6 ms·

I'm part of a group developing RNAi-based pesticides which are topically applied (so non-GM). They are extremely species specific; when designed properly they c

I'm part of a group developing RNAi-based pesticides which are topically applied (so non-GM). They are extremely species specific; when designed properly they can avoid even close relatives of the target insect, and the by-product of the active ingredient is degraded RNA, which is harmless. The OECD had a meeting on it recently to help develop a regulatory framework - link here if interested (https://www.oecd.org/chemicalsafety/pesticides-biocides/conference-on-rnai-based-pesticides.htm https://www.oecd.org/chemicalsafety/pesticides-biocides/conf...). In my opinion, if these kinds of products are successful, they'll massively reduce a major adverse environmental impact of farming. They also offer a non-GM approach to combating viruses, and are far safer than broad-spectrum insecticides, synthetic and organic alike.

vosper 7y ago
What potential risks can you think of for this approach?
- gravelc 7y ago
  The active ingredient is double-stranded RNA, which we all consume every day (from viruses in fruit and veges), so no issues for human health via ingestion pathway. A poorly designed dsRNA that has too much homology to a gene of a related beneficial species could impact it if it took up the dsRNA. dsRNA doesn't hang around in the environment, so the beneficial organism would have to be there at the time of spraying. For these reason, frameworks are being put in place to ensure due diligence is done in the design phase. Like any pesticide, what the active ingredient is applied with may not be terribly nice (surfactants and the like). That's a case-by-case thing, which is hard to generalize.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mhkool 7y ago
    You are making an assumtpion that your dsRNA is safe. The same type of assumption was made with Roundup where Roundup "only" effected a single pathway. We now know that this assumption was wrong and that Roundup causes cancer. Making assumptions is a very dangerous game.
    - gravelc 7y ago
      You're already eating dsRNA. Plants have microRNA precursors and viruses. We eat plants. Roundup is a synthetic herbicide - that they both could be used in agriculture is when the similarity ends.
      - mhkool 7y ago
        I know the difference between herbicides and microRNA but you do not seem to see the assumptions that you make.
        gravelc 7y ago
        What is the difference?
        skosch 7y ago
        The difference is: the dose makes the poison. Organisms may be able to handle everyday quantities of dsRNA, but beyond a certain concentration, you may suddenly see unexpected problems, which then cause domino effects throughout the ecosystem. These kinds of relationships are unknown unknowns, and they rarely behave linearly. I really like the RNA-based approach, don't get me wrong, but the other commenters here are right to point out that hubris is dangerous.
        irq11 7y ago
        Your logic disallows absolutely everything: I don’t know what the impact is of your existence, so the safe thing to do is to not allow you to exist. At some point, you take calculated risks, because there is no action in life that comes without risk. Even your preferred solution of eliminating all chemicals and switching to alternative farming practices comes with substantial risk: it’s very likely it won’t scale. Millions would starve.
        dang 7y ago
        Please don't cross into getting personal. No comment contains everything someone sees.
  - hedora 7y ago
    Saying dsRNA is safe is analogous to saying organic chemicals are safe because you eat things made of the same elements every day.
- croo 7y ago
  As a tangential remark I just want to point out for everyone how great this response is. This question accepts and respects the questioner's knowledge and in the same time does what every other response to the original comment - questions the validity of the response but in an oh so subtle way. Nice.
superpermutat0r 7y ago
These products can only be successful if tested for several generations. Pesticides also had a similar narrative and ended up being used in large quantities. Their effects on environment and human health are only discovered today and were unimaginable before. It was insanely unscientific to allow massive pesticide use and it would be insanely unscientific to allow RNAi-based pesticides without testing them for decades if not more.
- gravelc 7y ago
  As dsRNA is ubiquitous in nature, I would disagree. There is no equivalence with synthetic pesticides when it comes to the active ingredient. There's no new molecular structure, no genetic modification, no new protein produced. It's chemically identical to what you consume every day. It doesn't hang around in the environment. The status quo is we keep doing what we are currently doing for decades. The risks of doing that are far greater in my opinion.
  - smallnamespace 7y ago
    > The status quo is we keep doing what we are currently doing for decades. The risks of doing that are far greater in my opinion. Still a hard no. It's precisely this attitude that got us where we are today. 50 years ago, the response would have been 'the status quo is we're headed towards mass starvation as we become unable to feed the giant post-war population boom using traditional agricultural techniques'. Now we're faced with the possibility of widespread ecological collapse of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Species are going extinct at thousands to millions of times the background rate. Even if we merely survive, the loss of genetic diversity will reverberate through millions of years and likely result in heavily degraded, less productive ecosystems that will require heavy human intervention in perpetuity to continue to function. We're basically cutting a huge hole in the boat underneath us, and signing ourselves up to bail out the water ... forever. Let's be honest: we don't know the long-term ecological consequences of what we do. We didn't know 100 years ago, we didn't know 50 years ago, and we still don't know today. We do not have the ability to determine the long -term negative boomerang effect of mass application of so-called 'targeted' intervention. > It's chemically identical to what you consume every day. And how do you know drastically increasing the amount has no effect over the long term? Note that snippets of dsRNA floating around are potent immune system inducers, because it's what viruses create [1]. Does it have a long term pro-inflammatory effect? So let's assume you're correct, the dsRNA degrades quickly before humans eat it. What about the transient immune responses of all flora and fauna in the sprayed area? What effect on the soil microbiome? > no genetic modification Literally modifying the genomes of fauna in the environment en masse in a highly selective way, putting enormous selective pressure in particular species. Do we even have any idea what that selective pressure will do? Will targeted species undergo rapid mutation and speciate? Will the descendant species become both more aggressive and harder to target, due to there being an empty ecological niche? Do those targeted species take on critical ecosystem roles that we're not yet aware of? Note that this isn't idle speculation - just look at the enormous rise of MDR bacterial infections in hospitals, precisely the result of applying selective pressure for just a couple of generations. The crux of all our problems is a chronic inability to admit that we don't know, and perhaps cannot safely know, the ecological consequences of our actions. But sure, kill away. If we're lucky, we won't be around when the boomerang hits. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5924774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5924774/
blodovnik 7y ago
No. Not better, more targeted poisons. Just stop poisoning and killing. Why is it the words of the poisoners are always so positive and optimistic, telling a beneficial tale of forward looking improvement. The words have been the same since the poisoning started in the 20th century through generation after generation of new better less dangerous poisons. Your message is this “oh no we’re no working on bad poisons, we’re fixing it, we’re making the good new poisons, the ones that will fix things!”. It’s so easy to see through. I see through it... it’s just making new poisons to kill things. And the sales and justifications go on and on. Stop it. Stop selling stories of why your poison is a good poison.
- gravelc 7y ago
  Using emotive terms like 'poisoner' to tar people trying to develop safer alternatives to current products is rather disengenuous.
  - blodovnik 7y ago
    Which generation of chemist/scientist since the 1970s did not describe their work as developing “safer” poisons. Which chemical company has not sold their product primarily with the “safer” headline? Do you really believe it? Can you not just see that’s the umbrella justification under which all new generations of poison products are developed? The safe poison is no poison. Why are we so intent on killing things on the planet? “Our new product the Silent Spring Spray 9000 sets safety totally aside to give the farmer total apocalypse over all six legged creatures!!!!” said no chemical company or poisons chemist since DDT.
    - gravelc 7y ago
      Agriculture involves preferencing specific species over others. It's intellectually dishonest to think otherwise. Getting the balance right is what we should be striving for. I'd assume you take antibiotics - lot of death caused there. Why is that OK?
      - 7y ago
ced 7y ago
Can you explain how it works? Why does it degrade when a human ingests it, but kills the insects it targets?
- avip 7y ago
  Lots of info here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2018.01912/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2018.0191... (does not directly answer your Q2)
dbskdb 7y ago
Being cynical about human nature this technology scares me. Specifically, is there anything that stops the technology from being used against ethnicities, say by targeting the RNA of Jews (id guess very specific due to matrilineal inheritance of Judaism)?
- gl00pp 7y ago
  Are you high?
snowmaker 7y ago
What's the name / link for the group? I'm interested in learning more about this.
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
> when designed properly they can avoid even close relatives of the target insect There is no way of convincingly demonstrating this. We’ll all soon see how critical insects are to crops.
ktaylora 7y ago
I'm for anything that might eleviate this second silent spring we are seeing with pollinators/birds in the US. But how much time/money does it take to develop an RNAi-based pesticide? Also, it's specificity sounds like an intense selection pressure. How long would it take for pests to develop resistance that we see with other pesticides?

vosper 7y ago

What potential risks can you think of for this approach?

gravelc 7y ago
The active ingredient is double-stranded RNA, which we all consume every day (from viruses in fruit and veges), so no issues for human health via ingestion pathway. A poorly designed dsRNA that has too much homology to a gene of a related beneficial species could impact it if it took up the dsRNA. dsRNA doesn't hang around in the environment, so the beneficial organism would have to be there at the time of spraying. For these reason, frameworks are being put in place to ensure due diligence is done in the design phase. Like any pesticide, what the active ingredient is applied with may not be terribly nice (surfactants and the like). That's a case-by-case thing, which is hard to generalize.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mhkool 7y ago
  You are making an assumtpion that your dsRNA is safe. The same type of assumption was made with Roundup where Roundup "only" effected a single pathway. We now know that this assumption was wrong and that Roundup causes cancer. Making assumptions is a very dangerous game.
  - gravelc 7y ago
    You're already eating dsRNA. Plants have microRNA precursors and viruses. We eat plants. Roundup is a synthetic herbicide - that they both could be used in agriculture is when the similarity ends.
    - mhkool 7y ago
      I know the difference between herbicides and microRNA but you do not seem to see the assumptions that you make.
      - gravelc 7y ago
        What is the difference?
        skosch 7y ago
        The difference is: the dose makes the poison. Organisms may be able to handle everyday quantities of dsRNA, but beyond a certain concentration, you may suddenly see unexpected problems, which then cause domino effects throughout the ecosystem. These kinds of relationships are unknown unknowns, and they rarely behave linearly. I really like the RNA-based approach, don't get me wrong, but the other commenters here are right to point out that hubris is dangerous.
      - irq11 7y ago
        Your logic disallows absolutely everything: I don’t know what the impact is of your existence, so the safe thing to do is to not allow you to exist. At some point, you take calculated risks, because there is no action in life that comes without risk. Even your preferred solution of eliminating all chemicals and switching to alternative farming practices comes with substantial risk: it’s very likely it won’t scale. Millions would starve.
      - dang 7y ago
        Please don't cross into getting personal. No comment contains everything someone sees.
- hedora 7y ago
  Saying dsRNA is safe is analogous to saying organic chemicals are safe because you eat things made of the same elements every day.
croo 7y ago
As a tangential remark I just want to point out for everyone how great this response is. This question accepts and respects the questioner's knowledge and in the same time does what every other response to the original comment - questions the validity of the response but in an oh so subtle way. Nice.

superpermutat0r 7y ago

These products can only be successful if tested for several generations. Pesticides also had a similar narrative and ended up being used in large quantities. Their effects on environment and human health are only discovered today and were unimaginable before. It was insanely unscientific to allow massive pesticide use and it would be insanely unscientific to allow RNAi-based pesticides without testing them for decades if not more.

gravelc 7y ago
As dsRNA is ubiquitous in nature, I would disagree. There is no equivalence with synthetic pesticides when it comes to the active ingredient. There's no new molecular structure, no genetic modification, no new protein produced. It's chemically identical to what you consume every day. It doesn't hang around in the environment. The status quo is we keep doing what we are currently doing for decades. The risks of doing that are far greater in my opinion.
- smallnamespace 7y ago
  > The status quo is we keep doing what we are currently doing for decades. The risks of doing that are far greater in my opinion. Still a hard no. It's precisely this attitude that got us where we are today. 50 years ago, the response would have been 'the status quo is we're headed towards mass starvation as we become unable to feed the giant post-war population boom using traditional agricultural techniques'. Now we're faced with the possibility of widespread ecological collapse of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Species are going extinct at thousands to millions of times the background rate. Even if we merely survive, the loss of genetic diversity will reverberate through millions of years and likely result in heavily degraded, less productive ecosystems that will require heavy human intervention in perpetuity to continue to function. We're basically cutting a huge hole in the boat underneath us, and signing ourselves up to bail out the water ... forever. Let's be honest: we don't know the long-term ecological consequences of what we do. We didn't know 100 years ago, we didn't know 50 years ago, and we still don't know today. We do not have the ability to determine the long -term negative boomerang effect of mass application of so-called 'targeted' intervention. > It's chemically identical to what you consume every day. And how do you know drastically increasing the amount has no effect over the long term? Note that snippets of dsRNA floating around are potent immune system inducers, because it's what viruses create [1]. Does it have a long term pro-inflammatory effect? So let's assume you're correct, the dsRNA degrades quickly before humans eat it. What about the transient immune responses of all flora and fauna in the sprayed area? What effect on the soil microbiome? > no genetic modification Literally modifying the genomes of fauna in the environment en masse in a highly selective way, putting enormous selective pressure in particular species. Do we even have any idea what that selective pressure will do? Will targeted species undergo rapid mutation and speciate? Will the descendant species become both more aggressive and harder to target, due to there being an empty ecological niche? Do those targeted species take on critical ecosystem roles that we're not yet aware of? Note that this isn't idle speculation - just look at the enormous rise of MDR bacterial infections in hospitals, precisely the result of applying selective pressure for just a couple of generations. The crux of all our problems is a chronic inability to admit that we don't know, and perhaps cannot safely know, the ecological consequences of our actions. But sure, kill away. If we're lucky, we won't be around when the boomerang hits. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5924774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5924774/

blodovnik 7y ago

No. Not better, more targeted poisons. Just stop poisoning and killing. Why is it the words of the poisoners are always so positive and optimistic, telling a beneficial tale of forward looking improvement. The words have been the same since the poisoning started in the 20th century through generation after generation of new better less dangerous poisons. Your message is this “oh no we’re no working on bad poisons, we’re fixing it, we’re making the good new poisons, the ones that will fix things!”. It’s so easy to see through. I see through it... it’s just making new poisons to kill things. And the sales and justifications go on and on. Stop it. Stop selling stories of why your poison is a good poison.

gravelc 7y ago
Using emotive terms like 'poisoner' to tar people trying to develop safer alternatives to current products is rather disengenuous.
- blodovnik 7y ago
  Which generation of chemist/scientist since the 1970s did not describe their work as developing “safer” poisons. Which chemical company has not sold their product primarily with the “safer” headline? Do you really believe it? Can you not just see that’s the umbrella justification under which all new generations of poison products are developed? The safe poison is no poison. Why are we so intent on killing things on the planet? “Our new product the Silent Spring Spray 9000 sets safety totally aside to give the farmer total apocalypse over all six legged creatures!!!!” said no chemical company or poisons chemist since DDT.
  - gravelc 7y ago
    Agriculture involves preferencing specific species over others. It's intellectually dishonest to think otherwise. Getting the balance right is what we should be striving for. I'd assume you take antibiotics - lot of death caused there. Why is that OK?
    - 7y ago

ced 7y ago

Can you explain how it works? Why does it degrade when a human ingests it, but kills the insects it targets?

avip 7y ago
Lots of info here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2018.01912/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2018.0191... (does not directly answer your Q2)

dbskdb 7y ago

Being cynical about human nature this technology scares me. Specifically, is there anything that stops the technology from being used against ethnicities, say by targeting the RNA of Jews (id guess very specific due to matrilineal inheritance of Judaism)?

gl00pp 7y ago
Are you high?

snowmaker 7y ago

What's the name / link for the group? I'm interested in learning more about this.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago

> when designed properly they can avoid even close relatives of the target insect There is no way of convincingly demonstrating this. We’ll all soon see how critical insects are to crops.

ktaylora 7y ago

I'm for anything that might eleviate this second silent spring we are seeing with pollinators/birds in the US. But how much time/money does it take to develop an RNAi-based pesticide? Also, it's specificity sounds like an intense selection pressure. How long would it take for pests to develop resistance that we see with other pesticides?