Randomly changing millions of base pairs: good. Precisely cutting a gene from one crop and putting it in another: bad. Baffling.
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... ?
Power, scale, agenda and synergies matter.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
How many are funded by the GMO industry?
Studies are usually not answers to public concern questions, but a way people working in a domain figure things out about that domain.
Industries funding favourable research is the oldest trick in the book. See climate change studies, tobacco, etc.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.