3 ms·

Hard to see serious objections with a sound technical basis arising when literally everything that classifies as food is chock full of random, purposeful, and/o

Hard to see serious objections with a sound technical basis arising when literally everything that classifies as food is chock full of random, purposeful, and/or 'junk' RNA/DNA. Different genes, sure, but it's not as if eating spinach turns us green and kicks off mammalian photosynthesis.

anon84873628 3y ago
I understand your point and agree with you to an extent. But there are also these cute packages of DNA/RNA in nature that can cause extreme illness in humans - they're called viruses :D There are also a great many plants and microbes with toxic components - we just happen to have very effectively eliminated them from the modern food system. This wasn't the case for primordial hunter gatherers, say. So it's really not a good argument against caution and conservative safety protocols, because lots of things in nature _are_ harmful to us.
- thereisnospork 3y ago
  The point is that the character of RNA is intrinsically different than other classes of chemicals. More formally, the Bayesian prior of an RNA being dangerous/ toxic is far lower, ergo less caution is warranted. (Opportunity cost, wasted effort, etc.) More concretely as relates to the prior, but can't a person fairly literally eat a spoonful of isolated influenza[0] without getting sick? [0] or other virus, RNA, DNA, etc.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    Can you name a source of RNA being injected into an organism that isn’t harmful? I can only think of diseases; which would mean my priors suggest such things should be avoided.
    - asdff 3y ago
      You can quite literally inject this RNA product into your arm and nothing would happen. The sequence needs to be specific to a human mRNA in order for silencing to occur. On top of that you have to deliver the RNA into the cell itself intact. The fact this works is this beetle happens to be responsive to environmental RNA, meaning they could simply take a piece of potato and dip it in beetle specific double stranded RNA, and the larvae would eat it as the delivery mechanism. There is probably some fitness advantage to being able to engage in such uptake normally, and this is what is being taken advantage of here for insecticide purposes.
    - jryb 3y ago
      The other response is pretty good. I would add that you won't be injecting this food into your bloodstream unless that's how you take all of your meals. Your body also produces enzymes that degrade RNA in the duodenum. And this particular RNA has no homology to the human genome, so it doesn't even matter if it could make it through your digestive system intact. And even then, it would have no way of entering the cells that it encountered, so it wouldn't even have a chance to interact with the gene silencing proteins. The reason why viruses work is because they have ways of protecting their genomes and also sneaking into cells, this product has nothing at all to do that. Which again, still doesn't matter since it would be harmless even inside your cells.
heavyset_go 3y ago
Reducing it to just RNA is equivalent to reducing pesticides to just "chemicals" and pointing out that all food is made of chemicals.
- asdff 3y ago
  It's no different than saying the alphabet produces unique computer code from the same set of characters. These products are targeted to a given species unique sequence for a given transcript. You can validate that your siRNA targets only your species of interest by using a BLAST search against other species.
  - jryb 3y ago
    I did the BLAST search, available here for the next two days: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=KE1GENDM013 https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=KE1GEND... No hits, meaning no part of the human genome is targeted by this. Not that it matters, see my other comments for details.

anon84873628 3y ago

I understand your point and agree with you to an extent. But there are also these cute packages of DNA/RNA in nature that can cause extreme illness in humans - they're called viruses :D There are also a great many plants and microbes with toxic components - we just happen to have very effectively eliminated them from the modern food system. This wasn't the case for primordial hunter gatherers, say. So it's really not a good argument against caution and conservative safety protocols, because lots of things in nature _are_ harmful to us.

thereisnospork 3y ago
The point is that the character of RNA is intrinsically different than other classes of chemicals. More formally, the Bayesian prior of an RNA being dangerous/ toxic is far lower, ergo less caution is warranted. (Opportunity cost, wasted effort, etc.) More concretely as relates to the prior, but can't a person fairly literally eat a spoonful of isolated influenza[0] without getting sick? [0] or other virus, RNA, DNA, etc.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  Can you name a source of RNA being injected into an organism that isn’t harmful? I can only think of diseases; which would mean my priors suggest such things should be avoided.
  - asdff 3y ago
    You can quite literally inject this RNA product into your arm and nothing would happen. The sequence needs to be specific to a human mRNA in order for silencing to occur. On top of that you have to deliver the RNA into the cell itself intact. The fact this works is this beetle happens to be responsive to environmental RNA, meaning they could simply take a piece of potato and dip it in beetle specific double stranded RNA, and the larvae would eat it as the delivery mechanism. There is probably some fitness advantage to being able to engage in such uptake normally, and this is what is being taken advantage of here for insecticide purposes.
  - jryb 3y ago
    The other response is pretty good. I would add that you won't be injecting this food into your bloodstream unless that's how you take all of your meals. Your body also produces enzymes that degrade RNA in the duodenum. And this particular RNA has no homology to the human genome, so it doesn't even matter if it could make it through your digestive system intact. And even then, it would have no way of entering the cells that it encountered, so it wouldn't even have a chance to interact with the gene silencing proteins. The reason why viruses work is because they have ways of protecting their genomes and also sneaking into cells, this product has nothing at all to do that. Which again, still doesn't matter since it would be harmless even inside your cells.

heavyset_go 3y ago

Reducing it to just RNA is equivalent to reducing pesticides to just "chemicals" and pointing out that all food is made of chemicals.

asdff 3y ago
It's no different than saying the alphabet produces unique computer code from the same set of characters. These products are targeted to a given species unique sequence for a given transcript. You can validate that your siRNA targets only your species of interest by using a BLAST search against other species.
- jryb 3y ago
  I did the BLAST search, available here for the next two days: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=KE1GENDM013 https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=KE1GEND... No hits, meaning no part of the human genome is targeted by this. Not that it matters, see my other comments for details.