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How can we be certain that any chemical we put into the environment will not cause some catastrophe? We can’t. We can only study the solution until we get to so
by speedplane 8y ago
How can we be certain that any chemical we put into the environment will not cause some catastrophe? We can’t. We can only study the solution until we get to some reasonable level of certainty.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoManipulating genes is different, if the genetic variation can be transmitted somehow (as occurrs in GMOs, I gather) then the influence is transmitted. It's viral (no pun intended) and subject to random mutations that may be more virulent. With chemicals they tend to degrade. It's like the influence of single chain letter that's physically passed from hand to hand (and eventually falls apart) vs a Facebook post that's effectively infinitely duplicable. The diligence in handling genetic solutions to biological problems needs to be substantially greater.
- speedplane 8y agoThere are plenty of chemicals that don't degrade or degrade extremely slowly (e.g., PCBs, radioactive chemicals), and which can influence a species or ecosystem over many generations. Introducing genes definitely pose risks, but I they aren't fundamentally different from any other dangerous chemicals. We have tools and frameworks to evaluate this risk.
- strainer 8y agoIt is not the case that all types of chemical are equally mysterious to the environment. Fundamentally if the chemical or thing is already in the environment then we can quite confidently deduce the environment is evolved to work with not dissimilar amounts of it.