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Comment by odbol_ | Hacker News Reader

This is why I'm always skeptical of people zealously claiming "all GMOs are perfectly safe! It's been proven!"

Yeah, proven by expensive studies that were funded by the company making the GMO. Who is going to pay for another study to try to disprove it?

There's a reason we sprayed DET all over our vegetables for years before it was banned: there was no scientific studies proving that it was harmful, even though it clearly was harmful in hindsight.

Science is not instant, and there's no way someone can claim that some brand-new GMO is "perfectly safe", without any long-term studies on its effects over 10, 20, 30 years of exposure. That's just not possible. And yet you try to explain it to these science zealots and they just brush you off as being "anti-science".

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Do you mean DDT?

Anyway, beyond the 'philosophy of science' issue of whether you can prove something, there is good affirmative evidence that existing GMOs are safe for numerous reasons.

First, there's no mechanistic reason to think they would be dangerous. T-DNAs are not somehow magically toxic to humans; everything you eat is riddled with millennia of t-dnas, old viruses, transposon blooms, etc. etc.

The technologies themselves should be safe as well. BT is well understood and embraced by the organic community as an applied natural pesticide, so you would need to find evidence that the localization somehow makes it toxic. Glyphosate resistance is also unlikely to have any effect a priori because it affects a metabolic pathway completely absent in animals.

Argue all you like about how nothing can be 'perfectly safe', sure, but there's no reason to think that GMOs are dangerous, and people have looked quite hard. ______

Finally, just look at the Seralini pile-of-bullshit for evidence that there's plenty of incentive to publish anything critical of GMOs. No one is sitting on career-making evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9ralini_affair

> First, there's no mechanistic reason to think they would be dangerous.

That's like saying "there's no reason to think peanuts would be dangerous" since humans eat them all the time. And yet, they are deadly to some humans. No one knows why.

But they do know that food allergies are far more prevalent in the U.S. than in other countries. And now, suddenly, people in Africa and China are starting to exhibit food allergies that the U.S. has had for a while. So what have we started shipping over to them that's causing these allergies? Who will fund that study?

What you've hinted at here is fascinating to me.

Do you have some references?

In case it's not clear, I'd like to read articles about food allergies that have been common in USA for some time now becoming common in countries that are coming out of 2nd world status and into 1st world.

This is just a large strawman argument. Talking about the safety of GMOs is more like talking about the safety of "Medicine"- you're actually talking about the safety of a large variety of different products. Pushing the narrative that all GMOs should be treated equally is like pushing the narrative that all medicines should be treated equally, which is nonsensical.

The very idea that there can be "something wrong with GMOs" is as anti-scientific as the narrative that there can be "something wrong with medicines". It's anti-scientific on principle, because it's not the safety of individual products you are taking issue with, it's the very existence of the entire scientific field.

Anyways, it takes about 10 years for the average Ag product to make it to market. That's on par with the time for the average drug. If you are serious about safety, start talking about real improvements that could be made to the Ag approval process. Start talking about the flaws in individual studies. Until you do something like that, your anti-science blanket dismissal of an entire field is as ridiculous as someone who is "against medicines".

>The very idea that there can be "something wrong with GMOs" is as anti-scientific

Are you kidding me? Have you read Taleb on the risks of GMOs? He argues that the possibility space of danger from GMOs is different from the possibility space of danger from regular breeding.

Sorry but this is such a fundamentally wrong assertion on so many levels. Quite the contrary people ought to prove that there is a good reason to assume GMOs are inherently more unsafe than anything else. It is the anti-GMO crowd who are the creationists here relying on emotions and dogma.

GMO is controlled alteration of specific genes in a crop. Why on earth should we assume this is less safe than uncontrolled changes? Massive changes of crop DNA has been going on for decades. Food you eat every day has originally been produced by essentially nuking seeds and making lots of random mutations. One has then grown various "nuked" seeds looking for those with favorable characteristics. Plants get changed getting genes from bacteria, cross breeding and all sorts of things. Why on earth should be assume uncontrolled massive changes of plant DNA is somehow safer than GMO?

GMO is not really what needs to be proven. It is the other methods of changing plants which need to prove that they are safer than GMO.

The problem with GMO isn't the science of it. The problem with GMO is the politics. Here I agree with the anti-GMO crowd. Companies like Monsanto are highly immoral and a scourge of the earth. It is companies owning particular strains of seeds and requiring everybody to keep buying from them which naturally causes resentment.

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