Comment by cheeseprocedure | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cheeseprocedure | Hacker News Reader

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cheeseprocedure

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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