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Comment by Protostome | Hacker News Reader

We're GMOing crops long before the DNA revolution. Plants were selectively bred for certain qualities since the dawn of agriculture. None of fruits or vegetables we eat in the present (even without GMO) could be found naturally few hundred years ago. We were genetically modifying them without really knowing the mechanism.

There some ecological as well as regulatory challenges. That doesn't mean GMO isn't a solid approach to improving accessibility to high quality fresh food

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The magnitude of the changes that are possible now are so far beyond what was available with selective breeding, it's nonsensical to consider them in the same league. I wish people would stop trotting out that argument.

Are you sure? The Chihuahua was bred out of a wolf.

The Chihuahua does not have horns.

> The magnitude of the changes that are possible now are so far beyond what was available with selective breeding, it's nonsensical to consider them in the same league.

The pace, more than magnitude, of changes achievable is greater now (either with GMOs or mutation breeding) than with older forms of selective breeding (mutation breeding is, after all, a form of selective breeding.)

What about things like adding bioluminescence to organisms that never had such a gene, nor would have naturally come across it?

Seems a step or two removed from selective breeding to me, though I'm not arguing for or against GMOs, just saying that it seems to me there is a definite distinction between the processes and what they are capable of doing.

Here's a good paper discussing risk w.r.t. GMOs: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf

There's a massive difference between selective breeding and introducing completely new genes into an ecosystem, though.

There are absolutely forms of GMO crops that could be entirely safe, but that doesn't seem to be the area of interest of Monsanto.

Selective breeding is not the same as editing a genome. You cannot "selectively breed" a fish gene into a tomato.

sure you can, its all just DNA... it just takes waaay longer.

Uhm. You can, in fact, selectively breed any given gene into any creature. You are, of course, aware that plant mutation rates has been accelerated with mutagens for decades in search of desirable changes.

So while it may not be a gene copied directly from a fish, it will be a base-for-base identical copy of the gene found in a fish. Then it can be merged back into the main line of the plant via a recombinant backcross technique.

This is how plant breeding has been done for quite a long time now.

> You cannot "selectively breed" a fish gene into a tomato.

The actual results of breeding and natural selection, including particularly convergent evolution, suggest that its quite possible to achieve equivalent results to that by breeding, though the timescale required, if you are relying on natural mutation as your source of variation, might be very long.

Which is why selection breeding techniques that kick up the pace of mutation with radiation or chemical mutagens are still competitive means of developing new desired traits in a world that has gene editing.

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