> The lack of science education. A banana modified in a lab and one that is bred through selective breeding are both "GMO", it's just that one is done in a targeted manner and the other relies on random luck in the mutations.
I've logged in just to say that this comment is so quintessentially HN, and it particularly entertains me to see these two sentences juxtaposed because of the lack of domain expertise that it belies.
There is indeed a material difference between genome engineering and breeding. In the former case, you might introduce a gene that expresses any arbitrary protein. For instance, you could introduce a gene that expresses a highly potent toxin, like ricin. That would surely be very bad! In the latter case -- when breeding for variants -- you would be hard pressed to get a castor bean to cross-breed with a banana. So the capabilities of molecular biology allow for a much wider range of possibilities than breeding, hence the importance of regulatory oversight and caution.
P.S. There has been a lot of talk recently about what's wrong with the culture on HN. I'll tell you exactly what it is: people write overly confident and flippant things far outside their areas of expertise. Many of you run websites and phone apps: you do not know much of anything about other areas. Why are you therefore writing about those topics on the internet with such feigned authority?
I've logged in just to say that this comment is so quintessentially HN, and it particularly entertains me to see these two sentences juxtaposed because of the lack of domain expertise that it belies.
There is indeed a material difference between genome engineering and breeding. In the former case, you might introduce a gene that expresses any arbitrary protein. For instance, you could introduce a gene that expresses a highly potent toxin, like ricin. That would surely be very bad! In the latter case -- when breeding for variants -- you would be hard pressed to get a castor bean to cross-breed with a banana. So the capabilities of molecular biology allow for a much wider range of possibilities than breeding, hence the importance of regulatory oversight and caution.
P.S. There has been a lot of talk recently about what's wrong with the culture on HN. I'll tell you exactly what it is: people write overly confident and flippant things far outside their areas of expertise. Many of you run websites and phone apps: you do not know much of anything about other areas. Why are you therefore writing about those topics on the internet with such feigned authority?