GMO's - good or bad?

[squadbroken]

A counterexample to what you're talking about though is rabbits in Australia. Some aristocrat decided bringing a few rabbits over for some hunting would be a laugh, and they ended up being possibly Australia's biggest pest, devastating entire areas. And we can't get rid of the bloody things. That's the sort of thing that happens when you introduce something into a biological system that's radically different from the one it's designed for when you don't know what you're doing. And Australian agricultural history is just a long litany of the same sorts of warnings.

Or for an American example, kudzu.

 

[innonimatu]

The think which bugs me the pro-GMO arguments is that we really don't need these newer GMO crops. Despite all the malthusian doomsday predictions, food is more than plentiful. As someone (I think it was Amartya Sen) pointed out years ago, all modern famines can have its causes traded to political factors, not really to lack of agricultural productivity.

GMOs are not going to prevent a famine from being caused by a civil war, or a combination of unexpected drought and bad distribution of food. Whatever changes they cause in the food supply, they do not alleviate those problems. Where do they actually get used? In cash crops, in big producers and exporters of food. For slightly lowering the costs of production.
Do we really need to lower the costs of agricultural products ever further? With a scant few percent (is it what now, 2%?) of the population employed in agriculture in developed countries, do we really need pesticide-resistant crops in order so save a little in work by spraying large areas with planes, for example? Should we keep pretending that this cost squeezing does not sacrifice quality in any way, that miraculously all new GMOs, pesticides, etc, which are introduced do not carry risks?

In fact I even doubt that the cost reduction, overall, is significant. GMO crops, as they are being used now, look to me very much like a classic case of "we have this new technology, now let's invent some need for it so we can sell it". I'm not against developing new technology, and researching for the sake of pure research. But applying new technology where there is no need for it? I'm not sure that can be called progress.

 

[Narz]

GMO's - good or bad?

Don't know. I'll give them 20-30 more years & if all evidence points to them being safe I'll try some.

 

[G-Max]

A counterexample to what you're talking about though is rabbits in Australia. Some aristocrat decided bringing a few rabbits over for some hunting would be a laugh, and they ended up being possibly Australia's biggest pest, devastating entire areas. And we can't get rid of the bloody things.

Or for an American example, kudzu.

You're right! We must stop the spread of genetically modified rabbits and kud... wait... what do you mean, "they're not genetically modified"? Are you telling me that unmodified organisms have historically done orders of magnitude more damage to ecosystems than GMOs? Well then there is only one solution: we must ban all unmodified organisms!

 

[squadbroken]

You're right! We must stop the spread of genetically modified rabbits and kud... wait... what do you mean, "they're not genetically modified"? Are you telling me that unmodified organisms have historically done orders of magnitude more damage to ecosystems than GMOs? Well then there is only one solution: we must ban all unmodified organisms!

Way to miss the point. If an unmodified foreign species can grow out of control when introduced into an ecosystem that it can thrive in, then GMO organisms definitely have the same danger, especially if they've been engineered in a way that makes them more competitive.

 

[G-Max]

Way to miss the point. If an unmodified foreign species can grow out of control when introduced into an ecosystem that it can thrive in, then GMO organisms definitely have the same danger

Exactly. The same danger. not a bigger one.

especially if they've been engineered in a way that makes them more competitive.

And we can't have competition, can we?

 

[Midgard Eagle]

Way to miss the point. If an unmodified foreign species can grow out of control when introduced into an ecosystem that it can thrive in, then GMO organisms definitely have the same danger

Well, yeah, that's what we've been trying to tell you for several pages now.

The think which bugs me the pro-GMO arguments is that we really don't need these newer GMO crops.

We don't need new computers or solar panels or medicines, either, but guess what, we'll keep making them anyway.

Should we keep pretending that this cost squeezing does not sacrifice quality in any way, that miraculously all new GMOs, pesticides, etc, which are introduced do not carry risks?

That sounds like the Nirvana fallacy, that if something can't be made perfect or completely risk-free, it shouldn't be done. Commonly used against nuclear power, vaccines, and GMO.

Of course GMO carries risks and has potential for abuse. So does every human endavour. Electricity powers street lights, but also the computer systems of nuclear missiles. Needles can be used to administer vaccinations that save countless of children's lives, or to inject lethal injections into political dissidents in a North Korean labour camp.

 

[G-Max]

lethal injections into political dissidents in a North Korean labour camp.

Why use a needle for that? They have AKs.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

It's a different problem than the one you're talking about, the lack of genetic diversity within a given species. The Irish potato famine was a classic example of the problem of lack of biodiversity. Much of Ireland relied on potato varieties only relatively recently sources from limited original stock - so their was hardly any genetic diversity within their potato crops. So when a blight came, there were no resistant varieties to pick up the slack and a hell of a lot of people starved to death.

A counterexample to what you're talking about though is rabbits in Australia. Some aristocrat decided bringing a few rabbits over for some hunting would be a laugh, and they ended up being possibly Australia's biggest pest, devastating entire areas. And we can't get rid of the bloody things. That's the sort of thing that happens when you introduce something into a biological system that's radically different from the one it's designed for when you don't know what you're doing. And Australian agricultural history is just a long litany of the same sorts of warnings.

I notice neither of these is the result of transgenesis.

It's not that I doubt that GMOs can be harmful, but I'd like to see evidence of harm before becoming an alarmist.

I'm not one for the "think of the children" argument, but these transgenes could very conceivably be producing harmful byproducts that we haven't yet detected, and children are going to be the ones hardest hit if there are, especially if it's something that screws with developmental signalling. Hey, they're probably not, but who knows? It seems to me like madness to be releasing this stuff when we know so very little about the workings and can never ever bring them back.

You're arguing from ignorance, and think that just because you don't know, that means no one else does. Let me educate you. Toxins cannot be produced from nowhere. Introducing genes for pesticide resistance doesn't turn a plant into an alien predator.

 

[The_J]

Nah, the point is that most of them would never have gotten there. They're from entirely different organisms, so evolved to interact with a whole different set of proteins in an entirely different microenvironment, so who knows what they'll actually do? Context is important for these things.

So, what about horizontal gene transfer?
Technically the same thing. Genetic fragments from a totally unrelated species are introduced a genome, and work at the end.
Different environment, no idea what it might do, but it hasn't killed us yet, right?

The big difference is that those GMOs aren't let out to go nuts within the world's environments. Maybe they're safe, who knows? Nobody does, because we know hardly anything about the fine workings of biological systems. So what are we doing releasing these things, when we can never ever bring them back if something goes wrong?

Good point. And sure right.
But my main point is that you shouldn't judge about the technology based on one bad example.

It's not like they're actually being used for anything useful either - the world's problem isn't food supply, it's food distribution - and none of these advances are actually helping the people who need them anyway.

But that is again a distribution system. They could be used in a good way. We do have have enough food on this planet. Both doesn't prevent, that there are problems in these areas.

The think which bugs me the pro-GMO arguments is that we really don't need these newer GMO crops. Despite all the malthusian doomsday predictions, food is more than plentiful. As someone (I think it was Amartya Sen) pointed out years ago, all modern famines can have its causes traded to political factors, not really to lack of agricultural productivity.

Might be, but no one says that this will not change.
New pests are emerging every day.
The last time IIRC in the 70s a new pest wrecked a major part of the wheat production in the US. Not enough to cause a famine, for sure. But if you don't prepare for such things, they'll hit you one day unprepared. And then you have the problems.

 

[Tahuti]

But applying new technology where there is no need for it? I'm not sure that can be called progress.

So computers aren't progress? You don't need them to survive, do you? The very word progress is highly subjective, that's for sure.

 

[innonimatu]

So computers aren't progress? You don't need them to survive, do you? The very word progress is highly subjective, that's for sure.

Computers were a new thing. GMOs are merely providing (supposedly) more of the same thing - more food.

 

[Polycrates]

I notice neither of these is the result of transgenesis.

It's not that I doubt that GMOs can be harmful, but I'd like to see evidence of harm before becoming an alarmist.

The rabbit example seems to me to be very analogous to a GMO - it's a particular genetic mix that is entirely novel to that environment, and one which that environment has not had the time to evolve response mechanisms for. They're both essentially introduced species. People couldn't control it, and it's gone on to do massive damage to the continent. Here's another fun one that's perhaps even more analogous: the cane beetle was a big pest to cane crops in Queensland, so some bright sparks decided that the introduction of a foreign predator - the cane toad - would be the perfect biological response. The cane toad is now a far greater pest in Queensland than the cane beetle ever was. We've got heaps of these stories - being Australian, it's hard not to be paranoid about introduced species when you see the havoc they've caused. Here's my point: these things can be unpredictable, and it's a genie that can never, ever be put back in the bottle.

The second point of that analogy is a more cellular-level one: DNA that is perfectly natural and healthy in one environment can do radically different things when placed in a very different environment. Shoving a jellyfish gene into a plant is not only laughably crude, but expecting it to behave in the exact same way as in a jellyfish and only in that way seems to me like ridiculous optimism. There's a lot of that with commercial GMO tech.

If you want to call it alarmism, fine, but for me this is the key difference with GMOs and other risky new technology. The first prototypes of any new technology are going to be crude and, hey, potentially dangerous. Maybe some people get hurt or die, and maybe that's the unfortunate price of technological progress. But if there are problems, we can decide to cut our losses and stop. Or learn from our mistakes and make better ones. Either way, those first crude prototypes sit happily in a museum where they can't do any damage. For GMOs, those crude prototypes - and make no mistake, these are really, really crude prototypes - are out in the wild and we can never, ever recall them. To me, that's a hell of a risk to be taking without a real good justification. If there's ever a global food crisis (through global warming or whatever) that really is a lack of sufficient production rather than politics and distribution, then yeah I would re-evaluate the cost/benefit, but for now it seems to me that these GMOs will do nothing to help the world's fundamental problems in food supply, so why take the risk? I'm for keeping them in the lab.

You're arguing from ignorance, and think that just because you don't know, that means no one else does. Let me educate you. Toxins cannot be produced from nowhere. Introducing genes for pesticide resistance doesn't turn a plant into an alien predator.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing. Here's why: because no one does know. We know practically nothing about the interactions of genes and proteins even within their normal environments. We're a bunch of flailing, flailing amateurs stumbling around in the dark with absolutely no idea of what we're doing. The one thing we do know is that it's all far more complicated and messy than we like to assume. And you don't need magical new toxins to have the potential for harm, you really just need something harmful within the plant to be present at elevated levels. Look, I'll agree with you that the frankenfood angle is the weakest of the anti-GMO arguments and way too caught up with hysteria about peoples' kids waking up with three eyes one day, but there's the potential for them to negatively impact on health in a way that may not be immediately detectable.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

The rabbit example seems to me to be very analogous to a GMO ...

Except that it isn't, and neither are your other examples.

The second point of that analogy is a more cellular-level one: DNA that is perfectly natural and healthy in one environment can do radically different things when placed in a very different environment. Shoving a jellyfish gene into a plant is not only laughably crude, but expecting it to behave in the exact same way as in a jellyfish and only in that way seems to me like ridiculous optimism. There's a lot of that with commercial GMO tech.

You're again arguing from ignorance. There's no such thing as "healthy" DNA and "unhealthy" DNA. DNA is DNA.

If you want to call it alarmism, fine, but for me this is the key difference with GMOs and other risky new technology. The first prototypes of any new technology are going to be crude and, hey, potentially dangerous.

No argument there, but instead of looking stupid by making stuff up as you go along, you and your Luddite crowd would be advised to actually cite evidence of real dangers.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing. Here's why: because no one does know. We know practically nothing about the interactions of genes and proteins even within their normal environments.

Speak only for yourself. Genetic experiments have been going on for decades, and the behavior of genes is well understood. It is only you and your ilk who neither understand it nor want to understand it. The scenarios you present are just fantasy. Genes cannot instantaneously transform from one thing to another entirely unrelated thing. This is not a science-fiction movie.

 

[Polycrates]

Except that it isn't, and neither are your other examples.

Why not? A GMO is really just an introduced species when you get down to it, one with particular advantages over the species native to the environment where it's introduced. What we can see from these examples is that releasing organisms into an environment where they have a massive competitive advantage - same as with a GMO - can mean these organisms can run roughshod over the ecosystem and upset the balance of that environment. That organisms are completely unpredictable. And also that we are completely unable to rein in such species once they're out there. All lessons that completely apply to GMOs.

You're again arguing from ignorance. There's no such thing as "healthy" DNA and "unhealthy" DNA. DNA is DNA.

Not what I meant, perhaps not the best wording. Healthy as in "functioning in a beneficial way in the system for which it evolved". All I meant is that if you shove some DNA from such an environment into an unrelated environment, there's a pretty decent chance it will act in a manner that's bad for the health of the organism into which it has been introduced, and perhaps even the health of an organism that eats it. And there is such a thing as unhealthy DNA, but that's an unrelated topic I won't get into.

No argument there, but instead of looking stupid by making stuff up as you go along, you and your Luddite crowd would be advised to actually cite evidence of real dangers.

Not quite sure what I made up as I went along? Perhaps you could clarify. We don't know what the risks are because, hey, we don't really know what we're doing. Who knows what dangers could crop up (excuse the pun) ten, twenty years down the track? Not a problem, except that we've got no way of undoing our mistakes here. GM is unlike other technology because we can't stop it once it has started, and that to me suggests we exercise a far higher level of caution than with any other technology. Where's the gain from current GM crops that justifies that risk?

Speak only for yourself. Genetic experiments have been going on for decades, and the behavior of genes is well understood. It is only you and your ilk who neither understand it nor want to understand it. The scenarios you present are just fantasy. Genes cannot instantaneously transform from one thing to another entirely unrelated thing. This is not a science-fiction movie.

Nah, we know three-fifths of bugger-all about any gene you like, even within their original environments. We've barely scratched the surface of biological knowledge. And you can be sure there's plenty more that we don't even know we don't know. Take perhaps the most well-studied of all human genes, TP53 - we're still figuring out what it does, and it has plenty of interactions we don't know about with all sorts of other proteins that nobody has characterised. Hell, from one cell type to another it has all sorts of different interactions. We don't even have the technology to detect all its interactions. You might have seen nice, neat pathway diagrams - it's not like that at all. Shove human TP53 into some unrelated species and who knows what the hell it's going to do within that environment? It will most likely act in a totally unrelated manner, and there are going to be all sorts of unexpected interactions, many of which we don't even have the technology to detect.
And you're right, it's not a science fiction movie - in those, we're really good at it, and genetic modification is like ultra-precise surgery, with everything mapped out and accounted for. Not the laughably crude stabbing in the dark that it currently actually is.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

Why not? A GMO is really just an introduced species when you get down to it, one with particular advantages over the species native to the environment where it's introduced. What we can see from these examples is that releasing organisms into an environment where they have a massive competitive advantage - same as with a GMO - can mean these organisms can run roughshod over the ecosystem and upset the balance of that environment.

So cite an example of such a species that caused damage.

Not what I meant, perhaps not the best wording. Healthy as in "functioning in a beneficial way in the system for which it evolved".

Also not applicable to agriculture, since crops have been altered over thousands of years to be beneficial to us, not the plants. By your definition, every cultivated plant is unhealthy. As an example, the almond has been selected so as to be non-toxic. Wild almonds are toxic but we have removed that from them so as to be able to eat them, and by doing so, made them more vulnerable to predation. Evolution has nothing to do with agriculture, as we have been hijacking it for 8000 years, making crops valuable for us, not themselves.

All I meant is that if you shove some DNA from such an environment into an unrelated environment, there's a pretty decent chance it will act in a manner that's bad for the health of the organism into which it has been introduced, and perhaps even the health of an organism that eats it.

No, you're just making stuff up as you go along again. "Shoving" a gene into a foreign genome may just be as likely to be detrimental as helpful or even neutral. Even natural mutations are usually neutral. You would understand that if you understood that a genome can be tens of thousands of base-pairs, so that it could take a lot of alteration to cause any effect. But I'm willing to bet you don't even know how genomes function.

And there is such a thing as unhealthy DNA, but that's an unrelated topic I won't get into.

That's because you don't know what you're talking about. You are already incriminating your ignorance by calling DNA "unhealthy." DNA is a molecule and molecules don't have health. Organisms have health.

We don't know what the risks are because, hey, we don't really know what we're doing.

Right, we don't know what we're doing. That's why companies like Monsanto are willing to risk billions of dollars of investment -- because they don't know squat about their product.

Who knows what dangers could crop up (excuse the pun) ten, twenty years down the track?

With demands like that, no pharmaceutical product would ever come to market. No invention would even be worth inventing with unreasonable demands like that.

Not a problem, except that we've got no way of undoing our mistakes here. GM is unlike other technology because we can't stop it once it has started, and that to me suggests we exercise a far higher level of caution than with any other technology.

Also not true, because we could always stop the deleterious practices.

Where's the gain from current GM crops that justifies that risk?

Less worldwide hunger, lower food prices, better HEALTH, LESS use of Earth real estate to grow said crops (thereby less destruction of ecosystems like rainforests for tilling), etc. But let's wait 20 years to not do this so as to see if it's risk-free (which no venture is).

Take perhaps the most well-studied of all human genes, TP53 - we're still figuring out what it does, and it has plenty of interactions we don't know about with all sorts of other proteins that nobody has characterised.

I know you just copy-pasted this from a wikipedia article, but p53 is an animal protein, so I'm betting putting into a plant will have no effect.

While it is true that there is always more to discover in science, you are arguing deliberately greater ignorance than exists in the scientific world.

 

[Polycrates]

Why all the insults? Are they really necessary?

So cite an example of such a species that caused damage.

Yeah, I'm sticking with the rabbit and the cane toad. Same "introduced organism" problem.

Also not applicable to agriculture, since crops have been altered over thousands of years to be beneficial to us, not the plants. By your definition, every cultivated plant is unhealthy. As an example, the almond has been selected so as to be non-toxic. Wild almonds are toxic but we have removed that from them so as to be able to eat them, and by doing so, made them more vulnerable to predation. Evolution has nothing to do with agriculture, as we have been hijacking it for 8000 years, making crops valuable for us, not themselves.

Again, very big difference between hijacking genetic drift and pointing it where we want it to go, and between just shoving something in from an entirely different biological kingdom and hoping it works out in the long run.

No, you're just making stuff up as you go along again. "Shoving" a gene into a foreign genome may just be as likely to be detrimental as helpful or even neutral. Even natural mutations are usually neutral. You would understand that if you understood that a genome can be tens of thousands of base-pairs, so that it could take a lot of alteration to cause any effect. But I'm willing to bet you don't even know how genomes function.

You're right, I don't, and neither do you. Neither does anyone. Here's the thing though: between these posts, do you know what I did? I went and did some genetic modification with a bunch of transgenic DNA. It's a human gene I chopped out of the genome and stuffed an oncogenic mutation onto, then put into a modified bacterial plasmid cassette that also helpfully encodes for jellyfish green fluorescent protein, then put it into some helpful kidney cells with some retroviral DNA to encase it into a viral vector based on the shell of HIV. Then I went and shoved it in a bunch of human cells, where it's even now integrating with the genome.

You know what this DNA is going to do? Me neither, but I can offer a suggestion because I've done it before: rather than promoting unregulated, cancerous proliferation in these (already cancerous) cells, it actually causes them to slow down and die more than anything. Whereas it usually provides resistance to anti-cancer drugs through the activation of mitogenic and survival pathways, here it does no such thing. It instead promotes the eventual acquisition of anti-cancer drug resistance by some other mechanism, most likely via the suppression of DNA damage-repair mechanisms - thus causing an increase in the rate of mutation and increasing the likelihood of generation of a drug-resistance mutation. Who would have expected that? Nobody would have, because that's an entirely uncharacterised aspect of its function. Partly because, even in its normal form, it has entirely different interactions within various different cell types even just within humans, and because nobody really knows how it works because we know bugger-all about the nitty-gritty of biological processes because it turns out they're really complicated. You could put it into ten different cell types and get eleven different responses.
Now I don't know about you, but it seems to me that if you were inserting a transgene into something you were chucking out into the wild, having a transgenic protein that's not only unregulated within that system, but also promoting DNA damage (or inhibiting DNA repair) would be something you really would not to have out there. How certain are we that they don't? We're not, because we don't really have the technology to check these things (and you can bet that guys like Monsanto aren't even trying). It's an extreme example, but it's one that naturally sprang to mind.

That's because you don't know what you're talking about. You are already incriminating your ignorance by calling DNA "unhealthy." DNA is a molecule and molecules don't have health. Organisms have health.

I think we're just playing semantics here. Shine a bunch of powerful UV at yourself and you'll get all sorts of strand breaks, base mismatches, the works. That's why we have such an incredibly involved set of DNA repair mechanisms. On the other side of the DNA health thing, you've also got the potential for epigenetic silencing of the particular transgene, which is a kind of neat anti-retroviral protection mechanism. I don't think it's a real stretch to suggest that knocking out epigenetic silencing mechanisms might well be one of the first evolutions of GM crops, and that starts making things a fair bit more risky.

Right, we don't know what we're doing. That's why companies like Monsanto are willing to risk billions of dollars of investment -- because they don't know squat about their product.

Damn right they don't. I'm sure they like to pretend to know, though. Lotta hubris over that side of town.

With demands like that, no pharmaceutical product would ever come to market. No invention would even be worth inventing with unreasonable demands like that.

Also not true, because we could always stop the deleterious practices.

You're sidestepping my main point here: we can stop manufacturing a pharmaceutical or any other risky technology. We can't stop the manufacture of biological organisms once they're out in the environment. Hence the far more stringent demands.

Less worldwide hunger, lower food prices, better HEALTH, LESS use of Earth real estate to grow said crops (thereby less destruction of ecosystems like rainforests for tilling), etc. But let's wait 20 years to not do this so as to see if it's risk-free (which no venture is).

I don't want to get into this side of things so much, but frankly the problems of food supply are far more a political problem than a production problem. Without fixing the political and distributional aspects, I don't see it really helping the underlying problem.

I know you just copy-pasted this from a wikipedia article, but p53 is an animal protein, so I'm betting putting into a plant will have no effect.

Why not? Do the plants have regulatory mechanisms that shut down p53? I'm betting very few plants would have anything that functions like hdm2, for instance. I'm not suggesting it be shoved in under an animal promoter. Turns out, proteins don't have a set function and do nothing else - they can have all sorts of incidental interactions. Take jellyfish GFP, for instance. It's pretty much the most-used transgene, both because it's useful and because it doesn't seem to cause much in the way of health issues. It's from a jellyfish, so maybe it ought to be doing nothing, right? But if you transduce it into a cell, it does have an effect beyond making that cell glow nice and pretty green. Increase of cell death, reduction in cell cycle entry, minor morphological changes, etc. Is that because of the protein itself interacting with some other signalling pathway, the presence of transgenic retroviral DNA stuffing up the normal action of the cell's genome, or just because the cytomegalovirus promoter is just pumping out such ridiculous quantities of mRNA/protein that it has an impact on the cellular environment? I don't know, all I know is that it has a minor effect - the sort of thing that has chronic rather than acute consequences, the kind of thing that is hard to see.

While it is true that there is always more to discover in science, you are arguing deliberately greater ignorance than exists in the scientific world.

No, I really don't think I am. We know so very very little.

 

[classical_hero]

Computers were a new thing. GMOs are merely providing (supposedly) more of the same thing - more food.

We keep being told of food shortages, but most of the problems are political. In fact one of the reasons some food prices have risen is due to the fact that crops once grown for food are now being used as fuel instead. We have enough food, it is just that right now there is an imbalance of food due to political means, rather than actual shortage of food. Wars in Africa and unstable or corrupt governments are part of the problem. In fact GMO's have not shown any growth in production over the regular produce. In fact much of the growth has been due to improving farming techniques and not in GM technology. The fact that we are putting such foods into the general population that show no benefit, is not good policy.

 

[El_Machinae]

To be fair, I don't really care how the transgene affects the GM organism. We'll screen the phenotypes based on whether we like them or not.

I'm more concerned about the metabolites or toxins that have been engineered, and their effects on the environment outside of the farm. So, a 'drought-resistant' modification doesn't bother me at all (depending on how it is done, though). We should know enough about metabolites to know if there's some byproduct that makes the food unfit for people, or how worried we should be about that. I mean, if the fruit is producing new types of flavonoids due to the modification, then a little more safety testing would be required.

Engineering the plant to make new toxins (anti-insect or anti-fungal) is obviously a little more worrisome, and then the 'think of the children' argument comes into play. How a toxin affects a colony of mice (and zebrafish) for toxicity testing might be different that the long-term effects on children or (say) pregnancies, etc.

Mosts transgenics probably make an organism 'less fit' in the wild (even it's better for the farm), so only modifications that give them a risk of out-competing ecosystems are then worrisome on that front.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

You're right, I don't, and neither do you. Neither does anyone. Here's the thing though: between these posts, do you know what I did? I went and did some genetic modification with a bunch of transgenic DNA...

I'm going to ignore this part where you, again, copy-pasted information from somewhere to make yourself look less ignorant.

You're sidestepping my main point here: we can stop manufacturing a pharmaceutical or any other risky technology. We can't stop the manufacture of biological organisms once they're out in the environment. Hence the far more stringent demands.

We probably wouldn't have to, because their genetic properties would be, like almonds disadvantageous to them in competing in their environment. But sure, go ahead and stick with the wild rabbit model.

I don't want to get into this side of things so much, but frankly the problems of food supply are far more a political problem than a production problem. Without fixing the political and distributional aspects, I don't see it really helping the underlying problem.

That's nice, but unless you are hiding a magical solution to political problems causing food supply problems, this can be one solution.

Why not? Do the plants have regulatory mechanisms that shut down p53?

Here's another instance in which you condemn your ignorance. You don't understand that p53 is just a signal protein, and without things like receptors to regulate those signals, it's just a big molecular blob floating around doing nothing. So that's why when you, once again, mass quote-mined something to make yourself sound less ignorant, you fell flat on your face again. This is why I can't take the claims of the anti-GMO crowd seriously. Like creationists, they appeal to people's ignorance.

No, I really don't think I am. We know so very very little.

Again, speak for yourself. I actually have an extensive education in biochemistry and molecular biology, which I was required to have in my medical education. That's why it's so easy for me to catch you playing scientist and laugh at you.