I find it a terrific chance for humanity to engineer plants in such a way that they are more robust against disease and bad weather (with CRISPR/CAS and such methods).
Why would the massive corporations that have driven the food in our supermarkets ever cheaper, ever thinner in nutrients, ever higher in fat and sweeteners and fillers, ever more laden with pesticides and antibiotics, ever more processed—why would they use a technology like GMO crops for good? Why wouldn't they just splice pesticide and sugar genes into them directly and juice the yield even harder so that the soil is stripped and ruined even faster? I think they will be used to boost profits, not make our food more nutritious, or even cheaper in any way except per calorie.
I understand there are potentially benefits, e.g. growing crops resistant to pests so that spray pesticides can be reduced. I just have no faith whatsoever that these kinds of considered actions will be taken, based on the last 100 years of technology. It's just going to be wheat and corn, wheat and corn, wheat and corn until caloric yields approach insolation and the soil is as gray and lifeless as the moon.
The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms) https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf
Hopefully regulators aren't going to allow insertion of engineered genes producing novel molecules without going through actual medical grade trials for those molecules. Or it may torpedo the entire industry.
Determining cause and effect in the interaction of complicated systems is no easy task.
And if we're wrong, how do you remove GMO organisms afterwards?
And where is your knowledge coming from?
I am certainly not a biologist, but as far as I know, there are quite some plants that are edible in the breed we eat - but a different wild form is toxic (carrots for example). How are you sure, the wrong (dormant) genes do not get transfered and activated, without testing?
Or even with the same plant, potatoes. The root is good for us, but the flower is toxic.
In other words, you always have to do extensive testing, when you play around with genes.
Genes are not computer modules you just swap around and turn on and off. It is way more complicated.
Like, say, Galileo?
I agree that the anti gmo/vaxx etc. crowd is quite irrational in many regards, but I can see a difference between traditional breeding plants - and directly editing DNA.
And surprise: many plants are poisenous. And even with the slow method of natural breeding, poisenous traits can creep back in. The potential and speed of GMO methods is just way higher. For good and also bad results. So it is not the same.
Just like with vaccines having plenty of resistant food so people don't starve far overvalue whatever little side effects you might get.
It is, but with a technology, that is not fully understood.
Or is it fully known for example, why cloned animals live far shorter, than the original? Not as far, as I am aware.
Also, GMO is mainly criticized for its combination with pesticides. The people who believe it damages their souls, are not many.
Who knows what accidental genetic damage from breeding will cause problems in humans?
Have you ever eaten a SweeTango apple? It is one of dozens of varieties that have been created in the last hundred years using genetic engineering via cross breeding[1]. Do you know why commercial tomatoes are so bland? Genetic engineering via selective breeding[2].
The fact of the matter is that all of the crops and livestock that we cultivate today are genetically engineered. The main distinction now is that we are technologically advanced enough to introduce beneficial modifications deliberately, rather than relying on random mutations and gene recombinations that occur in nature at random over hundreds or thousands of generations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
[1] https://mnhardy.umn.edu/varieties/fruit/apples/all-apple-var...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato#Modern_commercial_varie...
Genetic engineering goes way beyond the possibility space of selective breeding, which we have thousands of years of experience with.
When it comes to diet, science is difficult enough as it is. Introducing such novelties only makes it harder.
It boils down to cost in the same way that you and I not owning a private jet boils down to cost—which is to say, as nice as it would be, there are probably not enough resources on the planet to feed everyone a balanced diet without these continued advances in food production, as the current conventional farming practices are not long-term sustainable, and they are already required to actually feed everybody on the planet today.
> Genetic engineering goes way beyond the possibility space of selective breeding, which we have thousands of years of experience with.
And inside that possibility space are things like extremely high-yield crops that end hunger forever. Grains like Golden Rice that solve nutritional deficiencies caused by incomplete diets. Nuts that are modified so they don’t trigger life-threatening anaphylaxis. Crops that absorb and sequester CO2 more efficiently. Delicious new hybrids that don’t even exist right now. Foods genetically modified to be low in FODMAPs so people who have gut problems aren’t so restricted in what they can eat.
All the problems that exist now with diets have hypothetical solutions in genetically engineering crops to create more of the nutrients that we need to be healthy, and to eliminate the bad stuff that makes us sick, down to the point of being able to provide ideal nutrition for a specific person’s body. However, we’re unlikely to get there if people’s imaginations are always focused on the potential negatives instead of balancing those risks with the obvious potential and need for this sort of technology to be developed.