[samirillian]

> Is there anything you and I can talk about that would convince you of not being anti-biotechnology.

Sure. I'm not strongly anti-biotechnology.

On reflection, the two points that really bother me.

a) genetic modifications are usually for stuff like "keeping potatoes from bruising because people don't like the look of bruised potatoes." Or "keeping tomatoes flavorful so people can keep mindlessly buying them out of season." They're always fixes that allow the consumer to remain as passive as possible.

b) I've never hear a single scientist make a good argument against GMOs. What, like you can't come up with a single possible downside? I think what finally convinced me to vote for Hillary was seeing the best arguments against her, by people who really hated her guts (like, really, the worst you have are dark insinuations?) I want to hear someone creative/knowledgeable come up with their best argument against GMOs. Like, they got hired to find the worst case scenarios. I just feel like I've never heard that argument articulated well.

Anyway, there are two possibilities: a) this issue is so amazingly stupid that no informed person would ever be bothered by these practices. b) there are real--if unlikely--toxic externalities to genetic modification, but no informed person wants to share them because they don't want to feed the fire of ignorance.

And, yeah, the dismissive tone of scientists I've talked to, coupled with their apparent ignorance, has not reassured me that this conversation is being had in good faith.

[KingMob]

The best argument against GMOs are Black Swans, which, due to their rarity, don't appear often/soon enough to dissuade people in advance. Probably 99.99999% of GMOs are fine, but that one in a million will have disastrous consequences for an ecosystem. It could also be that since our knowledge of human biology is still woefully incomplete, we optimize for the wrong things, leading to lower overall health (we've probably already done this without GMOs just by selecting for size/sturdiness over nutrients.) Multiply the complexity of individual organisms with entire ecosystems, and the reality is we just can't predict the likelihood of an adverse outcome at all.

This would be fine if we had a backup Earth. I'm all in favor of biotech on Mars, isolated moon labs, and interstellar colonies, if we had any. But the current irreplaceable nature of Earth means we have to be extra cautious with it. Our usual standards are insufficient, and thinking otherwise is hubris.

[tstactplsignore]

>Probably 99.99999% of GMOs are fine, but that one in a million will have disastrous consequences for an ecosystem.

This really doesn't make any biological sense and kind of goes against all of our understanding of evolution and ecology. Can you describe this theoretical situation in any kind of detail? I find it completely incoherent and unimaginable.

GMOs have a huge advantage over traditional methods of crop development because they can be engineered to be safer: they can be designed to not survive off of human farms, and not reproduce with wild plants, or have other safety measures.

The idea that we can create a single organism that could cause an ecological catastrophe (bigger than any of the ecological harm caused by simply moving around invasive natural species) is science fiction; the idea that we could do so accidentally while trying to create food to eat is a complete delusion. We've already created outlandish, strange, non-natural super plants: every single vegetable that you and I eat. We did so with no regard to safety, nor understanding of what we were doing. GMOs only improve enormously on this process.

Again, the utter failure of this argument is apparent in how it can be applied to any technology: we shouldn't make software because that 1 in a million program could destroy the power grid / Internet / cause nuclear war, we shouldn't make medicine because that 1 in a million vaccine will cause people to drop dead en masse 10 years down the road, etc. If those seem preposterous to you, I assure you that to plant scientists, geneticists, and EcoEvo folks, your worry seems equally preposterous.

[tstactplsignore]

>genetic modifications are usually for stuff like "keeping potatoes from bruising because people don't like the look of bruised potatoes." Or "keeping tomatoes flavorful so people can keep mindlessly buying them out of season." They're always fixes that allow the consumer to remain as passive as possible.

I think this is because biotechnology is in its infancy, and these sort of things tend to be pretty low hanging fruit that increase sales. I'm not a big fan either- I'm certainly not a big fan of corporate profits and corporate motives. The GMO world is corporate right now because it still requires substantial monetary investment- in the future technology will become so simplified that nonprofits and university scientists will be able to bring non-corporate GMOs to market in the way we have open source software today.

Here are some more positive gmo projects on the horizon:

C4 rice: http://c4rice.irri.org/index.php/component/content/article/1...

More efficient photosynthesis:https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/science/gmo-foods-phot...

Disease resistant Cassava:http://staskawiczlab.berkeley.edu/michael-gomez-wins-prize-h...

Disease resistant tomatoes: http://staskawiczlab.berkeley.edu/bacterial-spot-tomatoes

Drought resistant plants in particular will be extremely important for fighting climate change: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/science-sushi/2015/03/31/g...

>b) I've never hear a single scientist make a good argument against GMOs. What, like you can't come up with a single possible downside?

It is difficult to come up with an argument "against GMOs", because most definitions of the term have no ingerent biological meaning. If I edit a single base pair of a plant using crispr-cas9, is that a GMO? How is that different than breeding this plant until I get that base pair change by chance? If I edit an entire gene of a plant with crispr-cas9 to match the gene of another organism, how is that different from inserting the gene from that organism into this plant in the right spot?

I personally can't contemplate a general purpose argument against GMOs that doesn't apply to traditional mutagenesis and hybridization experiments: those are really like randomly messing with genes with no idea what you're doing- biotechnology targets systems we understand.

However, the best arguments against GMOs are those concerned with corporate influence. Yes, we do not want big corporations completely controlling our agricultural system (as they do now), especially when their interests do not align with society's. We want a biotechnology more like the open source world and startup world to keep agriculture innovative and open.