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by makomk 2945 days ago
I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread that golden rice has yield problems, as do many GMO foods. That's partly because this kind of genetic modification isn't actually all that controlled; one of the side effects is that it disrupts a random selection of completely unrelated genes.
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> I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread that golden rice has yield problems, as do many GMO foods.

So do many non-GMO engineered crops where the trait that is the focus of optimization isn't yield, since a “yield problem” is deteemined by comparison to mainstream crops which are engineered for yield traits.

> That's partly because this kind of genetic modification isn't actually all that controlled

That's even more true of selective breeding, whether by traditional or more rapid modern means, so that's not a problem with GMOs compared to any real alternative, it's a problem of all existing methods compared to a hypothetical state where we have both perfect modelling to predict phenotypical effects of genetic changes and perfect ability to make arbitrary, error-free edits to genetic code. And even then we are stuck with the fact that some traits at inherently in conflict.