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Comment by sidewndr46 | Hacker News Reader

So this group wants to propagate a GMO to "save" a tree species? Which is of course impossible with current mechanisms. Although it seems that producing a near replacement tree is likely within reach.

But they can't even seem to be sure what edited organism they are trying to propagate? This is why I do not trust GMO stuff. I have no special credentials (just an undergraduate degree) but even at that level it was clearly stated to me that if you're going to do research, you need to keep clear documentation about what you are doing so it is reproducible.

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how is GMO different from normal breeding where we hane no clue what mutations happen. Normal breeding doesn't even attempt toestudy for safety.

Yes the science should have been better done but the worst case of GMO is the same as everything else.

For some reason, when you take a process that has traditionally been done with a baseball bat and start doing it with a knife, suddenly everyone comes out of the woodwork to talk about how your knife is too dull and it should either be done with a scalpel or not at all.

Just to tap the brakes for anyone wanting to take your analogy too far: a lot of objections about GMO in general are about the accelerated rate at which the changes can be made, relative to traditional methods (such as breeding). The worry is that we might be introducing altered genomes at a rate faster than we can observe and understand the downstream impacts.

So in those arguments (which are the majority, in GMO debates I've encountered), it's not about the knife being too dull, but being too sharp.

> the accelerated rate at which the changes can be made, relative to traditional methods

Citation needed there. I know the claim is common, but GMO is inserting one known mutation. How many mutations are there from parent to children is not something I can find a citation for, but since most mutations do nothing (or kill the child) there must be a lot of mutations involved in traditional breeding not one which means that GMO is much decelerated vs traditional breeding.

I suppose there's a distinction to be made between quantity and quality of changes, too. Certainly regular sex mixes things up a lot every time, but only within the bounds of the established gene pool (roughly).

Compare this to, say, the famous example of adding firefly genes to tobacco plants, to make them bioluminescent. That's a small change in terms of number of genes, but very "sudden" in terms of how far it is away from the norm — it would have taken a very long time for that to have happened as a result of natural (or even breeding-style) permutations of existing genes. So it's a "big" change in that sense, even if "small" in the other.

As far as citations go, I think the Wikipedia page on GMO foods is decent? [1]

For instance, the "Gene flow" section describes the risk of various unexpected consequences of GMO crops affecting their surroundings: "There are concerns that the spread of genes from modified organisms to unmodified relatives could produce species of weeds resistant to herbicides[303] that could contaminate nearby non-genetically modified crops, or could disrupt the ecosystem,[304][305] "

Of course in general, GMO crops are seen as safe (with lots of of "more long term research is needed" caveats), but the page has various links to concerns and ongoing research along the lines we're been discussing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_cont...

> how is GMO different from normal breeding where we hane no clue what mutations happen

The answer is in your question. We have no clue.

What we do not know about how living organisms recreate themselves is much more, and more important (IMO) than what we do know.

We know that DNA plays an important role. We also know that DNA is not the whole story.

We know very little about how DNA plays it role. We terribly confused with analogies to coding systems we know about, but it is clearly much more than a code.

The part of reproduction that does not involve DNA is almost a complete mystery.

In normal breeding we do not have to be concerned about what we do not know, when we start changing DNA it becomes very important

We are creating novel self replicating organisms, there is a lot that might go wrong. A very small chance of complete catastrophic results

But, money

> In normal breeding we do not have to be concerned about what we do not know, when we start changing DNA it becomes very important

Normal breeding we are also changing DNA - it is just random uncontrolled mutation.

> Normal breeding we are also changing DNA - it is just random uncontrolled mutation.

That is not paying attention to what I said

> it is just random uncontrolled mutation.

We do not know how genetic changes (evolution) happens, we know it is much more than that

In addition to that there are also methods like atomic gardening which are not considered GMO.

You’ll get a lot of answers to this question, I’ll try to give one that’s distinct from the others:

Practical observation of the two techniques reveals very different outcomes and behaviours. Selective breeding takes time and has intermediate stages that help you see if you’re on the right track. Direct modification: if you get it wrong you’re back to the drawing board.

Worse, legally they’re two very different animals that are treated very differently. If you want big bucks, you want to go the GMO route. The combination of the risky nature with the potential profits makes an ideal environment for malpractice, whether it’s cherry-picking data, deliberately making seeds that aren’t long-term viable or strategies such as long-term pesticides which have a detrimental effect of neighbouring farms.

So in theory, I don’t have a moral objection to GMO. In practice, I can see why the EU banned it.

> Selective breeding takes time and has intermediate stages that help you see if you’re on the right track.

Only if selective breeding needs more than one mutation, otherwise you are just waiting/searching for the desired mutation in a random sample.

> Direct modification: if you get it wrong you’re back to the drawing board.

Either way you are back the the drawing board. Just that with selective breeding you have no idea how much longer you will wait to get the desired mutation.

We have no idea where the smallpox vaccine actually comes from, and it long predates GMO stuff.

Can you explain what you mean by that?

the original vaccine was a live virus, and the only way to grow more of it was to infect people and then harvest it from the pox on their bodies. So many generations of this vaccine virus were passed around this way.

For decades everyone believed it was cowpox, another common virus, but after a while scientists noticed it wasn’t actually cowpox - and modern generic studies show that it doesn’t match any known virus

All of what you said goes against common knowledge of the history of the vaccine. You will have to provide solid sources for your claims in order to not appear as a conspiracy theory peddler.

What you mentioned in the first paragraph is not vaccination, it is called variolation. It predates vaccination by a large margin and was far more dangerous.

> a conspiracy theory peddler.

What conspiracy? It’s a theory of lost knowledge / confusion, but no one is conspiring with anyone.

He asked for a citation. Please provide one.

Okay, I just jumped down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what OP might mean. I think they’ve got it sideways. I think they’re talking about vaccinia, a virus related to cowpox (and smallpox) that form the basis of modern smallpox vaccines. The origin of the virus is, entertainingly, lost to time due to poor record keeping.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinia

There’s also “kinepox”, but I _think_ that’s just a different method of cowpox vaccine delivery.

I’m not sure what’s sideways, how is this different from what I said?

Actually, you’re right. With the links it’s clear.

I commented with links to wikipedia’s relevant sections

If scientists found out that it wasn't cowpox and then conspired to keep that fact secret, or conspired to say "we all knew it wasn't cowpox from the beginning", that would be a conspiracy.

wikipedia: “From 1796 to the 1880s, the vaccine was transmitted from one person to another through arm-to-arm vaccination.”

(Variolation used real smallpox, arm-to-arm used the vaccine virus instead) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine#Types

“As medical researchers subjected viruses to serial passage, inadequate recordkeeping resulted in the creation of laboratory strains with unclear origins.[95]: 4 By the late 19th century, it was unknown whether the vaccine originated from cowpox, horsepox, or an attenuated strain of smallpox.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine#Origin

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