Hey BL, how do you feel about GMOs, and/or genetic modification in general? Good? Bad? If how you feel is complicated, could you elaborate?
It’s very complicated. Some things Monsanto does are cutthroat and destructive and there isn’t enough regulation, but a lot of the backlash against GMO’s isn’t even based on that. A lot of people just act like SCIENCE SCARY and that “unnatural” things are some kind of cancer-causing demon magic.GMO technology has saved lives and could save far more. If people would just try to understand it better before panicking, and governments could reel in the mess of copyrighting issues and business practices surrounding them, they could make the whole world a better place.The process isn’t even genuinely “unnatural.” Horizontal gene transfer happens constantly in nature.Through no human intervention at all, domestic cattle have rattlesnake DNA, which we believe may have been transferred one day by the bite of a tick, or a virus carried by the tick, and spread through their gene pool from there.We humans, and probably most species on Earth, have more “foreign” DNA in our bodies than our own DNA, probably through similar accidents.The vast majority of acquired genes in nature just don’t do anything. Some of them do, by slim chance, and can drive major mutations and new evolutionary paths, but there’s simply SO MUCH dna in one organism, the odds of a transferred gene “fitting in” to actually do something are astronomically small.The way we genetically modify things ourselves isn’t any different from this process, except that someone is paying attention to the nature of the genes in order to ensure they “fit in” and do something. In that sense, it really is comparable to the crossbreeding we’ve done to plants and animals for thousands of years. A process that would already happen in nature, but usually doesn’t have intelligence guiding the outcome.