Botanist dragging a barrel of glowing green fluid across the tiles of the station floor

Security Chief: "Botanist! What the ABSOLUTE HELL are you doing with 50 liters of radium?"

Botanist: "Mutating the corn so it's blight and drought resistant"

Chief: "????"

Botanist: "I've also mutated a species of hobby lemon to fill itself with sugary lemonade instead of citric acid"

Chief: "Oh, holy crap okay go right ahead"

every food you eat

okay i was all ready to devil's advocat you but you had to say FOOD. punk.

i was about to go eat, i don't know, a car or something to prove you wrong. I haven't had coffee yet i haven't thought this through

GMOs aren't dangerous because of the genetic manipulation. They're dangerous because of everything around it. Now it's possible to create vegetables that survive a centimetre of glyphosate coating. And if the farmers reuse seeds, they're breaching copyright law. With this, plants are copyrightable, would you like all of the cancer of contemporary American IP law applied to your food?

The problem is that the way GMO is used in practice is to maximize profits: get giant fruits that weigh a lot and catch eyes on the shelf, but are low in nutritional value and have shitty taste/texture.

Like huge strawberries that taste like water, or taste unripe even when they're ripe. Or giant asparagus that's as tough as sisal twine.

I have a theory that if you GMO to prioritize nutritional density, it'll taste better, because the photonutrients phytonutrients are the stuff that taste good.

I think the argument against GMO (for me) isn't so much the yields and other benefits, but rather the potential for single blight to wipe entire crops (did to the lack of variety, despite their claims to blight resilience) and the shady stuff that gmo companies do - sterilised seeds, patent wars, etc.

Yeah ancestral plants that became many crops look almost nothing like their descendants in many cases

The funniest I think are secondary crops like oats and rye. Our forebears weren’t even trying to grow a better version of those, those started off as just weeds that people were trying to get rid of in their wheatfields. In the course of purging them they accidentally selected for more wheat-like plants that people would be less likely to rip out until they became actual decent crops on their own, while also maintaining hardiness in areas that wheat couldn’t handle such that they spun off and became popular on their own rights.

Yeah the discussion has to be clear. I'm not in love with splicing genes very unrelated to the destination organism and not seeing what the long-term effects are. Also splicing genes specifically to make crops more resistant to Roundup so we can kill everything but the crop even harder and be unconcerned of the wider environmental impact the pesticide has.

bomb seeds with radiation and see what came out

are far more surgical in the process.

...right...