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Because we have very little feedback on the long term effect of new bio techs. Because they have the potential to have a cascading effect on human healt and the

Because we have very little feedback on the long term effect of new bio techs. Because they have the potential to have a cascading effect on human healt and the entire ecosystem. Because the people selling them have no incentive to make sure they are safe on the long run since corporations almost never pay anything for their mistakes, and when they do it's a small percent of what they gained from them. Because the only decent thing we got out of them was the assurance, and a lie, that they can contain it. It took 80 years from finding out asbestos killed people to banning it. Cigarets were sold as healthy, then opponents were fought to the bones. The pharmaceutical companies are making sure the US is becomming addict to opioid and prepare to sell people drugs to get out of addiction as well. Because we are talking about a country that had a president that lied about WMD to get to invade another country, and another one that govern using tweets, and they are in charge of keeping things in check. Because humans already have to face war, global warming and heavy pollution thanks to their careless nature. It's not about morality. It's not about conviction. It's just not wanting to jump without a parachute. Powerful techs, all of them, be it AI, nanobots or GMO, should be under amazing scrutiny and people using them in a constant state of audit for the next 50 years. That this is even questionable is beyond me.

downrightmike 7y ago
They probably shot the plant's genome with gold buckshot laced with new genes. The plants survived that, they grow in the fields and then migrate like everything else. They are viable. The genes may be able to be pollinated to other plants. Maybe incorporated, but if they can't outgrow weeds better than the non gmo, then it all is on equal footing. The qualities we want in a mono crop may not cross to the wilds.
- sametmax 7y ago
  Sure. That doesn't invalidate my point though. Let's not trust that things will go according to plan, or that the people making the plan have the proper agenda.
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    But is there any indication, that genetically modified plants do pose a danger to health, or the environment? I mean with cigarettes it should have been obvious, you inhale, you cough. Maybe not good. But with plants? In the food chain they just get digested. And in the wild they are either strong enough to be a new breed, or, more likely they fail and die out.
    - sametmax 7y ago
      It's too early to tell. But when we build a nuclear reactor, we don't just make safety systems for likely events. We make them also for very, very unlikely ones. Because the potential risk is huge. It's the same here. The potential risk is huge. We still have a hard time with things as simple as not killing each others, so thinking we are mastering introduction of these variables into such a complex systems is delusional at best, arrogant at worst. Given that the people in charge of this are motivated by profit, and that we have history proving such entities will not do the right thing for humanity given the chance, let's not trust them. Audit them to the ground. Force them to justify themself for 5 decades at every step. Make it transparent, systematic, and independant. Working on GMO is ok. Trusting them to be safe because lobbists say so is not.
      - hutzlibu 7y ago
        Yes, but in a reactor you know the dangers you protect against. What are the potential dangers with gmo? edit: "Working on GMO is ok. Trusting them to be safe because lobbists say so is not. " And no I don't. I just dont see any reason why they should not be safe. (their monoculture use with pesticides excluded. that is a different problem)
        sametmax 7y ago
        Most people didn't see any danger to something as simple as sugar 30 years ago. We added it everywhere, and now have an obese US population with sky high diabetes levels. Sugar is not complicated. The millions of DNA pairs of the millions of species of living things, all interacting, is complicated. Also, we eat those. So we understand probably 4 percent of it, and we tweak the settings. I don't see any scenario where this is not a serious risk. If you play with something on a huge scale that you don't fully understand, safety first. But the worst part for me is that we have to defend the point of view of asking for being careful. Look at this thread. All I'm suggesting is a non compromising auditing system, and it's a debate ! This is insane. It should be the opposite. If you want to opt out of the safety net of humanity, you better make your case.
- Retric 7y ago
  Hemlock is viable, that says nothing about it being good to eat.
sampo 7y ago
> Because they have the potential to have a cascading effect on human healt and the entire ecosystem. No they don't. This is stuff from scifi movies. Farmers have grown GMO crops for over 20 years, and there is not even a hint of an observation or theory on how they could cause any cascading effects.
- sametmax 7y ago
  20 years is amazingly short for ecosystems. Give it a century. Also, it took us 40 years to realize we may be responsible for global warning, and some still doubt it, or have an agenda to spread doubt. So you have to take in consideration that if we ever discover we messed up, inertia is going to be the doom of us. Besides, scifi movies have proven to be not so bad at predicting how much we suck. All in all, there is little downside to act safe, and it's very risky to not act as such. There is no emergency to get GMO everywhere, just an economic push. No, even this bs about solving world hunger, which is not a technical problem. So let's be good citizens and don't assume things will go our way just because we want to. GMO can arrive at a slower pace. And the very fact people are making it take the fast lane, screaming it's ok with no evidence, is a very good sign we don't have things under control: money does. So when a big corporation tells you they can contain GMO, and you get prove they couldn't, you don't defend them. It's not rational, nor good for democracy.
  - sampo 7y ago
    > Also, it took us 40 years to realize we may be responsible for global warning There is a known mechanism for global warming: CO2. If you invoke the precautionary principle for everything without any requirement for scientifically feasible mechanism causing the imagined adverse effects, you can oppose everything. Why did we make use of the internet and wifi and cell phones right away, instead of slowly introducing them over a 100 year transition period? After all, there would have been little downside in acting safe and slow?
    - sametmax 7y ago
      I'd agree with wifi and cell phones being introduced in a slower way actually. We don't need a 100 years though, since there is only one thing to check: if it affects us directly. We don't have the same cascading effect potential, nor nearly the same number of possible interactions. And we already know that cell phones affect us by the way: the new generation already present an attention and focus deficit because of the constant solicitation of the cell phone. Privacy is being denied more and more. We've created huge amount of electronic wastes. So yeah, I wish we had took a little more time instead of jumping full throttle into it. Or at least follow the effects and react. But we are not a very reasonable specie.
daeken 7y ago
Literally everything you're talking about applies to selective breeding of crops as much as it does transgenic crops (what people typically mean by GMO). It applies even more so to irradiated seeds, which - strangely - no one seems to mind or want labels on. Randomly changing millions of base pairs: good. Precisely cutting a gene from one crop and putting it in another: bad. Baffling.
- sametmax 7y ago
  One is using a self-safe system that has been tuned for balance for 1000000 of years and have a proven track record and no agenda. The second one is made by a few smart people for only 20 years for money. The second one has to prove to be safe. It's funny that all of HN hold boing so responsible for demonstrating things are safe when it affect only a few hundred people. But we have to be taking the word of people playing with new high tech toys for their own benefit that have the potential to affect the entire humanity because... ?
  - shawnz 7y ago
    Why do those principles which make natural evolution safe not also apply to GMOs?
    - sametmax 7y ago
      In the same way that a tiger killing a rabit is not the same thing than a human with a nuclear weapon. Power, scale, agenda and synergies matter.
  - daeken 7y ago
    How do you figure it's self-safe? That implies that selectively bred crops can't be harmful, but that's nonsensical. Many selectively bred crops carry higher than natural carcinogen quantities, for instance (potatoes). And that's ignoring plants that are straight-up deadly. And which category does seed irradiation fall into? If exposing seeds to high radiation in order to randomly mutate them is an acceptable "non-GMO" mechanism, clearly something is wrong.
shawnz 7y ago
> Because they have the potential to have a cascading effect on human healt and the entire ecosystem. Why should the risk be any higher in GMOs than it is in any new species, of which there are thousands discovered every year?
- sametmax 7y ago
  Because of agenda, scale, speed, scale, intertia and power. See other comments.
- shearskill 7y ago
  ‘Discovered’ is entirely different than being genetically engineered.
exabyte 7y ago
This is my main concern as well. I've tried having some discussions on this with the /r/farming subreddit and I just get down-voted
CodiePetersen 7y ago
Sounds like a bunch of boogey man talk to me. None of what you have said has anything to do with the actual practice of genetic modification. It's solely unfounded paranoia. Not a single one of those has ANY relation to biotech companies other than the fact they are companies. You're first paragraph was also full of falsehoods. >> have no incentive to make sure they are safe on the long run since corporations almost never pay anything for their mistakes Money and criminal prosecution, those are some good incentives. Also, corporations are constantly being sued. Some don't correct their mistakes because the people suing aren't interested in the global welfare either their interested in money so they settle. Also, I keep seeing the "they said that it would never spread" idea, I never recall any invested proponent say that there was 100% containment. Not once. Also it is fairly easy though to contain, most of the crops that are modified have very high nutritional demands, they need regular watering, regular nitrates and minerals, near perfect soil. I take it, from the looks of the comments, there are practically no HN community members from a farming background. Most of these plants will die without farmers or being in a field prepared by farmers. That's why weeds are such a problem for farmers, they outcompete their very needy crops. The only real exception I can think of (out of the modified crops) that can thrive on its own is potatoes, the rest of them are very needy and don't do well in the wild. Even with potatoes though they spread best by spuds, the seeds are tiny and die easy. But that's why the others were the first targets for modification, to resist the chemicals required to suppress competition.

downrightmike 7y ago

They probably shot the plant's genome with gold buckshot laced with new genes. The plants survived that, they grow in the fields and then migrate like everything else. They are viable. The genes may be able to be pollinated to other plants. Maybe incorporated, but if they can't outgrow weeds better than the non gmo, then it all is on equal footing. The qualities we want in a mono crop may not cross to the wilds.

sametmax 7y ago
Sure. That doesn't invalidate my point though. Let's not trust that things will go according to plan, or that the people making the plan have the proper agenda.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  But is there any indication, that genetically modified plants do pose a danger to health, or the environment? I mean with cigarettes it should have been obvious, you inhale, you cough. Maybe not good. But with plants? In the food chain they just get digested. And in the wild they are either strong enough to be a new breed, or, more likely they fail and die out.
  - sametmax 7y ago
    It's too early to tell. But when we build a nuclear reactor, we don't just make safety systems for likely events. We make them also for very, very unlikely ones. Because the potential risk is huge. It's the same here. The potential risk is huge. We still have a hard time with things as simple as not killing each others, so thinking we are mastering introduction of these variables into such a complex systems is delusional at best, arrogant at worst. Given that the people in charge of this are motivated by profit, and that we have history proving such entities will not do the right thing for humanity given the chance, let's not trust them. Audit them to the ground. Force them to justify themself for 5 decades at every step. Make it transparent, systematic, and independant. Working on GMO is ok. Trusting them to be safe because lobbists say so is not.
    - hutzlibu 7y ago
      Yes, but in a reactor you know the dangers you protect against. What are the potential dangers with gmo? edit: "Working on GMO is ok. Trusting them to be safe because lobbists say so is not. " And no I don't. I just dont see any reason why they should not be safe. (their monoculture use with pesticides excluded. that is a different problem)
      - sametmax 7y ago
        Most people didn't see any danger to something as simple as sugar 30 years ago. We added it everywhere, and now have an obese US population with sky high diabetes levels. Sugar is not complicated. The millions of DNA pairs of the millions of species of living things, all interacting, is complicated. Also, we eat those. So we understand probably 4 percent of it, and we tweak the settings. I don't see any scenario where this is not a serious risk. If you play with something on a huge scale that you don't fully understand, safety first. But the worst part for me is that we have to defend the point of view of asking for being careful. Look at this thread. All I'm suggesting is a non compromising auditing system, and it's a debate ! This is insane. It should be the opposite. If you want to opt out of the safety net of humanity, you better make your case.
Retric 7y ago
Hemlock is viable, that says nothing about it being good to eat.

sampo 7y ago

> Because they have the potential to have a cascading effect on human healt and the entire ecosystem. No they don't. This is stuff from scifi movies. Farmers have grown GMO crops for over 20 years, and there is not even a hint of an observation or theory on how they could cause any cascading effects.

sametmax 7y ago
20 years is amazingly short for ecosystems. Give it a century. Also, it took us 40 years to realize we may be responsible for global warning, and some still doubt it, or have an agenda to spread doubt. So you have to take in consideration that if we ever discover we messed up, inertia is going to be the doom of us. Besides, scifi movies have proven to be not so bad at predicting how much we suck. All in all, there is little downside to act safe, and it's very risky to not act as such. There is no emergency to get GMO everywhere, just an economic push. No, even this bs about solving world hunger, which is not a technical problem. So let's be good citizens and don't assume things will go our way just because we want to. GMO can arrive at a slower pace. And the very fact people are making it take the fast lane, screaming it's ok with no evidence, is a very good sign we don't have things under control: money does. So when a big corporation tells you they can contain GMO, and you get prove they couldn't, you don't defend them. It's not rational, nor good for democracy.
- sampo 7y ago
  > Also, it took us 40 years to realize we may be responsible for global warning There is a known mechanism for global warming: CO2. If you invoke the precautionary principle for everything without any requirement for scientifically feasible mechanism causing the imagined adverse effects, you can oppose everything. Why did we make use of the internet and wifi and cell phones right away, instead of slowly introducing them over a 100 year transition period? After all, there would have been little downside in acting safe and slow?
  - sametmax 7y ago
    I'd agree with wifi and cell phones being introduced in a slower way actually. We don't need a 100 years though, since there is only one thing to check: if it affects us directly. We don't have the same cascading effect potential, nor nearly the same number of possible interactions. And we already know that cell phones affect us by the way: the new generation already present an attention and focus deficit because of the constant solicitation of the cell phone. Privacy is being denied more and more. We've created huge amount of electronic wastes. So yeah, I wish we had took a little more time instead of jumping full throttle into it. Or at least follow the effects and react. But we are not a very reasonable specie.

daeken 7y ago

Literally everything you're talking about applies to selective breeding of crops as much as it does transgenic crops (what people typically mean by GMO). It applies even more so to irradiated seeds, which - strangely - no one seems to mind or want labels on. Randomly changing millions of base pairs: good. Precisely cutting a gene from one crop and putting it in another: bad. Baffling.

sametmax 7y ago
One is using a self-safe system that has been tuned for balance for 1000000 of years and have a proven track record and no agenda. The second one is made by a few smart people for only 20 years for money. The second one has to prove to be safe. It's funny that all of HN hold boing so responsible for demonstrating things are safe when it affect only a few hundred people. But we have to be taking the word of people playing with new high tech toys for their own benefit that have the potential to affect the entire humanity because... ?
- shawnz 7y ago
  Why do those principles which make natural evolution safe not also apply to GMOs?
  - sametmax 7y ago
    In the same way that a tiger killing a rabit is not the same thing than a human with a nuclear weapon. Power, scale, agenda and synergies matter.
- daeken 7y ago
  How do you figure it's self-safe? That implies that selectively bred crops can't be harmful, but that's nonsensical. Many selectively bred crops carry higher than natural carcinogen quantities, for instance (potatoes). And that's ignoring plants that are straight-up deadly. And which category does seed irradiation fall into? If exposing seeds to high radiation in order to randomly mutate them is an acceptable "non-GMO" mechanism, clearly something is wrong.

shawnz 7y ago

> Because they have the potential to have a cascading effect on human healt and the entire ecosystem. Why should the risk be any higher in GMOs than it is in any new species, of which there are thousands discovered every year?

sametmax 7y ago
Because of agenda, scale, speed, scale, intertia and power. See other comments.
shearskill 7y ago
‘Discovered’ is entirely different than being genetically engineered.

exabyte 7y ago

This is my main concern as well. I've tried having some discussions on this with the /r/farming subreddit and I just get down-voted

CodiePetersen 7y ago

Sounds like a bunch of boogey man talk to me. None of what you have said has anything to do with the actual practice of genetic modification. It's solely unfounded paranoia. Not a single one of those has ANY relation to biotech companies other than the fact they are companies. You're first paragraph was also full of falsehoods. >> have no incentive to make sure they are safe on the long run since corporations almost never pay anything for their mistakes Money and criminal prosecution, those are some good incentives. Also, corporations are constantly being sued. Some don't correct their mistakes because the people suing aren't interested in the global welfare either their interested in money so they settle. Also, I keep seeing the "they said that it would never spread" idea, I never recall any invested proponent say that there was 100% containment. Not once. Also it is fairly easy though to contain, most of the crops that are modified have very high nutritional demands, they need regular watering, regular nitrates and minerals, near perfect soil. I take it, from the looks of the comments, there are practically no HN community members from a farming background. Most of these plants will die without farmers or being in a field prepared by farmers. That's why weeds are such a problem for farmers, they outcompete their very needy crops. The only real exception I can think of (out of the modified crops) that can thrive on its own is potatoes, the rest of them are very needy and don't do well in the wild. Even with potatoes though they spread best by spuds, the seeds are tiny and die easy. But that's why the others were the first targets for modification, to resist the chemicals required to suppress competition.