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.
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.