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Comment by wmccullough | Hacker News Reader

>and no one seems to care

I'd have to disagree with that. There are lots of people who care and have tried to be good stewards to the public. The problem is that you also have corporations with major amounts of cash and influence that actively discredit anyone who speaks out. These are facts.

For example, whether or not GMO issues are horseshit or not doesn't matter when anyone who speaks out is given a gag order or when we find leaked documents showing that companies know of damage and our systems are so fucked we aren't even allowed to ask about it without getting sued into oblivion.

People care, but caring isn't enough anymore.

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>For example, whether or not GMO issues are horseshit or not doesn't matter when anyone who speaks out is given a gag order or when we find leaked documents showing that companies know of damage and our systems are so fucked we aren't even allowed to ask about it without getting sued into oblivion.

And my favorite group, the ones confusing technology with science, and insisting that GMOs must be perfectly safe, "because science" -- when most of the research and assurances is from companies looking for a quick buck, not impartial scientists (which almost don't exist anymore the way they did when academic/research jobs where plenty, scientists were often independently wealthy, and tenure a sure thing).

> the ones confusing technology with science, and insisting that GMOs must be perfectly safe

I don't know if I fall in that group (I don't think I confuse the two and I don't really talk about GMO much) but my prior belief would be that GMO products are probably safe, through some kind of hand-wavy mathematical argument: it's like modifying a program to do what you want; chances are if you mess up, it'll crash quickly and won't work rather than working almost-as-intended while injecting nefarious input into the next program.

Would LOVE to read evidence to the contrary though. So please share your citations.

>Would LOVE to read evidence to the contrary though. So please share your citations.

Perhaps you've missed my whole initial argument?

lmao idk where u come from but no evidence means no ground for argument. even if you made a point that you cant find evidence. If you accept that lack of evidence is evidence, then a i have a proposal for you that begins with r and ends with eligion.

>even if you made a point that you cant find evidence.

No, I made a point about the burden of proof. But of course that takes actually reading what has been written to tell.

>And my favorite group, the ones confusing technology with science

This. It's far too common here at HN.

Your argument also applies to the global warming 'settled science'.

My argument is pro-science and against technology that misapplies or hastily applies science for profit.

So in fact it's in the "global warming is real" side of the debate.

Except if you mean someone could make the same argument I speak against, and say "global warming doesn't exist, because science is wonderful and would never hurt us" or "global warming doesn't matter because science will save us". Then yes, those people would be confusing science with technology again.

Could you elaborate? I myself haven't seen much compelling evidence against GMOs.

The point isn't about whether GMOs are safe (I supsect they are), it's about the skewed debate.

Companies that produce GMO products (and the groups on the other side as well) stifle debate to the point that it's nigh impossible to find unbiased research to form an actually cogent opinion.

Only thing I find compelling is many of the GMOs are just IP locked products that allow you to use more herbicide/pesticide on your crop.

Or less. Get rid of Round Up and you'll use a lot more herbicides/pesticides.

Or more. Dicamba is coming onto the market and the amount of pesticides and herbicides has been increasing per field and not decreasing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5044953/

My issue isn't so much with GMOs but rather the few companies that will end up owning the patents on the world's food supplies.

GMOs are awesome. The fact that they are used to justify patenting a seed is horrifying.

Honest question given that GMOs are awesome but patenting a GMO seed is bad.

In that scenario, how are GMO creators incentivized to create more GMO products? Sell the first seed for a billion dollars and then the person that buys that seed can give out its progeny for free?

Honest question given that Genetically Engineered Babies are awesome but patenting a Genetically Engineered Baby genotype is bad.

In that scenario, how are Genetically Engineered Baby creators incentivized to create more Genetically Engineered Baby genotypes? Sell the first baby for a billion dollars and then the baby can give its germline cells for free upon sexual maturity?

They are selling life. Life forms reproduce. It's a pretty basic assumption and if GMO merchants want to change that then they need to embrace terminator seeds.

There's no connection really. Patenting seed has been around long, long before GMO technology (around 80 years or so in the US, around 50 years in my country).

Aren't those that are making extraordinary claims supposed to bring the evidence?

The idea that, given these premises:

a) we who don't understand even 10% of how the ecological ecosystem works

b) we don't understand even 10% of genes and how they interplay

c) we don't understand even 10% of second order effects of such changes

d) we don't yet have explanation for tons of interactions and functionality in the body (from what triggers cancers to all kinds of lesser stuff)

e) we can't even have a decent dietary advice from medical bodies that is not revised completely every 10-20 years

f) corporations will even put plutonium to kids milk if there's profit in it (and then lie about it)

g) all kinds of industry-sponsored research has been shown to be paid lies

... GMOs are perfectly safe.

It's more like changing various bits in working computer memory, with a ho-hum printout of parts of the program's in-memory structure and a crappy flow-chart of what it does, and wishing that the running program (and OS and such) will continue to play just fine...

Given the above, why do you think anything is safe? Common grapefruit was created by putting a radiation source in an orchard and seeing what happened - most of it was bad (as in trees died), but one grapefruit turns out to taste good. That grapefruit was grafted again and again until it is dominate. We have no idea which genes were changed and never did any study to see if the mutations were safe, we just eat it.

For hundreds of years farmers have been saving seeds from the plants that produced better. As a result the random mutations that farmers like have been selected for with no study on if those are safe mutations.

By Contrast with GMO we know which gene we change and why, and have done studies to prove safety. Maybe biases studies, and maybe not enough of them, but we have done them. That is more than you can say about anything not GMO.

This. We've been creating GMOs since the dawn of agriculture. Doing it in a petrie dish changes nothing. I'm less concerned about GMOs than I am about them changing them to spray worse and worse weedkiller on them before I eat it.

>We've been creating GMOs since the dawn of agriculture. Doing it in a petrie dish changes nothing.

Yeah, if breadth and scale doesn't mean anything.

It's like saying: "We have been blowing things up since the advent of gunpowder by the Chinese a millennium ago. Doing it with atomic bombs changes nothing".

Traditional "GMOs" were already closely related, and the modifications that could emerge were very constrained. Not so much with GMOs that allow for arbitrary outputs.

The breadth and scale is much smaller with GMO and random chance. A farmer several thousand years ago is responsible for as much genetic mutation of the human race as all the genetic manipulation that has made it to market. (though this will change quickly if we start making approval for GMO easy)

A radiation source constrains the modifications?

Given your attitude I expect you wouldn't be really happy getting to know how selective breeding works(it's waay more random - to the point where you get mainly unwanted side effects).

Where does the assumption that I don't know how selective breeding works comes? Because if someone has concerns such as mine they must obviously be some anti-scientific luddite?

For one, selective breeding has been going on for millennia -- and from people who had to eat its results, not mega corporations 10 times removed and interested in short term profit. If it was that dangerous we'd know it by now.

Second, the species must be already related and/or compatible to a certain degree -- the same reason we don't have cat and snake hybrids in nature. Whereas with GMOs you can have arbitrary changes and mixes.

So it's not "waay more random" as it has way more limited scope. It's only random in that practitioners are not certain of the successful inheritance of the desired traits.

But it's like comparing playing with lego bricks to playing with creating stuff at the molecule level.

> For one, selective breeding has been going on for millennia -- and from people who had to eat its results, not mega corporations 10 times removed and interested in short term profit.

Yeah, modern selective or “traditional” breeding uses completely novel methods of introducing diversity (including artificial mutagens), is done by exactly the kind of megacorps you are concerned about, and has less oversight or regulatory control than GMOs.

> So it's not "waay more random" as it has way more limited scope

No, it is way more random than inserting a known gene at a known location, and verifying he product in the ways done with modern GMOs. And the scope of genetic change in any one product is greater than in a GMO, not more limited.

My wife works in ag biotech, and has worked on both transgenic (GMO) and non-transgenic platforms.

> But it's like comparing playing with lego bricks to playing with creating stuff at the molecule level.

A less imperfect analogy might be that it's like comparing writing code by hand with a reasonably comprehensive test suite with making random bit flips to machine code until it passes a much more limited test suite. And just to be clear, the latter is the non-GM option.

> Where does the assumption that I don't know how selective breeding works comes?

Easy: You're against the less random of the two. This means that apparently you don't know how GMO and/or selective breeding works.

> If it was that dangerous we'd know it by now.

This same logic applies to GMO, which has been around since the nineties. Aside from some late capitalism-esque economic effects nothing interesting happened.

> Whereas with GMOs you can have arbitrary changes and mixes.

And that is bad because...?

>This same logic applies to GMO, which has been around since the nineties.

Yes, I can see how "since the nineties and regulated" gives the same guarantees as "for millennia".

>And that is bad because...?

Because they don't know the side-effects of what they're doing on top of it.

> the same reason we don't have cat and snake hybrids in nature

I think you've just created the film series that will succeed Sharknado.

> we find leaked documents showing that companies know of damage

Do you have any specific examples of damage from GMOs?

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