The point isn't about whether GMOs are safe (I supsect they are), it's about the skewed debate.
Companies that produce GMO products (and the groups on the other side as well) stifle debate to the point that it's nigh impossible to find unbiased research to form an actually cogent opinion.
Honest question given that GMOs are awesome but patenting a GMO seed is bad.
In that scenario, how are GMO creators incentivized to create more GMO products? Sell the first seed for a billion dollars and then the person that buys that seed can give out its progeny for free?
Honest question given that Genetically Engineered Babies are awesome but patenting a Genetically Engineered Baby genotype is bad.
In that scenario, how are Genetically Engineered Baby creators incentivized to create more Genetically Engineered Baby genotypes? Sell the first baby for a billion dollars and then the baby can give its germline cells for free upon sexual maturity?
They are selling life. Life forms reproduce. It's a pretty basic assumption and if GMO merchants want to change that then they need to embrace terminator seeds.
There's no connection really. Patenting seed has been around long, long before GMO technology (around 80 years or so in the US, around 50 years in my country).
Aren't those that are making extraordinary claims supposed to bring the evidence?
The idea that, given these premises:
a) we who don't understand even 10% of how the ecological ecosystem works
b) we don't understand even 10% of genes and how they interplay
c) we don't understand even 10% of second order effects of such changes
d) we don't yet have explanation for tons of interactions and functionality in the body (from what triggers cancers to all kinds of lesser stuff)
e) we can't even have a decent dietary advice from medical bodies that is not revised completely every 10-20 years
f) corporations will even put plutonium to kids milk if there's profit in it (and then lie about it)
g) all kinds of industry-sponsored research has been shown to be paid lies
... GMOs are perfectly safe.
It's more like changing various bits in working computer memory, with a ho-hum printout of parts of the program's in-memory structure and a crappy flow-chart of what it does, and wishing that the running program (and OS and such) will continue to play just fine...
Given the above, why do you think anything is safe? Common grapefruit was created by putting a radiation source in an orchard and seeing what happened - most of it was bad (as in trees died), but one grapefruit turns out to taste good. That grapefruit was grafted again and again until it is dominate. We have no idea which genes were changed and never did any study to see if the mutations were safe, we just eat it.
For hundreds of years farmers have been saving seeds from the plants that produced better. As a result the random mutations that farmers like have been selected for with no study on if those are safe mutations.
By Contrast with GMO we know which gene we change and why, and have done studies to prove safety. Maybe biases studies, and maybe not enough of them, but we have done them. That is more than you can say about anything not GMO.
This. We've been creating GMOs since the dawn of agriculture. Doing it in a petrie dish changes nothing. I'm less concerned about GMOs than I am about them changing them to spray worse and worse weedkiller on them before I eat it.
>We've been creating GMOs since the dawn of agriculture. Doing it in a petrie dish changes nothing.
Yeah, if breadth and scale doesn't mean anything.
It's like saying: "We have been blowing things up since the advent of gunpowder by the Chinese a millennium ago. Doing it with atomic bombs changes nothing".
Traditional "GMOs" were already closely related, and the modifications that could emerge were very constrained. Not so much with GMOs that allow for arbitrary outputs.
The breadth and scale is much smaller with GMO and random chance. A farmer several thousand years ago is responsible for as much genetic mutation of the human race as all the genetic manipulation that has made it to market. (though this will change quickly if we start making approval for GMO easy)
Given your attitude I expect you wouldn't be really happy getting to know how selective breeding works(it's waay more random - to the point where you get mainly unwanted side effects).
Where does the assumption that I don't know how selective breeding works comes? Because if someone has concerns such as mine they must obviously be some anti-scientific luddite?
For one, selective breeding has been going on for millennia -- and from people who had to eat its results, not mega corporations 10 times removed and interested in short term profit.
If it was that dangerous we'd know it by now.
Second, the species must be already related and/or compatible to a certain degree -- the same reason we don't have cat and snake hybrids in nature. Whereas with GMOs you can have arbitrary changes and mixes.
So it's not "waay more random" as it has way more limited scope. It's only random in that practitioners are not certain of the successful inheritance of the desired traits.
But it's like comparing playing with lego bricks to playing with creating stuff at the molecule level.
> For one, selective breeding has been going on for millennia -- and from people who had to eat its results, not mega corporations 10 times removed and interested in short term profit.
Yeah, modern selective or “traditional” breeding uses completely novel methods of introducing diversity (including artificial mutagens), is done by exactly the kind of megacorps you are concerned about, and has less oversight or regulatory control than GMOs.
> So it's not "waay more random" as it has way more limited scope
No, it is way more random than inserting a known gene at a known location, and verifying he product in the ways done with modern GMOs. And the scope of genetic change in any one product is greater than in a GMO, not more limited.
My wife works in ag biotech, and has worked on both transgenic (GMO) and non-transgenic platforms.
> But it's like comparing playing with lego bricks to playing with creating stuff at the molecule level.
A less imperfect analogy might be that it's like comparing writing code by hand with a reasonably comprehensive test suite with making random bit flips to machine code until it passes a much more limited test suite. And just to be clear, the latter is the non-GM option.
> Where does the assumption that I don't know how selective breeding works comes?
Easy: You're against the less random of the two. This means that apparently you don't know how GMO and/or selective breeding works.
> If it was that dangerous we'd know it by now.
This same logic applies to GMO, which has been around since the nineties. Aside from some late capitalism-esque economic effects nothing interesting happened.
> Whereas with GMOs you can have arbitrary changes and mixes.
