But is there any indication, that genetically modified plants do pose a danger to health, or the environment?
I mean with cigarettes it should have been obvious, you inhale, you cough. Maybe not good.
But with plants? In the food chain they just get digested. And in the wild they are either strong enough to be a new breed, or, more likely they fail and die out.
It's too early to tell. But when we build a nuclear reactor, we don't just make safety systems for likely events. We make them also for very, very unlikely ones. Because the potential risk is huge.
It's the same here. The potential risk is huge. We still have a hard time with things as simple as not killing each others, so thinking we are mastering introduction of these variables into such a complex systems is delusional at best, arrogant at worst.
Given that the people in charge of this are motivated by profit, and that we have history proving such entities will not do the right thing for humanity given the chance, let's not trust them.
Audit them to the ground. Force them to justify themself for 5 decades at every step. Make it transparent, systematic, and independant.
Working on GMO is ok. Trusting them to be safe because lobbists say so is not.
Most people didn't see any danger to something as simple as sugar 30 years ago. We added it everywhere, and now have an obese US population with sky high diabetes levels.
Sugar is not complicated.
The millions of DNA pairs of the millions of species of living things, all interacting, is complicated. Also, we eat those.
So we understand probably 4 percent of it, and we tweak the settings. I don't see any scenario where this is not a serious risk.
If you play with something on a huge scale that you don't fully understand, safety first.
But the worst part for me is that we have to defend the point of view of asking for being careful. Look at this thread. All I'm suggesting is a non compromising auditing system, and it's a debate !
This is insane. It should be the opposite. If you want to opt out of the safety net of humanity, you better make your case.
I'm totally with you. This is insane and REALLY scary...
Now I'm wondering why to be surprised if bigcorps don't care about others future when the individuals don't really care (~=want to make sure everything will be fine and not just assuming things won't break).
WDYT, what can we do about that issue? I'm totally staggered.
Except the unknown? This is the main reason for me as well.
It's like a stranger coming to you with a pill: eat that. I'm sure I won't "just because" its unknown and there is a real chance it might go wrong. If I can't even estimate this chance its worse, it does mean I can not responsibly take the action.
One of the big problems we always forget in the moment is that problems do not always present themselves in obvious ways. Leaded fuel is a great, and very recent, example. It remained legal for the better part of a century with numerous government declarations of its safety. One part of this was extensive lobbying and "research" from the industry players claiming it was safe, but the actual problem is that its problems manifest in very difficult to measure ways and over very long periods of time. You're not going to start wheezing and coughing around leaded fuel, at least not anymore so than unleaded fuel. And generally you'd seem to be completely unaffected given typical exposure levels.
Yet of course you aren't unaffected. Even today we we're not entirely certain of everything that leaded fuel fume exposure causes, let alone the exact mechanism for such. What we do know is that there is an apparent causal relationship between leaded fuel exposure, particularly during one's developmental years, and increased criminality, lower IQ, and other such things. But you're not going to show this in any sort of brief experiment and even over longterm experiments it can be difficult to discern the issues. I mean if we didn't already know as much, the idea that inhaling negligible amounts of gas fumes (in terms of parts per x) over years could somehow cause increased crime rates or even low IQs sounds pretty absurd. But our bodies react in ways that often belie intuition.
So you're left to look at things comparatively. How do people who do 'x' compare to people who do not do 'x' over years or decades? How do their children do? With GM crops we have a pretty ideal test suite since most of the world adopted these crops sparingly or not at all while in the United States near 100% of crops of certain crucial types are now genetically engineered. So how do young Americans, especially those born after the mid 90s, compare to those from other nations in terms of physical health, mental health, and other behaviors? Of course there are a million confounding variables here, some such as the growth of the internet can be controlled for but others cannot.
So this is something that would require extensive research and work to actively study. Presumably this would be the purview of agencies such as the FDA. Unfortunately, with our government this [1] was the last head of the FDA. A Monsanto VP lawyer who argued for things such as allowing corporations to knowingly allow at least a small amount of carcinogens into processed foods. That man determined food safety in the US for the majority of the last administration, and I doubt the current administration would have much interest in such research either. So instead we get no meaningful oversight, negligible or poorly formulated longitudinal research, and instead are left to rely primarily on the ethics of companies such as Monsanto.
I mean with cigarettes it should have been obvious, you inhale, you cough. Maybe not good.
But with plants? In the food chain they just get digested. And in the wild they are either strong enough to be a new breed, or, more likely they fail and die out.