11 ms·

I would first want to see people accept GMO crops. Then I'll be willing to think of people going to the doctor to change their eye color.

rs232 11y ago
For some reason I believe that cosmetic gene modifications will be more readily accepted than GMOs.
- baldfat 11y ago
  ^ This is it. I can be GMO as a human and have acme free skin? Thank you and here is your $25,000. This will be seen as medical benefit since it cures disease and I can have Green/Hazel eyes. Seriously I refuse to eat Chipotle with their fear mongering Anti-GMO stance on the front window.
  - zxcvcxz 11y ago
    So is genetically modifying your body pretty safe?
    - astazangasta 11y ago
      Hell, no. CRISPR has the benefit of specificity, but the kit must be delivered to the cell by live virus, which can cause problems (heavy immune response), especially if you are infecting with a high enough titer to affect a majority of cells.
  - coldpie 11y ago
    Yeah, Chipotle's anti-gmo stance has really killed my desire to eat there. It's is a shame because they had previously been relatively good on the environmental front. Then they fell into the pseudo-science deep-end and here we are.
- iamcurious 11y ago
  Plus, it will end racism and make anime hair color a reality.
  - mod 11y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with ending racism. Maybe you were being tongue-in-cheek. I mean, presumably someday far in the future, everyone will have access to the ability to alter fully their entire genome. I would think in the next XX years, though, there will be plenty of remaining distinguishing features beyond skin color, and more importantly, plenty of people without the money to make any changes. Besides that, I'm hopeful that we'll still retain diversity, so I'd think we'll still have plenty of races for ignorant folks to hate. When racism is done, we'll just continue hating for other reasons. I speculate class will lead the charge next.
    - iamcurious 11y ago
      >Maybe you were being tongue-in-cheek. Just a bit. >plenty of people without the money to make any changes. >I speculate class will lead the charge next. Exactly, it transforms the race problem into a class problem. People will probably discriminate based on how many designer genes you have. With time, most governments (not necessarily the US) will realize how much they can save by giving people healthy genes from the start, and it won't be as much of a class divide. Fads will come and go regarding some group of genes being better from such task or other. Like diets and workouts today, it will become tiresome for most people quickly enough. This is good. In the last century we transformed race from a military problem to a political problem. In this century it will become a technical problem. There will be plenty of nastiness, but each step reduces nastiness by an order of magnitude. >I'm hopeful that we'll still retain diversity We will win a whole new diversity. There will be people with chameleon skin walking among us in this century.
      - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
        >With time, most governments (not necessarily the US) will realize how much they can save by giving people healthy genes from the start, and it won't be as much of a class divide. The poverty-as-disease model already shows that governments could save money by treating/preventing poverty rather than providing lifetimes of palliative care[1]. The problem is the moralizing about poverty. [1] https://medium.com/basic-income/universal-basic-income-as-the-social-vaccine-of-the-21st-century-d66dff39073 https://medium.com/basic-income/universal-basic-income-as-th...
at-fates-hands 11y ago
While this is a hot button topic, I've seen some pretty horrible things Monsanto has done to farmers. Accepting GMO crops would mean accepting Monsanto who has a monopoly on the industry and are well know for using sketchy tactics when dealing with farmers resistant to using their seeds.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Accepting GMO crops would mean accepting Monsanto No, actually, accepting GMO crops could quite well go along with targeting specific unliked business practices engaged in by Monsanto. > who has a monopoly on the industry No, they don't. They are the biggest player, but there a numerous others, several not much smaller. (There's some concerns that the relations within the industry are cartel-like, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the industry get some anti-trust scrutiny, but "Monsanto has a monopoly" -- on the GMO crop industry, rather than the market for particular poorly-substitutable kinds of crops -- is not at all the case.)
  - at-fates-hands 11y ago
    >>No, actually, accepting GMO crops could quite well go along with targeting specific unliked business practices engaged in by Monsanto. Can you explain this? It would seem as the biggest player, they have a huge advantage over other smaller companies. So much so, I couldn't name two other companies who currently compete with them.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      >> No, actually, accepting GMO crops could quite well go along with targeting specific unliked business practices engaged in by Monsanto. > Can you explain this? The less noise there is about GMOs qua GMOs, the more possible it is to focus attention on Monsanto's (or other GM crop firms') -- or, for that matter, non-GM crop firms -- particular business practices of concern, rather than the kind of technology that goes into creating their product. > It would seem as the biggest player, they have a huge advantage over other smaller companies. So much so, I couldn't name two other companies who currently compete with them. Monsanto, I think, gets disproportionate attention for two reasons: (1) it absolute dominates a GM crops in two key markets in the US (virtually all the US GM corn and soy is Monsanto), and its also, of the big GM seed companies, the one that is best known as a big GM seed company, and not as a chemical (etc.) company (though, of course, Monsanto is also a chemical company, so this is completely about perception) -- most people may not think of "GM crops" when they think about DuPont, Dow, BASF, or Bayer, but they're all significant players in the GM industry.
beat 11y ago
The problem with GMO is that it's basically a vendor lock-in scheme for agribusiness giants. It's not a good engineering solution to the real food problems we face. Of course, the DONT EAT THE SCIENCE OR IT WILL GIVE YOU THE CANCER political nonsense is wrong. That doesn't let GMO off the hook, though. The problem it attempts to solve, on the surface, is increasing the productivity of monocropping. But productivity isn't the problem of our food chain. We can grow plenty of food, and cheaply. So what are problems? Loss of biodiversity. Modern nutrition-related health problems like obesity and diabetes that are related to factory-manufactured junk food. Et cetera. We should be focusing on making food fresher, better tasting, more nutritious, more interesting, and more ethical. Racing to the bottom on price isn't good for anyone but the companies that provide vendor lock-in.
- Kalium 11y ago
  Racing to the bottom on price isn't good for you because you have access to lots of food at prices you can easily afford. For a great many people, more and cheaper food means they can actually afford to get enough to eat. Foods have been modified to stay fresher and be more nutritious. But you don't see them in stores.
  - beat 11y ago
    The real advances have been in packaging and transportation, not genetics. That said, the cost improvements in food aren't such a big impact on real hunger. When people are too broke to eat, making food half as expensive really doesn't have that much impact. And much of the savings-per-calorie relative to fresh food get factored into profits. Food deserts are a huge problem in this country - places where there is no access to fresh food. They don't happen because junk food is cheap, but rather because it's stable. Fresh food can be just as cheap, if you can keep it flowing.
    - Kalium 11y ago
      You're thinking too small. There are places where a 30% rise in the cost of rice means people starving en masse. And riots, because this prospect does not please said people. Major yield improvements mean stable food supplies for much of the third world. You're not wrong about the lack of advances in genetics arriving in markets. What I think you've overlooked is that between attacks on the business models that make such advances possible and the political cover that such attacks bring to the "DON'T EAT THE SCIENCE" people... this isn't likely to change. So please, don't complain about the lack of advances in genetics until you're prepared to stop giving cover to the Luddites ranting about frankenfoods. Proposing a different - and practical and workable - business model that allows for the commercial development of GMOs without abusing copyright would be a great way to go about this. Also: look up Golden Rice. More nutritious foods have been made. And the lock-in angle addressed. Yet the stuff is still not widely grown. Your reading of food deserts is naive, however. Junk food isn't just cheap in money. It's cheap in time, infrastructure, and required knowledge. A burger from McD's is cheap, hot, and instantly edible. Even the cheapest of Healthy Fresh Green Things requires time to cook, facilities to cook in, equipment to cook, the knowledge to cook, and a place to store the results. You cannot just put Healthy Fresh Green Things in food deserts and get results. People have tried, and the stuff rots on store shelves.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Its ok, the people who accept CRISPR and use it to cure their aging bodies will outlive the folks who refuse to eat GMO food :-) On a slightly more serious note, income disparity is a thing but it also closely correlates with technology disparity. Folks who are embracing technology and using it to amplify their ability to get stuff done are generating higher incomes than those who don't. I don't see this as any different.
nickbauman 11y ago
I think we're going to learn that at best eating GMOs are going to be as safe as eating McDonalds fast food. Which is quite safe but not a terribly wise dietary choice. Because GMOs are made (at best) to maximize the profitability of what's being sold. And when you do that you sacrifice other things and you lose awareness of others. This is especially true considering how little we know about nutrition. We are at the stage with GMOs where we were in the 1950s with baby formula. We once thought that it would eliminate the need for human breast milk because we didn't understand the nature of human breast milk except at a very crude macrobiotic level. We now have learned that it's not a superior replacement for real human breast milk. Its a barely adequate one that we choose only if we can't get the child good human breast milk.
- Kalium 11y ago
  Why do you think GMOs are inferior? How are they fundamentally different from plants that have been human-modified for many thousands of years? Let's get concrete. In what specific nutritional manner do you think Golden Rice is inferior to the varietal of white rice from which it was derived? And if the answer to this is that we don't know enough about nutrition to be sure, then what basis do you have for alleging its supposed inferiority?
  - nickbauman 11y ago
    It's inferior because we aren't adapted to it. Our bodies are highly adapted for millions of years to thrive on the food that comes out of our biosphere more or less directly. This is why super-hybridized dwarf wheat (not even GMO!), for example, which was developed in the 1960s, has been linked to all kinds health problems, including obesity. Our bodies have not had time to adapt to it, but if we look at dwarf wheat purely through the lens of economics, it's a "great" product as it has twice the calories of ordinary einkorn wheat that we've been eating for more than 10,000 years.
    - Kalium 11y ago
      Would you care to address the specific question posed? Like, why Golden Rice is inferior to the rice varietal from which it is derived? Just because it doesn't come with a "100% Natural!" stamp doesn't make it bad. Neither, I should think, is the converse true. As you illustrate, there are plenty of problems with "natural" non-GMO plant breeding. Is the position that you mean to stake out perhaps that it's possible for GMOs to be inferior, rather than that they are necessarily so?
mcv 11y ago
Those are totally different issues. Fixing genetic defects in humans does not have the potential to disrupt complex ecosystems. The core of the problem of GMO crops on open, non-isolated fields, is that it's impossible to control the impact of new, artificial genes on complex ecosystems. Fixing defect genes in humans is a completely different issue. With its own ethical and practical concerns, sure, but totally different and unrelated concerns.

rs232 11y ago

For some reason I believe that cosmetic gene modifications will be more readily accepted than GMOs.

baldfat 11y ago
^ This is it. I can be GMO as a human and have acme free skin? Thank you and here is your $25,000. This will be seen as medical benefit since it cures disease and I can have Green/Hazel eyes. Seriously I refuse to eat Chipotle with their fear mongering Anti-GMO stance on the front window.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  So is genetically modifying your body pretty safe?
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    Hell, no. CRISPR has the benefit of specificity, but the kit must be delivered to the cell by live virus, which can cause problems (heavy immune response), especially if you are infecting with a high enough titer to affect a majority of cells.
- coldpie 11y ago
  Yeah, Chipotle's anti-gmo stance has really killed my desire to eat there. It's is a shame because they had previously been relatively good on the environmental front. Then they fell into the pseudo-science deep-end and here we are.
iamcurious 11y ago
Plus, it will end racism and make anime hair color a reality.
- mod 11y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with ending racism. Maybe you were being tongue-in-cheek. I mean, presumably someday far in the future, everyone will have access to the ability to alter fully their entire genome. I would think in the next XX years, though, there will be plenty of remaining distinguishing features beyond skin color, and more importantly, plenty of people without the money to make any changes. Besides that, I'm hopeful that we'll still retain diversity, so I'd think we'll still have plenty of races for ignorant folks to hate. When racism is done, we'll just continue hating for other reasons. I speculate class will lead the charge next.
  - iamcurious 11y ago
    >Maybe you were being tongue-in-cheek. Just a bit. >plenty of people without the money to make any changes. >I speculate class will lead the charge next. Exactly, it transforms the race problem into a class problem. People will probably discriminate based on how many designer genes you have. With time, most governments (not necessarily the US) will realize how much they can save by giving people healthy genes from the start, and it won't be as much of a class divide. Fads will come and go regarding some group of genes being better from such task or other. Like diets and workouts today, it will become tiresome for most people quickly enough. This is good. In the last century we transformed race from a military problem to a political problem. In this century it will become a technical problem. There will be plenty of nastiness, but each step reduces nastiness by an order of magnitude. >I'm hopeful that we'll still retain diversity We will win a whole new diversity. There will be people with chameleon skin walking among us in this century.
    - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      >With time, most governments (not necessarily the US) will realize how much they can save by giving people healthy genes from the start, and it won't be as much of a class divide. The poverty-as-disease model already shows that governments could save money by treating/preventing poverty rather than providing lifetimes of palliative care[1]. The problem is the moralizing about poverty. [1] https://medium.com/basic-income/universal-basic-income-as-the-social-vaccine-of-the-21st-century-d66dff39073 https://medium.com/basic-income/universal-basic-income-as-th...

at-fates-hands 11y ago

While this is a hot button topic, I've seen some pretty horrible things Monsanto has done to farmers. Accepting GMO crops would mean accepting Monsanto who has a monopoly on the industry and are well know for using sketchy tactics when dealing with farmers resistant to using their seeds.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Accepting GMO crops would mean accepting Monsanto No, actually, accepting GMO crops could quite well go along with targeting specific unliked business practices engaged in by Monsanto. > who has a monopoly on the industry No, they don't. They are the biggest player, but there a numerous others, several not much smaller. (There's some concerns that the relations within the industry are cartel-like, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the industry get some anti-trust scrutiny, but "Monsanto has a monopoly" -- on the GMO crop industry, rather than the market for particular poorly-substitutable kinds of crops -- is not at all the case.)
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  >>No, actually, accepting GMO crops could quite well go along with targeting specific unliked business practices engaged in by Monsanto. Can you explain this? It would seem as the biggest player, they have a huge advantage over other smaller companies. So much so, I couldn't name two other companies who currently compete with them.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    >> No, actually, accepting GMO crops could quite well go along with targeting specific unliked business practices engaged in by Monsanto. > Can you explain this? The less noise there is about GMOs qua GMOs, the more possible it is to focus attention on Monsanto's (or other GM crop firms') -- or, for that matter, non-GM crop firms -- particular business practices of concern, rather than the kind of technology that goes into creating their product. > It would seem as the biggest player, they have a huge advantage over other smaller companies. So much so, I couldn't name two other companies who currently compete with them. Monsanto, I think, gets disproportionate attention for two reasons: (1) it absolute dominates a GM crops in two key markets in the US (virtually all the US GM corn and soy is Monsanto), and its also, of the big GM seed companies, the one that is best known as a big GM seed company, and not as a chemical (etc.) company (though, of course, Monsanto is also a chemical company, so this is completely about perception) -- most people may not think of "GM crops" when they think about DuPont, Dow, BASF, or Bayer, but they're all significant players in the GM industry.

beat 11y ago

The problem with GMO is that it's basically a vendor lock-in scheme for agribusiness giants. It's not a good engineering solution to the real food problems we face. Of course, the DONT EAT THE SCIENCE OR IT WILL GIVE YOU THE CANCER political nonsense is wrong. That doesn't let GMO off the hook, though. The problem it attempts to solve, on the surface, is increasing the productivity of monocropping. But productivity isn't the problem of our food chain. We can grow plenty of food, and cheaply. So what are problems? Loss of biodiversity. Modern nutrition-related health problems like obesity and diabetes that are related to factory-manufactured junk food. Et cetera. We should be focusing on making food fresher, better tasting, more nutritious, more interesting, and more ethical. Racing to the bottom on price isn't good for anyone but the companies that provide vendor lock-in.

Kalium 11y ago
Racing to the bottom on price isn't good for you because you have access to lots of food at prices you can easily afford. For a great many people, more and cheaper food means they can actually afford to get enough to eat. Foods have been modified to stay fresher and be more nutritious. But you don't see them in stores.
- beat 11y ago
  The real advances have been in packaging and transportation, not genetics. That said, the cost improvements in food aren't such a big impact on real hunger. When people are too broke to eat, making food half as expensive really doesn't have that much impact. And much of the savings-per-calorie relative to fresh food get factored into profits. Food deserts are a huge problem in this country - places where there is no access to fresh food. They don't happen because junk food is cheap, but rather because it's stable. Fresh food can be just as cheap, if you can keep it flowing.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    You're thinking too small. There are places where a 30% rise in the cost of rice means people starving en masse. And riots, because this prospect does not please said people. Major yield improvements mean stable food supplies for much of the third world. You're not wrong about the lack of advances in genetics arriving in markets. What I think you've overlooked is that between attacks on the business models that make such advances possible and the political cover that such attacks bring to the "DON'T EAT THE SCIENCE" people... this isn't likely to change. So please, don't complain about the lack of advances in genetics until you're prepared to stop giving cover to the Luddites ranting about frankenfoods. Proposing a different - and practical and workable - business model that allows for the commercial development of GMOs without abusing copyright would be a great way to go about this. Also: look up Golden Rice. More nutritious foods have been made. And the lock-in angle addressed. Yet the stuff is still not widely grown. Your reading of food deserts is naive, however. Junk food isn't just cheap in money. It's cheap in time, infrastructure, and required knowledge. A burger from McD's is cheap, hot, and instantly edible. Even the cheapest of Healthy Fresh Green Things requires time to cook, facilities to cook in, equipment to cook, the knowledge to cook, and a place to store the results. You cannot just put Healthy Fresh Green Things in food deserts and get results. People have tried, and the stuff rots on store shelves.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Its ok, the people who accept CRISPR and use it to cure their aging bodies will outlive the folks who refuse to eat GMO food :-) On a slightly more serious note, income disparity is a thing but it also closely correlates with technology disparity. Folks who are embracing technology and using it to amplify their ability to get stuff done are generating higher incomes than those who don't. I don't see this as any different.

nickbauman 11y ago

I think we're going to learn that at best eating GMOs are going to be as safe as eating McDonalds fast food. Which is quite safe but not a terribly wise dietary choice. Because GMOs are made (at best) to maximize the profitability of what's being sold. And when you do that you sacrifice other things and you lose awareness of others. This is especially true considering how little we know about nutrition. We are at the stage with GMOs where we were in the 1950s with baby formula. We once thought that it would eliminate the need for human breast milk because we didn't understand the nature of human breast milk except at a very crude macrobiotic level. We now have learned that it's not a superior replacement for real human breast milk. Its a barely adequate one that we choose only if we can't get the child good human breast milk.

Kalium 11y ago
Why do you think GMOs are inferior? How are they fundamentally different from plants that have been human-modified for many thousands of years? Let's get concrete. In what specific nutritional manner do you think Golden Rice is inferior to the varietal of white rice from which it was derived? And if the answer to this is that we don't know enough about nutrition to be sure, then what basis do you have for alleging its supposed inferiority?
- nickbauman 11y ago
  It's inferior because we aren't adapted to it. Our bodies are highly adapted for millions of years to thrive on the food that comes out of our biosphere more or less directly. This is why super-hybridized dwarf wheat (not even GMO!), for example, which was developed in the 1960s, has been linked to all kinds health problems, including obesity. Our bodies have not had time to adapt to it, but if we look at dwarf wheat purely through the lens of economics, it's a "great" product as it has twice the calories of ordinary einkorn wheat that we've been eating for more than 10,000 years.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    Would you care to address the specific question posed? Like, why Golden Rice is inferior to the rice varietal from which it is derived? Just because it doesn't come with a "100% Natural!" stamp doesn't make it bad. Neither, I should think, is the converse true. As you illustrate, there are plenty of problems with "natural" non-GMO plant breeding. Is the position that you mean to stake out perhaps that it's possible for GMOs to be inferior, rather than that they are necessarily so?

mcv 11y ago

Those are totally different issues. Fixing genetic defects in humans does not have the potential to disrupt complex ecosystems. The core of the problem of GMO crops on open, non-isolated fields, is that it's impossible to control the impact of new, artificial genes on complex ecosystems. Fixing defect genes in humans is a completely different issue. With its own ethical and practical concerns, sure, but totally different and unrelated concerns.