I may not agree with it but I totally get the controversy over GMO foods.
However, I’m curious why there’s not a similar outrage over mutation breeding. It seems to perfectly tap into many of the same complaints and fears that people have over GMO. It uses scary high dose radiation and toxic, highly carcinogenic chemicals. There’s been no comprehensive studies done on it’s safety. Big agriculture has lobbied so even organic foods can come from mutagenic sources. It seems perfectly tailored as a cause du jour for food activists.
However, I’m not seeing any push for mandatory labelling laws about mutagenic sources. There’s no blogs dedicated to helping me avoid mutagenic foods. Nobody is going around claiming they cut all mutagenic food out of their diet and their acne cleared up. I bet not 1 person in 100 in America is even aware that mutation breeding exists.
Why does everyone care so much about GMO and so little about mutation breeding?
Are we sure that anti-GMO people aren’t talking about these as well under the same umbrella? It seems to me that many assume GM is something like this. Is the question “why don’t we worry about these potentially dangerous products?” or is it “why don’t the types of people opposed to GMO also oppose these regardless of any research on them?”? Or in other words, does “scary high dose radiation and toxic, highly carcinogenic chemicals” have a scientific background?
Some of it is probably just media exposure of the one vs ignorance about the other.
But mutation breeding is arguably only an intensified version of what already happens in nature. Traditional selective breeding even includes the exploitation of naturally-occurring mutations.
GMO is different in that it enables outcomes that could never plausibly happen in nature. It’s just not at all likely that genetic material from (say)a fish will be transferred into the germline of (say) a flowering plant. It’s conspicuously a different kind of tinkering.
I will make no argument as to whether that makes it better, worse, good or evil, but it is different.
I think this is the most telling argument about it; if you take plants and expose them to ionizing radiation, you’ll change the DNA, and produce mutants. In all likelihood, these mutations will cause the resulting plants to die or otherwise be non-viable. Some small percentage get their genes changed in a fortuitous way that can be used as breeding stock, or as-is.
This is EXACTLY what happens in nature, only sped up many times so that researchers don’t have to wait millions of years to find the right mutants.
GMOs on the other hand sometimes involve moving things like gene sequences from animals to plants or vice-versa, or between mostly unrelated organisms in the same kingdom. For example, Roundup Ready crops use bacterial genes to express a different variant of an enzyme that is inhibited by Glyphosate (Roundup’s actual chemical name), so that Roundup doesn’t inhibit the bacterial enzyme, but does inhibit the enzyme that all other plants make, thereby making Roundup harmless to the crops, but deadly to other weeds in the fields. Quite a bit different than just irradiating some seeds and keeping the ones that display the traits you want.
The mechanism for generating these breeds are different but why does that make one more deserving of scrutiny of the other? Also, gene transfer between species is another exteremely common and perfectly natural source of genetic variation.
It’s probably largely because genetic engineering is newer, and because giving up “mutation breeding” would at this point probably amount to giving up much of modern agriculture due to it having been around a long time.
The funny thing is, GE is much more controlled than random mutations, and so is probably safer if anything.
Pretty common. Plants have genes that originated in mammalian hemoglobin IIRC, and mammals use hijacked viral genes in their placentas.
Probably very common but it’s not important anyway. Arguing that one means of producing beneficial varieties of crops is safer or somehow superior because it’s “more natural” is a mistake. If you are concerned about safety then ask “is it maiming people?”. If you are concerned with superiority then describe a metric and compare methods. Whether a method of producing genetic variation is detrimental or beneficial should be judged on specifics and not some heuristic based in our limited understanding of nature.
I think if more people had heard of this there would be a popular movement to end the practice. As it is people won’t eat dead food irradiated to kill pathogens, if they find out they’re eating ‘radioactive’ food that is well known to result in giant Gila Monsters and whatnot then we’ll see a new movement form.
Hemoglobin variants are quite common in plants. The plant version(s) of such genes seem to have a common ancestor with hemoglobin genes in animals so it might not quite be correct to describe the plant version as having come from animals.
In plants, hemoglobin is used for binding and transporting oxygen, same as in animals. Plants cells do use oxygen in their metabolism and have to move oxygen around to the necessary parts of the cell to do so.
