In which a Maori beekeeper explains that he doesn't want any unnatural GM modified rats to offend the spirits, while laboriously smoking bees out of their hive to take their honey...
@xj9 It's not really about spirits, but about a selective definition of "natural"
"natural" and "unnatural" are usually proxies for "familiar/understood" and "unfamiliar/not understood". there is also "artificial" vs "natural" which is usually delineated by a thing's origin being human or not.
you are stuck on some semantics that are not important to the question at hand. all of these distinctions are arbitrary. the real issue is one of familiarity. we don't know how gene drives will behave in the wild. we know some very specific and powerful bits of information. we know how to make a gene drive, but we lack the wisdom to predict how it will behave in a large ecosystem.
we are very powerful beings, but we are young and shortsighted. if we aren't careful, we could easily make this planet very difficult to live on. we certainly *should* do and experiment with "unnatural" things, but scope and context need to be taken into account. we have no backup or test planet to work with and no real knowledge of existing in a truly hostile environment for extended periods of time.
Everybody is eating these today even though the radiation-induced mutations were completely random in their effects and might have modified much more genes than just those intended.
Now, when we came up with a very precise surgical techniques like CRISPR that are safer than anything known before a bunch of undereducated activists or scientific crooks like Seralini are fighting them as "unnatural"...
"During the past seventy years, mutation breeding led to more than 2250 plant varieties (Maluszynski et al. [4]; Ahloowalia et al. [5]). 70% of these varieties were released as directly induced mutants, and the other 30% from crosses with induced mutants. The use of chemical treatments was relatively infrequent, but gamma rays were frequently used (64%), followed by X-rays (22%) (Ahloowalia et al. [5])." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2218926/
actual publication based on the DOI in your link -> http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.1155%2F2007%2F82612
the article you linked
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.1155%2F2007%2F82612
is a letter to the editor in response to
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.1080%2F02648725.2006.10648085
and
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.1155%2FJBB%2F2006%2F25376
> what crop has CRISPR made safer? how?
I answered with a specific example.
They mention plants that you could buy in supermarkets for the last 3 decades or more. And they are considered safe even though they were produced by chaotic mutations induced with X-ray and Ξ³. Indeed, they have no known side effects as confirmed by millions of consumers over decades.
