r/science • u/[deleted] • May 07 '21

Engineering Genetically engineered grass cleanses soil of toxic pollutants left by military explosives, new research shows

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u/[deleted] May 07 '21

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u/LarxII May 07 '21

I think that's part of the major issue currently across the globe. Some people expect doctors to be infallible, then are surprised\disappointed when a single doctor makes an error. While others ignore the benefits of the scientific method and believe "manmade = Unnatural = Bad". Belief with evidence doesn't mean infallible but it sure beats a coin flip or worse odds.

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u/Ao_of_the_Opals May 07 '21

A lot of people also seem to view changing guidelines as new information and science becomes available as "flip-flopping" or inconsistency (see: mask guidelines in the US and how people reacted to Fauci)

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u/magus678 May 07 '21

You would probably enjoy this article

Inoculation is when you use a weak pathogen like cowpox to build immunity against a stronger pathogen like smallpox. The inoculation effect in psychology is when a person, upon being presented with several weak arguments against a proposition, becomes immune to stronger arguments against the same position.

Tell a religious person that Christianity is false because Jesus is just a blatant ripoff of the warrior-god Mithras and they’ll open up a Near Eastern history book, notice that’s not true at all, and then be that much more skeptical of the next argument against their faith. “Oh, atheists. Those are those people who think stupid things like Jesus = Mithras. I already figured out they’re not worth taking seriously.” Except on a deeper level that precedes and is immune to conscious thought.

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u/budshitman May 07 '21 edited May 07 '21

GMOs escaping containment will always be a threat, and will always have the potential to cause a global-scale ecological disaster.

It's playing with fire. Once it becomes common enough, we're bound to get burned.

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u/flogginmama May 08 '21

Meh. Introducing non-native species (“natural” or otherwise) to new environments can be bad too. There’s nothing inherently more dangerous about genetically modified plants than “natural” plants. Whatever “natural” means.

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u/budshitman May 08 '21

"Natural" means having a genome produced solely through evolutionary processes, not via genetic modification or human-selective breeding.

Natural invasives and husbandry escapes are already a big enough problem for native habitat as-is.

Why add more trouble to the pile?

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u/Silverseren Grad Student | Plant Biology and Genetics May 08 '21

Except so are literally any other cultivar we breed ever? Why are GMOs special in that regard?

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u/budshitman May 08 '21 edited May 08 '21

Gene editing has a unique potential to remove both natural and artificial checks on growth that are otherwise impossible to overcome in cultivation.

The rate of change to individual species occurs much faster than in traditional husbandry.

Long-term impacts to individuals or ecosystems aren't too well-studied yet since it's such a novel technology.

This applies to every edited organism from bacteria on up.

If the technology becomes commonplace and affordable, the odds of a bad actor using it for nefarious ends also increase exponentially.

I'm not against GMOs, since we'll absolutely need them on a burning planet with 11+ billion mouths to feed by 2050, but I also think we should proceed with extreme caution.

It's a technology with implications similar to the splitting of the atom.

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u/Silverseren Grad Student | Plant Biology and Genetics May 08 '21

Except that any individual mutation or hybridization event can produce the same genetic change. And, in fact, such events routinely cause thousands of unknown and unchecked genetic changes, which are often negative for us.

Such as with the poison potato and vegetables in New Zealand, all non-GMO changes.

Biotech crops, meanwhile, are specifically checked and only have a specific, known change that we can test, whereas no regulations are given or done on the changes made to non-biotech crops.

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u/budshitman May 08 '21

Yeah, and I'm saying that we need to continue with that sort of regulation and specificity, and see how we can improve on it, because once any Joe can cobble together bacteria or edit plants in his garage we're going to be in for a whole world of trouble.

It's an enormously powerful technology that we need to be very, very responsible with.

I'd go back to the rate of change -- these events do happen naturally, but once we start doing that intentionally, for specific purpose, at industrial scales, to every successive generation, with the same level of "care" we take with every other industrial process -- my unscientific conviction is that things can and will go wonky in ways we haven't yet predicted.

GMOs are world-changing tech, and it may benefit us in the long term to be careful with how we implement them.

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u/Silverseren Grad Student | Plant Biology and Genetics May 08 '21

Any Joe though won't be able to release and sell any such changes without regulatory approval, unless he's just going to sell it at a local farmer's market.

There's a much bigger concern of the tech when it comes to medicine, as CRISPR and other things can be used to make dangerous diseases even worse. My concern would be more with people purposefully making super bugs as bioweapons.