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Comment by alex_sf | Hacker News Reader

All crops are GMO. The only difference is how fast they were modified.

> All crops are GMO. The only difference is how fast they were modified.

This is often said in defense of GMO, but surely cross-breeding and hybridization - a farmer or gardener attempting to combine the entire genetic entity of one plant with another one (which must therefore be naturally compatible), to increase the potential utility of the result - is totally different to inserting a single gene from a totally arbitrary source (which can therefore be a completely separate life-form)?

And then there's Atomic Gardening which has been done for ages and does not officially count as producing GMOs, IIRC.

If I make a sandwich (wheat genes + chicken genes + cow genes + yeast genes) and cover it with honey (insect genes), what will happen to me when I will eat it?

With enough time that trait would show up by simple selective breeding too. GMO does it faster. (Of course so much faster that there is an argument that it's qualitatively not the same as good old breeding. And if someone comes up with some kind of killer trees that release anthrax in the spring that too counts as GMO too, but they are unlikely to be deterred by labeling requirements or GMO bans.)

Are you saying that's not a significant difference? It seems to me.

It seems to you what?

Probably that letting the slow-GMO survive in a natural environment for hundreds of years does wonders for ironing out the really bad bugs.

I'm not anti-GMO but i've been more wary ever since I realized it will inevitably be used to make better citizens (and not by making them better humans).

It depends. There's a number of dog breeds with known genetical issues.

GE is a double edged sword just like nuclear energy. With great power comes great responsability.

Those are mostly innovations of the latest century or so, bred "scientifically", regulated by dog breed foundations and chasing dog-show metrics.

Not really any more alarming to me than the initial domestication I guess. Manipulating the world around us is kinda our whole deal as a species.

This is false. The distance between selective breeding and GMO is horizontal vs vertical gene transfer.

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