to ban on most GMO foods like actual long-term tasty tomatos.

Long-term tasty tomatos are a good thing but what about impossibility to breed my own tomato seeds if GMO will win 100% of the market?

> Long-term tasty tomatos are a good thing but what about impossibility to breed my own tomato seeds if GMO will win 100% of the market?

That is a great question and a very valid concern.

Because there are two things at odds with each other:

- We don't really want GMO plants (or even animals and fish) to interbreed with non-GMP plants/animals because wide-spread effects on the ecosystem could be disastrous. We've lived through a few of those with natural plants and animals as invasive species, and boy do we not want a pest-and-herbicide-resistant strain of tomatoes to take over the planet [1]

- And yet we do want to let people (both hobbyists and farmers) to raise their own plants and animals. At the very least to preserve local varieties.

I don't have a good solution for that. I think what may work if implemented correctly is for governments to maintain a stock of non-GMO seeds or even mandate that X% of the market must be given over to non-GMO products.

[1] We already have the giant hogweed to deal with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_mantegazzianum. Imagine that but even more resistant to everything * shudder *

You are talking some decent ideas but I do not agree on the Heracleum mantegazzianum point (we use to call it borschevik).

1. Any invasive specie known today is about transporting an organism, evolutionally willing to live from one place to another. GMO organism aren't evolutionally willing to live, they just genetically willing to give us better tomatoes.

2. Absence of non-GMO is not a problem at all if I still have an access to bleeding-edge reproductionable seeds as it happens today. The problem is in patent system, what if the cost of bleeding-edge seeds will be costing so much that small farmers with expensive and not yummy non-GMO will be out of market? Have you seen any vegetable before selection? Nobody needs the corn with few grains while we use to have a corn with few hundrends of grains. Even the most green-headed crackpot on the planet will not grow that in 21th century.

3. I do not believe that all plants harvested from GMO are _really_ sterile. Since they use to have a reproductive system so all kinds of mutations are possible if something with CRISPR/Cas9 goes wrong. And there are some experiments with attempt to spread some modified genes to something like all the malary mosquitoes [1] . There are some GMO even among humans, and that humans are not sterile [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31095529

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair

> Any invasive specie known today is about transporting an organism, evolutionally willing to live from one place to another. GMO organism aren't evolutionally willing to live

Evolution doesn't have a concept of will. It does have the concept of survival. Survival of the fittest (yes, I know it's a simplification).

Nearly every species is invasive given lack of external controls. For example, Sweden needs to kill 100 000 (yes, one hundred thousand) of moose every year because their natural predator, the wolf, has been exterminated, and moose have become invasive.

If your pest-resistant, herbicide-resistant tomato that is also more adaptable to varying soil conditions is able to reproduce and hybridize, it will "willingly" take over any local plants not because it has the "will", but because it has the capacity.

It will just as "willingly" take over, say, wheat, if the field is contaminated with its seeds.

We use herbicides in our fields not because our plants have "no will to live", but because other plants will just take over given half the chance.

> I do not believe that all plants harvested from GMO are _really_ sterile. Since they use to have a reproductive system so all kinds of mutations are possible if something with CRISPR/Cas9 goes wrong

All GMO products (both plants and animals) are required to be sterile because impact on ecosystem is very hard to estimate if they aren't. And yes, it's not 100% fool-proof, and quite a concern

How does pest-resistant and herb-resistant tomato might survive in the environments with neither herbicides nor pesticides? Especially if the primary goal for modifying the gene was to make the tomato just yummier. You are talking reasonable things but I'm talking from the position of farmer who knows how easy is to break a useful plant and how hard is to destroy any useless one with decentralized root system and easy-peasy flower which can produce thousands of seeds per one stick in few weeks and nothing more.

You are writing correct things but the experience which is in my hands tells me that you are not right about properties of invasive specie vs properties of typical crop.

Or we could just use the damn anti-trust regulations on the books to actually keep markets open and competitive. There doesn't have to be a worry that Monsanto will lock down seeds if they get split into different companies and some of those companies continue to sell seeds that aren't locked down.

I think any market segment without at least 10 comparably sized companies AND the option to just not transact with ANY of them is not competitive and will not benefit from any "free market" supposed benefits.

GMO patents expire after 20 years IIRC.

We could argue whether it's too long, but it's a complex topic I don't know nearly enough.

"Natural" basically means local optimisation, whereas "artificial" means global optimisation. Note also that most companies aren't optimising for nutrition or satiety, but instead for low cost and high addictiveness.

It's the same reason we worry about (artificial) nuclear weapons - despite "natural" reactors also existing.

What does a natural nuclear reactor have to do with a nuclear weapon? There's almost no connection between the two.

> For some reason we demand significantly stricter controls over anything "lab-grown" than on anything "natural".

The reason is simple. We haven't co-evolved with lab-grown food for several billion years, or had transmitted cultural experience with it for tens of thousands of years. The recent discovery that artificial sweeteners have unforeseen health effects (hyper-clotting / glucose intolerance) should point out the necessity of caution.

The human organism has been in a very complex dance with its environment for millennia. We have no idea what subtle chemical traces it is grown to depend upon. We pay for our arrogance and never seem to learn.

> We haven't co-evolved with lab-grown food for several billion years, or had transmitted cultural experience with it for tens of thousands of years.

Trust me, you haven't co-evolved with a single plant you pick up at the supermarket today.

None of the hybrids you eat evolved naturally.

We'll see how it goes.

> For some reason we demand significantly stricter controls over anything "lab-grown" than on anything "natural".

Because we overall know the natural products, how they are to handle and how they interact with each other. And yet we still have many problems from poor handling and still unknown interactions and also new "optimizations" coming from the business-side. And GMO&lab-grown is this, just worst, it's unknown territory, coming from a mindset which quite often has not the benefit of consumers and mankind on its focus. Basically, we have learned to not trust big business, and these are cases where they can shine with all their evil ignorance, so many trust them even less than normally.

The absolute vast majority of what you consume and call natural never existed in nature and never would have existed without human intervention.