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The greater risk is mass starvation due to inhibited food production. Cancer can take a few years to kill you; starvation takes a few weeks. We have been genet

by jbob2000 8y ago

The greater risk is mass starvation due to inhibited food production. Cancer can take a few years to kill you; starvation takes a few weeks. We have been genetically modifying things to feed ourselves for thousands of years. We bred features into dogs so they would be better at finding food (e.g. beagles), is that not a form of genetic modification? We grafted strains of grass on to our wheat to make it drought resistant, isn't that genetic modification too? I'd challenge you to find me some kind of food that humans haven't genetically modified. The experiment has been on going for a long time and human life expectancy is at the highest it's ever been, seems to be working out well!

badrabbit 8y ago
There is no food supply issue,gmo does not avert any starvation crisis. Breeding is as much of a genetic modification as reproduction is. The genes are modified through indirect natural means. That isn't the same as directly selecting and modifying specific genes. All food before the past 60 years was not genetically modified,that is to say humans did not modify specific genes. Organisms were interbred and the new genes although different,we did not edit them directly. Back to the programming analogy - editing settings in an application (natural means) and modifying it or even editing the source code isn't the same as editing the machine code after reverse engineering it without even fully understanding what instructions are supported by the architecture. If someone edits machine code to fix a bug for an arch nobody fully understands then you should run a full regression test and UAT before deploying.
phyzome 8y ago
If you try to solve the hunger problem by producing more food... then what? Now you have an even larger population to feed. To fix it, we need to reduce the birthrate. In the meantime, we can try not throwing away so much food. (There's already enough to feed everybody, it's mostly a distribution problem.)
- AdamM12 8y ago
  I think this is more of an economic issue. Poor countries, or better stated their population, can't afford to pay for the food. Exact example would be during the Irish famine Ireland was still exporting food the GB as they were able to pay for it. Got the example from "Development as Freedom" [1] [1] https://www.amazon.com/Development-as-Freedom-Amartya-Sen/dp/0385720270 https://www.amazon.com/Development-as-Freedom-Amartya-Sen/dp...

badrabbit 8y ago

There is no food supply issue,gmo does not avert any starvation crisis. Breeding is as much of a genetic modification as reproduction is. The genes are modified through indirect natural means. That isn't the same as directly selecting and modifying specific genes. All food before the past 60 years was not genetically modified,that is to say humans did not modify specific genes. Organisms were interbred and the new genes although different,we did not edit them directly. Back to the programming analogy - editing settings in an application (natural means) and modifying it or even editing the source code isn't the same as editing the machine code after reverse engineering it without even fully understanding what instructions are supported by the architecture. If someone edits machine code to fix a bug for an arch nobody fully understands then you should run a full regression test and UAT before deploying.

phyzome 8y ago

If you try to solve the hunger problem by producing more food... then what? Now you have an even larger population to feed. To fix it, we need to reduce the birthrate. In the meantime, we can try not throwing away so much food. (There's already enough to feed everybody, it's mostly a distribution problem.)

AdamM12 8y ago
I think this is more of an economic issue. Poor countries, or better stated their population, can't afford to pay for the food. Exact example would be during the Irish famine Ireland was still exporting food the GB as they were able to pay for it. Got the example from "Development as Freedom" [1] [1] https://www.amazon.com/Development-as-Freedom-Amartya-Sen/dp/0385720270 https://www.amazon.com/Development-as-Freedom-Amartya-Sen/dp...