I ask because it struck me that when people discuss GMOs, many envision a cackling scientist in a white coat blasting poor animals and people with radiation rays and chemicals to alter them in ways that would be impossible through selective breeding, and it occurred to me that, in my lack of science knowledge, I don’t know if it’s possible to get such results. Do we already get them, even if they’re not Dr. Moreau-level? I actually don’t know.
Enlighten me?
OTTOMH we had a thread about gm goats that had spider silk protiens in their milk. So, yes.
Most of the point of GMO is exactly to move genes between species in a way that could never happen via selective breeding. Selective breeding can only amplify, or degrade, traits that already appear naturally.
Here’s one example: Genetically modified maize - Wikipedia. The point being that they took a naturally occurring feature of potatoes and transferred that feature intact into corn (maize to Europeans). Where it never had been, and practically speaking never could be, found naturally.
Wait, so does the definition of “GMO” inherently exclude selective breeding and other “more natural” means? Because the idea that anti-GMO people are also technically railing against selective breeding comes up a lot during those arguments, and the main reason this came to my mind to begin with.
The essential difference is that selective breeding can only operate on what’s called standing genetic variation. That doesn’t mean that it cannot generate new phenotypes, because it can give rise to new combinations of existing genetic variants. But it can only use the genetic variation that already exists in the population. If you keep trying to breed dogs for larger and larger size, eventually you hit a brick wall. In order to make a bigger dog, you would have to wait for some new mutation to arise spontaneously by chance, and that could take a very long time.
To take DocCathode’s example, if you wanted to produce a goat with spider silk proteins through selective breeding, it would probably take a very large population of goats and few hundred million years for the all the right mutations to show up naturally by chance to make it happen.
With genetic modification, you are not just selecting from the standing variation or waiting for the correct mutations to arise by chance, you are directly making the new genotypes that you want. This obviously requires that you have reverse engineered what’s going on and that you understand the genetics and the molecular mechanisms correctly. If you do, you can generate the phenotype you want directly and much more quickly.
Unless you’re willing to wait ridiculously long times for the right mutations, there are some things selective breeding can never do. On the other hand…
This is a fairly standard practice, with plants at least, and also doesn’t fall under the usual label of “genetically-modified”. Basically, you take a few thousand seeds, expose them all to high doses of radiation, plant them, and of those that survive, maybe a few will have “beneficial” mutations (where, of course, “beneficial” means “we can sell it to someone”).
Basically, it’s only called “GMO” if you know what you’re doing, and have control over the process.
Pretty much. And the “well actually” business about selective breeding is a bit like the pedants who say “WELL ACTUALLY all food is organic because it’s carbon based, hyuk hyuk!”
It’s a position rooted in linguistic ignorance (spoiler: words can have more than one definition).
Edit: cite
I don’t know what other people envision, but what I personally envision, in my aversion to genetic modification, is the law of unintended consequences. Which is already happening on a vast scale. I’m really tired of “I guess we didn’t think about the (intricate interlacing interacting web of life) before we started fucking with it and now we broke something probably irretrievably” news. I guess “tired of” is downplaying what I feel, which is more like white-hot futile rage.
It’s not what I ingest that is my concern. It’s the planet. Just as a little push-back to the trust in Science and contempt for anyone who questions it that I sense in the OP.
Yes, the point is the sequence of genes to - for example - create spider silk is complex, and it would be difficult to breed for. Most interesting chemicals produced by organisms are the result of a sequence of chemical reactions A->B->C->D etc. where each reaction is managed by a different gene. They arise when the earlier intermediate products could have been useful at one time to the organism but now have been replaced and improved by the next in sequence, etc. So the odds that some organism would spontaneuosly happen to mutate to produce the entire sequence is very very very very rare. (i.e. impossible) Particularly, if there is no benefit for being half-way there. A protospider that could spew out clobs of stick stuff to catch flies, maybe had an advantage until one came along that could make strings instead of globs and catch them faster. A goat- not so. No advantage.
GMO means genetically modified, i.e. the genetic material is (chemically) modified to add a trait that normally does not exist.
Similar GMO’s create for exaple, a greater tolerance to pesticides (thus locking the farmer into that brand of pesticide), or add genes to include the ability to produce toxins to certain insects. The problem is, are greater yields of corn or tobacco worth poisoning innocent non-pest insects also? Can the trait spread to related plants and expand into the wild?
Realistically, every plant that’s grown from seed is different from its parents. Plants are constantly generating thousands of pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals for its own purposes and any child plant could have a bit flipped that makes one of those go from being tolerable to humans to being instantly fatal.
The only safe system is one that’s 1) fully understood and 2) fully controlled.
We’re not looking at getting either of those anytime soon, so you’re basically screwed no matter what.
Why do you single out genetic modification for a “do absolutely nothing unless we understand all possible consequences with absolute 100% certainty” approach? Why not adopt this approach with all farming practices, and with all technology? A lot of people would starve and we wouldn’t have a lot of nice things, but I guess at least that would keep us completely safe from unintended consequences.
What bad things are happening on a vast scale that are attributable specifically to unintended consequences from GMO? This does not include people doing stupid things with perfectly predictable consequences.
Going back to the OP, the term “GMO” has a fairly well-agreed technical meaning in government and industry, and it has much woolier meanings among the naysayers, the lay boosters, and the general public.
So the right answer to the question of
What does ‘GMO’ mean?
is
Lots of different and contradictory things depending on who you’re talking to. Better ask them what they mean by ‘GMO’ before you try to address whatever else they said.
I don’t. It’s just the subject of the OP. I’ll come back with cites but have to go now.
Yeah, we humans have screwed up the delicate web of life in many, many ways, but I don’t know of any that are specifically due to what’s narrowly called “GMOs”.
The closest I can think of is the Round Up issue*. And even there, it’s not the GMO organism that’s causing the problem,it’s the pesticide.
That’s a distinction without a difference if the result is more herbicide.
Probably the largest problem that is clear right now, is the way gmo crops contaminate non-gmo and wild relatives through pollen drift. There is no way to stop this. We are changing, not just the genetic structure of this one crop, but those of neighboring farms – whether they chose it or not – and wild species.
In an animal equivalence, imagine you were raising some rare breed of sheep which is one of the few that has resistance to a certain skin disease. Your neighbor buys a bunch of Suffolk sheep, which are a very common breed. Although you have good fences, just the proximity of the Suffolks contaminates the genetics of your flock which is now perfectly useless for the purpose for which it was laboriously bred. And, you have absolutely no recourse. In fact, the Particular Rare Sheep registry kicks you out and none of your sheep can be sold as that breed, which goes for double what Suffolks do. Your whole investment is worthless and you go bankrupt.
When you complain to any authorities they just shrug and say, Suffolks are so popular and people are making a lot of money with them. You’re just a niche farmer. Who needs Particular Sheep Breed anyway, we just buy the anti-skin-disease boluses from Monsanto (a required contract for Suffolk breeders) four times a year and it’s so much easier!
That’s what is happening with gmo crops. What those genetics do in wild populations is unknown and uncontrolled and no one knows what will happen. It may for example make those species unfit for survival under natural conditions and they go extinct.
Of all the mistakes human beings recently have made, being too conservative and wary about the effects of applying huge new technologies about which we know very little doesn’t seem to be one of them.
The problem with this definition is that it’s both too wide and too narrow.
Too wide: most mules and other hybrids would be GMOs, since they are not the result of natural mating or natural recombination. Yes, some occur without human direction, but the vast majority are human-controlled combinations. Most people do not want to call a mule a GMO.
Too narrow: once a novel gene is introduced into a genome, natural mating and natural recombination are used to propagate it. Most people would like to call the descendants of a GMO also a GMO, even though an individual organism received its genes through natural mating.
A series of hybridizations, each improbable, were required to form the fertile hybrid of the modern wheat. Arguably the “unintended consequences” was the rise of settlements and civilisation.
Which makes the scientific mind chortle when modern marketing techniques now offer such wonders as:
Einkorn is a hybrid mongrel species which happens to be both fertile and productive.
Indeed, there is continual in-field natural hybridization of the modern cereal grains between crops of wheat, oats, barley and rye etc. when grown in proximity. Almost totally without success, the only fertile hybrid yet developed TMK is triticale (wheat/rye).
I’m aware of the development of modern cereal grains. It has nothing to do with my argument. What you seem to be saying is that crop domestication and development is an almost-unmitigated good, and it made possible civilization as we know it. Both of these subjective beliefs are very arguable, and the last one is apparently untrue – humans have had civilizations without dependence on agriculture. The trajectory we think we know does not correspond to the data.
If you cannot see the qualitative difference between GMO and einkorn, I can’t see it for you.
I’m afraid I disagree on both counts. The definition is fine.
You suggest it includes mules, because “they are not the result of natural mating.” I think you’re overthinking the word “naturally” here, as if it modifies “by mating”; really, “by mating” is intended to explain what “naturally” means. Any modification of genetic material that occurs via mating, no matter the conditions of that mating, falls outside the GMO definition. Your interpretation leads to obviously silly results, as it suggests that any organism created by mating occurring under human direction is GMO; that would mean every single human being is a GMO.
No, it doesn’t exclude the progeny of GMOs. Modify a goat with genes to make spider-silk milk, and her kids have “genetic material [that] has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally.” The fact that the propagation was natural doesn’t mean that the material wasn’t altered, one or more generations previously; they’ve inherited that altered DNA.
I think you’re misreading the definition.