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Plant breeding has always been tinkering with the genome, why aren't people scared of it? Read the Wikipedia page on the various ways plants are bombarded with

Plant breeding has always been tinkering with the genome, why aren't people scared of it? Read the Wikipedia page on the various ways plants are bombarded with radiation, mutagenic chemicals, have nuclei fuzed with electricity, et al in "non-GMO 'organic'" plant breeding. Why is the more error prone process, in which we are ignorant of the mechanism, presumed safer? If we invented a machine which randomly bred plants, sampled their DNA, and tested for the modification of a single gene, or infected plants with naturally occuring bacteria or virii and waited for an inter-species transfer, would you find this less scary than a process which uses a petri dish and a pipette? There's a continuous gradient between the way people bred, modified, and selected plants thousands of years ago up until today. Our precision and our knowledge has gotten a lot better. The only reason at all to trust maize, or other human domestic modifications, is simply because they've been around for a long long time and so you can infer safer because if there was something dangerous, it would have shown up already. Or, are we simply ignoring dangers that have already existed but become desensitized to them, like gluten issues, or lactose intolerance. Our diet has changed radically since the invention of agriculture, and in a way, much of man's early experiments at domestication of plants, our first "GMO" so to speak, may have had unforseen circumstances. But we brush it all off, yet people are hypersensitive to any minute theoretical issue that could happen with GMO, real or imagined. This boils down a lot I think to human emotion, and our notions of disgust with respect to food. We like what is common and fear the unknown.

manicdee 14y ago
Take the International Rice Organisation's IR8. It was supposed to be a miracle rice that yielded double the rice of existing strains. Introducing this rice meant farmers had to use pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers which had not previously been part of their practices. The herbicides and pesticides killed the local ecosystems including secondary crops which used to grow alongside the rice in paddies. The IR8 was certainly higher yield when fed properly, but under-performed without that industrial support. That industrial support costs money: so the farmer has to produce more rice to pay for the materials required to produce more rice, in what is essentially a net loss situation. What price to you put on the sound of frogs singing in the rice field? What value is there in being able to drink or swim in the water downstream without fear of poisoning?

manicdee 14y ago

Take the International Rice Organisation's IR8. It was supposed to be a miracle rice that yielded double the rice of existing strains. Introducing this rice meant farmers had to use pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers which had not previously been part of their practices. The herbicides and pesticides killed the local ecosystems including secondary crops which used to grow alongside the rice in paddies. The IR8 was certainly higher yield when fed properly, but under-performed without that industrial support. That industrial support costs money: so the farmer has to produce more rice to pay for the materials required to produce more rice, in what is essentially a net loss situation. What price to you put on the sound of frogs singing in the rice field? What value is there in being able to drink or swim in the water downstream without fear of poisoning?