For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
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By Mz Hedy
#1912386
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61537610

BBC tells us that gene edited tomatoes are coming our way soon. Apparently gene edited food is safe with predictable results, where as I recall being persuaded that genetically modified food is/was dangerous with unknown outcomes.

:study:

Am I wrong to believe someone is trying to bamboozle us?

Plenty of farmers on here... help!
#1912393
Mz Hedy wrote:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61537610

BBC tells us that gene edited tomatoes are coming our way soon. Apparently gene edited food is safe with predictable results, where as I recall being persuaded that genetically modified food is/was dangerous with unknown outcomes.

:study:

Am I wrong to believe someone is trying to bamboozle us?

Plenty of farmers on here... help!



It isn't a farmer you want, it's a biologist; preferably a truthful one !
#1912406
Apparently, in the book they did Soylent Red before they did Soylent Green.

Anyway,

You can trust them, it’s not like the horse meat wasn’t actually safe to eat.

We have an apple that’s been in the fridge for about 2 months. I keep wanting to throw it away, but my wife won’t let me, as she says she might want to eat it one day.

To be fair it does still look exactly the same as when it came home from the supermarket.
Last edited by Cessna571 on Tue May 24, 2022 7:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
#1912411
JAFO wrote:It's hard to think of a food which hasn't been genetically modified by humans at some stage...

True, but selective breeding, which is what you mean, at least has the 'safety' of using natural processes whereby the process has to have some degree of natural viability about it, not some technician in a lab dismantling DNA and adding bits into some completely unrelated organism.
By Nick
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1912431
What they really need to do is manipulate the DNA of cereal crops with that of clover, so that the root locks up the nitrogen. That would do away with so much reliance on artificial fertiliser and the run off into Waterways.

Nick
By TopCat
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1912437
What do people imagine happens to all this scary genetically modified DNA when you eat it?

When you eat food, it is digested. Broken down into its constituent bits. Why would this be any different just for the bit that's been engineered to make the plant more disease resistant, or hold on to water better?
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By Flyin'Dutch'
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1912442
JAFO wrote:It's hard to think of a food which hasn't been genetically modified by humans at some stage. Not much of the food you eat would have existed in nature without our interference. Seafood, maybe.


Trust a JAFO to make such an.....observation.

Read book. Enjoyed it. Worked with the police 2004-2015 your observations around 'reform' 'improvement' 'efficiency' mirror mine.
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User avatar
By Mz Hedy
#1912451
I have a naive view of the operation of DNA in living tissue. I think of it like a piece of humungously complicated software influencing the activity of a complex aggregation of machines. Within that model, I see gene editing (whether by addition or subtraction) as tinkering with the software at machine code level code without access to the design notes or source code. In IT they call this sort of thing a cludge (I did quite a lot of it back in the '70s).

Conventional evolution of food plants and animals by human selection has gone on for thousands of years, but it has always been a relatively slow, gradual process. Technological bypassing of the processes can result in rapid domination of the food supply by a limited number of varieties. Suddenly we are entrusting the wellbeing of our families and their offspring to the results of somebody's biological cludge: a biological equivalent, perhaps, of the Post Office Horizon technology.

I do accept that geneticists have a far deeper understanding of the compllexities of the subject that 30 years ago. In my OP I was hoping that someone on here could explain why 'gene editing' is properly scientific and safe when compared with either old-fashioned variety-selection or its antithesis genetic tinkering modification. I'd hate to be an unwitting beta tester of someone's biological cludge.

Anyone?
#1912454
I read somewhere a long time ago that either the Aztecs, or maybe it was the Inca, entrusted the preservation of one of the many strains of corn to one particular family, other families maintaining other strains. That to ensure a diverse food supply and to limit the effect of a blight affecting that one strain. Thus they hoped to preserve their staple food through thick and thin.

If the GM industry were to develop, say, a super resistant high yield staple crop like rice there would be a strong tendency for nations, peoples, call them what you will, to move to that GM crop and perhaps become reliant upon it.

What then if that GM crop was to be hit by a mutated micro organism having evolved to exploit that rich food source, which is probably what would happen since it's what nature does. In the short term there would be famine!

Nations, peoples, might no longer be able to revert to older varieties of rice since they had not been maintained. They would instead be reliant on the Monsantos of this world to 'engineer' a fix…no doubt at a considerable cost.

Gene editing may be a lesser evil than Gene Modification but I feel that's more of a semantic difference than a real one. Where does one end and the other begin? We as a species need biodiversity to survive and we threaten that at our peril.
Mz Hedy, Spooky liked this
By TopCat
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1912457
Mz Hedy wrote:I have a naive view of the operation of DNA in living tissue.

This is always a bad place to start when it comes to evaluating molecular biological techniques.

I think of it like a piece of humungously complicated software influencing the activity of a complex aggregation of machines.

... although that ^^ isn't a terrible analogy.

Within that model, I see gene editing (whether by addition or subtraction) as tinkering with the software at machine code level code without access to the design notes or source code.

... but this ^^ certainly isn't fair. They certainly have the source code. And the understanding of the mechanisms of the chemistry they're seeking to modify that corresponds to the design notes.

In IT they call this sort of thing a cludge

But you're suggesting that the mods go untested. They very much don't.

I'd hate to be an unwitting beta tester of someone's biological cludge.


I don't accept the 'cludge' premise, but by eating food from a GMO, you're not beta testing anything. As I said above, what do you imagine happens when you eat it?

The food is digested. The digestion process does not leave the genetic modification intact as it goes through the gut - all the large molecules are broken down into their constituent bits, which are metabolically indistinguishable from the unmodified plant.

And even if it did, there is no mechanism by which that DNA could be incorporated into yours.

There's no food safety issue with GMOs, because digestion is digestion.

What might conceivably be an issue, and again, there's no evidence for this being a bad thing, even if it's a real effect, would be if somehow the GMOs displaced the non-GM equivalents in some kind of unpredicted way, by breeding more effectively and strangling out the less 'fit' variants.

However, GM crops are not like Japanese Knotweed. They're farmed, ie planted, cultivated and harvested. And I would guess that they're not different enough from the originals to suddenly spread across the world and replace all existing natural flora. The mods are very specific - introducing genes that confer disease resistance, pest resistance, or better water retention. And of course these genes already exist in other plants.

GMOs may also be safer in some ways - if they require less fertiliser, there'll be less run-off into rivers causing algal blooms that suck up the oxygen and kill all the fish, and if they require less insecticide, you and the bees will be eating less of that.

The Frankenstein fears of GMOs are based mostly on ignorance, I think.
By TopCat
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1912459
rf3flyer wrote:If the GM industry were to develop, say, a super resistant high yield staple crop like rice there would be a strong tendency for nations, peoples, call them what you will, to move to that GM crop and perhaps become reliant upon it.

How much variety is there at present? Isn't there already enormous pressure to use the highest-yielding, most disease/pest resistant variants already?

If there isn't much true genetic diversity, I don't see that making better plants makes this problem any worse.

As for famine, we've got a war about to cause that.
#1912468
Cereal crops are basically types of grass, developed through plant “breeding” to give the very high yields of today. As I see it, GM is further development to combat various strains of plant disease, and in a way, to change the plant structure to prevent it being attacked by insects, birds etc. We’ve been consuming GM foodstuff for years. Sometimes, it’s stated on the label.