81–90 of 218 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or make them into burgers.
Given that the human microbiome [0] takes up genetic material from the food we consume, I'd be concerned about eating this stuff. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5711824/
The article cites the July Nature Biotechnology article about unintended consequences of CRISPR-Cas9 but subsequent work has eliminated many such consequences using slightly different techniques. No word of that fact in this article.
If consequences of genetic engineering are poorly understood, then this isn't reason to worry about reckless research. It's reason to rapidly accelerate the research, and remove as many barriers as possible, so that we can reach understanding and controllability quickly, while obviously taking precautions before products of such engineering are widely available.
The fact is that the majority of this work is happening in China, where no one cares what the moral mavens of the WSJ and the NYT think. I don't understand why such sources continually call for barriers to be put in the way of genetic engineering research.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that it doesn’t represent logic, it represents strings of amino acids that form proteins that fold up in unpredictable ways and interact with lots of other things to do stuff that half the time is weird and inefficient and doesn’t make sense.
That is logic, even if we cannot fully comprehend the system yet.
This just in: fucking with stuff we don't fully understand has negative consequences we don't fully understand. I'm grateful this is happening, otherwise our hubris might get too out if hand.
From my laymans POV, DNA is just a shit ton of variables in a very complex code that interact with each other. No single point just does a single thing. They all interact with each other. No different than changing a variable in one piece of code and having it create a bug in another that was previously working. For me, the real scary part is altering something, which inadvertently changes something else that isn't q…
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30629-3 https://www.quantamagazine.org/omnigenic-model-suggests-that...
For such a system to work, there must be great robustness in the way that traits are encoded. The omnigenic model implies graceful degradation, as also observed in neural networks. Only vanishingly rarely is a single neuron/gene critical.
The irony is too strong: “”” The goals are to improve agricultural productivity, produce hardier beasts and reduce practices that are costly or considered inhumane. “”” I can’t help but think about Oryx and Crake . I’m more interested in applying these principles and efforts and resources to plants and non-animal sources. I feel that further modifying animal agriculture is orthogonal to direction we can move civiliza…
We'll, the reality is that most people will continue eating meat regardless of what people like me and you think of it, so it's probably a good idea to put some effort into minimizing the negative consequences. Also, we can research lots of things at once, and research funding is not a zero-sum game. I don't think anybody's defunding non-animal agriculture research for this. Finally, there's a good chance that this s…
1. This is true, I do feel that such consumption is guided by and influenced by culture more so than just taste buds.
2. I feel there could be a bias towards whichever research leads to the best economic results, and with the current economic system we live in, I feel the most wealth generating outcome will overshadow.
3. I agree, science is non-linear and we can do much more of it these days, the benefits of many parallel efforts will compound.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"No single point just does a single thing." Exactly this! And this is why GM foods are more dangerous than you might expect. Even if gene x does only x in organism A, there is no guarantee that gene x does only one thing or the same thing in organism B.
GM foods are arguably no more dangerous than any massively engineered foods we've been eating for decades/centuries. Direct gene modification is more like using a scalpel rather than a 2x4. Still potentially dangerous, but far more precise.
Genetic engineering is more like changing the byte code in your OS hoping to change its functionality. Without having the source code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is logic, even if we cannot fully comprehend the system yet.
Call it that if you want to, but I’d be rather unhappy if that was how machine code worked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. DNA is the most fucking complex and complicated programming language. We have barely any understanding of how the whole thing hangs together, let alone how it's parsed and written, and how it all translates from stem cells to whole organs, an immune system, the complex interrelation between organs, the nervous system, the whole gamut. And that's not even touching on the nature of mind and consciousness in rel…
The equivocation to programming language is misleading, it implies the “language” is context free or context sensitive when dna is probably on the order of natural language complexity (posits I).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GM foods are arguably no more dangerous than any massively engineered foods we've been eating for decades/centuries. Direct gene modification is more like using a scalpel rather than a 2x4. Still potentially dangerous, but far more precise.
GM foods are actually more dangerous, due to how GM works. Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right places. And we just don't know how that even happens, or why. We don't understand nature's algorithm for DNA. No even the tip of the iceberg. Sure, nature isn't always correct, but does thing properly 99.999% of the time. And that's good enough. It is utterly incomparable to…
What you're seeing as "nature knowing what's best" is really just life being able to function with all kinds of random genes all over the place, because the core biochemical pathways are close enough.