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Comment by John_KZ | Hacker News Reader

>Europe’s outdated approach to gene editing.

Right, I can't wait to follow the latest trends on gene editing. Our approach is so old and boring, we should be trying the new fun and shiny stuff, like having some guy edit the genes of our staple foods while providing no guarantees whatsoever.

For those who aren't aware what this is article is about, it's about US farming lobbies being unable to export their genetically modified food crops to the EU.

While GMOs can be exported to Europe, they must pass through a careful set of tests by the EFSA (european food safety authority), including appropriate labeling, and the various EU countries can still choose to ban them under their authority.

As Trump said recently, he will be pushing the EU to accept all of the untested GMO crops his sponsors grow, and he'll probably be pushing for a forced, EU-wide directive to just take everything and shut up.

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Yeah, the problem with the EU regulations for GMOs isn't that they impose food safety requirements, but that they apply differently to targeted vs. untargeted genetic modifications.

Part of that is inertia, since humans have been using selective breeding to accumulate beneficial mutations for millennia, and they only rarely mess up and turn plants that were safe to eat into unsafe ones [1]. Because of that, conventional breeders don't see the point in doing strict tests they haven't been doing before.

But in the end, that different treatment just leads to attempts at making large genomic changes without having to report them as genetic modification (e.g. using radiation to induce mutations) that are probably less safe than relatively targeted methods like CRISPR.

[1] the best-known example is probably the Lenape potato https://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/the-case-of-the-poison-pot...

Noob here. Doesn't targeted genetic mutation have an additional step of recognizing the exact gene (or combination of genes or gene properties, whatever the terminology is) that is needed to be changed in order for the desired outcome to take place? If so, isn't all that fuss about GMO exactly about that additional step with several open questions like: 1. we cannot be sure that the gene we're editing is the one that is responsible for the feature we want (or that it is responsible only for that feature) 2. What are the chances of editing the wrong gene and noticing it? 3. What happens is we edit the wrong gene without noticing it?

Generally (I’m learning this stuff too). It’s gene to protein. You have to research what each protein does in the cell. Lots of research is about this. Crispr knock out is about turning off genes and seeing what happens.

2. Crispr has off target effects, they have some tools to help mininize those.

It’s hard as some genes have paralogs that produce similar proteins in the same species.

Very much so.

Beneficial genetic modifications will unfortunately always be pushed to create more lax laws and legal backdoors for modifications that are profit oriented.

As things are, the main modification of interest to the industries pushing for GM crops is herbicide and insecticide resistance (preferably of a particular patented brand). That is, just spray until everything but your tomatoes die.

As far as the article goes: if you want tasty tomatoes, try small scale organic crops, maybe even locally grown. Yes, they are more expensive. That's because they require more work.

Allowing for GM foods will not give you super tasty tomatoes at the price of cheap watery ones, even though that's the promise towards consumers. It's a racket for growing bad tomatoes even cheaper.

Gene suppression using CRISPR is less aggressive than some "traditional" techniques that aren't heavily regulated, like irradiating seeds and seeing what sorts of mutations that produces.

So banning CRISPR and not going back and making sure you aren't using any fruit of irradiated seeds is sort of incoherent.

How would you allow CRISPR just for gene suppression? It's a slippery slope, that's a problem. Soon, you get Roundup.

One way would be to go by the statements of the people producing the plant strains, and to observe how the plant strains were advertised and used.

So for example, you could pretty easily allow gene suppression and not transgenesis.

I completely support GMOs. As long as they're labeled. Let the consumers decide (also, food labelling is terrible in general - in many countries, you can say "no trans fats" for food that actually has trans fats).

Try to name a single food you consume that has not been genetically modified. _Everything_ has been modified for thousands of years. What is different now is that we do not need to rely on random chance and dumb luck to get a good mutation and that we can introduce sequences that were not originally in the original genome. Let's let consumers decide and be completely honest with them. Those 'organic' oranges and grapefruit you are buying? Genetically modified. That bread in your basket? Unless it is einkorn wheat then it is genetically modified.

You might want to read up about genetically modified, the term is not used as you think it is used.

You might wanna start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_organism

I am aware of the common meaning of the term and also that using it in this narrow fashion disguises the fact that selective breeding is also a mechanism for modifying the genes of the plant or animal. There are a large range of techniques that can be used to perform genetic modification and in most cases the fear that most people have is simply due to their ignorance and susceptibility to clever propaganda.

>disguises the fact that selective breeding is also a mechanism for modifying the genes of the plant or animal.

It does not disguise that fact, as that is not a fact. Selecting genes is not modifying genes.

>in most cases the fear that most people have is simply due to their ignorance and susceptibility to clever propaganda.

How do you know? One could just as easily say the same ignorance and propaganda is behind people shilling for multinational agricorps by thinking it makes them "pro-science". The amount of falsehoods promoted by "pro-science" people is tremendous, and "GMOs would save the planet" is one of them.

>_Everything_ has been modified for thousands of years.

Sure, and - consequently - has been tested extensively for an adequate period of time and found to be safe for human consumption.

While most of the modern "bio" obsession is IMHO not wholly justified, genetic modification of something that you eat may have unwanted consequences, possibly only visible in the long term.

How long has the particular variety of wheat that is in your bread been tested in humans? Five years, maybe ten? I am quite certain that it did not exist when your parents were born, so how do you know it is safe?

People always pull this argument out of their ass: "domesticated plants are genetically-modified by random chance, whereas in labs it's by design". The difference is, obviously, that there seems to be some kind of negative feedback mechanism in nature - organisms optimise towards the local maximum, but these small modifications are unlikely to result in something globally optimised (well, at least so far in 3bn years, no organism has taken over the whole planet). With GMO, it's fairly easy to combine some optimal bacteria gene with an optimal plant gene and make a super-organism.

It's like saying, well we shouldn't worry about terrorists enriching uranium, after all due to random movement of particles a nuke could just assemble spontaneously. I mean, yeah, it's possible (in fact, natural reactors exist) but so so unlikely; on the other hand, humans managed to do in in a decade of concentrated effort... several times.

I'm not even saying that the above scenario is likely, or that legislation can prevent bad actors from creating super-organisms. But the point is, there's thousands of similar scenarios - we simply have no idea what even single genes/proteins do, let alone combinations of genes from species that have had billions of years of distinct evolution.

But it's the tail/catastrophic risk that worries me. It's like with climate change - almost nobody would mind 1 or 2 degree celsius increase, there are plenty of benefits actually - plants works better with increased CO2 in atmosphere, and maybe we could even grow food in Siberia... but it's the runaway climate change that's worrisome - i.e. it's impossible to guarantee that it will be only 2 degree increase. And if we can't even model physics/climate, how can we model biology?

> staple foods

Loads of the commercial tomato variants are easy to transport and taste nothing like a proper tomato. It's travesty they share the name. It's a far stretch to even call them food. I'll take ones modified to be edible every day.

> As Trump said recently, he will be pushing the EU to accept all of the untested GMO crops his sponsors grow, and he'll probably be pushing for a forced, EU-wide directive to just take everything and shut up.

The EU was so far very protective, even imperialistic about its own farming industry. The chances of that scenario happening, especially from a internationally laughed-at politician like Trump, are very low IMHO.

I don’t buy this. It is 100% guaranteed that these GMO tomatoes are safer than alcohol and tobacco. Yet the ‘old and boring’ approach has deemed these clearly poisonous substances safe, and allows billion dollar industries to exist selling them. This is totally illogical.

> alcohol and tobacco. Yet the ‘old and boring’ approach has deemed these clearly poisonous substances safe

It has not deemed them safe - They are "grandfathered" in. There is absolutely no way that you could introduce tobacco as a new product today.

This is the point - there is no scientific integrity with the current approach.

Suddenly and totally banning tobacco products would have "scientific integrity" sure, but is practically impossible due to how human beings work.

However, tobacco is actually being gradually phased out across Europe. Compare smoking prevalence in a city now vs 20 years ago. Extrapolate out another 20 years.

This is a separate issue.

My point is that the current regulatory approach to GMO lacks scientific integrity, and is anachronistic and hypocritical.

Alcohol can be justified as having some cultural merit, and there are many people who use it moderately. Tobacco is just making money from nicotine addicts while they kill themselves slowly. No need to ban it outright, just double the price every few years.

What's the proof?

The article says:

> a cupboard full of genes with known effects, that can each be adjusted to turn an unruly wild plant into a valuable domesticated one

which I don't believe at all - if we really knew exactly what genes do, we could construct new life-forms artificially. But we don't biology is far too complicated for us (for the time being). We don't even understand climate (even the best models consistently overstated the predicted temperature rise).

It doesn't say we know what every gene does. It says they have a "cupboard full".

You lack any sense of proportionality. Compare a theoretical and frankly implausible risk of harm from a vegetable to an aerosolised highly addictive carcinogen.

Which do you think deserves closer scrutiny?

The ‘life is too complex argument’ leads no where. There is far more genetic experimentation going on in your gut bacteria as we speak than there ever will be in a GMO tomato.

Yeah comparing GMO to smoking is a bit of a red herring... Like, who cares, everybody knows that smoking is bad and driving is very risky, but these are known risks, we choose to do them. I'm comparing GMO tomatoes to non-GMO tomatoes and frankly, I don't see that much potential benefit at all, especially if you buy locally grown tomatoes (which already taste amazing).

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