Hacker News Reader

Comment by john_minsk | Hacker News Reader

Not to start a holy war, but what is the difference at the end of the day? Isn't one just faster?

When it comes to biology applied to agriculture, I prefer eco systemic research to genetics, as a personal taste but I don’t even think those are mutually exclusive.

Maybe an example is appropriate. Monocrop cultures are efficient short term, easy to control ... but also simplistic and brutal. In this system, gmo can help reduce the nefarious intrants (fertilizers, pesticides ...). This sounds like optimization.

Alternative cultural models, multicrops for instance, are saner but implies many technical and economical issues that still have to be dealt with. This is more like an architectural change.

One occurs naturally and thus happens all around us without human interaction. So there's value in understanding how things work without any input from humans.

One is more like studying a natural process while the other is the mechanics of that process.

Yes exactly. The fruit might be the same at the end of the day; red, round, juicy. But there is more that goes into growing fruit than just reaping the end product. There is fertilizers which run off into lakes [1], pesticides and herbicides that get into the soil increasingly making soil less fertile [2], market cornering tactics like seed patenting [3]. I think it is more important to study how to make nature do the work of growing food abundantly with as little side-effects as possible, instead of engineering it to with no caution for side-effects.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizer-runoff...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC91132/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.

Look up mutagenic breeding, the idea breeders are taking a more natural approach is nuts.

I do agree we should invest more heavily in tech like bug resistance to reduce necessary pesticides.

GMOs are the somewhat intentional introduction of genes from another organism while breeding approaches often involve radiation to expedite random mutations which may have less obvious changes that are not safe.

To be fair, GMOs can just as easily be unsafe; the difference in that regard is that with GMOs there are fewer ways things might go wrong, and they're much more easily enumerated and examined.

The best example of an "unsafe GMO" would be this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8594427/ (brazil nut proteins were transferred to soybeans; the proteins happened to be ones that cause brazil nut allergy. If this had been rolled out in large scale, probably some fraction of consumers would die).

Nearly everybody in the first world is eating food which has been modified by radiation to expedite mutations for many decades (since the Green Revolution) and I don't think anybody has shown any convincing evidence that the products have been systemically unsafe.

I'd say that one is studying a plant and its interaction with the environment/other organisms whether the other is more interested in the inner works of a fungi. It is a matter os perspective, one is doing ecology and the other one is more weighted to genetics.

There was an instructive novel written by Mary Shelley on that very topic. Recommended reading.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com