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Comment by ucaetano | Hacker News Reader

"Fixing the global food system. The damage this system wreaks is shocking."

If we could only invent a teleportation device...

Also, shipping massive amounts of free grain around the world wreaks havoc in local markets, driving small farmers out of business in poor countries.

We need efficient supply chains, efficient market pricing and efficient crops, such as golden rice.

Instead, we get governments interfering in market prices, blocking food supply chain companies in the name of "tradition" and blocking GMO development and usage in the name of religion and bogus science.

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Over the last few years I've seen many comments on Hacker News that are pro-GMO. The thing is... I don't understand how any respectable developer could support programming DNA with current technologies.

You know how they code new organisms? They rip out code from one organism and then they randomly insert it somewhere in the DNA code of another organism. They do this thousands of times... 99.999% of the time the cell dies. So they keep trying to compile random variations of code and it keeps crashing. But let's say they get lucky one time and the code compiles. The cell lives, and then they use that cell to create a new organism. If that organism has the one property they wanted to port over from the new DNA code, they call it a success. They don't do any unit testing, they can't possibly test every scenario this new organism would be used in production, and yet no one cares.

Would any software developer use a process like this in a production environment? No - it's obvious this way of coding would would cause drastic unintended consequences. With GMOs you get malformed proteins, new chemicals/toxins, and interbreeding with other plants that could cause even more unintended consequences.

Usually I'm all for technological progress. But until we understand DNA inside and out and can precisely edit just the code we want, GMOs seem very dangerous.

I'm not "pro-GMO". Not against it either.

"Would any software developer use a process like this in a production environment?"

Would any engineer use software development techniques in building a bridge? Absolutely not. Hold on, I'll build a mock bridge, run a test truck on top to see if it holds. If it doesn't, I'll just build a new one.

Don't compare disciplines which have enormously different requirements. With all dues respect, the world isn't just software engineering.

Sorry I didn't mean to label you. I still think the analogy holds because DNA is so much like source code.

If software keeps eating the world maybe everything else will be software too... well I can only hope.

> I still think the analogy holds because DNA is so much like source code.

DNA isn't much like source code at all.

A better, though still far from precise, analogy would be base-four data which can, in some environments, configurations, and contexts, be interpreted as machine code.

Nice scare analogy for GMOs. The problem is that if you do the same thing to traditional breeding, its even worse: rather than ripping out code that you know performs the function you are looking for and inserting it into another code base, randomly or not, traditional breeding (and especially the modern, accelerated forms) is a variety of different combinations of randomly mixing code from codebases that each have some of the features you want and inducing random bit flips throughout the code base, testing for the features you want, throwing out code that doesn't have them, and hoping you don't have unnoticed unintended consequences. (And natural breeding is pretty much the same as traditional breeding, but without the selection for traits desired by humans.)

That's not to say traditional breeding or natural breeding is bad, but it is to say that if we reason at the level of your scare analogy, we just would avoid food entirely, rather than avoiding GMO-food specifically; you don't really provide any reason to think that GMO food is worse than the alternatives.

I think there's a reason nature doesn't allow a frog to breed with a plant.

You can call it a scare tactic... but with GMOs we're doing things that would be impossible to try with traditional methods.

> You can call it a scare tactic...

I can, because that's exactly what the software development analogy is: a scare tactic that relies on ignorance of how the alternatives would work if looked at the same way.

There is no method available for crop development that is analogous, in the manner that things were framed upthread, to good software development. (And there won't ever be, unless, through experience with the use of the gene editing tools we have now, we develop much better tools.)

> but with GMOs we're doing things that would be impossible to try with traditional methods.

With "traditional" (which mostly means non-GMO -- the methods that fall under that label now are often as new, or newer, than the GMO methods) methods we are also doing things which would be impossible with the traditional methods available before the time when we started doing GMO.

That's not really surprising, the advance of technology usually involves doing things impossible with earlier technology.

"Nature" doesn't disallow anything. Viruses and bacteria can exchange DNA with pretty much almost any living thing. We actually have descendants of bacteria with their own DNA living inside each of our cells.

DNA, and nature, is a mess.

We've been modifying plants through cruder means for thousands of years, killing the ones we don't like and planting the ones we do. It's a vastly slower process, relying on natural mutations, but it's the same principle.

The real problem with GMOs involves patents and copyright--not necessarily anything to do with the plants themselves.

Doesn't that fact argument work against GMOs? Cross-breeding has been done for thousands of years, so it's a very well understood technique, whereas doing it in a lab is has not even had half a century of experience behind it.

Golden rice is basically useless except as a PR tool to clear the way for more profitable GMOs. Its only benefit is that it might provide an alternative to vitamin A supplementation if countries were allowed to grow it. Unfortunately, it's covered by a thicket of patents from about 30 companies, and the free patent licence is a PR stunt - almost all the countries it includes can't actually grow rice. The only country that's both permitted to grow it by the patent license and has the right climate to do so is the Philippines, which is why so much of the attention on golden rice is focused there (and even they're reliant on rice imports to feed their population). Sadly for golden rice's proponents, while they were still getting it to work the government there quietly dealt with the vitamin A deficiency problem through a more low-tech and effective technique: vitamen supplements.

I'm pretty sure this is by design, by the way. The criteria for being licensed to grow golden rice is that the country grows less calories of food than it takes to support their population. Rice is so calorific that it's hard for a rice-growing country to meet this criteria, which is also why it's a popular staple food in developing countries and why rice was chosen in the first place.

The issue of yields is also relevant. Here is a report from 2014. The original page has been changed.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

"While the target level of beta-carotene in the grain was attained, average yield was unfortunately lower than that from comparable local varieties already preferred by farmers."

This is pure anti GMO propaganda. "it's covered by a thicket of patents from about 30 companies"

The patents have been waived for humanitarian purposes. Also rice is self polinating so of little interest to seed companies. http://www.goldenrice.org/Content1-Who/who4_IP.php

"the government there quietly dealt with the vitamin A deficiency problem through a more low-tech and effective technique: vitamen supplements"

Really? 250,000–500,000 children in developing countries become blind each year owing to VAD, with the highest prevalence in Southeast Asia and Africa. I guess in your world that qualifies as effective. Even if they did solve it with supplements, wouldn't it be better to solve it already in the food, instead of spending millions a year on supplements? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_A_deficiency

"The criteria for being licensed to grow golden rice is that the country grows less calories of food than it takes to support their population."

Do you have any sources for this or are you just making it up?

"Golden rice is basically useless except as a PR tool to clear the way for more profitable GMOs"

A classic anti GMO talking point with no basis in fact. Just because corporations use genetic engineering doesn't mean it can't be used for altruistic purposes. Have you considered the possibility that people are actually trying to solve a problem that kills tens of thousands and blinds countless more every year? I guess its easier to believe in conspiracy theories.

"Do you have any sources for this or are you just making it up?"

My source for this is the page you linked: "Humanitarian use" means "Use in developing countries (low-income, food-deficit countries as defined by FAO)". The FAO's definition of a low-income, food deficit country is that they're forced to import food because they don't grow enough calories to feed their population, and their income must also be below a threshold. See http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/lifdc/en/

Though my information is slightly outdated in one area: the Phillipines are no longer on the FAO list as of this year because they're too wealthy.

"Really? 250,000–500,000 children in developing countries become blind each year owing to VAD, with the highest prevalence in Southeast Asia and Africa. I guess in your world that qualifies as effective"

Golden rice cannot help them under the current licensing regime, because most or all of those countries can't grow rice and even if the humanitarian use license did include any that could, it forbids exporting golden rice - it's strictly for internal consumption only. The page you linked makes this restriction very clear.

I emailed Adrian Dubock (via the contact email on the website) and his reply was that the philippines will still be included.

My guess is that when they started the philippines and other rice producint countries where on that list (couldn't find for previous years), but from what he said, its a "project of need and goodwill". Take away what you want from this, but I think its a case of the inventors not foreseeing these countries would not be part of that list back in the early 2000s. Syngenta have the rights to the distributions (the original inventors have the actual patents), so it might not be much of an issue to change those terms.

"if the humanitarian use license did include any that could, it forbids exporting golden rice - it's strictly for internal consumption only. The page you linked makes this restriction very clear."

So you're going from the premise that those countries dealt effectively with VAD with supplements with the one that says that Golden rice is bad because they can't export? How does a restriction on export mean that you can't enjoy the benefits of Golden Rice? The point is that poor farmers grow a rice that is a source of vitamin A, without having to grow/buy vegetables or get vitamin supplements. They don't need to export to get the benefits, they just need to eat rice with added Vitamin A. Your argument doesn't make any sense.

edit: missing word

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