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I think there's a reason nature doesn't allow a frog to breed with a plant. You can call it a scare tactic... but with GMOs we're doing things that would be im

I think there's a reason nature doesn't allow a frog to breed with a plant. You can call it a scare tactic... but with GMOs we're doing things that would be impossible to try with traditional methods.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> You can call it a scare tactic... I can, because that's exactly what the software development analogy is: a scare tactic that relies on ignorance of how the alternatives would work if looked at the same way. There is no method available for crop development that is analogous, in the manner that things were framed upthread, to good software development. (And there won't ever be, unless, through experience with the use of the gene editing tools we have now, we develop much better tools.) > but with GMOs we're doing things that would be impossible to try with traditional methods. With "traditional" (which mostly means non-GMO -- the methods that fall under that label now are often as new, or newer, than the GMO methods) methods we are also doing things which would be impossible with the traditional methods available before the time when we started doing GMO. That's not really surprising, the advance of technology usually involves doing things impossible with earlier technology.
ucaetano 11y ago
"Nature" doesn't disallow anything. Viruses and bacteria can exchange DNA with pretty much almost any living thing. We actually have descendants of bacteria with their own DNA living inside each of our cells. DNA, and nature, is a mess.