Genetically Engineered Wheat Found in Unplanted Washington Field

Trying to impose a patent which prevents a farmer from replanting seeds, or attempts to interrupt basic function of living things (making plants that do not replicate) is morally wrong. In the name of profit, companies like Monsanto will deliberately make their products "infertile" and unable to replicate. They do this so they can sell you new seeds every year.

Bit different from a patent on a phone screen. You can water it, leave it in the Sun, and a phone screen will never replicate itself in a million years.

It's the same here. The potential risk is huge. We still have a hard time with things as simple as not killing each others, so thinking we are mastering introduction of these variables into such a complex systems is delusional at best, arrogant at worst.

Given that the people in charge of this are motivated by profit, and that we have history proving such entities will not do the right thing for humanity given the chance, let's not trust them.

Audit them to the ground. Force them to justify themself for 5 decades at every step. Make it transparent, systematic, and independant.

Working on GMO is ok. Trusting them to be safe because lobbists say so is not.

Yet of course you aren't unaffected. Even today we we're not entirely certain of everything that leaded fuel fume exposure causes, let alone the exact mechanism for such. What we do know is that there is an apparent causal relationship between leaded fuel exposure, particularly during one's developmental years, and increased criminality, lower IQ, and other such things. But you're not going to show this in any sort of brief experiment and even over longterm experiments it can be difficult to discern the issues. I mean if we didn't already know as much, the idea that inhaling negligible amounts of gas fumes (in terms of parts per x) over years could somehow cause increased crime rates or even low IQs sounds pretty absurd. But our bodies react in ways that often belie intuition.

So you're left to look at things comparatively. How do people who do 'x' compare to people who do not do 'x' over years or decades? How do their children do? With GM crops we have a pretty ideal test suite since most of the world adopted these crops sparingly or not at all while in the United States near 100% of crops of certain crucial types are now genetically engineered. So how do young Americans, especially those born after the mid 90s, compare to those from other nations in terms of physical health, mental health, and other behaviors? Of course there are a million confounding variables here, some such as the growth of the internet can be controlled for but others cannot.

So this is something that would require extensive research and work to actively study. Presumably this would be the purview of agencies such as the FDA. Unfortunately, with our government this [1] was the last head of the FDA. A Monsanto VP lawyer who argued for things such as allowing corporations to knowingly allow at least a small amount of carcinogens into processed foods. That man determined food safety in the US for the majority of the last administration, and I doubt the current administration would have much interest in such research either. So instead we get no meaningful oversight, negligible or poorly formulated longitudinal research, and instead are left to rely primarily on the ethics of companies such as Monsanto.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_R._Taylor

We don't need a 100 years though, since there is only one thing to check: if it affects us directly. We don't have the same cascading effect potential, nor nearly the same number of possible interactions.

And we already know that cell phones affect us by the way: the new generation already present an attention and focus deficit because of the constant solicitation of the cell phone. Privacy is being denied more and more. We've created huge amount of electronic wastes.

So yeah, I wish we had took a little more time instead of jumping full throttle into it. Or at least follow the effects and react.

But we are not a very reasonable specie.

That's why we do testing in most areas. That's the point of the FDA -- EVERY new drug must be presumed unsafe and tested. Such an attitude would serve us well if it were applied to widespread environmental concerns. Otherwise it'll be self-interested corporations with a damning track record (e.g. DuPont) making the calls[1].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuPont_(1802%E2%80%932017)#Con...

Power, scale, agenda and synergies matter.

Plus evolution doesn't have an agenda that would make it creates things like the terminator gene. We are in a very peculiar situation.

I'm open to see how it plays out, as long as we don't arrogantly pretend we know for sure everything will be ok. Because we heard this one before, and it was always stated by people that wanted to sound trustworthy or smart, never the ones that wanted to make sure we are all happy.

Besides, how asking for severe and regular audits is even a bad thing ? If one is against that, I trust their judgment even less.