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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

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... ?

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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.

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.

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