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
Now, even more amazingly, these "X-ray varieties" are *excluded* from EU GMO directive restrictions because they are considered "traditionally safe".
At the same time CRISPR varieties are considered "unsafe" and subject to absurd restrictions, that were never in place with the X-ray experiments in 70's.
Even though with CRISPR you know *precisely* what you add/remove/modify and with X-ray you don't.
WTF?
@hushroom @xj9 it's like saying we can't use Mastodon because it requires "specialised software and trained people". It does, so what? We do both all the time. It's a poor excuse not an actual issue.
And "standard breeding techniques" took like 10k years to create modern dog breeds (and most of them with defects) and thousands of randomly mutated irradiated tomato samples to create the one we eat now.
And never created rice with vitamin A.
in my own garden i grew Brandywine, peacevine, and a few other novelty colored ones, and the big farm i bought sauce tomatoes from grows San Marzano.
Brandywine was introduced at least as early as 1886
San Marzano 1926
"Peacevine earned its name from its high content of gamma amino butyric acid, an amino acid that acts as a calming body sedative." - http://www.peaceseedslive.com/ (no GM or radiation here)
I know the atomic gardens are a thing (beginning in 1950s apparently), that produced some unique germplasm, but its not some huge breakthrough that revolutionized agriculture and impacted every crop.
Same with CRISPR, even though it occupies 100% of the agriculture related headlines on "Hacker news", get into books and forums on people actually involved and GM is just mentioned and acknowledged but not emphasized because in most cases its not the best technique for the job.
>most characteristics of agricultural importance are quantitative genetic traits... Flavor, yield, cold hardiness, heat tolerance, drought resistance, and other components of ecological adaptation are all traits that involve many genes