> from "safe until proven otherwise" to "unsafe until (independently) proven safe"
That’s about how the EU does it.
That’s about how the EU does it.
The precautionary principle has its merits, but I think it's often cargo-culted and its limitations not well articulated. In cases such as GM crops where the stakes may within a human lifetime be "devestating famine" versus "less famine", or cases like vaping where although the harm is unknown it's certainly less than what it's replacing (vaping is uncontroversially less harmful than smoking) the precautionary principle actually has a harmful effect in itself.
I don't know if they test for this, but GMOs do run the risk of become invasive or destructive species which could potentially tilt things towards the "devastating famine" side of the equation.
I don't think the ecological concern is what most people worry about when they think GMOs, and I'm not of the mind that GMOs = Bad, but I think we owe it to ourselves to study the ecological impact of GMOs we plan to grow widely.
Having said that, the EU is a bit of a unique specimen when it comes to things like this. I'm perhaps being a little unfair to the precautionary principle per se when I suppose it's more the EU's implementation of it that I'm criticising. I don't want this to come across as an anti-EU polemic either, there's obviously pros and cons here and I realise the EU is very much in a class by itself when it comes to political polities which make comparisons quite difficult. My own biases are probably at play here too, for various reasons I'd say my risk tolerance is probably higher than most.
I've enough friends who work for the Canadian government or university administration to know that there is a coveted and illusive middle ground where vital regulation doesn't grind all it touches to a hapless stand-still.
Hot take: I think the HN software dev crowd might not be the worst equipped to help towards addressing these sorts of problem. From the horror stories I hear, disciplined approaches to tooling could solve a class of problems that appear to be pervasive.
On the other hand, the multiple levels of bureaucratic red tape and regulatory approval keeps a lot of technology from progressing onto the market and into people's lives at the rate it could otherwise.
Crop plants don't run the risk to become invasive or destructive species. They are bred to be easily digestible food sources, which the exact opposite of the strategy for surviving in the wild.
I guess my point is that we don't always get what we think we're getting when it comes to GMOs/selection: when farmers selected for Red Delicious apples that were entirely red, they also selected out the gene that made them palatable. Surely they wouldn't have done what they had if they knew we'd be left with the mealy mess Red Delicious apples are today.
We hope we'll get edible plants that also don't do well in the wild, but there's a lot of room for error and testing is warranted in my not-an-expert opinion (I've a degree in Biochemistry, not Ecology or Agriculture).
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/the-evil-...
We must find a way to bound the corporate greed with a good regulatory framework because GMO sooner or later might become inevitable.
The EU has more efficient agriculture by area compared to the US. Part of it by necessity of course. There are problems with pesticides that could be solved with GMO in some circumstances.
But the same principle applies: It isn't stricly necessariy to employ GMO, especially not for yield (we don't have any yield problems anyway). The problems of agriculture today are economic in nature and there still could be negative consequences if GMO strains are spread in nature.
So I don't see anything as backwards really. There just isn't a problem that requires GMO currently. I think saying GMO will be vital instrument against climate change is ridiculous to be honest. Maybe if plants could be modified to use less water?
If any effects are unmeasurable with standard clinical trial practices, then it's safe. People care about things that actually are harmful.
> Proving a negative ("this is not dangerous") is hard :)
Which is why I never asked for it. Safety standards are always phrased positively. OSHA doesn't say "workplaces must not be dangerous", they say "wear a hard hat, the employer shall do ___, employees must not be forced to do ___". It's very easy to regulate that "new compounds must be shown not to affect human hormone levels at X concentration, must be shown not to be carcinogenic in Y model of cancer" etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfluorex
A drug that was highly suspected of killing several hundred to several thousand people stayed on the market for decades.
A similar drug with similar risks was pulled from the US market 24 years earlier.