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The problem with the Darling 58 genetically modified chestnut tree

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Re: The problem with the Darling 58 genetically modified chestnut tree

#41

Post by Thorrez »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #39
alexvoda wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of what you said goes against common knowledge of the history of the vaccine. You will have to provide solid sources for your claims in order to not appear as a conspiracy theory peddler. What you mentioned in the first paragraph is not vaccination, it is called variolation. It predates vaccination by a large margin and was far more dangerous.

> a conspiracy theory peddler. What conspiracy? It’s a theory of lost knowledge / confusion, but no one is conspiring with anyone.

If scientists found out that it wasn't cowpox and then conspired to keep that fact secret, or conspired to say "we all knew it wasn't cowpox from the beginning", that would be a conspiracy.

Re: The problem with the Darling 58 genetically modified chestnut tree

#42

Post by sfn42 »

Suppafly wrote: post #22
sidewndr46 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely an odd take, given the 150+ saplings I pull from my meager backyard every spring. I'm still killing off the root system of some Elm trees that were destroyed in 2021 during the big freeze here in Texas. If I didn't keep that in check I'd have dozens of elms at this point.

There definitely is a weird dichotomy between intentionally planted trees and the ones that just randomly show up. Maple trees grow like dandelions here in the midwest. Hell I've had a little cottonwood tree growing in the corner of my truck bed for 3-4 years. It never gets any bigger but always produces new leaves every spring.

Get one of those fancy scissors, do some pruning and say you're doing this new thing called truck bonsai

Re: The problem with the Darling 58 genetically modified chestnut tree

#43

Post by koliber »

whartung wrote: post #10
rulalala wrote: post #4

IMHO this is a romantic effort, no one can plant a tree species at such a scale.

Sometimes, I just have some view of a city, or whatever, look out, quietly scan the horizon and just muse "every tree I see was planted by someone". Someone said "here, there will be a tree" and it was so. Small ones, big ones. They're just everywhere. "See that park over there? Someone put every one of those trees in the ground." Then, as a corollary, one day, a parking lot has several dozen trees. Next day, they're…

Well put.

It's incredible how our minds are unable to grasp timescales greater than a decade. It dawned on me recently. I visited a place that had trees which were roughly my height 10 years ago. It's a genuine forest now.

Trees are perfectly fine with those timescales. Let them be and they will grow.

Another mind-blown moment was when I was visiting a park in Warsaw. Seemed like old-growth forest - little do I know! There was a display nearby which shared, that during WWII, the Nazis cut the park clear because the opposition was hiding in the trees. That was less than 100 years ago.

Re: The problem with the Darling 58 genetically modified chestnut tree

#44

Post by moomin »

bluGill wrote: post #28
sidewndr46 wrote: post #19

So this group wants to propagate a GMO to "save" a tree species? Which is of course impossible with current mechanisms. Although it seems that producing a near replacement tree is likely within reach. But they can't even seem to be sure what edited organism they are trying to propagate? This is why I do not trust GMO stuff. I have no special credentials (just an undergraduate degree) but even at that level it was cle…

how is GMO different from normal breeding where we hane no clue what mutations happen. Normal breeding doesn't even attempt toestudy for safety. Yes the science should have been better done but the worst case of GMO is the same as everything else.

You’ll get a lot of answers to this question, I’ll try to give one that’s distinct from the others:

Practical observation of the two techniques reveals very different outcomes and behaviours. Selective breeding takes time and has intermediate stages that help you see if you’re on the right track. Direct modification: if you get it wrong you’re back to the drawing board.

Worse, legally they’re two very different animals that are treated very differently. If you want big bucks, you want to go the GMO route. The combination of the risky nature with the potential profits makes an ideal environment for malpractice, whether it’s cherry-picking data, deliberately making seeds that aren’t long-term viable or strategies such as long-term pesticides which have a detrimental effect of neighbouring farms.

So in theory, I don’t have a moral objection to GMO. In practice, I can see why the EU banned it.

Re: The problem with the Darling 58 genetically modified chestnut tree

#45

Post by Dr_Birdbrain »

gradschoolfail wrote: post #16

For those, like me, who wondered, why not just reclone the original Darling 58? Here is the answer from TACF: “ Why not then return to the “real” Darling 58? The first reason is that the Darling 58 also uses the 35S constitutive promoter which appears to result in a variety of metabolic costs to the tree and likely causes the majority of performance problems observed in the Darling line. Secondly, there are only a ha…

I’m still confused, why can’t they return to the real Darling 58? Are they saying even the real 58 is not that good, and if they are going to rewind that far back they might as well start from scratch?

Re: The problem with the Darling 58 genetically modified chestnut tree

#46

Post by moomin »

boxed wrote: post #40
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a conspiracy theory peddler. What conspiracy? It’s a theory of lost knowledge / confusion, but no one is conspiring with anyone.

He asked for a citation. Please provide one.

Okay, I just jumped down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what OP might mean. I think they’ve got it sideways. I think they’re talking about vaccinia, a virus related to cowpox (and smallpox) that form the basis of modern smallpox vaccines. The origin of the virus is, entertainingly, lost to time due to poor record keeping.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinia

There’s also “kinepox”, but I _think_ that’s just a different method of cowpox vaccine delivery.

Re: The problem with the Darling 58 genetically modified chestnut tree

#47

Post by HelloNurse »

hoseja wrote: post #17
buescher wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A country of two million people managed to plant six million trees in one day in 2008 https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE4AI49U/

Planting trees results in inferior forests. A healthy forest comes from natural forestation that goes through pioneer species stages.

A healthy forest comes from strict conservation laws, confiscation, expropriation, etc. When land is secured, what to plant is a technical detail.

Achieving a good approximation of pristine natural forests might have a lower priority than the variable needs to increase rare plants, provide an habitat for rare animals, make the forest robust against climate and geological hazards, dealing with people with friendly (e.g. edible fruit) or hostile (e.g. thick vegetation to discourage secret hemp cultivation) features, etc.

Re: The problem with the Darling 58 genetically modified chestnut tree

#48

Post by bluGill »

interroboink wrote: post #30
causality0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, when you take a process that has traditionally been done with a baseball bat and start doing it with a knife, suddenly everyone comes out of the woodwork to talk about how your knife is too dull and it should either be done with a scalpel or not at all.

Just to tap the brakes for anyone wanting to take your analogy too far: a lot of objections about GMO in general are about the accelerated rate at which the changes can be made, relative to traditional methods (such as breeding). The worry is that we might be introducing altered genomes at a rate faster than we can observe and understand the downstream impacts. So in those arguments (which are the majority, in GMO de…

> the accelerated rate at which the changes can be made, relative to traditional methods

Citation needed there. I know the claim is common, but GMO is inserting one known mutation. How many mutations are there from parent to children is not something I can find a citation for, but since most mutations do nothing (or kill the child) there must be a lot of mutations involved in traditional breeding not one which means that GMO is much decelerated vs traditional breeding.

Re: The problem with the Darling 58 genetically modified chestnut tree

#49

Post by bluGill »

moomin wrote: post #44
bluGill wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is GMO different from normal breeding where we hane no clue what mutations happen. Normal breeding doesn't even attempt toestudy for safety. Yes the science should have been better done but the worst case of GMO is the same as everything else.

You’ll get a lot of answers to this question, I’ll try to give one that’s distinct from the others: Practical observation of the two techniques reveals very different outcomes and behaviours. Selective breeding takes time and has intermediate stages that help you see if you’re on the right track. Direct modification: if you get it wrong you’re back to the drawing board. Worse, legally they’re two very different anima…

> Selective breeding takes time and has intermediate stages that help you see if you’re on the right track.

Only if selective breeding needs more than one mutation, otherwise you are just waiting/searching for the desired mutation in a random sample.

> Direct modification: if you get it wrong you’re back to the drawing board.

Either way you are back the the drawing board. Just that with selective breeding you have no idea how much longer you will wait to get the desired mutation.

Re: The problem with the Darling 58 genetically modified chestnut tree

#50

Post by bluGill »

worik wrote: post #33
bluGill wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is GMO different from normal breeding where we hane no clue what mutations happen. Normal breeding doesn't even attempt toestudy for safety. Yes the science should have been better done but the worst case of GMO is the same as everything else.

> how is GMO different from normal breeding where we hane no clue what mutations happen The answer is in your question. We have no clue. What we do not know about how living organisms recreate themselves is much more, and more important (IMO) than what we do know. We know that DNA plays an important role. We also know that DNA is not the whole story. We know very little about how DNA plays it role. We terribly confus…

> In normal breeding we do not have to be concerned about what we do not know, when we start changing DNA it becomes very important

Normal breeding we are also changing DNA - it is just random uncontrolled mutation.

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