His views are insubstantial. His main argument is that his previous ad hominem positions were not sufficient to condemn GMOs (correct) and that GMOs haven't caused any problems yet.
He has not presented evidence that GMO's are safe. He has two main arguments:
1. Trial and error crossbreeding affects entire genes.
2. Viruses sometimes spread genes from one organism to another.
First, trial and error crossbreeding isn't likely to produce anything catastrophic. We've been interbreeding plants for milennia. Current techniques may be more risky, but generally speaking it should be hard for plants to produce a horrid mutation based on natural interbreeding mechanisms.
Second, just becauses cross species gene transfers do occur doesn't mean that it's safe when we do it. If such transfers have occurred in nature for a long, long time, then it's safe to say that nature has created pathways that are safe. Our pathways are new.
I'm making a Talebian argument here. Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.
It means nothing to say that GMOs haven't caused harm yet. All it would take would be ONE catastrophic GMO plant to cause large amounts of damage. By definition, we won't be able to foresee this until it happens.
HN is a very tech positive community, and also a community that's very aware of the complexity of large system, and their fragility when meddled with. When considering GMOs, many forget complexity due to a pro-technology attitude.
> Current techniques may be more risky, but generally speaking it should be hard for plants to produce a horrid mutation based on natural interbreeding mechanisms.
What about the (widespread) practice of mutation breeding? [1] Blasting seeds with X-rays and gamma rays in an attempt to generate new cultivars is a genetic wrecking ball compared to performing genetic engineering.
Conventional breeding has given us plenty of Oopses. The modern kiwifruit, whose progenitor (the smaller and less tasty Chinese gooseberry) may have been safely snacked upon by many folks who would today suffer a lethal allergic reaction after eating a kiwi. In the 1980s, a mutant variety of zucchini began producing enough cucurbitacin toxin to hospitalize a number of people. [2]
> If such transfers have occurred in nature for a long, long time, then it's safe to say that nature has created pathways that are safe. Our pathways are new.
We're still playing by nature's fundamental biological rules, and nature has had hundreds of millions of years to develop resiliency inside that same framework. One example: bacterial mechanisms to mitigate the damage from undesirable horizontal gene transfers by recognizing and deactivating to foreign genetic material: [3]
> I'm making a Talebian argument here. Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.
I think "incremental" is a bit of an understatement if we can, for example, feed tens of millions of humans in parts of the world where conventional crops cannot (yet?) provide reliable and sufficient nutrition, a critical step in reducing poverty.
Having said all this, I think crop monoculture is a serious problem, but I think it's an issue that needs to be solved through sound policy, not just through science.
I'm curious what sort of realistic disaster scenario you think might occur due to cross-species gene transfer (and for that matter, purely synthetic genes) in GMOs, and how the existing safeguards are inadequate against it. Normally I'm against FUD, but please, go nuts, so long as there's a reasonable chance of it occurring (i.e. we're not talking about a mad scientist who wants to create man-eating plants)
Very well said, and I'm heartened to see your comment at the top of the page.
I think it's worth emphasizing that GMOs aren't a category, from a safety point of view. There can't be any evidence that all GMOs that will ever be produced will be safe, any more than there could be evidence that all drugs that will ever be synthesized will be safe. We have to look at them individually. I don't think the public has digested this point yet.
EDITED to add: It's also worth keeping in mind that in some cases, the primary danger may not be from the plant itself, but from pesticides to which it has been engineered to be resistant. I'm speaking, of course, of glyphosate, which I understand is being applied in growing quantities as the weeds it is intended to kill evolve their own resistance.
I read his argument differently. He is not claiming they are safe in an absolutist sense, merely that they are safe enough to alleviate the food shortage the world faces without them.
There are no magic pathways for gene "transfer". Theres chromosomal crossover and there are random mutations. These are very very blunt instruments and the only reason they work to create complex organisms is through sheer number of different organisms and natural selection.
Nature is messing with nature all the time through pure randomness, the penultimate chaos monkey. Nothing has collapsed.
>>I'm making a Talebian argument here. Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.
I've never understood this argument. It basically amounts to "yes, there are advantages to GMOs, but we haven't found any disadvantages yet, therefore they are unsafe!"
This is basically the equivalent of early seafarers being afraid of uncharted waters and writing on their maps "here be dragons".
edit: I should also point out that the complexity of a system does not necessarily mean that messing with it will cause problems. If anything, that same complexity may include many fail-safe mechanisms to prevent problems when the system is messed with.
Without addressing the validity or invalidity of your assessment of the merits of his position (or the position itself), his views are insubstantial (or at least of limited substance) for some other reasons too.
For instance, while he appeals to science and reason here, not all the organic-enviro-antiGMO complex holds its positions for reasons of science. There's a substantial number of people for whom it is part of superstitious and para-religious reasoning behind peoples' objections. (In other news, Whole Foods sells homeopathic remedies.) Even beyond the superstitious, there are a lot of anti-GMO advocates whose primary form of investment is emotional, not intellectual. (Actually, you could probably say that about most political positions...)
It's easy enough to treat the guy as a heretic in that sort of environment.
> Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.
this is an argument against literally any kind of technology. electricity, medicine, computers, steam engines, light bulbs, animal husbandry, farming, ...
Plant breeding has always been tinkering with the genome, why aren't people scared of it? Read the Wikipedia page on the various ways plants are bombarded with radiation, mutagenic chemicals, have nuclei fuzed with electricity, et al in "non-GMO 'organic'" plant breeding.
Why is the more error prone process, in which we are ignorant of the mechanism, presumed safer?
If we invented a machine which randomly bred plants, sampled their DNA, and tested for the modification of a single gene, or infected plants with naturally occuring bacteria or virii and waited for an inter-species transfer, would you find this less scary than a process which uses a petri dish and a pipette?
There's a continuous gradient between the way people bred, modified, and selected plants thousands of years ago up until today. Our precision and our knowledge has gotten a lot better.
The only reason at all to trust maize, or other human domestic modifications, is simply because they've been around for a long long time and so you can infer safer because if there was something dangerous, it would have shown up already.
Or, are we simply ignoring dangers that have already existed but become desensitized to them, like gluten issues, or lactose intolerance. Our diet has changed radically since the invention of agriculture, and in a way, much of man's early experiments at domestication of plants, our first "GMO" so to speak, may have had unforseen circumstances.
But we brush it all off, yet people are hypersensitive to any minute theoretical issue that could happen with GMO, real or imagined.
This boils down a lot I think to human emotion, and our notions of disgust with respect to food. We like what is common and fear the unknown.
Take the International Rice Organisation's IR8. It was supposed to be a miracle rice that yielded double the rice of existing strains. Introducing this rice meant farmers had to use pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers which had not previously been part of their practices. The herbicides and pesticides killed the local ecosystems including secondary crops which used to grow alongside the rice in paddies.
The IR8 was certainly higher yield when fed properly, but under-performed without that industrial support. That industrial support costs money: so the farmer has to produce more rice to pay for the materials required to produce more rice, in what is essentially a net loss situation.
What price to you put on the sound of frogs singing in the rice field? What value is there in being able to drink or swim in the water downstream without fear of poisoning?
I think that the real problem is the false dichotomy between 'all GMOs are bad' and 'all GMOs are good'. There is clearly a middle path - 'some GMOs are safe, and some aren't, and whether release is acceptable depends on the organisms, the genes, the methods used, and the level of testing done'.
I don't think putting herbicide resistance genes into plant species that don't already have them is a very good idea, because it is a short term solution (selective pressure on weeds will eventually create the same thing anyway), has other environmental costs (the evidence last time I checked is that while glyphosate breaks down quickly, if it gets into waterways in the short period before it has broken down, it can cause considerable damage), and even without any form of gene transfer can end up as a weed (the definition of a weed is a plant growing somewhere where it is unwanted - GMO corn in a GMO soy field is a weed).
Even worse applications can be imagined - for example, imagine a cultivar of corn with genes for a drug, where the corn is toxic because of high levels of the drug - would you want that growing in the next field over from where the corn you are going to eat grows?
I think that it is right for reasonable precautionary measures to be in place whenever substantial genetic engineering of plants is going on, whether it is through transgenic methods, through mutagenically exposed plants, or even through selective breeding combined with sequencing, because there are still high risks.
It is the extreme positions of absolute prohibition or absolute acceptance of all GMOs which are irrational.
If he's changed his mind based on facts, then I'm happy for him. However, the implications of Monsanto's Terminator seed technology (DRM for plants) is so sweeping and, frankly, frightening that whatever time society wasted due to the anti-GMO activism was worth it.
Does anyone really think that if we didn't make a stink about GMO that they wouldn't have gone full steam ahead?
Uh... what implications would those be? Sterile hybrids of plants where the offspring of hybrids are generally undesirable anyway?
DRM for computers is bad because the only way for it to work is to ban computers as we know them and replace them with something fundamentally broken. There really isn't a plant equivalent.
I'm always surprised and intrigued when people switch from being vehemently on one side of a debate to the other. I'm reminded of televangelist Pat Robertson claiming that the Earth is way more than 6,000 years old: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/29/pat-robertson-chall...
One of my favorite conversation prompts is to ask people, "what have you read recently that changed your mind about some issue?" People happily reinforce their own cognitive dissonance with internet "news bubbles" and echo chamber forums. Letting your mental guard down to fairly reevaluate your own beliefs is an unfortunately rare event.
A superficial reading of the news would lead one to believe that Monsanto == GMO, and I believe a lot of people are swayed to be in the anti-GMO camp by the bullying tactics of Monsanto.
Along the line of the argument, "John Smith, leading health care reform advocate, admits health care reform is unnecessary." And "Renowned atheist, on deathbed, admits atheism was a mistake." At least with the atheist guy I had heard of him.
So it is an 'appeal to authority' argument, but it's not even an authority who many people have heard of, and fewer still have ever thought of as an authority on the topic, and in fact who it looks like the side he is now aligned did not consider to be an authority until he said he now agreed with them.
Also the article's suggestion that this guy created GMO criticism and without him no one would have asked questions about GMO safety is absurd. Lots of people have reasonably been asking those questions. It's absolutely not something that one person created out of nothing and became the undisputed world leader as if he is some kind of pope. The article reads a lot like propaganda trying to create a straw man leader and then watch as the straw man commits suicide.
Another problem is the conflating of criticism with attacks/vilification, and the ad-hominem use of claiming critics are anti-science: "To vilify GMOs is to be as anti-science as climate-change deniers". This is the opposite of reality. It is very science oriented to ask about risks and be as interested in long term safety trials as we are with pharmaceuticals.
(To be clear, I am not getting to pros or cons of the argument, just noting this article makes a poor argument.)
I don't see the headline as making a claim to authority because the speaker used to believe differently. His view on the issue will be different because he's been on both sides, and those sorts of views can help us to see how to bridge gaps in understanding. The value is not that he's more right, but that he has a different perspective.
The headline was written by a poor winner, but that doesn't make the content less interesting.
As someone who is totally dependent on a gluten-free diet to avoid constant sickness, the idea of people tinkering with food proteins is horrifying. If it's employed for very particular, controlled reasons then so be it. But there is the potential for immense hubris here. Note that when I went to the doctor some years ago and told them I was sure bread was making me sick they told me I was wrong because I tested negative for Celiac disease.
So was this guy also involved in hosing food irradiation? The insane campaign against food irradiation -- thanks to which we continue to eat all kinds of unnecessary preservatives -- was what led me to abandon Greenpeace.
If you can separate GMOs from the more evil commercial activities revolving around them (patents, seed control, ...), then I don't get it.
I'm not saying that's an easy separation to make, but science and technology will continue to move forward. If it brings about our end, so be it. You can say the same about a lot of different technologies. It just happens to be the dangerous phase we are in (transitioning from a Type 0 to a Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale).
I was fascinated by reading Marc's 'Six Degrees' and would still recommend it. Now I wonder how far he is away from saying climate change isn't happening at all.
"What you don’t have the right to do is to stand in the way of others who hope and strive for ways of doing things differently, and hopefully better. Farmers who understand the pressures of a growing population and a warming world. Who understand that yields per hectare are the most important environmental metric. And who understand that technology never stops developing, and that even the fridge and the humble potato were new and scary once."
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
I know enough to know that we don't know enough. Too many times we've done things that in hindsight should never have been done had we had more information. I fear this may be one of those times.
[+] [-] graeme|13 years ago|reply
He has not presented evidence that GMO's are safe. He has two main arguments:
1. Trial and error crossbreeding affects entire genes. 2. Viruses sometimes spread genes from one organism to another.
First, trial and error crossbreeding isn't likely to produce anything catastrophic. We've been interbreeding plants for milennia. Current techniques may be more risky, but generally speaking it should be hard for plants to produce a horrid mutation based on natural interbreeding mechanisms.
Second, just becauses cross species gene transfers do occur doesn't mean that it's safe when we do it. If such transfers have occurred in nature for a long, long time, then it's safe to say that nature has created pathways that are safe. Our pathways are new.
I'm making a Talebian argument here. Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.
It means nothing to say that GMOs haven't caused harm yet. All it would take would be ONE catastrophic GMO plant to cause large amounts of damage. By definition, we won't be able to foresee this until it happens.
HN is a very tech positive community, and also a community that's very aware of the complexity of large system, and their fragility when meddled with. When considering GMOs, many forget complexity due to a pro-technology attitude.
[+] [-] cheeseprocedure|13 years ago|reply
What about the (widespread) practice of mutation breeding? [1] Blasting seeds with X-rays and gamma rays in an attempt to generate new cultivars is a genetic wrecking ball compared to performing genetic engineering.
Conventional breeding has given us plenty of Oopses. The modern kiwifruit, whose progenitor (the smaller and less tasty Chinese gooseberry) may have been safely snacked upon by many folks who would today suffer a lethal allergic reaction after eating a kiwi. In the 1980s, a mutant variety of zucchini began producing enough cucurbitacin toxin to hospitalize a number of people. [2]
> If such transfers have occurred in nature for a long, long time, then it's safe to say that nature has created pathways that are safe. Our pathways are new.
We're still playing by nature's fundamental biological rules, and nature has had hundreds of millions of years to develop resiliency inside that same framework. One example: bacterial mechanisms to mitigate the damage from undesirable horizontal gene transfers by recognizing and deactivating to foreign genetic material: [3]
> I'm making a Talebian argument here. Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.
I think "incremental" is a bit of an understatement if we can, for example, feed tens of millions of humans in parts of the world where conventional crops cannot (yet?) provide reliable and sufficient nutrition, a critical step in reducing poverty.
Having said all this, I think crop monoculture is a serious problem, but I think it's an issue that needs to be solved through sound policy, not just through science.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding
[2] http://books.google.ca/books?id=Jcq1wTe_93UC&lpg=PP1&...
[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17575047
[+] [-] bascule|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ScottBurson|13 years ago|reply
I think it's worth emphasizing that GMOs aren't a category, from a safety point of view. There can't be any evidence that all GMOs that will ever be produced will be safe, any more than there could be evidence that all drugs that will ever be synthesized will be safe. We have to look at them individually. I don't think the public has digested this point yet.
EDITED to add: It's also worth keeping in mind that in some cases, the primary danger may not be from the plant itself, but from pesticides to which it has been engineered to be resistant. I'm speaking, of course, of glyphosate, which I understand is being applied in growing quantities as the weeds it is intended to kill evolve their own resistance.
[+] [-] iand|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revelation|13 years ago|reply
Nature is messing with nature all the time through pure randomness, the penultimate chaos monkey. Nothing has collapsed.
[+] [-] CamperBob2|13 years ago|reply
There are uncountable ways in which we all "mess with" Nature on a daily basis, both individually and as a society. Why single out this one?
[+] [-] enraged_camel|13 years ago|reply
I've never understood this argument. It basically amounts to "yes, there are advantages to GMOs, but we haven't found any disadvantages yet, therefore they are unsafe!"
This is basically the equivalent of early seafarers being afraid of uncharted waters and writing on their maps "here be dragons".
edit: I should also point out that the complexity of a system does not necessarily mean that messing with it will cause problems. If anything, that same complexity may include many fail-safe mechanisms to prevent problems when the system is messed with.
[+] [-] fennecfoxen|13 years ago|reply
For instance, while he appeals to science and reason here, not all the organic-enviro-antiGMO complex holds its positions for reasons of science. There's a substantial number of people for whom it is part of superstitious and para-religious reasoning behind peoples' objections. (In other news, Whole Foods sells homeopathic remedies.) Even beyond the superstitious, there are a lot of anti-GMO advocates whose primary form of investment is emotional, not intellectual. (Actually, you could probably say that about most political positions...)
It's easy enough to treat the guy as a heretic in that sort of environment.
[+] [-] andylei|13 years ago|reply
this is an argument against literally any kind of technology. electricity, medicine, computers, steam engines, light bulbs, animal husbandry, farming, ...
[+] [-] bitcartel|13 years ago|reply
Q. What do you call someone who supports nuclear power, shale gas fracking and GM crops?
A. An environmentalist.
[+] [-] cromwellian|13 years ago|reply
Why is the more error prone process, in which we are ignorant of the mechanism, presumed safer?
If we invented a machine which randomly bred plants, sampled their DNA, and tested for the modification of a single gene, or infected plants with naturally occuring bacteria or virii and waited for an inter-species transfer, would you find this less scary than a process which uses a petri dish and a pipette?
There's a continuous gradient between the way people bred, modified, and selected plants thousands of years ago up until today. Our precision and our knowledge has gotten a lot better.
The only reason at all to trust maize, or other human domestic modifications, is simply because they've been around for a long long time and so you can infer safer because if there was something dangerous, it would have shown up already.
Or, are we simply ignoring dangers that have already existed but become desensitized to them, like gluten issues, or lactose intolerance. Our diet has changed radically since the invention of agriculture, and in a way, much of man's early experiments at domestication of plants, our first "GMO" so to speak, may have had unforseen circumstances.
But we brush it all off, yet people are hypersensitive to any minute theoretical issue that could happen with GMO, real or imagined.
This boils down a lot I think to human emotion, and our notions of disgust with respect to food. We like what is common and fear the unknown.
[+] [-] manicdee|13 years ago|reply
The IR8 was certainly higher yield when fed properly, but under-performed without that industrial support. That industrial support costs money: so the farmer has to produce more rice to pay for the materials required to produce more rice, in what is essentially a net loss situation.
What price to you put on the sound of frogs singing in the rice field? What value is there in being able to drink or swim in the water downstream without fear of poisoning?
[+] [-] A1kmm|13 years ago|reply
I don't think putting herbicide resistance genes into plant species that don't already have them is a very good idea, because it is a short term solution (selective pressure on weeds will eventually create the same thing anyway), has other environmental costs (the evidence last time I checked is that while glyphosate breaks down quickly, if it gets into waterways in the short period before it has broken down, it can cause considerable damage), and even without any form of gene transfer can end up as a weed (the definition of a weed is a plant growing somewhere where it is unwanted - GMO corn in a GMO soy field is a weed).
Even worse applications can be imagined - for example, imagine a cultivar of corn with genes for a drug, where the corn is toxic because of high levels of the drug - would you want that growing in the next field over from where the corn you are going to eat grows?
I think that it is right for reasonable precautionary measures to be in place whenever substantial genetic engineering of plants is going on, whether it is through transgenic methods, through mutagenically exposed plants, or even through selective breeding combined with sequencing, because there are still high risks.
It is the extreme positions of absolute prohibition or absolute acceptance of all GMOs which are irrational.
[+] [-] celiac|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] politician|13 years ago|reply
Does anyone really think that if we didn't make a stink about GMO that they wouldn't have gone full steam ahead?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technol... wherein we learn that Monsanto acquired the company that did the initial R&D.
[+] [-] bcoates|13 years ago|reply
DRM for computers is bad because the only way for it to work is to ban computers as we know them and replace them with something fundamentally broken. There really isn't a plant equivalent.
[+] [-] andylei|13 years ago|reply
what do intellectual property laws have to do with being pro or con GMOs?
[+] [-] baddox|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aroberge|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droithomme|13 years ago|reply
Along the line of the argument, "John Smith, leading health care reform advocate, admits health care reform is unnecessary." And "Renowned atheist, on deathbed, admits atheism was a mistake." At least with the atheist guy I had heard of him.
So it is an 'appeal to authority' argument, but it's not even an authority who many people have heard of, and fewer still have ever thought of as an authority on the topic, and in fact who it looks like the side he is now aligned did not consider to be an authority until he said he now agreed with them.
Also the article's suggestion that this guy created GMO criticism and without him no one would have asked questions about GMO safety is absurd. Lots of people have reasonably been asking those questions. It's absolutely not something that one person created out of nothing and became the undisputed world leader as if he is some kind of pope. The article reads a lot like propaganda trying to create a straw man leader and then watch as the straw man commits suicide.
Another problem is the conflating of criticism with attacks/vilification, and the ad-hominem use of claiming critics are anti-science: "To vilify GMOs is to be as anti-science as climate-change deniers". This is the opposite of reality. It is very science oriented to ask about risks and be as interested in long term safety trials as we are with pharmaceuticals.
(To be clear, I am not getting to pros or cons of the argument, just noting this article makes a poor argument.)
[+] [-] aeturnum|13 years ago|reply
The headline was written by a poor winner, but that doesn't make the content less interesting.
[+] [-] fennecfoxen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dizzystar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celiac|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iand|13 years ago|reply
http://www.ofc.org.uk/files/ofc/papers/mark-lynas-lecture-ox...
Here's the video:
http://www.ofc.org.uk/videos/2013/mark-lynas-changing-perspe...
[+] [-] Tloewald|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkat|13 years ago|reply
I'm not saying that's an easy separation to make, but science and technology will continue to move forward. If it brings about our end, so be it. You can say the same about a lot of different technologies. It just happens to be the dangerous phase we are in (transitioning from a Type 0 to a Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale).
[+] [-] graeme|13 years ago|reply
I'll post my comment separately once I've looked at it.
[+] [-] noiv|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheeseprocedure|13 years ago|reply
"What you don’t have the right to do is to stand in the way of others who hope and strive for ways of doing things differently, and hopefully better. Farmers who understand the pressures of a growing population and a warming world. Who understand that yields per hectare are the most important environmental metric. And who understand that technology never stops developing, and that even the fridge and the humble potato were new and scary once."
http://www.ofc.org.uk/files/ofc/papers/mark-lynas-lecture-ox...
[+] [-] dgbsco|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ScotterC|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manicdee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KerrickStaley|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] latinohere|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyarkles|13 years ago|reply