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Comment by jeena | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I follow, you say "Genetic material is code being used in a production environment!" as far as I understand it we have been researching for decades and haven't found real problems, at least not more then with older alternatives like radiation and chemicals to speed up the production of genetic changes.

It confuses me that people are ok with, like the article calls it, the shotgun approach (radiation, chemicals) but not with the surgeon approach (using a scalpel and replacing only the genes we want to), I honestly don't understand why.

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I am not saying that we should eliminate genetic research. I am saying that we need to isolate genetic modification from the general genetic pool until we understand what we are doing. Until half a year ago "we" (geneticists) thought that upwards of 80% of the genome was junk DNA... oops, I guess not. I think that we have to be a little more cautious. A lot more cautious.

If (as I feel is the case) genetic material is code, and we (all Earth based life) is a production environment... I just cannot express how sloppy I feel we have been in the last 20 years. Policy, research, implementation... its not like we don't know how to run a clean software environment, how to do safe development... but in the genetic world? Hack, reverse engineer, install trap doors, holy fuck, we brought down a root level dns server? Cool! We are awesome! We must be geniuses!

We are 13 and loving it.

"Until half a year ago "we" (geneticists) thought that upwards of 80% of the genome was junk DNA... oops, I guess not."

That wasn't my impression when I left this field for chemistry in 1989. Back then "we" were saying "this doesn't code for specific proteins, is it junk, or does it have function?" The consensus then was "junk", and the recent claim otherwise is speculative as I read it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA#Junk_DNA

The flip side is by then we were realizing that DNA moves around a lot more than we'd though, and transgenic organisms were common in nature ... or at least tries, Nature is much more a script-kiddie than us and most of those "attempts" fail.

Right, I am not and never was a geneticist.

The point I am trying to make is that we assume too much. I would say that this statement, "Nature is much more a script-kiddie than us" is just such an assumption. How much of transgenic communication is accidental and how much is necessary with the design (sorry, probably political phrasing here...) parameters. I would assert that we just don't know yet.

In any case, to use, "Nature is the bigger ignorant hacker, we can be ignorant hackers too if it lines our pockets" is a terrible argument IMO.

Ah, but I was a budding geneticist from 1977-1989 (even "practicing" in the summer of 1977), and based on what I observed of the field then you are seriously overstating your case. My comment about Nature is not based on an "assumption" but on what people in the field learned during that period. Very conveniently the period started just after the Asilomar Conference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asilomar_conference_on_recombin...), and I studied all this in detail before finances forced me into a sordid, initially on and off career of programming.

Or at least as view your "accidental" vs. "necessary with the design" concept; I don't give much credence to the latter, and I think it doesn't affect the argument that Nature has proved this to be generally safe.

Final note: if I and the others who believe this are correct, it's not merely a "lines our pockets", it's also a "X fewer people stave to death or suffer from malnutrition".

Forgive me, I did not meant to imply that "geneticists" as a group do it solely for money... that quip was aimed at Monsanto and typical public policy.

As concerns "necessary within the design" I would argue that you do. I am trying to say that as scientists, we like to say, "evolution has taken us [this far] (whatever [this far] is)". But we don't say, "How far could evolution have taken us?" How broad is the existing code base? Is it individual code bases branching into species, or is it all interleaved in some more subtle way?

I tend to believe it is the latter, and the evolution has taken us much farther than we realize.

This is why I believe our current handling of genetic modification is extremely bad practice and can (?) result in a "genetic seg-fault".

If you could develop that thesis I'd give it a hearing, but ... well, perhaps start with proposing a mechanism that "interleaves it in some subtle way" or some observations that suggest that's the case.

Me, I hope we're a lot more "modular" and that "genetic seg-faults" will continue to be by definition rare ("by definition" unless they happen after an organism breeds and is otherwise not responsible for its children). What makes you think evolution would go in the non-robust path you think might be the case?

Yeah, I would love to have time to develop this thesis as well. Let me think about it a bit, and I'll try to post a five sentence postulate.

As concerns nature, my observation is that (if I can personify nature, and grant it intention for the argument), it does not mind eliminating large groups of children if some (at least one, I guess) viable children remain. As a matter of fact, eliminating a lot of less viable children in favor of few more viable children is kind of the rule for selection.

So we take a group of strongly viable lines, contaminate them, and (in nature's much longer perspective) make them less viable. Marked for elimination.

We usually think this elimination comes from direct competition, and I would agree that in our experience so far this is the observed case. But what is observable in much GM research is that after three or so generations, animals consuming the GM product stop reproducing. The "why" here is still being researched and is at best poorly understood.

So, I argue that nature in this case is taking the robust path. Eliminating contamination.

I just wanted to say that we do far more dangerous stuff with the radiation and nobody demands we should isolate those until we understand what is going on. But when it comes to GMO people suddenly are terrified, that is what confuses me.

To amply on jeena's point, we used to do this by exposing seeds to e.g. cobalt 60 gamma rays, and breeding the surviving mutants that seemed promising. If you eat all but I assume the very best sushi in the US, the rice is probably a Calrose, do a search on calrose radiation (funny, the Wikipedia article doesn't mention this at all, then again I'm not 100% sure current day Calrose is derived from those earlier varieties).

Yeah... I was not aware of this. Another food source I will have to investigate. Chickens, I have found, love rice.

Look into the Green Revolution, e.g. start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution ; if you're growing or using a cereal that's from a dwarf/semi-dwarf plant variety, before modern genetic engineering it probably had untold horrors committed on it to achieve higher yields.

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