EPA fast-tracking of gene-altering pesticide sparks concerns

> In that context you only give the shills more sway.

This is a really good point that I overlooked.

I'm in an industry where sophisticated participants can see the blatant scams, but laypeople have no chance at spotting them. Your claim makes a lot of sense.

There was evidence of the negative health effects from his own research.

I'm not sure how that line could be drawn. If a person does something that most would consider evil, but does it for reasons they honestly believed in which side is right?

Some of the Nazis may have honestly believed that Jewish people were the cause of Germany's economic problems, but I don't think many would claim they were anything less than evil.

That was incredible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Moore_(consultant)

During an interview by French investigative journalist Paul Moreira, which was first broadcast on French television station Canal+, Moore was asked about the safety of the herbicide glyphosate. Moore told Moreira that one "could drink a whole quart of it" without any harm. When Moore was challenged to drink a glass of the weedkiller, he refused, saying "I'm not an idiot" and "I'm not stupid" before ending the interview. Monsanto, the primary producers of glyphosate weedkillers under the Roundup brand, denied claims that Moore is a paid lobbyist for their company.[71][72][73] The interview came shortly after the release of a World Health Organization (WHO) report adding glyphosate to a list of probable carcinogens.[74][75]

Isn't that the farm's problem? At least in theory workers are supposed to be protected with PPE and/or proper procedures. Blaming them for the failure of that feels like blaming chainsaw manufacturers for causing hearing loss.

I hate regulatory capture! The officials heading these agencies are often picked by the industry they are meant to regulate and often become highly paid lobbyists after they retire

Dude. Let me tell you a story.

I was 13 years old, a schoolboy on a trip to the countryside to "help" farm workers to harvest cabbages. It was a routine thing those days because the centralized Soviet industrial-government apparatus couldn't properly plan even such trivial things. There were about a hundred kids on that field. As we went with our business, a tractor spraying DDT came from the other side of the field. It passed us no more than 20 meters away, spraying everything around with the clouds of white stuff. Everybody knew it was DDT, everybody knew it was poisonous at that time. Our teacher approached the tractor and asked the operator to wait until we are done; the guy basically told her to fuck off and went on with spraying.

Now go ahead and tell me about capitalism, I'm all ears.

Would you have rejected antibiotics if you were around when they were invented? There's a cost to always being skeptical.

RNAi was discovered in 1998 and is very well-studied. There's really no room for surprise here. It's hard to overstate the degree to which biologists can say with certainty that this isn't dangerous to humans in any way. My question wasn't rhetorical - can you think of a way that this could go wrong?

Regular small-molecule pesticides do worry me because the risk there genuinely can't be assessed without experiments. RNA is exquisitely predictable in this case.

I know the fundamental issue here is that you have no way of assessing my (or any scientist's) competence, honesty or degree of certainty (I'm assuming you don't have a biology background given your non-answer to my question, correct me if I'm wrong). And it's probably safer to lean on the side of caution, right? Just as I prefer organic foods, even though they probably have some small-molecule pesticides on them. I have no idea what those are doing to me, and no way of knowing.

But what is a civilization to do when it genuinely solves a problem? Sometimes things do get better.

You can quite literally inject this RNA product into your arm and nothing would happen. The sequence needs to be specific to a human mRNA in order for silencing to occur. On top of that you have to deliver the RNA into the cell itself intact. The fact this works is this beetle happens to be responsive to environmental RNA, meaning they could simply take a piece of potato and dip it in beetle specific double stranded RNA, and the larvae would eat it as the delivery mechanism. There is probably some fitness advantage to being able to engage in such uptake normally, and this is what is being taken advantage of here for insecticide purposes.

The other response is pretty good. I would add that you won't be injecting this food into your bloodstream unless that's how you take all of your meals. Your body also produces enzymes that degrade RNA in the duodenum. And this particular RNA has no homology to the human genome, so it doesn't even matter if it could make it through your digestive system intact. And even then, it would have no way of entering the cells that it encountered, so it wouldn't even have a chance to interact with the gene silencing proteins.

The reason why viruses work is because they have ways of protecting their genomes and also sneaking into cells, this product has nothing at all to do that. Which again, still doesn't matter since it would be harmless even inside your cells.

Even if it did do something, there's a finite amount of it and it needs to be introduced into the cell in some way to have any effect. When siRNA experiments are done in a lab setting with human cells grown in a petri dish, one technique to make this happen is to actually shock the cells with just enough electricity to not kill them off, but to allow them to be in a certain state to take up the siRNA internally. Then, the effect only lasts as long as there is siRNA to silence mRNA transcripts. In other words over time normal expression patterns return as the siRNA is depleted and new mRNA is transcribed.

Many people think it is a conspiracy theory. I believe it’s the source of so much that ails our regulatory system. I was hoping to spark a conversation with people who both agree and disagree with as little effort as possible. Seems my ambiguity and or brevity earned me nothing but down votes.