4 ms·

Very interesting article that shows how far we've come. But I was completely turned off by the undertone of "GMO is OK, we've been doing it forever". Actual gen

by mark-r 7y ago

Very interesting article that shows how far we've come. But I was completely turned off by the undertone of "GMO is OK, we've been doing it forever". Actual gene editing has so much more potential, not just for beneficial changes but for inadvertent catastrophes. What happens when GMO creates a mistake on the order of Thalidomide?

stickfigure 7y ago
Old school selective breeding is full of consequential mistakes too. See "Africanized killer bees". If anything, gene editing is much more predictable than randomly mashing together the genes of select specimens.
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  You might be overestimating our gene-editing abilities - our current knowledge is, in rough terms, a bunch of guesses where we only discover other roles a gene has years later. It’s anything but predictable.
  - acomjean 7y ago
    We’re actually getting pretty good at gene editing at this point. Predicting what the consequence of those edits is another story. (Although I think that’s what you were getting at). Plant genes are odd. From and old article by Michael Polan: “When I got home from St. Louis, I phoned Richard Lewontin, the Harvard geneticist, to ask him what he thought of the software metaphor. ''From an intellectual-property standpoint, it's exactly right,'' he said. ''But it's a bad one in terms of biology. It implies you feed a program into a machine and get predictable results. But the genome is very noisy. If my computer made as many mistakes as an organism does'' -- in interpreting its DNA, he meant -- ''I'd throw it out.'' I asked him for a better metaphor. ''An ecosystem,'' he offered. ''You can always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another.''” https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-the-garden.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-t...
    - russh 7y ago
      ''An ecosystem,'' Thats a brilliant metaphor.
  - stickfigure 7y ago
    I'm trying to point out that our previous tool for gene editing - mashing two sets of DNA together randomly - is even less predictable. We just consider it normal because it's been going on for much longer.
odyssey7 7y ago
Or more mundanely, what if we’re living in the 90s (a lot seems to have changed in such a short amount of time), and we remove the fat from everything to make it healthier, or add inflammatory emulsifiers to improve shelf stability and flavor? Or more sinisterly, how long until someone creates a banana with nicotine? Food science and chemistry aren’t always used in ways that are good for society, intentionally or not. There really seems to be a pressure for people who believe in science to say “GMO = good,” but it is a technology like any other (eg, nuclear, antibiotics, AI) that deserves scrutiny in how it is applied.

by mark-r 7y ago

stickfigure 7y ago

Old school selective breeding is full of consequential mistakes too. See "Africanized killer bees". If anything, gene editing is much more predictable than randomly mashing together the genes of select specimens.

ricardobeat 7y ago
You might be overestimating our gene-editing abilities - our current knowledge is, in rough terms, a bunch of guesses where we only discover other roles a gene has years later. It’s anything but predictable.
- acomjean 7y ago
  We’re actually getting pretty good at gene editing at this point. Predicting what the consequence of those edits is another story. (Although I think that’s what you were getting at). Plant genes are odd. From and old article by Michael Polan: “When I got home from St. Louis, I phoned Richard Lewontin, the Harvard geneticist, to ask him what he thought of the software metaphor. ''From an intellectual-property standpoint, it's exactly right,'' he said. ''But it's a bad one in terms of biology. It implies you feed a program into a machine and get predictable results. But the genome is very noisy. If my computer made as many mistakes as an organism does'' -- in interpreting its DNA, he meant -- ''I'd throw it out.'' I asked him for a better metaphor. ''An ecosystem,'' he offered. ''You can always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another.''” https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-the-garden.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-t...
  - russh 7y ago
    ''An ecosystem,'' Thats a brilliant metaphor.
- stickfigure 7y ago
  I'm trying to point out that our previous tool for gene editing - mashing two sets of DNA together randomly - is even less predictable. We just consider it normal because it's been going on for much longer.

odyssey7 7y ago

Or more mundanely, what if we’re living in the 90s (a lot seems to have changed in such a short amount of time), and we remove the fat from everything to make it healthier, or add inflammatory emulsifiers to improve shelf stability and flavor? Or more sinisterly, how long until someone creates a banana with nicotine? Food science and chemistry aren’t always used in ways that are good for society, intentionally or not. There really seems to be a pressure for people who believe in science to say “GMO = good,” but it is a technology like any other (eg, nuclear, antibiotics, AI) that deserves scrutiny in how it is applied.