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Comment by Millennium | Hacker News Reader

>You can never prove that any food is safe beyond a doubt.

Ultimately, this. You can test for very, very small numbers, but you can't test for zero. This is why, for example, even though lead has no biological function, extremely small "acceptable levels" are specified in regulations rather than simply saying zero lead. You can prove that, for example, lead levels in the air are less than 0.15 µg/m^3, or that they are not. You cannot do that for zero (nonzero is easy to verify, but zero is not).

There is also, of course, the fact that no food is safe in all scenarios. Even pure water is toxic at high enough doses. For that reason, it makes no sense to hold GMO food to even higher standards than non-GMO food: equal standards certainly make sense, but not higher.

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> For that reason, it makes no sense to hold GMO food to even higher standards than non-GMO food

Normal food has the advantage that we already know it has no disastrous ecological consequences, by virtue of the fact that is has coexisted in its environmental niche for a while. The more food is altered, the less sure we become about that.

As Taleb has pointed out, our standards for danger should match the risk/reward involved. (E.g., we're ok with fast-tracking unproven cancer treatments because the alternative is death. Likewise, we have high standards for a common cold treatment because the alternative is inconvenience.) Unfortunately, we have no backup plan for the planet, so we must be extra careful with what we introduce to it.

To me, saying we don't need more stringent standards for GMOs is like saying we can definitely burn $X billion more oil reserves and not worry about global warming.

"The more food is altered, the less sure we become about that."

Except with genetic engineering, by being precise as to how and where the new genes are inserted, we are actually altering it less than with traditional breeding or mutagenics. Those types of breeding have far less testing than transgenics. We can potentially create new genes with those older methods that have never existed before and never know about it.

This is something that taleb was criticised for by biologists and geneticists (and basically his reply was "that they are idiots", yup, great argument).

"Normal food has the advantage that we already know it has no disastrous ecological consequences".

There is no such thing as normal food: Take the sweet potato. It has been altered transgenically using the agrobacterium twice in its history without human intervention. The agrobacterium is the same bacteria used when doing transgenic GMO. Basically nature beat us to it a long time ago when it comes to transgenics.

You can breed a potato the old fashion way to contain high level of solanine (which can be poisonous). Its not how the genes are altered, its what they do that is key.

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