Atomic Gardening (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Atomic Gardening (2017)

atlasobscura.com

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"Creso" wheat, which is a popular cultivar in its native Italy and has been used around the world to create other variants, was obtained from seeds irradiated with neutrons and gamma rays.

I always mention this to people irrationally worried about eating GMO food featuring precise edits.

I'm only vaguely familiar with the GMO debate, but isn't the primary concern that they make food into controllable IP, locking farmers into a SaaS-like subscription lock in, not allowed to replant their own seeds?

Although I'm sure there are people who are just worried about the scary-sounding nature of "genetic modification", the IP angle struck me as a reasonable concern when I heard it.

What you mention is a genuine concern (however as far as I understand the issue is not precisely that one - it's not generally efficient for farmers to use their own seeds anyway), but I'm talking about people that think that GMO food is going to harm their health for nebulous reasons.

> it's not generally efficient for farmers to use their own seeds anyway

This would certainly seem to be true for commercial farmers in the first world. I don’t know if it applies as much in the third world though.

For modern industrial farming (ie not you on a patch of ground you manage with tools you can pick up and carry) seeds are usually anyway purchased in bulk from a specialist. What you've described is a problem, but it's coincidental to the existence of GM.

AIUI The spectre of GMO preventing seed saving got into the picture by the following route:

1. GMO opponents feared a GMO could spread in the wild, which sure enough can happen, and as with the whole "Vaccine might turn me into a chimp" (the Astrazeneca vaccine is based on a virus that infects Chimpanzees) thing they exaggerated the resulting risk, they argued that it's possible for genetics from the GMO to be copied into other things. So, maybe your weedkiller resistance gene gets copied into the weeds by some means.

2. GMO developers went OK, we can make a "terminator" feature so the modified plants don't reproduce, mitigating the problem. Nobody relies on self-seeding of crops for industrialised farming anyway and that'll fix your concern right?

3. Terminator is now an excuse to say the GMO seeds are deliberately broken to prevent seed saving.

This is especially remarkable because Terminator is a specific feature, not included in most GM organisms, so, if that's really what you're afraid of then you'd only be opposed to those GMOs not the whole concept.

Thanks for the clarification, sounds like the usual rationalisation dance from when people are resistant to something new.

And just to expand on the above, modern farming heavily exploits heterosis (1) for greatly improved yields and healthier crops, even when not using "GMO" crops.

This means that while seed saving is, strictly speaking, possible, it is uneconomical -- properly fully heterozygotic seeds coming from an organization dedicated to making them will yield so much more than the second generation descending from those seeds (or any other natural seed stock) that everyone will gladly pay for them.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis

Regular old hybrids also don't grow true from harvested seed. That's pretty much the whole point of heirloom plants. For example, it's not as if Big Apple intentionally sells apples with worthless seeds, that's just how fruit trees work.

It would be pretty cool though if some scientists actually did engineer plants with desirable properties that grow true from seed, but with the perverse incentives currently in place I'm not holding my breath on that one.

No, it's not the main concern usually. Most people who are anti-GMO are against the gene editing part and its potential effects on the human genome.

If you probe deeply enough you realize there's not much there.

> isn't the primary concern that they make food into controllable IP, locking farmers into a SaaS-like subscription lock in, not allowed to replant their own seeds?

That's a concern (along with IP trolls suing farmers for infringment after cross-pollination and "terminator" features of GM crops's pollen interfering with self-seeding of said cross-pollinated crops), but IME it seems like the primary concern (ie, of most people complaining about it) is the stupid scary-soundingness one. (Which is annoying, because the former is a very real and serious problem, as it exacerbates existing centralization of food production.)

The other concern is about genetically engineered glypohsate-resistant "Roundup Ready" crops, which facilitate increased and imprudent usage of glyphosate.

Haven't the usage of glyphosate been linked with the decline of bees population?

Not directly, I think. The recent debate over declining bee population has has been over pesticides from the neonicotineide family.

But I think the current concensus is that the decline in bees populations is due to a combination of

- Pollen sources being increasingly from monocultures (yes, roundup use is a factor in this) possibly making bees kinda malnourished

- Bee populations are themselves getting less diverse due to comercial breeding practices making bees less resilient to changes in the environment

- Mites and decieses that has been around since forever

Anyway, declining bee populations, while sad, is a tiny part of the problem: Insect populations across the board is vanishing.

From the source: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/sustainable-agriculture/issue...

A summary of their concerns would be:

* GMO tend to be “pesticide resistant” (eg roundup-ready) and more pesticide is bad for humans and the environment

* GMO has not been proven to be safe for human consumption

* GMO turns agriculture into IP which threatens the sovereignty of farmers

So yes, the IP concern is a big one for anti-GM campaigners, but I’d not say it’s the primary one.

(As an aside, I think the pesticide concerns are quite strong, but not all GM crops encourage pesticide use, so I’d rather restrict pesticides than GM. I don’t find the human safety concerns convincing. And the IP concerns are quite compelling to me, but again I think these could be better fixed elsewhere in the system, for example by state funded GM research or IP law reform, rather than banning GMOs.)

Isn’t there also a concern about these genes escaping by cross pollination into wild plants?

It's more that people don't want things to end up like the US where the food industry has gone completely insane.

Fun fact: mutagenized crops are generally not considered to be GMOs.

From https://geneticliteracyproject.org/gmo-faq/glp-tackles-one-o... :

> [...] chemical/physical mutagenesis and a lot of other techniques are “unnaturally” performed “in the lab” but are not classified as GMOs.

So is the problem with categorizing anything, nature doesn't care about neat categories and honestly neither do we.

We have genetically modified almost every organism we eat the only difference is the method of modification.

When does something become GMO? Selective breeding? Mutagenesis? Marker assisted breeding? Targeted gene insertion? Who decides and why?

I wonder if it's possible to DIY this, but using say a beta emitter, I just found:

"Beta particles are less damaging but have greater penetration than alpha particles, and can cause DNA mutation and cell damage."

Theoretically could you use an electron gun in a vacuum chamber to cause mutations in a seed?

Sure, I guess any mutagen would do, as long as you have some control over the dosage.

Mutagenic chemicals might work equally well. Would be super annoying/dangerous to work with compared to flipping a switch on an electron gun though.

The mutagenesis is not the rate limiting step, its the screening of positive mutants.

That was one of the suggested experiments in the classic Amateur Scientist column "A Homemade Atom Smasher" (page 344 at http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/projects_for_the... ).

Spin up that old Van de Graaff in your closet and make some cool mutations!

>Theoretically could you use an electron gun in a vacuum chamber to cause mutations in a seed?

Yes

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/129124-japanese-scientis...

When China began their space missions, one of the experiments is to make "space seeds" which are seeds mutated from space rays.

It seems like this effort continues even up to now [0].

[0]: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202101/04/WS5ff25229a31024ad0...

I knew there is space mutation breeding, but didn't know about some kind of space cucumber...

https://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-hazards/radiation/...

Ionically [0], if you take a sample of your crisp genome-edited tomato from your biosafe lab and plant it near the roses outside the lab building, plants that have been chemically mutated in some Chinese backwater, you're going to be in trouble.

[0] {[(r)]} in biosafety lab level 3.

Ionically?

Oh, just a frankenword I stitched together on the whim. Made from inoization and ironically. I know it's rough on the edges, but you have to work with what the body snatcher catches.

The quarantined r in the footnote is a pun on sometimes unnecessary safety routines. It also lacks as the last letter of crispr...

Since I see gen-editing as a form of wordplay, I thought it fitting.

Ionized radiation is one method of mutation breeding. Atomic Gardening was just an extrem and sometimes whimsical form. See Muriel Howorth.

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

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

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