111–120 of 147 posts
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Life by definition is a process of genetic modification
Truisms don't make for productive discussions. Picture yourself receiving a cancer diagnosis followed by your statement above.
Picture yourself receiving a cancer diagnosis and then hearing that tobacco is organic non-GMO.
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Did no one watch Jurassic Park? You can't put genetic alterations in the environment and expect them not to propagate. The idea that this is possible has been proven multiple times to be utterly and completely false. No matter what the level of care or control. You put it out there, and there is any possibility for it to proliferate... it will proliferate. Period. People don't learn they still think they are in contr…
The only lessons to be learned from Jurassic Park are a) Michael Crichton is a better writer than people think b) Wow, this CGI thing is going to be huge! It's fiction. It did well because it tapped into the zeitgeist and gave form to people's fears. It is not evidence that those fears are justified.
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Truisms don't make for productive discussions. Picture yourself receiving a cancer diagnosis followed by your statement above.
How is cancer related to gmo? You know what is also bad? Traffic jam and rain. And flu. And clowns, I hate them.
How wrong am I to draw the conclusion from this, that people claiming that GMOs are "completely safe" (i.e. cannot have unexpected side effects, such as creation of super-species that completely crowds out other, non-GMO and now inferior, species in the specific niche, or the migration/expression of toxin-producing genes in unexpected places) are full of bullshit? That's my knee-jerk conclusion, I'd be really interes…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only lessons to be learned from Jurassic Park are a) Michael Crichton is a better writer than people think b) Wow, this CGI thing is going to be huge! It's fiction. It did well because it tapped into the zeitgeist and gave form to people's fears. It is not evidence that those fears are justified.
The original Jurassic Park only used CG for the weird animated DNA stand. There dinosaurs were animatronic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only lessons to be learned from Jurassic Park are a) Michael Crichton is a better writer than people think b) Wow, this CGI thing is going to be huge! It's fiction. It did well because it tapped into the zeitgeist and gave form to people's fears. It is not evidence that those fears are justified.
The original Jurassic Park only used CG for the weird animated DNA stand. There dinosaurs were animatronic.
When will we stop pretending like silver bullet solutions exist and that we can tamper with natural systems like this without introducing impactful unintended consequences? We've repeatedly observed that what happens in the lab has little to do with what happens in nature, yet we ignore this lesson routinely and dangerously. Does science have a learning disorder? Could it be, in part, a lack of humility?
Science can no more have a learning disorder than binary numbering systems can have a color, books can think. To blame science is a hopeless reification and insane as a murderer trying to claim innocence because it was crime that killed the victim and not them. We have in fact solved mosquitoes before but I suspect you would like the side effects even less because everyone would. Filling in swamps and wetlands comple…
How wrong am I to draw the conclusion from this, that people claiming that GMOs are "completely safe" (i.e. cannot have unexpected side effects, such as creation of super-species that completely crowds out other, non-GMO and now inferior, species in the specific niche, or the migration/expression of toxin-producing genes in unexpected places) are full of bullshit? That's my knee-jerk conclusion, I'd be really interes…
The actual process of GMO is completely safe. Just like the process of nuclear fission. You have to treat it with care though, otherwise very bad things may occur.
Anything can be safe depending on how you use it, almost by definition, because "rare/no usage" is included in that. The real argument to be had is not whether or not something can potentially fail whatsoever. The argument is, "What are the consequences at the expected rate of failure?"
Viewed from that perspective, much greater stakes are revealed. When the consequence of failure is "Irreversible alteration of an entire species", understandably even a single failure should be cause for pause.