this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Its a little strange to think about, but there's nothing 'natural' about modern crops.
For millenia selective breeding was used to get desired traits, with who knows how many other mutations along the way.
More recently radiation has been used to induce mutations in crops to wider diversity.
GMOs are just the next step in more precisely editing a plants genome with only the changes we want.
Now the corpations making them like Monsanto can get fucked, they should still be treated like every other plant. If you have seeds you should be able to plant them.
Yeah, for me the issue with GMOs is less with the concepts of genetic engineering and more with the legal rights. Should be impossible to copyright or patent a fucking plant, and if that means that big corporations don’t want to do it anymore then that’s absolutely fine.
I probably shouldn't have used the word natural, it's too broad. I just feel there is a risk with allowing an artificial gene (for example the bacterial beta carotene gene) to spread through a population it never would have been in. Now I can't think of any particular reason this might actually be bad, but we are still introducing a variable into a system we do not understand fully. When that system is what feeds us, I'd rather not mess with it without complete understanding.