6 ms·

"No single point just does a single thing." Exactly this! And this is why GM foods are more dangerous than you might expect. Even if gene x does only x in orga

"No single point just does a single thing." Exactly this! And this is why GM foods are more dangerous than you might expect. Even if gene x does only x in organism A, there is no guarantee that gene x does only one thing or the same thing in organism B.

smaddox 8y ago
GM foods are arguably no more dangerous than any massively engineered foods we've been eating for decades/centuries. Direct gene modification is more like using a scalpel rather than a 2x4. Still potentially dangerous, but far more precise.
- curious_fella2 8y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - jf- 8y ago
    Selective breeding is the poor man’s genetic engineering.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Think about wolves. Over many generations of selective breeding, we have poodles. No engineering required, but obviously a huge change.
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      Another example would be King Charles Spaniels, which are overbred to have tiny heads and big cute eyes - and are at high risk of seizures from compression of the brain by the skull :-( I have shepherds and there's a big philosophical split between shepherd owners who want 'working line' dogs and those who want 'show dogs' that are significantly more likely to have health problems. Dog breeding is a very poorly regulated market and the outcomes are just as depressing as you would imagine.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
        I wonder what possess people to want to own dog breeds that are physically deformed by design. What kind of brain injury do you have to have to go out of your way to want to breed these dogs? And why the hell don’t / haven’t animal rights activists, and society in general, vigorously pursue regulation to ban these absurd breeds.
        anigbrowl 8y ago
        It's easy to breed and sell dogs and hard to regulate/litigate against bad breeders. The US Kennel club prioritizes promoting 'breed standards' over the wellbeing of the animal. My informal observations suggest an overlap between such priorities and the general belief in animals as property/divinely ordained for human use/lacking in consciousness of any kind.
- Valmar 8y ago
  GM foods are actually more dangerous, due to how GM works. Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right places. And we just don't know how that even happens, or why. We don't understand nature's algorithm for DNA. No even the tip of the iceberg. Sure, nature isn't always correct, but does thing properly 99.999% of the time. And that's good enough. It is utterly incomparable to GM done by humans ~ genes are inserted, but the results are not equivalent to what is done by nature, because we don't understand DNA enough to know where we should be placing the inserted DNA, so that things don't massively fuck up inexplicably somewhere down the line.
  - traverseda 8y ago
    Why do you think cross breeding is safer then GM? Nature doesn't "know better", crossbreeding is just easier, and we only keep the results that work. Known-viable mammal hybrids tend to have poor health, with some obvious exceptions like mules. What you're seeing as "nature knowing what's best" is really just life being able to function with all kinds of random genes all over the place, because the core biochemical pathways are close enough.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      Personally, I think the monetization of GMO is the problem more than the GM. We have turned seeds into the equivalent of Gillette razors. A farmer buys patented seeds and the complimentary chemical to kill everything else. The problem is that as farming has turned into a big dumb business, centuries of best practices with respect to land management are getting tossed. Farmers near where I grow up (who are left) don’t rotate and are being ground into bankruptcy as larger and larger entities dominate.
  - notheguyouthink 8y ago
    > Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right place I feel like this is putting too much faith in "natural" methodologies. Eg, who's to say a cross breeding solution is less dangerous than a GM solution? If the concern is that it may take 50 years to know the GM is bad, why are we assuming the non-GM is good now? You could say that people have been cross breading for many many generations, but i'm unsure why we'd know that one cross breed being safe means all crossbreeds are safe. I'm not inherently defending GM. I'm attacking the notion that man made tricks like cross breeding are inherently safe.
- andrei_says_ 8y ago
  Intentionally confusing genetic modification with cross breeding is one of monsanto’s favorite talking points. Genetic engineering is more like changing the byte code in your OS hoping to change its functionality. Without having the source code.
  - koube 8y ago
    This analogy is getting tortured beyond the point of usefulness, because the the other side of this analogy is that cross breeding is mixing files from two different repos together and hoping they still work.
- dwaltrip 8y ago
  It's more like editing the raw binary of an executable. It's only more precise if you understand the binary representation and the impact of changes. Otherwise it's incredibly imprecise, as you are just randomly flipping switches. In the case of genetics, we have a some understanding, but it is fairly limited. There is real potential for unexpected harm, given how much we don't know and the complexity of the code. Of course, we can do some amazing things with the parts we do understand. Selecting breeding is like using a high level GUI that is decently functional. Like most GUIs, it significantly restricts how you can modify the underlying data. The plus side is that it is harder to put the data in a bad or dangerous state using only the controls offered by the GUI.
  - pskk 8y ago
    I was trying to reason about CRISPR (and other editing methods) and try to get an analogy. It sounds a lot like an efficient hex editor. Sure you can edit parts of the "code" but we don't have any debuggers readily available. We can edit randomly and "run" the code, but as far as I know that's about it.
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      And it turns out nature really likes operator overloading.
    - saltcured 8y ago
      It's not a perfect analogy, but I think CRISPR is a bit like a regexp-replace edit function being used to hot-patch your live system memory. It has an extremely narrow pattern-recognition buffer, and you are gambling that you found a sufficiently unique signature at your edit point(s) so that it doesn't also corrupt unrelated parts of your system image that happen to match the same pattern.
  - lukeschlather 8y ago
    I don't think it's really accurate to describe selective breeding as restricting how you can modify the underlying data. I'd rather say that the executable itself contains layer upon layer of consistency checks so if you modify it too much it will just refuse to "boot up." In fact selective breeding relies heavily on this mechanism since it can create hundreds or even millions of nonviable organisms for every viable organism. If the consistency checks in the natural genome don't stop you, pretty much by definition whatever you're doing could happen through an unlikely coincidence of selective breeding (especially if you involve a wild virus to take the place of the lab virus.)
- forgotmypw3 8y ago
  The problem with GM foods is that the overwhelming majority of them are modified for resistance to poison chemicals, which are dangerous and haremful
- jayalpha 8y ago
  "GM foods are arguably no more dangerous than any massively engineered foods " This may be your opinion. While GM foods are not per see dangerous, the long tail risk is tremendous, exactly because you can not tell what a gene is going to do in another organism. Take my word for it, I have a PhD in that shit. Taleb also advocates the precautionary principle: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5787.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5787.pdf
  - snovv_crash 8y ago
    Any change analyzed in a vacuum is risky. The trick is to compare it to the alternative, and see if it is more risky. The alternative to GMO is applying random mutations, and then selecting a strain that has the behavior we want. This has much higher risk than changing only what we need, since many other components could be changed at the same time too, and each of them also have these many interactions. Honestly, Taleb should stick with what he knows: finance. In other fields I trust his opinion about as much as I would any other Wall Street banker.
  - mdtancsa 8y ago
    Speaking Risk, Rob Reid wrote an interesting series of articles, one of which was on global risk that this topic made me think about https://medium.com/s/powertrip/the-50-50-murder-a3832f587bee https://medium.com/s/powertrip/the-50-50-murder-a3832f587bee
  - trevyn 8y ago
    You’re probably right, but could you provide an example of an unexpected consequence of an inserted gene?
- carboy 8y ago
  Arguably? Yes. Provable? No. Until we know how the system works your ideas are only ideas. In and adult your precise change might have minimal impact, but what if that sequence is checked during embryo development, and if it’s not present “exactly” as expected the embryo aborts? How long do you think it will take to figure out that your “precise” change now prevents humans from reproducing?
htk 8y ago
Even if this hypothesis is correct, I would replace "dangerous" with "unpredictable", because the resulting effects of those interactions would be as likely to cause good as to cause harm.
- Valmar 8y ago
  Unpredictable, therefore being dangerous and extremely risky? They're often partners in crime, when it comes to subjects not well understood. Especially with something as fragile as DNA.
- rjf72 8y ago
  Why do you think changes would be as likely to cause good as to cause harm? In complex, yet structured, systems - I think changes without fully understanding what you're doing are vastly more likely to cause harm than good. Software is the obvious example. Change a line of bytecode/assembly to something else. I think the chances of that change being good are extremely close to 0.
  - denerio-a 8y ago
    This guy is 100% right, and this is important, so please stop downvoting him.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    But in nature most mutations are neutral, period. It is likely to be more don't cares although actual improvements are unlikely. Good outcomes from random chances are rare but that doesn't mean that bad outcomes must be the dominant component. Just look at Atomic gardening [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening] - a practice which should be /way/ worse if mutations really did produce bad effects most of the time. Instead the effects were either dud seeds or a few useful byproducts as opposed to 'this grapefruit is now rich in cyanide'.
Sawamara 8y ago
No, please, please. Do not do this. You eat your food. The purpose is different. It has been engineered to shit already.
albertgoeswoof 8y ago
Except food doesn’t tend to harm you if it’s DNA is a little different, you digest it, it doesn’t modify your cells directly.
- code_beers 8y ago
  The DNA doesn’t, no. But what does DNA do? For one thing, it contains instructions for constructing proteins. Proteins which you ingest with the DNA as part of the food. GMO foods have been shown to produce malformed proteins, and some of them appear to have harmful effects when eaten. And that just scratches the surface. https://responsibletechnology.org/gmo-education/health-risks/ https://responsibletechnology.org/gmo-education/health-risks...
  - albertgoeswoof 8y ago
    That genetic modification can, and does, happen naturally, all the time. It’s how evolution works
    - code_beers 8y ago
      That talking point has already been attempted by others. Using one term, genetic modification, for several completely different processes doesn’t hide the truth, it just confuses people. And no, grafting entire sections of bacterial DNA into plant genomes absolutely does not happen in nature. Please read the link, then get back to me with any actual scientifically founded refutations you may have. Citations are throughout the link, but I don’t see any from you!
      - mr_toad 8y ago
        > Using one term, genetic modification, for several completely different processes doesn’t hide the truth, it just confuses people. That’s exactly what the article you linked to does too. The takeaway is that any alteration to the genome of food is bad.
        8y ago

smaddox 8y ago

GM foods are arguably no more dangerous than any massively engineered foods we've been eating for decades/centuries. Direct gene modification is more like using a scalpel rather than a 2x4. Still potentially dangerous, but far more precise.

curious_fella2 8y ago
Can you elaborate?
- jf- 8y ago
  Selective breeding is the poor man’s genetic engineering.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Think about wolves. Over many generations of selective breeding, we have poodles. No engineering required, but obviously a huge change.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    Another example would be King Charles Spaniels, which are overbred to have tiny heads and big cute eyes - and are at high risk of seizures from compression of the brain by the skull :-( I have shepherds and there's a big philosophical split between shepherd owners who want 'working line' dogs and those who want 'show dogs' that are significantly more likely to have health problems. Dog breeding is a very poorly regulated market and the outcomes are just as depressing as you would imagine.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      I wonder what possess people to want to own dog breeds that are physically deformed by design. What kind of brain injury do you have to have to go out of your way to want to breed these dogs? And why the hell don’t / haven’t animal rights activists, and society in general, vigorously pursue regulation to ban these absurd breeds.
      - anigbrowl 8y ago
        It's easy to breed and sell dogs and hard to regulate/litigate against bad breeders. The US Kennel club prioritizes promoting 'breed standards' over the wellbeing of the animal. My informal observations suggest an overlap between such priorities and the general belief in animals as property/divinely ordained for human use/lacking in consciousness of any kind.
Valmar 8y ago
GM foods are actually more dangerous, due to how GM works. Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right places. And we just don't know how that even happens, or why. We don't understand nature's algorithm for DNA. No even the tip of the iceberg. Sure, nature isn't always correct, but does thing properly 99.999% of the time. And that's good enough. It is utterly incomparable to GM done by humans ~ genes are inserted, but the results are not equivalent to what is done by nature, because we don't understand DNA enough to know where we should be placing the inserted DNA, so that things don't massively fuck up inexplicably somewhere down the line.
- traverseda 8y ago
  Why do you think cross breeding is safer then GM? Nature doesn't "know better", crossbreeding is just easier, and we only keep the results that work. Known-viable mammal hybrids tend to have poor health, with some obvious exceptions like mules. What you're seeing as "nature knowing what's best" is really just life being able to function with all kinds of random genes all over the place, because the core biochemical pathways are close enough.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Personally, I think the monetization of GMO is the problem more than the GM. We have turned seeds into the equivalent of Gillette razors. A farmer buys patented seeds and the complimentary chemical to kill everything else. The problem is that as farming has turned into a big dumb business, centuries of best practices with respect to land management are getting tossed. Farmers near where I grow up (who are left) don’t rotate and are being ground into bankruptcy as larger and larger entities dominate.
- notheguyouthink 8y ago
  > Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right place I feel like this is putting too much faith in "natural" methodologies. Eg, who's to say a cross breeding solution is less dangerous than a GM solution? If the concern is that it may take 50 years to know the GM is bad, why are we assuming the non-GM is good now? You could say that people have been cross breading for many many generations, but i'm unsure why we'd know that one cross breed being safe means all crossbreeds are safe. I'm not inherently defending GM. I'm attacking the notion that man made tricks like cross breeding are inherently safe.
andrei_says_ 8y ago
Intentionally confusing genetic modification with cross breeding is one of monsanto’s favorite talking points. Genetic engineering is more like changing the byte code in your OS hoping to change its functionality. Without having the source code.
- koube 8y ago
  This analogy is getting tortured beyond the point of usefulness, because the the other side of this analogy is that cross breeding is mixing files from two different repos together and hoping they still work.
dwaltrip 8y ago
It's more like editing the raw binary of an executable. It's only more precise if you understand the binary representation and the impact of changes. Otherwise it's incredibly imprecise, as you are just randomly flipping switches. In the case of genetics, we have a some understanding, but it is fairly limited. There is real potential for unexpected harm, given how much we don't know and the complexity of the code. Of course, we can do some amazing things with the parts we do understand. Selecting breeding is like using a high level GUI that is decently functional. Like most GUIs, it significantly restricts how you can modify the underlying data. The plus side is that it is harder to put the data in a bad or dangerous state using only the controls offered by the GUI.
- pskk 8y ago
  I was trying to reason about CRISPR (and other editing methods) and try to get an analogy. It sounds a lot like an efficient hex editor. Sure you can edit parts of the "code" but we don't have any debuggers readily available. We can edit randomly and "run" the code, but as far as I know that's about it.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    And it turns out nature really likes operator overloading.
  - saltcured 8y ago
    It's not a perfect analogy, but I think CRISPR is a bit like a regexp-replace edit function being used to hot-patch your live system memory. It has an extremely narrow pattern-recognition buffer, and you are gambling that you found a sufficiently unique signature at your edit point(s) so that it doesn't also corrupt unrelated parts of your system image that happen to match the same pattern.
- lukeschlather 8y ago
  I don't think it's really accurate to describe selective breeding as restricting how you can modify the underlying data. I'd rather say that the executable itself contains layer upon layer of consistency checks so if you modify it too much it will just refuse to "boot up." In fact selective breeding relies heavily on this mechanism since it can create hundreds or even millions of nonviable organisms for every viable organism. If the consistency checks in the natural genome don't stop you, pretty much by definition whatever you're doing could happen through an unlikely coincidence of selective breeding (especially if you involve a wild virus to take the place of the lab virus.)
forgotmypw3 8y ago
The problem with GM foods is that the overwhelming majority of them are modified for resistance to poison chemicals, which are dangerous and haremful
jayalpha 8y ago
"GM foods are arguably no more dangerous than any massively engineered foods " This may be your opinion. While GM foods are not per see dangerous, the long tail risk is tremendous, exactly because you can not tell what a gene is going to do in another organism. Take my word for it, I have a PhD in that shit. Taleb also advocates the precautionary principle: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5787.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5787.pdf
- snovv_crash 8y ago
  Any change analyzed in a vacuum is risky. The trick is to compare it to the alternative, and see if it is more risky. The alternative to GMO is applying random mutations, and then selecting a strain that has the behavior we want. This has much higher risk than changing only what we need, since many other components could be changed at the same time too, and each of them also have these many interactions. Honestly, Taleb should stick with what he knows: finance. In other fields I trust his opinion about as much as I would any other Wall Street banker.
- mdtancsa 8y ago
  Speaking Risk, Rob Reid wrote an interesting series of articles, one of which was on global risk that this topic made me think about https://medium.com/s/powertrip/the-50-50-murder-a3832f587bee https://medium.com/s/powertrip/the-50-50-murder-a3832f587bee
- trevyn 8y ago
  You’re probably right, but could you provide an example of an unexpected consequence of an inserted gene?
carboy 8y ago
Arguably? Yes. Provable? No. Until we know how the system works your ideas are only ideas. In and adult your precise change might have minimal impact, but what if that sequence is checked during embryo development, and if it’s not present “exactly” as expected the embryo aborts? How long do you think it will take to figure out that your “precise” change now prevents humans from reproducing?

htk 8y ago

Even if this hypothesis is correct, I would replace "dangerous" with "unpredictable", because the resulting effects of those interactions would be as likely to cause good as to cause harm.

Valmar 8y ago
Unpredictable, therefore being dangerous and extremely risky? They're often partners in crime, when it comes to subjects not well understood. Especially with something as fragile as DNA.
rjf72 8y ago
Why do you think changes would be as likely to cause good as to cause harm? In complex, yet structured, systems - I think changes without fully understanding what you're doing are vastly more likely to cause harm than good. Software is the obvious example. Change a line of bytecode/assembly to something else. I think the chances of that change being good are extremely close to 0.
- denerio-a 8y ago
  This guy is 100% right, and this is important, so please stop downvoting him.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  But in nature most mutations are neutral, period. It is likely to be more don't cares although actual improvements are unlikely. Good outcomes from random chances are rare but that doesn't mean that bad outcomes must be the dominant component. Just look at Atomic gardening [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening] - a practice which should be /way/ worse if mutations really did produce bad effects most of the time. Instead the effects were either dud seeds or a few useful byproducts as opposed to 'this grapefruit is now rich in cyanide'.

Sawamara 8y ago

No, please, please. Do not do this. You eat your food. The purpose is different. It has been engineered to shit already.

albertgoeswoof 8y ago

Except food doesn’t tend to harm you if it’s DNA is a little different, you digest it, it doesn’t modify your cells directly.

code_beers 8y ago
The DNA doesn’t, no. But what does DNA do? For one thing, it contains instructions for constructing proteins. Proteins which you ingest with the DNA as part of the food. GMO foods have been shown to produce malformed proteins, and some of them appear to have harmful effects when eaten. And that just scratches the surface. https://responsibletechnology.org/gmo-education/health-risks/ https://responsibletechnology.org/gmo-education/health-risks...
- albertgoeswoof 8y ago
  That genetic modification can, and does, happen naturally, all the time. It’s how evolution works
  - code_beers 8y ago
    That talking point has already been attempted by others. Using one term, genetic modification, for several completely different processes doesn’t hide the truth, it just confuses people. And no, grafting entire sections of bacterial DNA into plant genomes absolutely does not happen in nature. Please read the link, then get back to me with any actual scientifically founded refutations you may have. Citations are throughout the link, but I don’t see any from you!
    - mr_toad 8y ago
      > Using one term, genetic modification, for several completely different processes doesn’t hide the truth, it just confuses people. That’s exactly what the article you linked to does too. The takeaway is that any alteration to the genome of food is bad.
      - 8y ago