Are you trying to conflate "selective breeding" and "genetic modification" or do you mean "US Americans" when you say "anyone"?
If by "Anyone" you mean "US Americans", then you are probably referring to that vitamin A added GMO "golden banana" that is field tested there. But in that case there would be no need to say "technically in some fashion or another". (EDIT: i must have misinterpreted a single source, there is a lack of secondary sources confirming any large scale availability of this banana in the USA. Sorry! The field test is in Uganda not America)
The banana we are used to (Cavendish, ~99% world export market share) is not a GMO, because that term has a definition and a meaning, no matter how much people try to conflate "selective breeding" and "genetically modified organism".
What you are doing is called "muddying the water" and in general it is not helpful in serious debate, except when you aim for winning an argument, instead of reaching consent or discovering a deeper truth. I am not saying it is invalid to make a comparison between selective breeding and gene editing, highlighting the similarities. Doing that is perfectly fine. What is not ok, in my opinion, is trying to attempt to redefine and twist the words used by the other side of an argument to describe their position such that they can not express their position anymore. Note that sometimes word definitions are vague and reaching a common understanding can look similar to this pattern, but in this case the "technically in some fashion or another" gives the intention away.
Speaking as someone who has genetically modified several organisms, please don't do this.
Genetic engineering is a distinctive and new technique for modifying the genomes of organisms, and the results of genetic engineering are referred to as GMOs.
The rhetorical flourish of decompiling the acronym and pretending it is descriptive rather than nominal does no one any favors. It's disingenuous, and doesn't alleviate someone's distrust of genetic engineering, because they know perfectly well that you know what they meant and are deflecting the conversation.
No, I took the actual definition, and you just don't like it.
Just because other people are ignorant or arrogant, doesn't mean we should cater to their ignorance or arrogance. But it does mean we should make it easier to differentiate the key differences by not re-using the same acronym over and over again.
Instead of calling the 'new methods' GMO's, we should be calling them something else, instead of confusing the dummies. The new techniques folk like you are using should get a whole new acronym to go with it... Not just labelled GMO, yet again.
It just confuses the dummies. And we live in democracies mostly, so you should be concerned about that.
> No, I took the actual definition, and you just don't like it.
You didn’t take the actual definition. Look at the GMO wiki, and the first sentence defines the term in such a way to restrict it to organisms created with more modern techniques. When having conversations with people it’s important to have a shared vocabulary with people. Having a different vocabulary creates miscommunications. It can be especially hard to assume best intent of people are using a non-standard definition because it is a technique purposefully done around scientific and academic jargon to achieve political ends.
> In genetic modification, however, recombinant genetic technologies are employed to produce organisms whose genomes have been precisely altered at the molecular level, usually by the inclusion of genes from unrelated species of organisms that code for traits that would not be obtained easily through conventional selective breeding.
Should I conclude that you're a liar, or very bad at reading your hastily summoned sources.
The banana is a seedless triploid (seeds don't form because they have an odd number of chromosome pairs). This is a common mechanism in fruits to achieve seedless varieties that can then be propagated vegetatively.
The term GMO has functionally lost all meaning to me as anyone can load up a straw man defining it how they need it to be defined at that point in time. Borlaug was a great plant breeder, but some of his inventions ushered in those tricky 2nd and 3rd order effects that I alluded to earlier. Namely, the response of (wheat) crops to synthetic fertilizer and how much synthetic fertilizer is both an economic boom and and environmental quagmire. Interesting debates no doubt
Also lemons, broccoli, and pretty much any modern vegetable or fruit - humans have been selectively growing plants since humans have had the knowledge of how to grow things period.
That by selective growing of plants over thousands of years, we have altered the genetic make up of the foods we consume. While "GMO" is a "new technique", reductively this isn't exactly another dimension compared to over many years isolating and growing things like broccoli and lemons.
Yes, GMO is a new technique to modify food sources away from "naturally occurring processes" - but again things like lemons and broccoli are also not naturally occurring in nature.
Saying declarative short (and virolic) sentences like this also helps no one.
Humans already eat a wide variety of foods as part of their daily diet that have no natural occurrence (lemons, broccoli, many different kinds of meat) - they were specifically bred that way. Some people have concerns about GMO in the same angle - that since for example these cattle are bred to endure climate change and they have no 'naturally occurring' example, there might be something inherently unsafe about them.
Yes, GMO is a new technique, but there is an intelligible way to connect the dots between the GMO and what humans have been doing with our food supply for thousands of years.
Norman Borlaug helped rid us of Wheat rust, which took a more 'natural' approach to gene editing.
The banana has been a mutant for decades now.