Re: [DIYbio] Re: Biosecurity

> According to your own argument,
both should be stopped.

No. According to my own argument the sane reaction would be to treat them at least similarly. Not treat the inherently one with the so-far-perfect safety record as if it's the devil while treating the former with a terrible safety record as inherently safe.

I have not ignored " time and scale" but you've made false claims about both.

it may take 50-60 years of tracking of a population to isolate some effect of size X... but currently no such tracking is done for a huge range of novel "organic" products.

There's also a common, bizarre, view that anything that's been around for hundreds of years **must** be safe because traditionalist tend to have the delusion that we spot negative effects on the population scale over the course of hundreds of years. but that's veritably false even for huge effect sizes. Doctors somehow managed to go centuries failing to notice that failing to wash their hands before deliveries was bad for the health of the women giving birth. People went centuries failing to notice that smoking caused lung cancer.

People went thousands of years without noticing that various herbs used in traditional chinese medicine were hellishly carcinogenic.

Even centuries of something being common in society is basically worthless for assessing it's safety.

Even 2 years of real scientific safety trials can be far far more powerful and useful than centuries of just hoping someone will notice something in the general population. It's why traditionalism is utterly broken as a worldview. It fails.

There should absolutely be safety trials but they should be the same standards for novel "organic" varieties, random new mushrooms someone found in a forest somewhere and GM crops.

You seem to want a special standard of 180 years for " bioengineered products" " highly processed " foods but my point is that your entire worldview is bollox. If they need 180 years then that random new version of banana's that some farmer found in his field with some unknown biochemical changes within it should be held to exactly the same standard.

if the standard is insane for the latter then it's insane for the former.

BTW: following your standard yellow bananas would have been released to the general public in 2016.

On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 4:36 PM Jonathan Cline <jcl...@ieee.org> wrote:

On 6/13/19, David Murphy <murph...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>This traditional farmer breeds his mutated plant in
>>small scale plots and manual breeding takes multiple plant
>>generations. ... yadda yadda
>
> organic farming is a 97 billion dollar industry.


Again you are ignoring time and scale.  That traditional farmer story
you are using is a historic analogy from before rapid deployment
existed.  The organic farm industry  with much faster time and scale
is also less than 20 years old, also far shorter than the valid time
frame to reflect medical results.  According to your own argument,
both should be stopped.  Because your argument ignores time and scale,
the analogy gives no support to the idea that the science is safe.

A modern reflection of this at the time and scale is occuring right
now with the new fake meat products, which is chemical engineering of
food to create a meatlike-substance made up of plant protein isolates.
Within just two years (and very little testing in comparison to prior
generations), the products have been introduced into half of the major
fast food franchises on earth, and within 2 more years, fake meat will
be sold in all convenience restaurants and every major grocery chain,
globally.  Humans have never eaten highly processed protein isolates
in such large amounts and ratios before.  Last week there was a news
report that some people (estimated to be about 3% of the 10% of adults
with food allergies) experienced previously unknown allergic reactions
after eating the products, because of the ratio and makeup of pea
protein in the food.   This also indicates lack of testing and
too-rapid deployment in terms of time and scale.  Your previous
analogy shows that these products should also be stopped from entering
the marketplace along with GM food and organic food which has not
undergone 2+ human lifespans of medical study.

What is an appropriate time frame for testing before biologically
engineered products are allowed to enter the market in large scales?
It currently takes 50-60 years of medical tracking of a population to
reach medical conclusions regarding safety, and even those research
studies are said to remain inconclusive.  Applying a generic standard
of engineering safety might suggest that this should be multiplied by
3.  Thus all of these bioengineered products should be tested for
perhaps 180 years before global productization is allowed, according
to your historic analogy.  This 100+ years timeframe is still much
faster than a new species of vegetable would have been globally
propagated in traditional agriculture, historically.

This is why that common biologist's analogy of the "traditional
farmer" is a deeply flawed defense.


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## Jonathan Cline
## jcl...@ieee.org
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