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Literally everything you're talking about applies to selective breeding of crops as much as it does transgenic crops (what people typically mean by GMO). It applies even more so to irradiated seeds, which - strangely - no one seems to mind or want labels on.

Randomly changing millions of base pairs: good. Precisely cutting a gene from one crop and putting it in another: bad. Baffling.

One is using a self-safe system that has been tuned for balance for 1000000 of years and have a proven track record and no agenda. The second one is made by a few smart people for only 20 years for money.

The second one has to prove to be safe. It's funny that all of HN hold boing so responsible for demonstrating things are safe when it affect only a few hundred people. But we have to be taking the word of people playing with new high tech toys for their own benefit that have the potential to affect the entire humanity because... ?

Why do those principles which make natural evolution safe not also apply to GMOs?

In the same way that a tiger killing a rabit is not the same thing than a human with a nuclear weapon.

Power, scale, agenda and synergies matter.

How do you figure it's self-safe? That implies that selectively bred crops can't be harmful, but that's nonsensical. Many selectively bred crops carry higher than natural carcinogen quantities, for instance (potatoes). And that's ignoring plants that are straight-up deadly.

And which category does seed irradiation fall into? If exposing seeds to high radiation in order to randomly mutate them is an acceptable "non-GMO" mechanism, clearly something is wrong.

Because it worked for a lot longer than 20 years. In 100 years, without GMO problems, we can label them safe too.

Plus evolution doesn't have an agenda that would make it creates things like the terminator gene. We are in a very peculiar situation.

I'm open to see how it plays out, as long as we don't arrogantly pretend we know for sure everything will be ok. Because we heard this one before, and it was always stated by people that wanted to sound trustworthy or smart, never the ones that wanted to make sure we are all happy.

Besides, how asking for severe and regular audits is even a bad thing ? If one is against that, I trust their judgment even less.

Seed irradiation hasn't yet been in use for 100 years -- the first commercial crop to use it was ~80 years ago -- but we consider it safe, despite that it consists of forcing completely random changes to occur. Why? Because we don't talk about the safety of the process; we talk about the safety of the result.

There's no way we can ever say "GMOs are safe" because it's like saying "crops grown during the 14th week of the year are safe". It's a technique, not a product.

Food irradiation in general is yet another issue, that deserves a different threat.

The parent isn’t talking about food irradiation, they’re talking about atomic gardening: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening

Anthrax is "self-safe" too. It's an organism made by evolution.

Anthrax is not cultivated by the most invasive specy of the planet, given artificial characteristics to be optimized only for economic incentive, and would have never be allowed by natural selection to have such things as the terminator gene.

I'm not saying nature is good and benevolent, I'm saying there is a difference in having uranium in the ground or in a bomb.

I don't think asking for serious, regular, transparent, independant audit for decades is a bad thing. Or would you let any company deal with uranium without serious follow up ?

> I don't think asking for serious, regular, transparent, independant audit for decades is a bad thing.

You're right! It's a great thing, in fact. That's why there are over 3000 studies on GMO crops so far, with hundreds more happening each year.

Also, I'm a touch baffled by the mention of Terminator genes. 1) They've never existed. There's a patent on it, owned by a company who has pledged to never use it or allow any other company to do so. 2) It solves all the issues regarding drift, which is often a thing anti-GMO folks are concerned about. Never quite understood that.

> That's why there are over 3000 studies on GMO crops so far, with hundreds more happening each year.

How many are funded by the GMO industry?

How many chemistry studies are funded by chemical companies?

Studies are usually not answers to public concern questions, but a way people working in a domain figure things out about that domain.

How incredibly naive.

Industries funding favourable research is the oldest trick in the book. See climate change studies, tobacco, etc.

The "research sponsored by Big $Foo" is also getting a tired meme. By itself, taking in money does not mean research is biased - there needs to be conflict of interest involved. Sometimes it's easy to point it out (e.g. "roundup & cancer" studies with monetary ties to Monsanto), but that doesn't mean every study that was funded by industry is biased. People working there need to get at least some of these things right some of the time; they don't benefit from biasing a study they're using themselves to make sure their product works or meets safety regulations.

One of my post-grad friends was involved in environmental research. He was open (but disappointed) that if they didn't come up with the "right" conclusion there'd be no more funding from "Big $Foo". You may be tired of it, but that's not going to make such blatant conflict of interests go away.

- studies != audits

- most of those studies are used to demonstrate if something is doable. Few are targeting safety, even fewer are long enough or on a large scale enough to answer the previously raised concerned, and almost none are by independent entities.

- GMO have been planted and sold for consumption way before we had proof of short term and scale safety through independent studies. I have zero trust in the will to do the right thing of their manufacturers, either to fund objective studies for long term and large scale or to act humanly if those reveals something bad.

- the terminator gene is just an image I use, really, for the kind of modifications that we can think of, but that would not evolve out of a living system

> would have never be allowed by natural selection to have such things as the terminator gene

Many eusocial insect species (ants, bees, termites) have sterile worker and soldier castes. In some cases, the soldiers have such enlarged jaws that they are even unable to eat on their own, the workers need to feed them. A sterile soldier unable to eat, that's real natural selection for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality#Paradox

There is a purpose in that for the colony, so it evolved that way. And of course it took time, and a lot of small adaptive trials, to get there.

There is not purpose in that for the plant, hence it would not have evolved that way. And of course we just made a big leap out of it.

My point with the terminator gene is not about the feature itself, but the concept: we make fast and important changes with very narrow objectives that have zero logic into the system context. It's just for a few people's short term gain.

This is a teleological position, assuming that the end purpose carries intrinsic bearing on the worth of the process that produces that end. It's the same sort of logic behind anti-vax.

Evolution doesn't magically become dangerous just because it's been done in a lab. It's dangerous when it has measurable deleterious effects on biological systems.

I think the larger point still stands. It's my understanding that most fruit you eat these days is clones of the exact same source.

In fact, many varieties of apples are completely unable to reproduce by seed, only by clone. It's cool that we've made these cool hybrids, but it seems like nobody is thinking about the systemic environmental risk.

literally almost nothing he was talking about has anything to do with the differences between GMO and selective breeding, but it was a master-stroke of debate tactics for you to lead the discussion into that and away from his actual point. good work.

Sounds like a bunch of boogey man talk to me. None of what you have said has anything to do with the actual practice of genetic modification. It's solely unfounded paranoia. Not a single one of those has ANY relation to biotech companies other than the fact they are companies.

You're first paragraph was also full of falsehoods.

>> have no incentive to make sure they are safe on the long run since corporations almost never pay anything for their mistakes

Money and criminal prosecution, those are some good incentives. Also, corporations are constantly being sued. Some don't correct their mistakes because the people suing aren't interested in the global welfare either their interested in money so they settle. Also, I keep seeing the "they said that it would never spread" idea, I never recall any invested proponent say that there was 100% containment. Not once.

Also it is fairly easy though to contain, most of the crops that are modified have very high nutritional demands, they need regular watering, regular nitrates and minerals, near perfect soil. I take it, from the looks of the comments, there are practically no HN community members from a farming background. Most of these plants will die without farmers or being in a field prepared by farmers. That's why weeds are such a problem for farmers, they outcompete their very needy crops. The only real exception I can think of (out of the modified crops) that can thrive on its own is potatoes, the rest of them are very needy and don't do well in the wild. Even with potatoes though they spread best by spuds, the seeds are tiny and die easy. But that's why the others were the first targets for modification, to resist the chemicals required to suppress competition.

They probably shot the plant's genome with gold buckshot laced with new genes. The plants survived that, they grow in the fields and then migrate like everything else. They are viable. The genes may be able to be pollinated to other plants. Maybe incorporated, but if they can't outgrow weeds better than the non gmo, then it all is on equal footing. The qualities we want in a mono crop may not cross to the wilds.

Sure.

That doesn't invalidate my point though.

Let's not trust that things will go according to plan, or that the people making the plan have the proper agenda.

But is there any indication, that genetically modified plants do pose a danger to health, or the environment?

I mean with cigarettes it should have been obvious, you inhale, you cough. Maybe not good.

But with plants? In the food chain they just get digested. And in the wild they are either strong enough to be a new breed, or, more likely they fail and die out.

It's too early to tell. But when we build a nuclear reactor, we don't just make safety systems for likely events. We make them also for very, very unlikely ones. Because the potential risk is huge.

It's the same here. The potential risk is huge. We still have a hard time with things as simple as not killing each others, so thinking we are mastering introduction of these variables into such a complex systems is delusional at best, arrogant at worst.

Given that the people in charge of this are motivated by profit, and that we have history proving such entities will not do the right thing for humanity given the chance, let's not trust them.

Audit them to the ground. Force them to justify themself for 5 decades at every step. Make it transparent, systematic, and independant.

Working on GMO is ok. Trusting them to be safe because lobbists say so is not.

Yes, but in a reactor you know the dangers you protect against.

What are the potential dangers with gmo?

edit: "Working on GMO is ok. Trusting them to be safe because lobbists say so is not. "

And no I don't. I just dont see any reason why they should not be safe.

(their monoculture use with pesticides excluded. that is a different problem)

Most people didn't see any danger to something as simple as sugar 30 years ago. We added it everywhere, and now have an obese US population with sky high diabetes levels.

Sugar is not complicated.

The millions of DNA pairs of the millions of species of living things, all interacting, is complicated. Also, we eat those.

So we understand probably 4 percent of it, and we tweak the settings. I don't see any scenario where this is not a serious risk.

If you play with something on a huge scale that you don't fully understand, safety first.

But the worst part for me is that we have to defend the point of view of asking for being careful. Look at this thread. All I'm suggesting is a non compromising auditing system, and it's a debate !

This is insane. It should be the opposite. If you want to opt out of the safety net of humanity, you better make your case.

No, you generally assume that GMO are unsafe. And people would like to know, why? Any particular reason except the fear of the unknown?

Except the unknown? This is the main reason for me as well.

It's like a stranger coming to you with a pill: eat that. I'm sure I won't "just because" its unknown and there is a real chance it might go wrong. If I can't even estimate this chance its worse, it does mean I can not responsibly take the action.

I am so happy I'm not alone with this.

I'm totally with you. This is insane and REALLY scary...

Now I'm wondering why to be surprised if bigcorps don't care about others future when the individuals don't really care (~=want to make sure everything will be fine and not just assuming things won't break).

WDYT, what can we do about that issue? I'm totally staggered.

One of the big problems we always forget in the moment is that problems do not always present themselves in obvious ways. Leaded fuel is a great, and very recent, example. It remained legal for the better part of a century with numerous government declarations of its safety. One part of this was extensive lobbying and "research" from the industry players claiming it was safe, but the actual problem is that its problems manifest in very difficult to measure ways and over very long periods of time. You're not going to start wheezing and coughing around leaded fuel, at least not anymore so than unleaded fuel. And generally you'd seem to be completely unaffected given typical exposure levels.

Yet of course you aren't unaffected. Even today we we're not entirely certain of everything that leaded fuel fume exposure causes, let alone the exact mechanism for such. What we do know is that there is an apparent causal relationship between leaded fuel exposure, particularly during one's developmental years, and increased criminality, lower IQ, and other such things. But you're not going to show this in any sort of brief experiment and even over longterm experiments it can be difficult to discern the issues. I mean if we didn't already know as much, the idea that inhaling negligible amounts of gas fumes (in terms of parts per x) over years could somehow cause increased crime rates or even low IQs sounds pretty absurd. But our bodies react in ways that often belie intuition.

So you're left to look at things comparatively. How do people who do 'x' compare to people who do not do 'x' over years or decades? How do their children do? With GM crops we have a pretty ideal test suite since most of the world adopted these crops sparingly or not at all while in the United States near 100% of crops of certain crucial types are now genetically engineered. So how do young Americans, especially those born after the mid 90s, compare to those from other nations in terms of physical health, mental health, and other behaviors? Of course there are a million confounding variables here, some such as the growth of the internet can be controlled for but others cannot.

So this is something that would require extensive research and work to actively study. Presumably this would be the purview of agencies such as the FDA. Unfortunately, with our government this [1] was the last head of the FDA. A Monsanto VP lawyer who argued for things such as allowing corporations to knowingly allow at least a small amount of carcinogens into processed foods. That man determined food safety in the US for the majority of the last administration, and I doubt the current administration would have much interest in such research either. So instead we get no meaningful oversight, negligible or poorly formulated longitudinal research, and instead are left to rely primarily on the ethics of companies such as Monsanto.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_R._Taylor

Other than leaded gas, you can look at the sugar industry.

Hemlock is viable, that says nothing about it being good to eat.

> Because they have the potential to have a cascading effect on human healt and the entire ecosystem.

No they don't. This is stuff from scifi movies. Farmers have grown GMO crops for over 20 years, and there is not even a hint of an observation or theory on how they could cause any cascading effects.

20 years is amazingly short for ecosystems. Give it a century.

Also, it took us 40 years to realize we may be responsible for global warning, and some still doubt it, or have an agenda to spread doubt.

So you have to take in consideration that if we ever discover we messed up, inertia is going to be the doom of us.

Besides, scifi movies have proven to be not so bad at predicting how much we suck.

All in all, there is little downside to act safe, and it's very risky to not act as such. There is no emergency to get GMO everywhere, just an economic push. No, even this bs about solving world hunger, which is not a technical problem.

So let's be good citizens and don't assume things will go our way just because we want to.

GMO can arrive at a slower pace. And the very fact people are making it take the fast lane, screaming it's ok with no evidence, is a very good sign we don't have things under control: money does.

So when a big corporation tells you they can contain GMO, and you get prove they couldn't, you don't defend them. It's not rational, nor good for democracy.

> Also, it took us 40 years to realize we may be responsible for global warning

There is a known mechanism for global warming: CO2. If you invoke the precautionary principle for everything without any requirement for scientifically feasible mechanism causing the imagined adverse effects, you can oppose everything. Why did we make use of the internet and wifi and cell phones right away, instead of slowly introducing them over a 100 year transition period? After all, there would have been little downside in acting safe and slow?

I'd agree with wifi and cell phones being introduced in a slower way actually.

We don't need a 100 years though, since there is only one thing to check: if it affects us directly. We don't have the same cascading effect potential, nor nearly the same number of possible interactions.

And we already know that cell phones affect us by the way: the new generation already present an attention and focus deficit because of the constant solicitation of the cell phone. Privacy is being denied more and more. We've created huge amount of electronic wastes.

So yeah, I wish we had took a little more time instead of jumping full throttle into it. Or at least follow the effects and react.

But we are not a very reasonable specie.

The point of the precautionary principle is we don't know the mechanism. And that's the correct approach -- because our understanding of human health, the environment, and the ecosystem is still in its infancy.

That's why we do testing in most areas. That's the point of the FDA -- EVERY new drug must be presumed unsafe and tested. Such an attitude would serve us well if it were applied to widespread environmental concerns. Otherwise it'll be self-interested corporations with a damning track record (e.g. DuPont) making the calls[1].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuPont_(1802%E2%80%932017)#Con...

Can cell phones grow in the wild and potentially affect entire local ecosystems? Your analogies are poor.

Crop plants can't grow in the wild (outside human managed areas) either.

That's entirely false.

This is my main concern as well. I've tried having some discussions on this with the /r/farming subreddit and I just get down-voted

> Because they have the potential to have a cascading effect on human healt and the entire ecosystem.

Why should the risk be any higher in GMOs than it is in any new species, of which there are thousands discovered every year?

Because of agenda, scale, speed, scale, intertia and power. See other comments.

‘Discovered’ is entirely different than being genetically engineered.