Al_ said:
Although, if someone wanted to genetically engineer a poisonous strawberry, for example, that would be entirely possible, given the required skill and lab setup. At least with traditional foods (including old varieties produced by selective breeding) we have the assurance that comes from centuries of testing on live subjects.
Call me a "late adopter" if you like
Conventional breeding also carries risks of creating poisonous or unsafe plants. For example, in the 1960s, farmers bred a new variety of potato that created the best potato chip that anyone had ever made. Unfortunately, while selectively breeding for the ability to produce better potato chips, the farmers had also inadvertently introduced genes from wild potato plants that increase the amounts of toxic compounds in the potato (remember, the potato is in the same family as nightshade).
"Often, people frame genetically modified plants as this huge open question — a giant uncertainty, of the sort we’ve never dealt with before. There’s this idea that GM plants are uniquely at risk of producing unexpected side effects, and that we have no way of knowing what those effects would be until average consumers start getting sick, Gould told me. But neither of those things is really true. Conventional breeding, the simple act of crossing one existing plant with another, can produce all sorts of unexpected and dangerous results. One of the reasons Lenape potatoes are so infamous, I later found out, is that they played a big role in shaping how the USDA treats and tests new varieties of conventionally bred food plants today.
In fact, from Gould’s perspective, there’s actually a lot more risk and uncertainty with conventional breeding, than there is with genetic modification. That’s because, with GM, you’re mucking about with a single gene. There are a lot more genes in play with conventional breeding, and a lot more ways that surprising genetic interactions could come back to haunt you. “You try breeding potatoes for pest resistance, but you’re bringing in a whole chromosome from a wild potato,” he said. “We’ve found interactions between the wild genomes and the cultivated genomes that actually led to potentially poisonous chemicals in the potato.”
https://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/the-case-of-the-poison-potato.html
Of course, all varieties of GMO plants are extensively tested before they can be approved for human consumption in order to prevent situations like the Lenape potato from occurring, and long term studies of GMO crops, such as one put out by the US
National Academy of Sciences, have concluded that they are safe.
Al_ said:
IMHO, the real danger of GMO foods is not from directly eating them, but the effect that GM might have on the world ecosystem if modifications escape the farm and thrive in the wild.
Think about how introduced species have damaged ecosystems across the world, almost every continent has it's troublesome invaders.
The power of GM to make massive, designed, radical changes to a plant's genes far exceeds what is likely to occur in nature by orders of magnitude.
As an example, what if photosynthesis is made more efficient. Currently plants manage about 3% energy conversion, I have read. If GM gives us plants that manage 30%, and they escape, do they have the potential to evolve into forms that take over the grasslands and forests of the world?
Most domesticated food crops (the type being genetically engineered) would survive in the wild about as well as a domesticated house cat would survive in the African savanna (or else why would farmers have to put in so much effort to keep weeds [wild plants] for taking over their fields). Some applications would carry the risk of spreading engineered organisms into wild populations, but those applications rightly receive a lot of scrutiny.
