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Comment by kaiusbrantlee | Hacker News Reader

> This is the kind of GMO that's generally considered fairly benign

not by me. The rpecautionary principle is not followed in any GM process so invasive.

Even breeding, which is a far less invasive form of genetic manipulation, has caused serious issues. The vast majority of commercial produce has had a lot of its nutrition bred out of it, for example.

These kinds of long arc problems for the consumers of the food are not possible to track over anything but multiple generations (generations of the consumers of the food, not generations of the plants). They become all but impossible to track when the incentives of the systems at play essentially guarantee fuckery with regards to the gathering, interpretation, and dissemination of data that jepordizes profits.

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> The [pr]ecautionary principle is not followed in any GM process so invasive.

While that is true, the precautionary principle is also not followed in any other process. It can't be, because the precautionary principle is nothing more than the statement "never do anything, not under any circumstances".

Phrased a bit nicer, the PP will always result in the decision to not do something, because you can never be 100% nothing bad will result.

This is why people only apply PP to things they don't want done.

> the PP will always result in the decision to not do something, because you can never be 100% nothing bad will result.

It's worse than that; the precautionary principle will tell you that you can't do [whatever it is], because there might be risks, and it will also tell you that you can't refrain from doing [whatever it is], because there might be risks to that too. It is completely logically incoherent, an intellectual embarrassment.

The only thing that determines what the precautionary principle will tell you to do is what question you choose to ask.

"Let other people put this stuff in their bodies, and see what happens to them".

What "happens to them" is that their life is sustained by calories and nutrition they would not otherwise be able to afford.

This kind of GMO is literally (not figuratively!) life-saving technology.

Just like the Haber process enabled fertilizer to be produced cheaply, saving billions of lives. Without it, India would have faced mass-starvation and its population would be half of what it is now.

Now, you may wish to argue that the World has become overpopulated as a consequence, but then the question becomes: How would you reduce the population?

Most people would prefer to elevate societies through sufficient sustenance, comprehensive health-care, and stable governments. This seems to reliably result in negative or zero population growth.

Your view seems to be that it's preferable to starve hundreds of millions to death, leaving the survivors in abject poverty to avoid... what... "meddling with nature"?

No, you misidentify me; I'm not one of those anti-human "the world is overpopulated!! Degrowth!!" People. Better food is good; I just assume someone will fuck up at some point while we're figuring out nutrition and genetic engineering.

Let the hundreds of millions eat what they will; any problems or mistakes with gene-edits that lead to poisoning, carcinogens or insidious malnutrition will be sorted out after a few decades, I'm sure. I just don't want to be the guinea pig, if I can let a hundred million other people do so instead!

Those hordes of hungry mouths are a great laboratory: diverse, far enough away and poor enough they can't take revenge on you if you accidentally poison them, etc.

This is an extremely privileged position to hold. Faced with starvation, I suspect you would feel less like a guinea pig.

> Those hordes of hungry mouths are a great laboratory

Is this sarcasm/satire?

I'd feel like a hungry guinea pig! I'm very glad to have the privilege of avoiding novel foods.

Is it not true? I suppose not; they are a laboratory, but not a very good one.

Just ignorance and the privilege to maintain it.

That is a perfectly fine personal position to take, but an awful position to take as a society.

>vast majority of commercial produce has had a lot of its nutrition bred out of it

Citation please.

https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conserv...

"Mounting evidence from multiple scientific studies shows that many fruits, vegetables, and grains grown today carry less protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C than those that were grown decades ago."

"Nutrient decline “is going to leave our bodies with fewer of the components they need to mount defences against chronic diseases—it’s going to undercut the value of food as preventive medicine,” says David R. Montgomery, a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington in Seattle and co-author with Anne Biklé of What Your Food Ate."

"Even for people who avoid processed foods and prioritise fresh produce, this trend means that “what our grandparents ate was healthier than what we’re eating today,” says Kristie Ebi, an expert in climate change and health at the University of Washington in Seattle."

A study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15637215/

"Objectives: To evaluate possible changes in USDA nutrient content data for 43 garden crops between 1950 and 1999 and consider their potential causes."

"Results: As a group, the 43 foods show apparent, statistically reliable declines (R < 1) for 6 nutrients (protein, Ca, P, Fe, riboflavin and ascorbic acid) [...] Declines in the medians range from 6% for protein to 38% for riboflavin."

"Conclusions: We suggest that any real declines are generally most easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties between 1950 and 1999, in which there may be trade-offs between yield and nutrient content."

It hasn't actually been shown that it's the strain variation because identical strains (giving wild plants as samples) are shown to have the same declines. There's no known reason, but one decent hypothesis is that the atmosphere is changing and plants are bulking faster due to the increase of CO2. This is something you can demonstrate in a grow tent by venting in CO2.

When plants have higher CO2 they increase the synthesis of carbohydrates, sugars and starches, and they decrease concentrations of protein and nutrients.

This details someone of these details, including references to some of the studies you linked.

Worth noting is that if GMO varieties had stark differences in nutrient content, it would be noted at the time and likely common knowledge by now. It doesn't seem to fill the nutrient gap though, and some varieties have improved nutrition profiles (though not sufficient to close the gap).

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/vanishing-...

I'm not particularly pro-GMO; I think we'd be better off investing more in farming and our food in the first place. There are some things we think should be cheap in life, and food is one. We went from spending our days finding, processing, and eating food to expecting 20lb of potatoes to cost a few dollars, or less than an hour of work. There's something wrong with that picture in my mind. Even if we don't want to be farming in our day-to-day lives, I think this requires a greater investment than we're giving it.

I'd say the same about education. I think it simply costs more and deserves more than we give it, and we pay the price for skimping. Totally different topic, but, we want to have the best things in life for less all the time when maybe we should want to invest correspondingly to its importance. Perhaps farmers (and teachers) should still be some of the most important people in society. In the case of farmers, GMOs might boost yields and they might be a good investment, but they can't actually replace the farmers.

Edit: There is a decent summary from Veritasium on YouTube as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl_K2Ata6XY (This link contains some good sources in the description as well)

The vast majority of commercial produce has had a lot of its nutrition bred out of it, for example.

As far as I am aware, this is very much untrue. Modern agricultural practices have indeed resulted in lower levels of nutrition in many fruits and vegetables—there was a bit of chat about this earlier in the year—but to say it has been “bred out” is not accurate.

I’m no GMO hawk, but it seems entirely feasible that breeding or GMing produce to reduce dependency on various aggressive agricultural techniques offers the possibility of increasing the nutritional content of produce, rather then diminishing it.

It not the organic nutrients (amino acids etc.) that are low as a result of fast growing crops, it the inorganic nutrients that are low, i.e. metals. Faster growth of the plant means less time to absorb from the ground.

I've no idea how that affects hydroponics, but practically none of the food I eat is hydroponic so that is moot.

Easy to say when you're not going hungry.

Imagine if the precautionary principal had to be used for any other technology. We wouldn't have electricity, cell networks, airplanes or antibiotics. It is an impossible standard.

> These kinds of long arc problems for the consumers of the food

You always have to compare with the long arc problems by not making changes... Like the increased nitrogen runoff destroying ecosystems in lakes and oceans, and the reduced yield meaning humans on the margins die of starvation.

How many humans should we kill by starvation to be a little more cautious about deploying this tech?

Why is a higher degree of invasiveness a bad thing?

OC misused the term invasiveness afaik in their previous statement.

What did they mean in that case?

I have no idea what they mean, but invasibillity has a specific definition, generally not applied to genetics or genomics. While there is a way I could see this term being used in genetics, the way they've used it, the clearly don't understand.

Invasibillity is the tendency for an organism to expand into an environment and out-compete its native flora/fauna. I've got enough training in biology to understand that there are some cases where individual genes, sets of genes, chromosomes, plastids, viroids, etc.. could be considered invasive? Genes move, so it could be framed that way, but its also clearly not what the author means.

My assumption was that they were using the term as it's used in the medical field. A procedure such as a sonogram is noninvasive because it does not penetrate the organism or cause large changes or damage. Surgery is an invasive procedure.

My understanding of the comment is that breeding plants together and selecting for traits is noninvasive while going in and directly modifying the genome through enzymatic means is more invasive. I don't know if this is the correct way to use these terms in this circumstance, but this is my perspective.

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