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Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

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Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#91

Post by koube »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #87
smaddox wrote: post #69

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.

Intentionally confusing genetic modification with cross breeding is one of monsanto’s favorite talking points. Genetic engineering is more like changing the byte code in your OS hoping to change its functionality. Without having the source code.

This analogy is getting tortured beyond the point of usefulness, because the the other side of this analogy is that cross breeding is mixing files from two different repos together and hoping they still work.

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#93

Post by notheguyouthink »

Valmar wrote: post #76
smaddox wrote: post #69

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…

> Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right place

I feel like this is putting too much faith in "natural" methodologies.

Eg, who's to say a cross breeding solution is less dangerous than a GM solution?

If the concern is that it may take 50 years to know the GM is bad, why are we assuming the non-GM is good now? You could say that people have been cross breading for many many generations, but i'm unsure why we'd know that one cross breed being safe means all crossbreeds are safe. I'm not inherently defending GM. I'm attacking the notion that man made tricks like cross breeding are inherently safe.

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#94

Post by dwaltrip »

smaddox wrote: post #69
jayalpha wrote: post #65

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.

It's more like editing the raw binary of an executable. It's only more precise if you understand the binary representation and the impact of changes. Otherwise it's incredibly imprecise, as you are just randomly flipping switches.

In the case of genetics, we have a some understanding, but it is fairly limited. There is real potential for unexpected harm, given how much we don't know and the complexity of the code. Of course, we can do some amazing things with the parts we do understand.

Selecting breeding is like using a high level GUI that is decently functional. Like most GUIs, it significantly restricts how you can modify the underlying data. The plus side is that it is harder to put the data in a bad or dangerous state using only the controls offered by the GUI.

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#95

Post by snaky »

sleepydog wrote: post #37
Valmar wrote: post #9

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…

It's like if you had a version of C that replaced all compilation errors with undefined behavior.

We were told the evolution do the thing this way exactly, but one error at a time.

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#96

Post by Spooky23 »

curious_fella2 wrote: post #75
smaddox wrote: post #69

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.

Can you elaborate?

Think about wolves. Over many generations of selective breeding, we have poodles.

No engineering required, but obviously a huge change.

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#97

Post by marviel »

bastawhiz wrote: post #23
RRWagner wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what happens once discarded gene-editing technology is available to 14-year olds? There are few technologies in history, including nuclear, that haven't eventually been available to curious teenagers.

We should never avoid discovering something out of the fear that it could be misused. We have an imperative to learn all that is learnable and then use the findings to ensure safety and develop countermeasures. Otherwise, someone else will discover it and we will be unprepared. Top scientists would struggle to create a super disease today. Worrying that a kid will do it when the technology is commoditized is putting…

Would you stand by your initial statement provided the discovery was something which was certain to eliminate all life?

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#98

Post by Gibbon1 »

Quote: and they fear that mutated genes may spread unchecked as animals breed.

Reminds me, similar thing happened with cattle. Some breeding bulls are used to impregnate tens of thousands of cows. I fail to remember the details but one of them 30-40 years ago had a genetic defect which contaminated a lot of the US stock.

Found a link

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/10/the-dairy...

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#99

Post by bumby »

cronix wrote: post #57

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…

Is this similar to the concept of pleiotropy?

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#100

Post by intralizee »

all2 wrote: post #66
vxxzy wrote: post #55

There's always the argument about "Playing God" but we do vaccinate ourselves right? I mean I think the real issue is inflicting a change to a being that will become "Sentient" or "Conscious". When we genetically alter that which has potential for "life", do we know, beyond a doubt, that the change we inflict will be positive for the individual AND positive for our species as a whole? If we cannot say for certain, th…

> There's always the argument about "Playing God" I come from a religious background and this is an argument that has ceased to have meaning to me. We can't possibly play God. We can't create something from nothing. All we can do is fiddle around with this existence we're in. Part of that happens to be genetics. What drove me to change my mind was the question "if you have the ability to treat a genetic disease, and…

I’m writing from a hard determinist mindset. I would argue that whatever is done in life is the will of God. Since choices are an illusion around oneself believing in free will. So basically life is predetermanism for every cause & effect. The phrase playing God just makes me think of something similar to how a bunch of game programmers have already created a simplified replication. The Sims. Who is to say the sims are any different than us. Anyway the create anything out of nothing is symbolic. I really do like your last sentence “last paragraph” and made me want to reply with mentioning this.
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