Should I be afraid of GMOs?

Pavitra

I was raised to believe that genetically-modified foods are unhealthy to eat and bad for the environment, and given a variety of reasons for this, some of which I now recognize as blatantly false (e.g., human genetic code is isomorphic to fundamental physical law), and a few of which still seem sort of plausible.

Because of this history, I need to anchor my credence heavily downward from my sense of plausibility.

The major reasons I see to believe that GMOs are safe are:

I would probably think they were dangerous even if they were safe, due to my upbringing.
In general, whenever someone opposes a particular field of engineering on the grounds that it's unnatural and dangerous, they're usually wrong.
It's not quite obvious to me that introducing genetically-engineered organisms to a system is significantly more dangerous than introducing non-native naturally-evolved organisms.

The major reason I see to believe that GMOs are dangerous is:

I might believe they were safe even if they were dangerous, due to "yay science" (which was also part of my upbringing).
We are designing self-replicating things and using them without reliable containment, thereby effectively releasing them into the wild.

So: green goo, yes or no?

Because of this history, I need to anchor my credence heavily downward from my sense of plausibility.

The major reasons I see to believe that GMOs are safe are:

I would probably think they were dangerous even if they were safe, due to my upbringing.
In general, whenever someone opposes a particular field of engineering on the grounds that it's unnatural and dangerous, they're usually wrong.
It's not quite obvious to me that introducing genetically-engineered organisms to a system is significantly more dangerous than introducing non-native naturally-evolved organisms.

The major reason I see to believe that GMOs are dangerous is:

I might believe they were safe even if they were dangerous, due to "yay science" (which was also part of my upbringing).
We are designing self-replicating things and using them without reliable containment, thereby effectively releasing them into the wild.

So: green goo, yes or no?

Terminator tech is effectively banned, and while I'm highly vulnerable to anti-corporate/capitalist rhetoric especially in the case of Monsanto, and so may be overcompensating, I think this is generally a bad thing. This is both because it makes biosafety more difficult, and because it reduces the ability of the big biotech companies to capture the benefits of GM research. This is good in the short term (though in a few cases it disproportionately benefits the largest landowners) but ultimately means that research is underfunded and mostly focused on relatively monetizable stuff like pesticide resistance for the big four plants and not things like more nutritious tef. Of course, we could lay this problem at the feet of the neoliberal hegemony- a massive Green Revolution style public investment campaign would circumvent the problem, but that just ain't the way business is done in universities nowadays.

Note the problem on biosafety is more that good GMOs will be banned because they'd spread pesticide resistance to weeds without terminator tech, not that they will be introduced illegitimately and spread pesticide resistant genes to weeds.

Note the problem on biosafety is more that good GMOs will be banned because they'd spread pesticide resistance to weeds without terminator tech, not that they will be introduced illegitimately and spread pesticide resistant genes to weeds.

How exactly would pesticide resistant genes transfer to weeds? Unless the your GMO plant interbreeds with weeds, witch is not very likely based on the fact that you do not often stumble upon tomato-dandelions (if I'm terribly misinformed here please tell me). And horizontal gene transfer, have not been observed to any large extent in multicellular organisms.

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Should I be afraid of GMOs?

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Should I be afraid of GMOs?

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