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CRISPR-Altered Plants Are Not Going To Be Regulated (For Now) (fastcompany.com)
Good news for people who like genetically altered tomatoes and other plants. The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will no longer regulate them. From a report: The USDA not only rolled back Obama-era rules regulating genetically edited plants, but now it claims that plants whose genomes have been altered using gene-editing technology (read: CRISPR) pose "no risk," MIT's Technology Review reports. While CRISPR engineering is still a relatively new science whose full impact is not yet known, the USDA has decided that it is merely an innovative shortcut to the age-old practice of plant breeding.
It just ends up as proteins and starches when you eat it. Now if they produced some kind of chemical that ended up as poisonous that's a different story. The only reason you'd prefer one over the other as an end user is either taste or cost.
It's just a more engineered version of why the Irish nearly replaced their entire crop with potatoes back in the day. They were easier to plant and produced good yield... until they didn't. Variety is the space of life after all.
I don't read AC
You're shocked that the current administration rolled back rules set during the Obama administration and took the opposite stance?
Good news for people who like genetically altered tomatoes and other plants
I defy anyone to find me a crop we raise that is NOT genetically altered. Seriously, wander around any grocery store and find me a single vegetable, fruit, grain, or protein for sale that humans have not genetically altered substantially. The only item I can think of are wild caught seafood. The only difference between them is the techniques used but they ALL have been genetically altered. Same goes for your household pet, the fibers in the clothes you wear, etc. We've been at this genetic alteration game for as long as we've been raising crops. Odds are that a good approximations of none of the food you've ever eaten wasn't genetically modified by humans at some juncture.
The USDA not only rolled back Obama-era rules regulating genetically edited plants, but now it claims that plants whose genomes have been altered using gene-editing technology (read: CRISPR) pose "no risk,"
While I'm not remotely against GMOs and gene editing, claiming that there is "no risk" given our current knowledge is more than a little absurd. Every researcher I've ever spoken with about CRISPR (my wife works with several of them) says something to the effect of "whoa that's powerful stuff... we should be careful until we understand it better". (their real concerns tend to be more in the area of bio-weapons and pathogens but crops are a mild concern of theirs) While it might turn out that there is actually no meaningful risk from CRISPR on crops, that doesn't mean we should rush headlong into the unknown without thinking through each step and making sure we know what we are doing as best we can. Modifying plants demonstrably affects ecosystems, sometimes in ways we didn't predict. Sometimes the modifications themselves aren't harmful but the actions they permit are - see modifying crops to be resistant to chemicals like glyphosate where the genetic modification isn't harmful itself but the herbicides or behaviors they facilitate clearly are harmful on some level. I see no evidence that we shouldn't use technologies like CRISPR but spending some years testing and learning seems like a practical first step and if we need some regulations to make that happen, so be it.
Genetic editing is just a precisely targeted, one-generation way of modifying natural species the way we have been doing since the beginning of agriculture.
Just because we're doing it doesn't mean we should.
What are you talking about? We've been genetically modifying plants for as long as there have been humans and it is fine. Yes we should be doing it, we will continue to do it, and the techniques for doing it are only going to get more effective. It will be effectively impossible to feed the human population without GMOs. It's not even a choice really.
I won't be satisfied about the safety of GMO until we've had a couple hundred years of informed consent trials.
So you are saying you'll never be satisfied. That isn't going to happen. Seven billion people on the planet, widespread use of GMOs using modern techniques for decades now (plus thousands of years of older techniques) and zero evidence of any negative nutritional effects across generations. If that sort of evidence isn't good enough for you then you will never be satisfied. The nutritional question is settled for all practical purposes and any negative health effects from them that might exist are clearly extremely subtle at worst. The experiment has already been run and the evidence seems clear that GMOs aren't a nutritional health risk either in the short or long term.
Now if you want to make an argument about the effects of GMOs on ecosystems being potentially harmful then you might have an argument. There the evidence is a lot less clear and there is clear evidence that use of GMOs (think roundup ready) influences our behavior in ways that have clear and demonstrable harms both direct and indirect.
Also, I defy anyone to point out a time when Nature has allowed the mixing of tomato and frog genes to produce a superior tomato.
Your DNA is absolutely loaded with code from species that are not human. The fact that you can't wrap your brain around mixing genes from seemingly unrelated species isn't evidence of a problem. You talk about nature "allowing" things as if genetics is somehow planned. That's not how it works. Genetic code doesn't have an agenda beyond reproduction. Read The Selfish Gene sometime for a more eloquent argument.
Which is a legal problem, not a problem with genetic engineering. Note that the No GMO cranks hate open source projects like Golden Rice just as much as they hate Monsanto products.
It allows for changes which can't be achieved through breeding. For the most part that fact is good, but it certainly does pose a degree of danger. I have defended GMO foods in the past as being safe, but that was under the premise that they were carefully monitored. This is just... nuts.
There's nothing weird about this, GMOs are backed by very large companies. Ultimately, that's all that matters.