Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

Just a bit.

>plenty of people without the money to make any changes.

>I speculate class will lead the charge next.

Exactly, it transforms the race problem into a class problem. People will probably discriminate based on how many designer genes you have. With time, most governments (not necessarily the US) will realize how much they can save by giving people healthy genes from the start, and it won't be as much of a class divide.

Fads will come and go regarding some group of genes being better from such task or other. Like diets and workouts today, it will become tiresome for most people quickly enough.

This is good. In the last century we transformed race from a military problem to a political problem. In this century it will become a technical problem. There will be plenty of nastiness, but each step reduces nastiness by an order of magnitude.

>I'm hopeful that we'll still retain diversity

We will win a whole new diversity. There will be people with chameleon skin walking among us in this century.

> Can you explain this?

The less noise there is about GMOs qua GMOs, the more possible it is to focus attention on Monsanto's (or other GM crop firms') -- or, for that matter, non-GM crop firms -- particular business practices of concern, rather than the kind of technology that goes into creating their product.

> It would seem as the biggest player, they have a huge advantage over other smaller companies. So much so, I couldn't name two other companies who currently compete with them.

Monsanto, I think, gets disproportionate attention for two reasons: (1) it absolute dominates a GM crops in two key markets in the US (virtually all the US GM corn and soy is Monsanto), and its also, of the big GM seed companies, the one that is best known as a big GM seed company, and not as a chemical (etc.) company (though, of course, Monsanto is also a chemical company, so this is completely about perception) -- most people may not think of "GM crops" when they think about DuPont, Dow, BASF, or Bayer, but they're all significant players in the GM industry.

You're not wrong about the lack of advances in genetics arriving in markets. What I think you've overlooked is that between attacks on the business models that make such advances possible and the political cover that such attacks bring to the "DON'T EAT THE SCIENCE" people... this isn't likely to change. So please, don't complain about the lack of advances in genetics until you're prepared to stop giving cover to the Luddites ranting about frankenfoods. Proposing a different - and practical and workable - business model that allows for the commercial development of GMOs without abusing copyright would be a great way to go about this.

Also: look up Golden Rice. More nutritious foods have been made. And the lock-in angle addressed. Yet the stuff is still not widely grown.

Your reading of food deserts is naive, however. Junk food isn't just cheap in money. It's cheap in time, infrastructure, and required knowledge. A burger from McD's is cheap, hot, and instantly edible. Even the cheapest of Healthy Fresh Green Things requires time to cook, facilities to cook in, equipment to cook, the knowledge to cook, and a place to store the results.

You cannot just put Healthy Fresh Green Things in food deserts and get results. People have tried, and the stuff rots on store shelves.

This is a case of GMOs to preserve freshness, rather than nutrition.

So while it may not be a gene copied directly from a fish, it will be a base-for-base identical copy of the gene found in a fish. Then it can be merged back into the main line of the plant via a recombinant backcross technique.

This is how plant breeding has been done for quite a long time now.

The actual results of breeding and natural selection, including particularly convergent evolution, suggest that its quite possible to achieve equivalent results to that by breeding, though the timescale required, if you are relying on natural mutation as your source of variation, might be very long.

Which is why selection breeding techniques that kick up the pace of mutation with radiation or chemical mutagens are still competitive means of developing new desired traits in a world that has gene editing.

The pace, more than magnitude, of changes achievable is greater now (either with GMOs or mutation breeding) than with older forms of selective breeding (mutation breeding is, after all, a form of selective breeding.)

The seeds might not be sterile, but even then the seed would produce unreliable plants.

http://www.granny-miller.com/the-difference-between-hybrid-n...

Plant breeding 101:

Every individual has two copies of each gene: one comes form the father, on from the mother. It has been observed that individuals who mostly have different maternal and paternal versions, are more vigorous. This is called heterosis, or hybrid vigor [1].

Now, just to produce children with a high number of genes that have different paternal and maternal copies, it would be enough to have a father and a mother who mostly do not have same copies. But if father has versions G1 and G2, and mother has versions G3 and G4, the child can have any of (G1,G3), (G1,G4), (G2,G3), (G2,G4). So the features of the children are not predictable.

So plant breeders have invented this method, to use inbreeding to produce highly homozygous [2] lines first. Suppose (G1,G3) is the type you want. So first breed line A of plants which always have (G1,G1) and similarly for other genes. And breed line B which consistently have (G3,G3).

Now use A as father and B as mother, and voila, you can produce offspring that consistently have (G1,G3). So the offspring exhibit hybrid vigor, but are also predictable and similar to each other. Quality and consistency!

Now sell these seeds, everyone wants to buy highly productive consistent quality seeds. Profit!

But as long and you are the only possessor of the parent lines A and B, you are the only one who can produce this particular type of hybrid offspring. The customers only get the offspring, and you keep the lines A and B safe and secret.

If the customer tries to mate those (G1,G3) individuals with each other, they will get a mix of (G1,G1), (G1,G3) and (G3,G3), so the next generation will not be nearly as productive crop as the pure hybrid seed was.

So, the "vendor lock-in" is structured by not giving anyone else access to the parent lines A and B.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygosity

It's not a great sales slogan: "Roundup Ready - increases costs by increasing the amount of spraying you can do".

Similarly, there are lots of markets that are unserved by the global food chain. How can one say that food subsidies in developed countries can affect these unserved markets? They can't sell to the developed world, and developed world food doesn't really make it there.

I spent some time in Colombia, not quite a developed or a developing nation, in mostly big cities, and even there much of the food consumption was local. Sure, bigger farmers would be able to sell at a profit to Western conglomerates, and Western food was available (at steep prices) in the large chain grocery stores.

But most people shopped at the ubiquitous small family-run groceries that served a mix of local agricultural output and mass-market, also locally-produced goods. I'd be very surprised if Western agricultural innovations weren't being employed to grow all of the great-tasting produce I ate there. Seeds are much much easier to transport than mangoes.

GMO is just an extension of Green Revolution capitalism-centric agriculture. That model has done miracles for supporting the growing population and making food cheaper, but it's not a free lunch.

There are, in fact, ag biotech firms that have expended resources to develop GMOs for developing world conditions and problems. Of course, there's more money in solving first world problems, attracting more investment, but that's true of pretty much every industry, not something special about GMOs.

This is not true for all GMO crops. Golden Rice is a prime example of a GMO crop developed specifically to fight malnutrition in the developing world.

But your argument is probably true for the stuff peddled by Monsanto and their competitors.

Is the position that you mean to stake out perhaps that it's possible for GMOs to be inferior, rather than that they are necessarily so?