[msandford]

> Please don't conflate issues with scientific backing (antibiotic abuse) with unscientific fearmongering (GMOs).

GMOs are only unscientific fearmongering until some kind of a heretofore invisible link is found.

Now I'm not suggesting that one will be found, but to say that you know there isn't one is the height of arrogance. There are a great many things that science has known that have been later overturned.

For example, Semmelweis beat Pasteur to the punch by a solid 10 years but he died basically in disgrace because the medical community chose to ignore him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur

I'd love to provide another dozen examples but I don't have a handy list to show you. Rest assured that if science could be wrong at least once it's within the realm of possibility that it could be wrong again. There's definitely no law of the universe that prevents science from making a mistake or two along the way to knowledge.

[openasocket]

By that logic you can assume anything is true. It is certainly _possible_ that GMOs are harmful, but without any evidence you have nothing to go on. I could use your exact same argument to argue against evolution or gravity.

[msandford]

You're trying to compare biology to biology and physics. Biology is messy and squishy and imprecise so you'll have an easier time there. Good luck on the physics front, though, because physics is so fundamental.

We have tremendous ability to make predictions in physics and then test those predictions roughly as many times as we care to. Biology is probably a few hundred years (or more!) from that.

[openasocket]

If you want me to believe GMOs are harmful, you need a better argument than "biology is hard."

Sorry if that comes off as harsh. I'll admit that the misuse of genetic modification could have big consequences, but the regulation currently in place seems sufficient. If you have regulations you would like to add, I would love to hear them.

[msandford]

When you do physics you're basically trying to test one interaction and you might have a half-dozen other interactions that you have to contend with. And even then, it's really hard! NASA is continuing to investigate the EM drive on the tiny, tiny chance that it's real, but mostly to see what these folks got wrong.

In biology you don't have a half-dozen other interactions to contend with, you've got probably on the order of millions. How many organic molecules are there? Do you know? I sure don't and I spent a couple of years doing computational genomics. The best we could do is spend thousands of processor hours trying to understand how the genome affects things, much less the transcriptome or proteome. If you want to suggest that "oh, GMO is fine because biology isn't THAT HARD" then I would implore you to go revolutionize biology because everyone I talked to said it was very, very hard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcriptome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteome

[jfoutz]

Alternatively, humans eat everything. From seeds to whales. Some things turn out to be bad for everyone, like hemlock. Some things are generally good, but very dangerous for a few, like peanuts.

As i see it, there are pretty much 2 cases for GMOs right now, and a third that worries me.

1, editing down a sequence to remove unwanted genes. Now, corn without gene X may be toxic. But, that seems unlikely. Billions of people have eaten corn one way or another, and there's bound to be a mutant corn without gene X that people have eaten, just due to random mutation. For this case, GMO's seem very safe.

2, combining genes from 2 things. Now, perhaps feature A weakens us in some way that feature B then exploits and becomes dangerous. Even then, as you say, our biology is fabulously complicated, and has worked solutions for a whole ton of problems. A potato with a cow gene doesn't see obviously more risky than eating potatoes and cows. For this case, GMOs seem a bit more risky, but not substantially more risky than the editing case.

3, Genes created from the imagination. Our biology, specifically digestive system, has had to deal with the prior cases as long as there have been things eating each other. Creating entirely new sequences that our biology has never seen, well, that's scary. we don't have 4 billion years of evolution to rely on.

So, to sum up, case 1 and 2 seem reasonably safe. At least the kind of thing we can try out, if there are bad effects, we can outlaw those specific bad sequences. case 3 is really scary, and those types of GMOs ought to go through something like clinical drug trials for widespread adoption.

edit

by safe, i mean safer than driving. likely far far safer than driving.

because biology is fabulously complicated, heuristics are the best we can do right now. The above, or more sophisticated variations seem reasonable. we don't know for sure, furthermore we can't know for sure. Perhaps a limited release/clinical trial style is better for case 2. But, there's a ton of those kinds of foods already, they've appeared safe so far. Today, that seems like a lot of effort for not much value.

[TeMPOraL]

Well,

1) "Ye cannae change the laws of physics". We're pretty sure that there isn't any molecule that you can flip around to have unicorns start popping out of thin air[0]. We have some bounds on the amount of damage one can do.

2) Yes, biology is messy and complicated. It's also extremely important that we master it. So there's little choice but to push forward.

[0] - well, unless it's a molecule your VCs know how to monetize.

[msandford]

> 1) "Ye cannae change the laws of physics". We're pretty sure that there isn't any molecule that you can flip around to have unicorns start popping out of thin air[0]. We have some bounds on the amount of damage one can do.

Sure, but every interaction is a hard fought lesson at the moment. If you naively chart it out we're going to be spending literally eons figuring this stuff out.

Now I realize that advances in a bunch of technologies means that we'll know way, way more than we do now in probably 20-30 years. Not just 50% more, not 500% more but probably a thousand times more.

But if there are a million molecules, there are on the order of n! permutations which give you a rough idea of the number of possible molecular interactions. Maybe instead of P(n,n) (which means that all molecules could react with all other molecules all at the same time for one reaction) you'd be talking about P(n,n-5) or so, but 10^6^5 is still 10^30 or a really, really big number. It'll overflow a 32 bit int, a 64 bit int and it uses up a substantial fraction of a 128 bit int.

People tend not to understand that biology isn't just a little squishy or weird, or "hard", the math makes the fact that we understand anything a tribute to human intelligence. It's not finding a needle in a haystack, it's finding a needle in a galaxy's worth of planets that are all covered in nothing but haystacks.

[openasocket]

Sure it's hard to design GMOs, but testing their safety is much easier: feed the GMO to some lab rats and see what happens. Or am I missing something?

[BuckRogers]

> If you want me to believe GMOs are harmful, you need a better argument than "biology is hard."

But the burden of proof that it's safe is on you. Not on those who prefer the conservative route.

[xkcd-sucks]

But, suggesting all types of genetic modification are equivalent ("GMOs") is also unscientific fearmongering.

[msandford]

Well they're equivalent insofar as they used methods outside traditional breeding in order to achieve their goals; namely "artificial" sequence editing. Will all the modifications have the same potential for harm? It's an open question.

We do know that humans do pretty well on things that have been bred using ancient techniques. Might modern techniques do a better job? Absolutely yes. Might these modern techniques also introduce problems? You can't really rule it out.

I'm not suggesting that all GMO are evil and that they should be banned, destroyed, etc. But what I am suggesting is that when the rate of change we can achieve gets much, much faster than using traditional techniques it's entirely possible that we could do something bad that would take generations to shake out.

Presuming that we "know" something after a couple of years when it has to do with biology, especially when you're talking about humans, is pretty dicey.

Soylent seems to be OK for humans so far, but if all you eat/drink is soylent for a decade you might find out that it's got too much of something, or not enough of something else. It's entirely premature to proclaim soylent 100% safe, that'll take a couple of generations. I feel the same way about organisms that have had their breeding sped up significantly. Not definitely bad, but I'd prefer not to be the guinea pig myself.