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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

I've watched the entire cycle in the past thirty years as a former agronomist. We were able to genetically modify plants so they generated natural pesticides as a defense against insects. This allowed us to stop spraying thousands of tons of less insecticides.

But the very people complaining about spraying chemicals rejected these new enhanced plants saying they weren't 'natural'. We have been breeding plants to do things the past 170 years ever since Gregor Mendel and his pea breeding. The only difference now is that we have better tools. You cannot win everyone over.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel

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We also, at the same time, genetically modified plants to be resistant to Glyphosate so that we could spray thousands of tons more of this herbicide. Semantic arguments about what is and isn't 'natural' aside, it's clear the technology has been a double-edged sword.

I'm not set against GMOs myself, but I feel that proponents of the technology do themselves a disservice with the argument that it's no different to selective breeding with better tools: there is actually a difference of kind, not just degree here, because the technology allows you to introduce complete alien genes to an organism rather than incremental modifications or regulation changes of genes already existing in that species. Trying to gloss over that feels dishonest.

BASF has produced herbicide tolerant crops plants without using GMO in the breeding process, and patented the whole system (BASF Clearfield ® Production System).

This does everything people accuse GMO's for, but it's not GMO.

That just proves that it is possible to achieve what the GMO proponents argue that GMOs are necessary for, without using GM.

And it certainly doesn't do the main thing that we accuse GMOs for, which is spreading genetically modified organisms in nature.

I couldn't quickly find any information about the system that didn't look like marketing material. But apparently you have to combine it with other practices, like crop rotation, that usually is considered better for the soil and the environment.

No, it's far worse than GMO. Because besides the changes which were desired, there are also a whole bunch of random mutations which were introduced, which could do anything from making the species highly invasive, to putting carcinogens in the parts used for human consumption.

GM is much safer and easier to verify as not having harmful side effects. And, it's easier. The only reason they invented this process at all is because people were scared of GM.

More random mutations than traditional breeding? I would be genuinely interested if you could provide some reliable source for what you are claiming. But I must confess that for now it sounds like FUD spread by the GMO industry.

Ostensibly the same as traditional breeding, but done on an industrial scale. GM is the outlier, with no random mutations, only the specifically designed ones.

Also, what process is there for verifying that GMOs don't have any harmful side effects that you can't use for traditionally bred plants?

Animal and human testing just like virtually every other biological scientific endeavor. We also have gotten pretty good at detecting chemicals that would cause such issues. I guess I'm just throwing that out there.

The question was about what kind of testing that can be done on GMOs that can't be done on other types of organisms. The commenter that I was hoping to answer me claimed that it is harder to test traditionally bred organisms than GMOs.

With GMOs you know exactly where the differences are, so you can test very deeply on those components. Traditional breeding and these accelerated mutation processes could have differences anywhere, so you pretty much need to do a ground up re-evaluation of the whole organism to get the same safety coverage as GM. (yeah right, like traditional breeders are going to do that).

You assume that it is easy to predict exactly what effect some genes from some bacteria would have is, say, spinach. It is rarely so. In traditional breeding, you know what you start with, and crossing two variants from the same species never creates anything unexpected.

These processes are not crossing existing lines of plants. They bombard the seeds with radiation to massively increase the number of mutations, then select in the much more highly variable results for the traits they are interested in. There is nothing predictable or controlled about the process, it is just a way of getting a result quickly without getting a GMO label at the same time. It gives the same safety margins as traditional breeding, but is much less safe than GMOs.

Why do you think plants that produce pesticides are not an environmental problem of their own?

Bees are dying from neonics getting into the pollen. You willing to bet the biosphere that you’re right, and nothing bad will happen?

I'm willing to bet it's less bad than the status quo.

Sure, bad things will happen with a few GM crops, but worse things will probably happen from existing non-GM farming practices. I think most experts would also agree with that assesment.

That is a false dichotomy. It is perfectly possible to get good yields with farming practices that use neither pesticides nor GM.

Exactly. This reminds me the interview where a Monsanto rep was asking an activist whether she’d prefer to provide people with genetically engineered rice or have them suffer from vitamin deficiency.

What a made up false dichotomy.

It isn't as much of a false dichotomy as you make out.

At any point in the decision making chain, in general, the decision is "should be do this new thing, so should we not".

So it really is a dichotomy, at least as far as the decision maker is concerned.

It is certainly a false dichotomy, because you paint it as a decision between GMO and conventional non-GMO farming. But as in all false dichotomies, there are more alternatives.

And no, that is not how decisions are made. You don't stand stupidly and consider if you should drive your car to work this morning or not, without at the same time taking into account the alternatives and their consequences. How long would it take to walk, how is the path, the weather? Are public transport available, how much does it cost, how long would it take?

So there is no dichotomy for the decision maker either.

Surely it's better to replace indiscriminate spraying of substances known to be harmful with GMO crops carefully bred to have the smallest changes possible?

Genes do not stay put.

Genes do not know how to stay put. Their whole purpose is to spread. The difference between weed and crop is very narrow in many cases. Brassicas especially. Any gene you put into them you’re going to deal with in a weed very soon.

>One example of hybridization between GM crops and wild species has been documented in creeping bentgrass commonly used on golf courses. Scotts Miracle-Gro genetically engineered this grass to contain a gene that confers resistance to a common herbicide so that the golf course can be sprayed to kill weeds without harm to the grass. Because this grass is wind-pollinated, a perennial, and highly capable of outcrossing with related wild species, researchers decided to investigate wild grass in close proximity for the presence of the herbicide resistance gene. The researchers collected seeds from wild plants at varied distances from the origin of the grass farm and used herbicides to detect tolerant plants. They confirmed the presence of the herbicide resistant gene in wild grass up to 9 miles from its origin only one year after the grass was planted [2,3,4]. This distance is very surprising because most hybridization events have been reported between plants that are less than a mile apart. It is clear from this study that genetic modifications can be transferred to wild species through hybridization; however, future investigations will need to be performed in order to differentiate whether the genetic modification increases the fitness of wild species or if these hybridizations are a natural result of planting a large grass farm in close proximity to wild species.

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/challenging-evolutio...

In 'Gathering Moss', RWK talks about how moss spores hitchhike on squirrels, increasing their effective range by over one or two orders of magnitude.

Recently it came out that birds can and sometimes do transport live fish eggs to new bodies of water, miles away. And I learned today that birds that don't eat the seeds they get from the bird feeder? They take them and hide them, for instance in the chinks in tree bark. For the species this man knew about, most of those seeds end up in a 50 meter radius of the source, but there are other transport systems like digestive tracts (see also birds and pepper seeds)

Animals that keep transporting viable germlines around with them create a selective advantage for their entire species. Squirrels, humans, pollinators, etc. If our ancestors hadn't literally and figuratively squirreled seeds away we'd probably not be here to have this conversation.

Those are not the only alternatives available. There are farming practices that give good yield, use none or a minimum of pesticides and herbicides, and don't use any GMOs.

I saw a video that I wish I had bookmarked about a US farmer using alley cropping with no pesticides, and indeed almost no management other than the first planting and yearly harvesting.

Their setup is to grow asparagus for income in the alleys between nut trees (which take 7+ years to start producing), leave a bunch of asparagus to go to seed instead of harvesting it all, and time their field mowing to support asparagus growth. When the trees start producing, they will reforest the fields between them. Low-effort and low-cost by working with native species and using long-established techniques.

Is it going to yield as much as highly-managed farmland? No. But it also takes a fraction of the effort, so they can pursue other things in the meantime. It ain’t quite passive income, but it ain’t real active either, and they’re rehabilitating the flora and fauna while they do it.

Lots of permaculture ideas share similarities with this and are more geared towards higher yields.

> Why do you think plants that produce pesticides are not an environmental problem of their own?

All plants that, in the nature, tend to get eaten by insects, naturally produce pesticides against their pests. Humans have bred super-edible, non-pesticide plants for cultivation, and insects are happy to attack these. Now we are bringing back into crop plants some of the natural defenses that wild plants have always had against the insects.

insect populations are declining rapidly and are also in need of protection. we're probably going to have to start eating bugs for survival when all the animals are dead, since bugs are one of the most efficient sources of protein, so i'd personally be wary of telling the bugs to fuck off just so we can save the crops.

If insect populations are dwindling and in need of protection, why would we suggest people eat them? Wouldn’t that accelerate their demise?

Also, most folks are not protein deficient, but they are not getting enough fiber. https://www.vox.com/2019/3/20/18214505/fiber-diet-weight-los...

i didn't say that we should eat bugs because insect populations are declining. i said we are going to have to start eating bugs anyway (e.g. there are no more wild fish), and also that insect populations are declining.

Understood. I think most people would start eating plants for protein before they resort to insects unless the insects are processed beyond recognition and relabelled. :)

If we start eating insects, we will start farming them. But most of the insects we’re talking about as food sources are not primary pollinators.

And that’s the important distinction that your question raises. Increasing the total biomass of insects won’t help with the pollination problem if we’re only boosting non-pollinator species. It will not help the situation with insecticides and plants.

We'll have the same problem that salmon farms and honeybee wranglers have now: so many parasites that they transfer to the wild populations.

I mean, I still think we should farm insects, but as a more natural substitute for corn for our omnivore meat sources.

Yeah, I haven’t looked into that but there’s no reason to expect otherwise. Speaking broadly, farming optimizes for output and disregards the ecosystems that the farms are a part of. For each farmer, this is okay; it works for them for now. Taken as a whole, it is not okay and contributes to bigger problems later (sometimes for earlier values of later).

A greater understanding of farming trade-offs when it comes to ecosystems would likely obviate the need for farming insects in the first place. High up on the list is eliminating factory farms, and IMO all livestock farms and massive monoculture plant farms will have to be deeply scrutinized.

A bunch of organic and permaculture people are discovering that you can feed food waste to chickens. They get a little veg, and then as the rest breaks down the food slowly turns into bugs and worms.

It's morally similar to pre-consumer paper recycling - you're sourcing materials from food services. As long and you can keep the carbon footprint of transportation down, it's something you can use to offset feed corn, which has a large footprint. One place corn wins out is the low moisture content. You're not trucking water back and forth. But the corn doesn't win out on nutrition or quality of life for the animals, nor from a host of environmental concerns.

> We were able to genetically modify plants so they generated natural pesticides as a defense against insects.

Isn't this the good old "naturalistic fallacy" though? Would you eat a poisonous mushroom because the poison is "natural"? You can at least wash some pesticides off.

I'm not a biologist but I'm sure there is a difference between crossing different varieties of peas versus introducing a non-pea (or maybe non-plant) gene into the pea DNA.

Different means to the same ends. DNA is DNA no matter what organism it is in. Many genes are conserved through most orders of life.

Again, I'm not a biologist but I highly doubt that. Evolution had millions of years to create very specialised genes in different organisms. Genes have complex interactions between them and we don't always have a full grasp of those interactions. Cherry picking a single gene from an insect and transplanting it onto a plant might have unforeseen effects.

I'm neither pro-pesticide nor anti-GMO but we should refrain ourselves from a blanket "GMO is natural, hence better than chemicals" statement.

Well you shouldn't. We share about 50% of our DNA with a banana.

And that 50% seems to do something very different in humans than in bananas

Usually it does the exact same things actually!

Exactly my point. It's a huge difference.

Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a naturally occurring bacterium in the soil that produces proteins specifically active against certain insects.

This is the exact same insecticide used by certified organic growers. Plant breeders have just engineered the plants to produce it in their leaves, not in the corn itself.

For thirty years objections have been raised, scientific research has been done disproving the objections. Yet Bt corn is still banned in a large part of Europe.

There are other political reasons for the ban... Do you want your whole food supply dependant on licensing from another nation who is an ally today, but could use this as a bargaining chip to "do as we say or we'll stop licensing you corn and destroy your agriculture industry".

Sure, but licensing/patents are entirely separate from the environment benefits here.

If you say "I'll take the environmental benefits, but pass on the patents/licensing", you're quickly gonna get slapped with sanctions.

So they aren't really seperate.

They're definitely separate issues, but decision makers still need to take both into account.

"It's better for the environment" is a poor excuse when you have angry farmers yelling outside one door, and poor hungry people outside the other.

If this was the only driver then the logical response wouldn't be a ban but rather more r&d spending to develop European alternatives.

Any European alternative developed would end up banned in the US, the biggest corn market. The US doesn't let people muscle in on its flagship agritech industries.

Europe might be a big enough market to be worth the R&D though - although it doesn't grow anywhere as much corn as we do.

Just do what European pharmaceutical companies do and make a generic version.

Just because it occurs naturally in soil doesn’t mean it is harmless, especially in concentrated settings.

Putting BT-Genes in plants also means using pesticides indiscriminately and precludes targeted pesticide use.

Sorry, no. Even Monsanto's own research confirms that large-scale use of Bt-corn will destroy organic farming.

When a pesticide is widespread, insects develop resistance. At the moment, few insects have resistance to BT, because it is not continually in the environment in sufficiently high numbers.

So it works as an organic insecticide when needed.

Genetically engineer it into large numbers of plants, and in 30-40 years it is no longer effective.

Which means organic farmer no longer have the option of using it.

"we shouldn't mess with nature" is also a naturalistic fallacy, fyi

No it isn't. While the naturalistic fallacy is the belief that natural = preferable, and that does sit very close to 'don't mess with nature', so too does the Precautionary Principle, and I would argue that sits supreme.

We can argue about the degree of overlap of course, but it's not clear cut. I believe our scientific understanding in this area is at best partial, and so minimal interference only where strong justification exists is preferable.

yes it is. "we shouldn't mess with nature" and "we should be cautious when we are messing with nature" are two completely different things.

The precautionary principle is false though.

If you have a good explanation of the dangers of a particular action, then that’s sufficient to argue for caution—there’s no need for an additional principle, because you have an explanation about the dangers involved.

If you don’t have a good explanation of the dangers of a particular action, then you definitely don’t need a principle to tell you how cautious you ought to be. Presumably even when abiding by the precautionary principle one must estimate the plausibility of any hypothetical danger (to avoid universal hypothetical dangers of the form “there could be a wizard out there who has decided that they will kill us if we do X”), but developing good explanations for the plausibility of dangers is precisely the work mentioned in the previous paragraph that obviates the need for the precautionary principle.

If you are pointing at me, I have never said that.

i know, i'm just filling in the blanks

Yes, we have been breeding plants and animals for a long time, long before Mendel. But the difference between breeding and GM is not only a difference in magnitude, it is also a difference in kind. We are not only breeding faster and better aimed, but we are not only ingesting genes from completely different species, but from different kingdoms!

"Well, people have been killing each other with spears forever. Nukes are just more of the same."

Are intentionally conflating breeding with genetic engineering? That’s one of Monsanto’s tactics to confuse the public and dismiss concerns with genetically engineered plants.

If you can breed plants to make their own pesticide, why use techniques like CRISPR? If you can't why pretend GMOs are the same selective breeding?

If the pesticides stay in the plant, you're asking customers to eat a lot of pesticides. Are you sure they're safe? You can't wash them off after all. If they don't then they'll leak into the soil and kill it just like externally provided pesticides won't they?

I am unconvinced by the case for GMOs (in case you hadn't guessed :)). But questioning it isn't anti-science. Quite the opposite: it should be A-OK to make all the points above. The fact that I will be down voted for doing so sort of demonstrates my concern: no one is questioning this tech because doing so is "antiscience" and unexamined changes are almost always bad...

As something of a "peace offering", "look I can be reasonable" closing point, I like ideas like Golden Rice, created to have improved nutritional content. I am not blanket opposed. I just don't think opposition is always fear mongering or that the usual points in support for more GMOs hold much water...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice

I've read this argument since forever yet I still have a small issue about GMO because, it seems to me that, at that level, potential negative mutations can happen a lot more than the old way. It's a bit like saying we've been using sun light to heat ourselves, and it's nuclear so why worry about radioactive uranium.

I don't think the negative changes are higher. On other hand I do not really understand why don't we apply same standards for testing with any cultivar as we do with GMO one. Surely that isn't too much to be asked for food safety.

I'm all for GMOs that allow reduction of pesticides and more sustainable ag practices in general... but that's not what we've seen happen.

Additionally, the IP issues raised when Monsanto's GMO plant pollen drifts onto my land making me subject to litigation due to infringement of Monsanto's IP... yeah, that's total bullshit.

The other downside with the GM approach that people rarely mention is that there are no transformation protocols for many crops.

What is a transformation protocol in this context?

The ability to genetically modify a crop. Generally (though not always) you need a tissue culture protocol to regenerate whatever you've transformed into a plant (so shoots, roots etc.). Plenty of species are recalcitrant to the transformation itself when using things like agrobacterium or projectile bombardment, or recalcitrant to tissue culturing.

The so called organic food has little to do with environment preservation. One can use pesticides in organic farming. They just have to be "natural". But I wonder if these so called natural pesticides are any less dangerous. Also by requiring more soil to grow this isn't sustainable to feed the human population.

Organic food is for a bunch of people scared of modern technology. Some usually take alternative medicine such as homeopathy and are afraid of electromagnetic waves.

They claim buying organic is better for the environment and their health. But that's in fact the opposite

I don’t know how it works everywhere, but in EU, buying organic means buying “regulated and supervised crops”. Organic, here, it’s more expensive mainly because your production needs to be accounted.

Tech side, it’s as “modern” as the non-organic farming; but just regulated and controlled. Most of the non-organic crops in my country are just not at all supervised and uneducated farmers that constantly commit ecological harm because the more x I put in the field the better it should work.

So, I prefer to pay a little more to eat a fruit produced with some sciences and technicians involved in the production.

I'm also on the EU, and the EU has also many rules for "traditional" agriculture, it is also regulated and controlled.

The problem I have with the Bio label is that these extra rules are counter productive.

    - no use of artificial pesticides (but still allow "natural" ones) 
    - no use of mineral fertilizer
    - no use of GMO
    - no use of artificial food colouring or aromas or conservative.

The thing is that there is little evidence that any of this is better for health or for the environment.

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