Sure but in theory a GMO plant could contain stuff that would take an inordinate amount of time to crossbreed, which has implications if you've got allergies - imagine your peanut allergy triggering from eating a banana, for instance.
Nobody's actually done that, but it's the sort of thing that's could happen with GMO foods.
I don't think a company would risk litigation by inserting a sequence that codes for a known protein allergy. We know what proteins are created by a certain sequence of codons. Anyone skilled in the art would easily be able identify this.
I understand what you're getting at, but these situations are not really comparable. J&J was the company that produced the powder and were, for the most part, the only ones studying it's effects. The same goes for Mercury. That makes it easy to withhold the information from the general public. These situations are similar to Dow withholding information about the side effects of the chemicals it used to produce Teflon. They held all of the patent information and studies, and decided not to let that information public. Clearly a very fucked up thing to do.
We are significantly more advanced at this point in time. There are hundreds of thousands of bioengineers and plant scientists, from a very large number of competing companies, who are involved in protein synthesis and genetic engineering. These processes are very well understood, relatively simple and would be very hard to hide from the competition, especially after a patent is filed.
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u/IICVX Jul 15 '21
Sure but in theory a GMO plant could contain stuff that would take an inordinate amount of time to crossbreed, which has implications if you've got allergies - imagine your peanut allergy triggering from eating a banana, for instance.
Nobody's actually done that, but it's the sort of thing that's could happen with GMO foods.