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?

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.

I'm pretty sure that this worry is more about passing herbicide resistance to weeds, for example, canola and mustard are closely related, wild mustard can be viewed as a weed. This was the first result in a google search for "canola mustard hybrid". If, for example, they handle highway medians by spraying herbicide, and all of the sudden, the wild mustard can thrive in round-up, then they would have to use a more costly method for median maintenance.

My biggest objection to GMO's and the reason I strongly avoid them, is that I don't feel there... (read more)

0Mercy14y

Sorry I missed this reply before, note sure if it's worth replying but briefly yes, narrow-band pesticides take care of the most distantly related weeds so your biggest problems are "volunteers" from the previous crop rotation, and wild relatives of whatever crops you are planting. That's why you have to modify the crop, rather than the pesticide.