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Atomic Gardening

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Re: Atomic Gardening

#91

Post by jcranmer »

firebaze wrote: post #71
pfdietz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you drill down on many (all?) anti-GMO arguments you will find the evidence for them really isn't there. It's remarkable how the whole ideological edifice is built on nothing.

Occam's razor suggests the best strategy - if available - is to suppress natural reproduction, if you were in possession of a superior genetic strain, in order to stay ahead of the market. Suppressing natural reproduction is the same general principle as suppressing others using your idea/strategy/copyright. I'm sincerely curious why this seems so far fetched to you. If I were the CEO of a company having the option t…

> I'm sincerely curious why this seems so far fetched to you. If I were the CEO of a company having the option to nudge my researchers into this, I probably would, seen from a ethics-detached point of view.

Not the person you're responding to, but there are three main responses I can give:

1. By and large, for most of the food crops that we eat, what we are eating is itself the seed of the crop. Tinkering with the reproductive elements of the crop has a higher chance of screwing up desirable properties of the food part of the crop than, say, introducing resistance to glyphosate.

2. In a related topic, genetic engineering is rarely so competent as being able to do something like "prevent reproduction." Seeing genetic manipulation as being basically like designer babies is pure science fiction; the more complex the demand is, the further in the realm of speculative nonsense it is.

3. On a related topic, there's the impact it has on the production costs of seedcorn. The easiest (cheapest) way to make anything biological is to use natural biology to make it, not try to create it in vitro. If I'm designing seeds, I'd rather make a couple of seeds using the expensive in vitro steps, plant them in a plot for a few generations, and sell their offspring, instead of trying to sell all the seed designing it in vitro. Inhibiting natural reproduction inhibits this method of making the product.

Re: Atomic Gardening

#92

Post by jcranmer »

theptip wrote: post #55
pfdietz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument against IP protection for GMOs makes no sense to me at all. If there were ever a technology for which IP protection was appropriate, it's this one. The plants literally manufacture themselves, so if the IP wasn't protected the investment in the creation of the variety could not be recouped. There would be one season of sales then the market would be gone.

I think it’s immensely problematic that a seed can fall in your farm, and you can be sued for illegally growing Monsanto’s IP. More generally I think it’s a bad societal outcome for one company to use IP laws to monopolize the food production economy. I think allowing this will lead to a much less robust society. I’m all for free markets for most markets, but things get very bad if people don’t have food. So I think…

> I think it’s immensely problematic that a seed can fall in your farm, and you can be sued for illegally growing Monsanto’s IP.

It would be problematic if that's the case. That is not the case however. What you're probably thinking of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise..., where the farmer originally claimed to have had accidental contamination of the Monsanto seeds (this defense was dropped before the actual trial itself, and if you read the actual depositions, it's really hard to actually believe this claim). It's difficult to find any other case that comes close to falling under the claimed situation here (due to the notoriety of this one case), but I don't think that any of them actually do.

Incidentally, I should point out that the underlying issues of plant patents are actually far older than GMO cases (early-mid 20th century). It's not anything actually new.

Re: Atomic Gardening

#93

Post by forgotmypw17 »

asdff wrote: post #86
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GMO in the sense most people mean it (direct genetic modification) almost always also means pesticides. I think that

Organic farming also means pesticides. All farming means pesticides.

Oh, are you an expert on farming?

Re: Atomic Gardening

#94

Post by Asparagirl »

ashwal wrote: post #59
Asparagirl wrote: post #24

Even today, within what could be called the “fancy houseplant” community of garden enthusiasts, we hear stories about Indonesian farmers purposely and repeatedly putting houseplants through airport X-Ray machines to try to induce variegation in their offspring. There are also plants like the Pink Congo, where growers use ethylene gas and auxin hormones to temporarily create pink foliage: https://www.wired.com/story/p…

Where does the fancy houseplant community hangout on the internet? I’m intrigued

Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, believe it or not!

Instagram has been a big driver of houseplant sales; people see other people showing off their plants and their “shelfies” (plant shelf selfies), in gorgeous glamour photos, and it drives demand of the plants and discussion in the comments. Instagram is also a direct sales channel for Indonesian, Thai, and Sri Lankan growers, who often don’t speak English well but know how to tag the photos of their crops in English, so you can search the hashtags and get daily photos of ready stock. And buyers and sellers then use Google Translate to complete the sales in Instagram messages. I usually reach out to multiple growers in Instagram messages to get their latest price lists, compare them to the latest photos in the feeds, and then do a little arbitrage.

Facebook groups are huge for houseplant geeks. And while FB may have a reputation for older folks, the people in these groups trend much younger, many in their twenties. There are groups divvied up by care tips per specific species, and “BST” (Buy, Sell, Trade) groups that are for commerce but not really discussion, and even regional groups that build up local communities. For example, the Bay Area has BART: Bay Area Rare Tropicals, but also Bay Area Hoya. People post what they’re looking for, and do sales and swaps and even arrange transportation for newly purchased plants (i.e. if you’re going from Livermore to Palo Alto mid-week, can you bring my philodendron). These groups tend to have large and active administrator teams, and tracking reputation within the communities/groups helps cut way down on scammers. If you sell someone a crappy plant, or conversely if you waste a seller’s time and flake out on your purchase, word will get around.

Finally, there is some seriously great plant content on YouTube. Detailed how-to videos, propagation experiments, tours of rare plant nurseries and stores, and many people use that content to drive traffic to their own store or to promote their favorite stores. Rare plant unboxing videos are a whole genre! And they’re extra suspenseful because a decent number of wholesale deliveries from overseas do arrive dead.

Outside of those three, Etsy has become a major sales channel for rare houseplant sales. And just so we’re clear, rare houseplants can go for hundreds of dollars. Price inflation isn’t just for lumber, it’s philodendrons, too.

Re: Atomic Gardening

#95

Post by tlb »

DominoTree wrote: post #50
hirundo wrote: post #5

How likely is a random mutation in a plant to be dangerous to the eater? E.g. a protein sequence changed such that a toxic molecule is produced. If subtle or slow acting that could pass a lot of expensive testing and make it to market. But is it risky enough to worry about? Sure it could occur with natural mutations too but at a much lower rate.

I think the most likely scenario would be the plant expressing a new (or modified) allergenic protein, and it seems like there are some decent methods to look for those things already in use. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251449018_Mitigatin...

Also likely is that part of the genome that produces toxins in one part of the plant that isn't normally eaten gets turned on in edible part.

For example: asparagus berries are toxic, but the toxin doesn't appear in the stalk. The mechanism to produce the toxic chemical is there, just turned off in those cells. Enabling it is the sort of thing that small mutations might do.

Re: Atomic Gardening

#96

Post by pvaldes »

pvaldes wrote: post #80
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in your boat. Gene's are letters in a story. To say "That's a salmon gene! It doesn't belong in my tomato!" is puzzling, like "That letter belongs to another book! Keep it out of this book!" Anyway, good ol' paleo food was whatever nature provided, most of what was happy to kill you. Humans tamed 1000's of plants over 50,000 years changing them beyond recognition so they wouldn't hurt us with alkalis and poisons.…

> Gene's are letters in a story. To say "That's a salmon gene! It doesn't belong in my tomato!" is puzzling, like "That letter belongs to another book! Keep it out of this book!" Using the same reasoning we could pick some pieces from an apple computer, mount it in a PC and expect that will fit in place and work flawlessly because, well... plastic is plastic. Right?. It does not work like that. Organisms has been des…

-> Organisms have been...

Re: Atomic Gardening

#97

Post by theptip »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #87
mahogany wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe Greenpeace would argue that we’re already endangering the biosphere a bit with selective breeding, and going any faster would dramatically increase the danger. This is an interesting point. The practice of using GMOs, including the broad category of selective breeding, could ultimately lead to much less biodiversity which is, at best, not fully understood by us, but seems to be quite bad for life.

Conversely, it could lead to much greater biodiversity as we control the process.

Agreed. In principle we could introduce deliberate biodiversity, and as it becomes cheaper to create new variants, it would become easier to find multiple genotypes that achieve the same desired adaptation. You could even imagine doing so programmatically, perhaps even with explicit inputs describing the known issues that need to be optimized around (e.g. Panama Disease in bananas).

Unfortunately I am not optimistic that this is an inevitable outcome, at least not in the short-to-medium term; if you look at the software ecosystem or even just corporate structure in general, you see a strong pressure towards consolidation and monoculture rather than an emphasis on robustness to systemic risks.

However I think it's encouraging that advances in GM technology provide us with a potential long-term solution to the problem of monoculture, without asking us to give up the benefits that the market selected for in our current state. Of course we could solve monoculture in our current system by giving up the cultivars that the market prefers, and instead switching to more-localized and less-productive cultivars, but this doesn't seem like a realistic way of feeding 7-8B people.

Re: Atomic Gardening

#98

Post by ashwal »

Asparagirl wrote: post #94
ashwal wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does the fancy houseplant community hangout on the internet? I’m intrigued

Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, believe it or not! Instagram has been a big driver of houseplant sales; people see other people showing off their plants and their “shelfies” (plant shelf selfies), in gorgeous glamour photos, and it drives demand of the plants and discussion in the comments. Instagram is also a direct sales channel for Indonesian, Thai, and Sri Lankan growers, who often don’t speak English well but…

Thanks for the detailed reply! Can you drop some names of content creators you enjoy as a starting point?

Re: Atomic Gardening

#99

Post by bosswipe »

SigmundA wrote: post #9

It always amuses me to find that people are against GMO foods yet almost everything we eat is GMO depending on how you define it. Almost every crop and livestock has been genetically modified through selective breeding (domestication). Mutagenesis, which atomic gardening falls under, has been around since the 1920's using x-rays and chemicals and currently doesn't normally fall under most GMO definitions because its…

I'm against GMO because 99% of the time it means I'm eating the pesticides that the plant was engineered to resist.

Re: Atomic Gardening

#100

Post by speed_spread »

SigmundA wrote: post #9

It always amuses me to find that people are against GMO foods yet almost everything we eat is GMO depending on how you define it. Almost every crop and livestock has been genetically modified through selective breeding (domestication). Mutagenesis, which atomic gardening falls under, has been around since the 1920's using x-rays and chemicals and currently doesn't normally fall under most GMO definitions because its…

The real problem with GMO is entirely political. Plants with proprietary DNA engineered to ignore a soil-persistent wide-band herbicide. Short term crop productivity rises, forcing farmers to follow suit. Next, prices drop, costs rises, but you can't go back because fields now can't grow anything else for years. It's agricultural lock-in. Add insecticides that destroys pollinating insects for maximum effectiveness...
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