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> Current techniques may be more risky, but generally speaking it should be hard for plants to produce a horrid mutation based on natural interbreeding mechanisms.

What about the (widespread) practice of mutation breeding? [1] Blasting seeds with X-rays and gamma rays in an attempt to generate new cultivars is a genetic wrecking ball compared to performing genetic engineering.

Conventional breeding has given us plenty of Oopses. The modern kiwifruit, whose progenitor (the smaller and less tasty Chinese gooseberry) may have been safely snacked upon by many folks who would today suffer a lethal allergic reaction after eating a kiwi. In the 1980s, a mutant variety of zucchini began producing enough cucurbitacin toxin to hospitalize a number of people. [2]

> If such transfers have occurred in nature for a long, long time, then it's safe to say that nature has created pathways that are safe. Our pathways are new.

We're still playing by nature's fundamental biological rules, and nature has had hundreds of millions of years to develop resiliency inside that same framework. One example: bacterial mechanisms to mitigate the damage from undesirable horizontal gene transfers by recognizing and deactivating to foreign genetic material: [3]

> I'm making a Talebian argument here. Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.

I think "incremental" is a bit of an understatement if we can, for example, feed tens of millions of humans in parts of the world where conventional crops cannot (yet?) provide reliable and sufficient nutrition, a critical step in reducing poverty.

Having said all this, I think crop monoculture is a serious problem, but I think it's an issue that needs to be solved through sound policy, not just through science.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding

[2] http://books.google.ca/books?id=Jcq1wTe_93UC&lpg=PP1&...

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17575047

> I think "incremental" is a bit of an understatement if we can, for example, feed tens of millions of humans in parts of the world where conventional crops cannot (yet?) provide reliable and sufficient nutrition, a critical step in reducing poverty.

You can argue about many benefits, but genetic engineered crops is hardly a solution to poverty and malnutrition.

Apologies if I'm off base, but can you correct my logic?

If GMOs[1] can enable the growth of more productive and nutritious food crops, it follows that they can enable more efficient agriculture. Lower inputs of resources (including time) and higher output (meaning, hopefully, less hunger and lower food prices) would seem to translate to the higher availability of resources to allocate to other ventures.

If communities are freed from the pressure of scraping together their next meal, doesn't that fundamentally change their health and economic prospects?

[1] Or any specialized cultivar, for that matter.

> If GMOs[1] can enable the growth of more productive and nutritious food crops, it follows that they can enable more efficient agriculture.

Productivity only matters for large monocultures, like soy, corn, sugar cane, where the costs are fixed and profit comes from the output - exactly the people who do not produce to feed poor people.

Poor people depend on subsistence polycultures, which don't require high productivity because they don't profit off it. On the other hand, these engineered seeds incur higher initial costs they can't afford.

People starve not because agriculture is not productive enough, but because they can't produce themselves, for a variety of reasons: the government can't ensure they keep their land (they sell for lumber/mining/monocultures, or have their land stolen outright), food production is not local (thus too expensive), lack infrastructure (most of the times, water) or simply lack knowledge on better ways to irrigate, fertilize and handle the soil. GMOs don't solve any of those problems, they just reduce even further the amount of people who can produce themselves.

Highly nutritive crops is another BS. People just need access to a large variety of food (polyculture) to maintain health, not an engineered corn, rich in iron and full of pesticide, that costs three times as much to produce.

Indeed .. My honors project was genetically modefying a common pastural legume to produce anti-RNAs of a specific virus. It produced resistance but 2 or 3 generations down the line, the genes were still there but the RNAs weren't. Something was stopping them being expressed. Only 1 year so couldn't delve deeper but it was interesting none the less.

You make a good point. I have no idea what the risks to mutation breeding are.

That said, the fact that it's potentially problematic doesn't make GMOs safe. It just means they're both potentially unsafe. I don't know enough to say.

By incremental gains, I meant that GMO crops will at best add some percentage growth to total food production. This will be partly a wash, as increased food tends to increase birth/survival rates. Our food boom has helped create the population boom.

So on balance, GMOs will provide a benefit, but it is unlikely to be a kind of 'end hunger forever benefit'.

Meanwhile, the system accumulates hidden risk. Once food supplies are created, we become dependent on their persistence. If anything unforeseen and catastrophic happened that lopped a percentage off world food production, we would be ill placed to bear the shock.

> Our food boom has helped create the population boom.

Impoverished populations tend to have a high birthrate, which frequently begets more poverty. I'd like to think we can work to reduce overpopulation through reducing poverty (which includes improving food security) instead of simply relying on Malthus to sort everything out. Call me an optimist.

> Meanwhile, the system accumulates hidden risk. Once food supplies are created, we become dependent on their persistence. If anything unforeseen and catastrophic happened that lopped a percentage off world food production, we would be ill placed to bear the shock.

Again, this seems like a policy problem. Having a robust selection of lower-input/higher-output cultivars would help shield us from the failure of single crops.

> I think "incremental" is a bit of an understatement if we can, for example, feed tens of millions of humans in parts of the world where conventional crops cannot (yet?) provide reliable and sufficient nutrition, a critical step in reducing poverty.

The problem is that in some parts of the world people are too poor to farm. GMO seed - produced by a company who will lock in farmers to that seed and prevent them from growing on from the crop - is not going to help that.

Kenya has barriers to free trade, which makes its food too expensive for many people to buy. (http://medilinkz.org/east-africa/kenya/37195-kenya-urban-poo...)

Some regions waste too much food, maybe as much as 33% (http://spam.irinnews.org/Report/96485/In-Brief-Southeast-Asi...)

Some more information about food insecurity (http://www.irinnews.org/In-depth/77872/72/A-global-food-cris...) - GMO isn't going to do much against war, HIV, natural disaster, etc.

Better weather forecasting (and education) may help - (http://medilinkz.org/africa/38139-climate-data-has-helped-af...)

This used to be a slide show, but they've broken it. :-/ (http://irinnews.org/Photo/Default.aspx?id=43)

Here's one image, but it's worth noodling through the others. (http://irinnews.org/Photo/Details/201202241150420779/HIV-AID...)

(http://irinnews.org/Photo/Result.aspx?id=43&CountryID=LS)

I'm not anti GMO; I'm just very cautious about allowing huge industry the opportunity to exploit starving children to make massive profits. We heard how agro-chemicals were going to feed the world. They don't. Now I'm hearing how GMOs are going to feed the world. Well, fix the other stuff and maybe I'd be more sympathetic to letting them sell their seed.

First, I completely agree that there are plenty of very complex pieces to the food security puzzle, and I hope I'm not painting GMOs as a magic bullet.

> The problem is that in some parts of the world people are too poor to farm. GMO seed - produced by a company who will lock in farmers to that seed and prevent them from growing on from the crop - is not going to help that.

Not every GMO is a product of pure corporate interest. There are non-profit projects with massive potential (the BioCassava Plus, for example[1][2]).

I agree that the ethical track record of many agricorps is appalling, and I think we need more funding of GMO science that keeps valuable IP in public and charitable hands.

> We heard how agro-chemicals were going to feed the world. They don't.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. It's estimated that a third of humanity is sustained by the Haber-Bosch process [3]; should we count that technology as a failure because hunger still exists?

[1] http://tyglobalist.org/in-the-magazine/features/genetically-...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21526968

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

I'm curious what sort of realistic disaster scenario you think might occur due to cross-species gene transfer (and for that matter, purely synthetic genes) in GMOs, and how the existing safeguards are inadequate against it. Normally I'm against FUD, but please, go nuts, so long as there's a reasonable chance of it occurring (i.e. we're not talking about a mad scientist who wants to create man-eating plants)

Weed-killer resistance transfers to a weed, helping boost it to invasive species?

Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US?

A huge multinational wants to include "TERMINATOR GENES" in their crops to make sure the cropped seed cannot grow; environmentalists freak out at the name and oppose that; the multinational doesn't include that gene but now inspect the fields of people on the route of seed delivery and if they find any gene-manipulated crop (which is probable from wind-blown seed) they sue the farmer into oblivion.

> Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US?

This is already a risk because industrial agriculture is optimized for monocrops.

This is like arguing that it's ok to build houses that won't resist hurricanes, because they're already vulnerable to fire.

GMO risks present an additional risk over already problematic agricultural practices.

> Weed-killer resistance transfers to a weed, helping boost it to invasive species?

Cannot happen. If inter-plant gene transfer was that simple, it would already be an agricultural practice.

A weed-killer resistant species becoming a weed is something to consider though.

> Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US?

No. A vulnerable crop would not have a chance to become 80% of the crop share before dying out.

> No. A vulnerable crop would not have a chance to become 80% of the crop share before dying out.

80% is sci-fi hyperbole. But it's easy to see that monoculture could still be as much of a problem with GMO as without it.

Dutch Elm disease managed to kill 40% of Elm trees in Europe during the first big outbreak, and at least 66% in the UK during the second outbreak. (Maybe 25 million trees out of maybe 30 million trees in the UK).

Irish potato famine was caused by potato blight.

About half the world's crop of bananas is destroyed each year because of disease caused by monoculture growing.

A protein is added that adversely affects the gut. Think gluten.

300,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide in the past 15 years because of the monopoly that GMO companies have over seeds with patents. What used to be previously free now costs farmers a huge amount of money with promises of great returns. However, in the past few years, these GMO crops have had tremendous crop failures, and have instead bankrupted the farmers that used them.

Hundreds of thousands of farmers taken advantage of by a monopolistic GMO company and ruins the lives of countless families sounds like a real-life disaster scenario to me.

http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2012/11/why-are-in...

Their seeds are known to mingle with domestic corn varieties creating corn that is unusable for consumption. That to me seems like a legit reason to be careful around them.

Basically if you a corn farmer, have people around you start planting Monsanto Corn, you have two options: change to Monsanto or switch professions.

Extensive use of Roundup Ready crops leads to evolution of weeds that are resistant to glyphosate.

How do you prepare fields for cropping if all the weeds are resistant to herbicides? Use stronger herbicides? How is this not an environmental disaster?

What happens when altering the gene of a wheat plant to make it resistant to rust ends up adding a cumulative poison (e.g. a protein or prion associated with the rust resistance) causing the body to leech calcium from bones? Over 30 years we figure the gene was safe, then comes a 100 year long epidemic of brittle bones due to the rust gene being forgotten and no un modified wheat being available to breed clean strains from.

Or leaving the food chain entirely: what about living in a world where you are not allowed to grow food plants in your own backyard and collect the seeds yourself to provide for next year's crop?

Why do we have to increase the food supply to feed an ever-expanding population?

Very well said, and I'm heartened to see your comment at the top of the page.

I think it's worth emphasizing that GMOs aren't a category, from a safety point of view. There can't be any evidence that all GMOs that will ever be produced will be safe, any more than there could be evidence that all drugs that will ever be synthesized will be safe. We have to look at them individually. I don't think the public has digested this point yet.

EDITED to add: It's also worth keeping in mind that in some cases, the primary danger may not be from the plant itself, but from pesticides to which it has been engineered to be resistant. I'm speaking, of course, of glyphosate, which I understand is being applied in growing quantities as the weeds it is intended to kill evolve their own resistance.

I read his argument differently. He is not claiming they are safe in an absolutist sense, merely that they are safe enough to alleviate the food shortage the world faces without them.

The world doesn't face a food shortage. We already have enough food. We just don't distribute it.

One of the big concerns is micronutrients in Asia. We don't need GMOd crops for vitamin and mineral supplementation.

> The world doesn't face a food shortage. We already have enough food

due to GMOs...

No.

There are no magic pathways for gene "transfer". Theres chromosomal crossover and there are random mutations. These are very very blunt instruments and the only reason they work to create complex organisms is through sheer number of different organisms and natural selection.

Nature is messing with nature all the time through pure randomness, the penultimate chaos monkey. Nothing has collapsed.

When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.

There are uncountable ways in which we all "mess with" Nature on a daily basis, both individually and as a society. Why single out this one?

Because of the way we run our agricultural system. We tend to use monocultures, or 'ogilopolies' of certain plant varieties.

Past plant varieties were more likely to be safe from hidden vulnerabilities due to the process that created them. Even so, some plants were wiped out by a single surprise event, such as during the Irish potato famine.

If, as I argue, GMO crops present more hidden risks, then we are increasing the odds of a catastrophic failure of a staple crop.

Growth in the food supply tends to produce a growth in population. This new population is dependent on food supply staying at least at it's current level. If a staple crop fails, then the consequences will be dire. There is little slack in the system.

Hmm. I don't see a reason to assume that GMO crops present "more" hidden risks -- since by definition any such risks are hidden in both the GMO and non-GMO cases -- and you certainly haven't provided any such reasons in your post. If we want to avoid future unpleasant surprises like the Potato Famine, it seems to me that the best strategy is to gain the greatest possible mastery of plant genetics.

There will be unpleasant surprises along the way but science, like life itself, offers no guarantees. Meanwhile I haven't seen any potato famines lately.

The reason there are more hidden risks is because we're creating breeds that couldn't occur in nature. We can't understand the full effects of modifications.

Natural plants have been tested over time so that we can be somewhat sure they don't have that many unknown weaknesses.

We can't understand the full effects of modifications.

That's the Precautionary Principle, which as someone else pointed out is basically a rephrasing of Pascal's Wager with all of its gaping logical holes.

>>I'm making a Talebian argument here. Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.

I've never understood this argument. It basically amounts to "yes, there are advantages to GMOs, but we haven't found any disadvantages yet, therefore they are unsafe!"

This is basically the equivalent of early seafarers being afraid of uncharted waters and writing on their maps "here be dragons".

edit: I should also point out that the complexity of a system does not necessarily mean that messing with it will cause problems. If anything, that same complexity may include many fail-safe mechanisms to prevent problems when the system is messed with.

If an early seafarer went down with his/her ship, it didn't affect a significant portion of the population. GMO foods are more like, "Hey look! I invented this new banana in a test tube! It looks safe, so it must be! Here eat it! Does it cause problems when you eat these types of bananas for 20 or 30 years? Who knows! Just eat it, it looks safe!"

You could say that about any new product. Here! Use this cellphone! What? The battery can explode when it overheats? Don't worry about it! Almost never happens!

And with cellphones ... that's already happened. Yet you still have one in your pocket.

> Does it cause problems when you eat these types of bananas for 20 or 30 years?

Bananas didn't evolve with "being good for you 20 or 30 years from now" ethos. That doesn't help the spread of their seeds. They just needed to taste sweet, so you would eat them now and spit out their seed somewhere else.

Is there even a plant out there that has harmful side-effects two decades after you eat it? If we make one, that would be one hell of an achievement.

>You could say that about any new product. Here! Use this cellphone! What? The battery can explode when it overheats? Don't worry about it! Almost never happens!

If the battery explodes you will know about it. Each explosion will be an independent, isolated event. They will not all blow up at once. A better analogy would appeal to concerns over EM radiation from cell phones. In that case, it turned out to be harmless - at least in terms of cancer risk. And that single, highly-controllable factor took years to validate for safety.

>Is there even a plant out there that has harmful side-effects two decades after you eat it?

Gluten sensitivity can take years to show up, and months to get better after you've cut it out of your diet. For years doctors dismissed patients who claimed to be suffering from wheat allergies. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

> Is there even a plant out there that has harmful side-effects two decades after you eat it? If we make one, that would be one hell of an achievement.

I understood the post to mean the cumulative effects of eating that plant.

One cigarette is not going to do much, but smoking 40 a day for 30 years is probably going to cause a few problems.

The food you eat has a lot more intimate interaction with your body than the cellphone that you are using. While we know a great deal about human physiology, it's still an equation that we have yet to solve. The systems of a cellphone (and the battery) are probably better understood, with less variables to account for.

Also, when the food at your local grocery store is completely replaced with GMO foods, you don't really end up with a choice in the matter. On the other hand, you still have a choice to get a cellphone or not (even in today's world).

  | Bananas didn't evolve with "being good for you 20 or
  | 30 years from now" ethos. That doesn't help the spread
  | of their seeds. They just needed to taste sweet, so you
  | would eat them now and spit out their seed somewhere else.

Yes, but people have been eating them for a long time, and thus far we haven't found any correlations between them and negative outcomes.

  | Is there even a plant out there that has harmful side-effects
  | two decades after you eat it? If we make one, that would be one
  | hell of an achievement.

Are you saying that it's impossible for plants to end up having a cumulative effect on your body? For example, checkout this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494083. Summary: Broccoli has mutagenic and anti-mutagenic properties, and in one study of fruit flies the mutagenic properties won out. What happens when GMO broccoli ends up further tipping this balance towards mutagenic? What happens when another food is engineered and tips the balance from the anti-mutagenic side (to the mutagenic side)?

>>If an early seafarer went down with his/her ship, it didn't affect a significant portion of the population.

Not necessarily true. Suppose there is a nation-state A. Further suppose a rival nation-state B captured vital trade routes and started charging trades exorbitant sums of fees, and the long-term well-being of nation-state A depends on its seafarers being able to find alternative trade routes to their trading partners. Note that this is exactly how it went down in history. Only those seafarers who were bold enough to take risks were rewarded.

There's a huge middle ground between "proven safe" and "proven unsafe". People in this debate seem to forget that.

Personally, I want pretty good evidence that something is safe before putting it in my body. If the mere lack of evidence that it's unsafe is sufficient for you, well, that's your choice.

You can never prove something is safe. The only indication that something is safe is lack of evidence of unsafety multiplied by time.

What would be evidence for you that something is safe enough to put into your body?

Well, if a population of several thousand humans had been eating it for 50 years without evident ill effect, I suppose that would be more or less good enough.

In any discussion of risk it is important to remember the value to be obtained. I might take a drug with known dangerous side effects on the chance it would cure a disease from which I suffered. But to me, the only possible benefit of eating a GMO food is that it would be somewhat cheaper than something else I could eat. For some people, that might be a good enough reason. For me, it's not.

I've never understood this argument. It basically amounts to "yes, there are advantages to GMOs, but we haven't found any disadvantages yet, therefore they are unsafe!"

You've got the wrong thing after "therefore". The argument you're trying to paraphrase would probably advocate the Precautionary Principle instead:

"... if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

I never understood how the Precautionary Principle wasn't just Pascal's Wager and subject to the same logical problems.

Pascal's Wager: There is more to be gained from wagering on the existence of God than from atheism, and that a rational person should live as though God exists.

Anti-GMO Activists: There is more to be gained from assuming that GMOs are unsafe than that they are safe, and that a rational society should live as if they are unsafe.

Sounds like the same logic to me.

A casual observer might suspect that the two of you are being deliberately obtuse in order to cast the Precautionary Principle in negative light so that it might be more easily dismissed.

I'll respond as if you are earnest students of reason, seeking to see the difference.

Fortunately, the main difference is very simple: Pascal was wagering to gain something that cannot be shown to exist (an afterlife). The Precautionary Principle is counseling us to guard something known to exist (the environment in which we live) that is demonstrably essential to our own existence.

Had Pascal been arguing as an atheist about why not to play Russian Roulette with his one and only life, the two arguments might be similar enough to legitimately confuse.

There is no evidence for the existence of God(s), nor any evidence for the continuation of consciousness beyond death.

There is a large body of testable evidence of organisms that are unsafe for human consumption. We cannot prove whether or not any changes introduced by humans via genetic engineering, whether intended or not (such as random mutations) will result in an unsafe product. The worst case being that we create a strain of organism that is superior to those we currently have, displacing all others in the environment and being unsafe for human or animal consumption, and if it is a staple crop one that leads to more starvation not less.

As far as feeding an increasing population, the simple answer is not to have the increase. Even then our current agriculture system is heavily based on fossil fuels. Increasing cost of production and distribution if not outright decline in fossil fuel output is much more likely to lead to starvation.

Without addressing the validity or invalidity of your assessment of the merits of his position (or the position itself), his views are insubstantial (or at least of limited substance) for some other reasons too.

For instance, while he appeals to science and reason here, not all the organic-enviro-antiGMO complex holds its positions for reasons of science. There's a substantial number of people for whom it is part of superstitious and para-religious reasoning behind peoples' objections. (In other news, Whole Foods sells homeopathic remedies.) Even beyond the superstitious, there are a lot of anti-GMO advocates whose primary form of investment is emotional, not intellectual. (Actually, you could probably say that about most political positions...)

It's easy enough to treat the guy as a heretic in that sort of environment.

> Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.

this is an argument against literally any kind of technology. electricity, medicine, computers, steam engines, light bulbs, animal husbandry, farming, ...

Mark Lynas will find a new career in bad Christmas cracker jokes.

Q. What do you call someone who supports nuclear power, shale gas fracking and GM crops?

A. An environmentalist.