Given their recent behavior with round up (they let it be sprayed on crops at harvest — I’m surprised it doesn’t have to go on the ingredient list!), the bar for fast tracking this without safety studies should be “the execs, regulators, and their families drink a gallon”, not “the day laborers at the farm wear respirators, and we don’t perform any follow up checks on their health”.
Taleb popularized the myth but I like the usenet quote from Dewar better:
"When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it while the first legion marched across. If programmers today worked under similar ground rules, they might well find themselves getting much more interested in Ada!"
If RoundUp is so safe, why don't the execs and lawyers and shills all douse themselves in it? It'd prove their alleged point against the guy who got horrible lesions and cancer all over his body after being exposed to it in a work accident.
Even that stunt might not be enough for a sufficiently evil shill, e.g. Thomas Midgley Jr. He famously did a similar move at a press conference for tetraethyllead (TEL), where he washed his hands in the stuff to prove its safety:
> On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its vapor for 60 seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems.
The trick to this stunt is to, as usual, hide behind complexity. While this sort of stunt may be telling in some cases where a single or handful of exposures lead to health problems, there's an increasing amount of investment in things that may or may not be so obvious, where an exposure or handful of exposures are unlikely to have a huge effect.
In that context you only give the shills more sway. We could take the golden public health case of something like cigarettes. The evidence these days is pretty rock solid and irrefutable but if you didn't have that information because said thing is new, you could consume it right in public with almost no side effects. While it's not advisable, you could smoke a pack of cigarettes over a year in such demo's and have little side effects/risk overall. Heck, if you're smart about it you only puff a few puffs each time to demonstrate to make the exposure even less.
So while these sort of safety demos can be valuable and shine a light on truth, risk, and just how far someone may go to sell something and reap the benefits, you have to make sure the context like dosage, exposure, whatever else is relevant match.
We've been living in a highly reductionist scientific world for awhile and in a lot of cases reductionism is fantastic, if we can generalize and peel away a bunch of context that's great, but we have to remember we can't always do that and these demos appeal to that sort of overly reductionist mindset. It makes it very hard to tell someone not educated about real risk that may exist to take something like a short exposure demo as ironclad proof that something is low-to-no risk and it'll be difficult to ever show that person otherwise.
> In that context you only give the shills more sway.
This is a really good point that I overlooked.
I'm in an industry where sophisticated participants can see the blatant scams, but laypeople have no chance at spotting them. Your claim makes a lot of sense.
I'm not sure how that line could be drawn. If a person does something that most would consider evil, but does it for reasons they honestly believed in which side is right?
Some of the Nazis may have honestly believed that Jewish people were the cause of Germany's economic problems, but I don't think many would claim they were anything less than evil.
I think you're agreeing with me, if I'm understanding you right.
> Why you call him an evil shill? It sounds like he actually believed it.
> It's not evil to be wrong.
I was responding to this and making the point that we don't often allow it to be this simple. I raised the Germany example to make the point that most consider what the Nazis did evil regardless of whether they honestly believed in their reasoning that lead to genocide.
During an interview by French investigative journalist Paul Moreira, which was first broadcast on French television station Canal+, Moore was asked about the safety of the herbicide glyphosate. Moore told Moreira that one "could drink a whole quart of it" without any harm. When Moore was challenged to drink a glass of the weedkiller, he refused, saying "I'm not an idiot" and "I'm not stupid" before ending the interview. Monsanto, the primary producers of glyphosate weedkillers under the Roundup brand, denied claims that Moore is a paid lobbyist for their company.[71][72][73] The interview came shortly after the release of a World Health Organization (WHO) report adding glyphosate to a list of probable carcinogens.[74][75]
Isn't that the farm's problem? At least in theory workers are supposed to be protected with PPE and/or proper procedures. Blaming them for the failure of that feels like blaming chainsaw manufacturers for causing hearing loss.
If the chainsaw company executives have to repeatedly try to convince the government that their product is actually safe despite being excessively loud over and over again, but they won't actually put themselves in a situation where they themselves wield their own chainsaws because of safety concerns, then yeah, it's on them.
If you're in the US, you've probably consumed glyphosate today. Farm workers wearing PPE will be exposed to elevated levels of glyphosate no matter how hard they try because humans aren't perfect. If execs won't put themselves in the same position as the people handling their products, they're evil hypocritical bastards.
> If the chainsaw company executives have to repeatedly try to convince the government that their product is actually safe despite being excessively loud
We're going in circles here. As mentioned earlier the MSDS provided by bayer clearly says you shouldn't get it on your skin or ingest it. Therefore it's pretty clear that glyphosate isn't "safe", at least in those circumstances.
>Farm workers wearing PPE will be exposed to elevated levels of glyphosate no matter how hard they try because humans aren't perfect.
You can make the same argument for chainsaws. Earmuffs aren't comfortable to wear in 100 degree weather. Should they be liable for hearing loss for the same reason?
Earmuffs in 100 may not be the most comfortable thing in the world, but its still perfectly fine to use for hours, you just sweat a bit more on ears and around. Also, if you want rest just stop cutting and put them down. I've seen forest workers use them all the time in summer heat.
Now we switch to same conditions but requirement is to wear pretty good 'airtight' face mask. Most people would be nearing collapse after some time when doing some hard work, I know I had some proper hard time during covid when trying some rather low efforts.
Those 2 examples are really not that comparable. Also, you very conveniently ignore the fact that chemical crap poisons everything, and ends up in my and your and my kid's food chain. Some chainsaw 20 km in the forest is really no such concern.
I can go on and on like this. Really, not comparable examples at all. Yeah, fuck Bayer and all those involved, I am normally peaceful person but for those involved while knowing, or at least strongly suspecting the truth I wish only horrible things in their lives.
They know how it's being used, spend millions on downplaying and denying its harms and lobby the government to loosen safety restrictions on its use.
This is the same excuse drug dealers use when selling substances they know are being abused and harm people. Following your logic, the MSDS sheets for heroin and fentanyl make it clear on how they should be dealt with safely.
From the farm workers perspective... it sounds they'd better try avoiding the situation anyway.
---
An analogy is an accident between a semi trailer and a motorbike.
Even if the semi trailer was the cause of the accident (legally), it's still a really bad idea for the motorbike to not try avoiding it. That way leads to a squished motorbike rider. :(
Note that the bill would restore the permissible residue levels to the previous limit, which is 1/300th the current limit. The limit was raised in order to allow the practice in the US.
I hate regulatory capture! The officials heading these agencies are often picked by the industry they are meant to regulate and often become highly paid lobbyists after they retire
I was 13 years old, a schoolboy on a trip to the countryside to "help" farm workers to harvest cabbages. It was a routine thing those days because the centralized Soviet industrial-government apparatus couldn't properly plan even such trivial things. There were about a hundred kids on that field. As we went with our business, a tractor spraying DDT came from the other side of the field. It passed us no more than 20 meters away, spraying everything around with the clouds of white stuff. Everybody knew it was DDT, everybody knew it was poisonous at that time. Our teacher approached the tractor and asked the operator to wait until we are done; the guy basically told her to fuck off and went on with spraying.
Now go ahead and tell me about capitalism, I'm all ears.
Apparently it's done to dry out tough perennial weeds so that harvest can run more smoothly, and also for crop desiccation (getting the harvest to dry uniformly by killing all of the plants simultaneously).
All concerns of safety notwithstanding, which is generally fucked in the industry and government, it's pretty cool that a RNAi product was developed to be literally sprayed on fields -- Things have probably progressed in the 15 years since I was active in lab work, but the general consensus was RNA would fall apart if you even talked too loudly, and the people regularly working with RNA all developed weird rituals and got all twitchy and paranoid (from stress, not poisoning!)
> Hansen also wonders about the pesticide’s efficacy – and the efficacy of RNAi pesticides more generally. A 2021 Scientific Reports study assessed a similar double-stranded RNA, which was being developed for a spray to combat the same potato pest. It found that within nine generations, 11,100 times the original quantity of pesticide was needed to get the same effect – an “extremely high” level of resistance, according to the study itself.
I want it to be easier to get initial approval, but harder to keep approval.
Ie. 'we approve sale of 1,000 gallons of this product, but if you want approval for more you need to do these additional tests '.
That's because I have a higher expectation of safety with a product that ends up in the food of 10 million people than the food of 1 million people.
Unfortunately thr regulations for food tend to be black and white - something is either approved or not. And that's wrong - the level of effort into verifying something is good to feed to people should go up with more people you are feeding it to.
Would you have rejected antibiotics if you were around when they were invented? There's a cost to always being skeptical.
RNAi was discovered in 1998 and is very well-studied. There's really no room for surprise here. It's hard to overstate the degree to which biologists can say with certainty that this isn't dangerous to humans in any way. My question wasn't rhetorical - can you think of a way that this could go wrong?
Regular small-molecule pesticides do worry me because the risk there genuinely can't be assessed without experiments. RNA is exquisitely predictable in this case.
I know the fundamental issue here is that you have no way of assessing my (or any scientist's) competence, honesty or degree of certainty (I'm assuming you don't have a biology background given your non-answer to my question, correct me if I'm wrong). And it's probably safer to lean on the side of caution, right? Just as I prefer organic foods, even though they probably have some small-molecule pesticides on them. I have no idea what those are doing to me, and no way of knowing.
But what is a civilization to do when it genuinely solves a problem? Sometimes things do get better.
I'm not against progress, I'm just against the breathless enthusiasm for the magic of science to solve all problems if only we put our blind faith in the Midgley's of the world who tell us that tetraethyl lead is safe, that chlorofluorocarbons are fine, that there's nothing to worry about!
Arguably those things were effectively "safe" in a laboratory setting and when testing at small scales.
It's not that I don't understand the technology, it's that these things get applied in ways we don't intend but could anticipate. Maybe today's RNAi solutions are provably safe, but what about some AI concocted future version which, at least according to the opaque AI model, is safe, too, yet, uh-oh, turns out maybe not?
Nothing is truly safe without safeguards, and if there's any industry that shows it's singularly uninterested in giving even the slightest of fucks it's the pesticide industry.
> Maybe today's RNAi solutions are provably safe, but what about some AI concocted future version
I'm actually finding it hard to imagine a scenario where you would accept any invention of any kind. Try to think of an invention that an AI (whatever you mean by this) couldn't make dangerous. I mean, literally any invention, past, present or even imagined. This is not rhetorical - you name something that seems obviously safe and I'll play the weaponizing AI.
> Nothing is truly safe without safeguards
What additional safeguards do you want, specifically? Again, not rhetorical. There's absolutely no way this could impact human health, so the only real concern is that it might affect organism other than the pest in question (though they'd need to be relatively closely related, and also eat the crops being sprayed or nearby plants - it can't go far because there are so many things that degrade RNA everywhere). Existing pesticides (that are being used right now) already have this problem and are often very broad-spectrum.
> I'm just against the breathless enthusiasm for the magic of science to solve all problems if only we put our blind faith in the Midgley's of the world
Not everyone is Thomas Midgley. Some (most?) people actually want to make the world better, and not adopting those improvements also has costs. And I'm here to make this less magical. I don't want you to need faith. I'm literally in this thread to demystify the technology just since it seems like a clear win over every other alternative that I know about, and there's clearly a lot of trepidation based on your responses and the responses of others.
Off topic so sorry but concerning roundup.
I was at a trade show / ag convention type event at del mar fairgrounds in around 1987 and roundup had a big display and one of the salesmen were doing thier promotional spiel and this one guy said that this product was so safe that he opened a carton from the wall display and poured some into a cup and drank it right there.
I have always wondered what ever happened to that guy
In the female and male rats, the LD50 levels of GI between 24 and 48 h were determined as 7444.26–7878.50 mg/kg and 7203.58–7397.25 mg/kg, respectively.
For home use it's a 1% solution.
So assuming a 70 kg human, you'd need to ingest 525g and at a 1% solution, drink 53L.
I've heard it compared to salt water. Perfectly safe. You could swim in it. But if you drink it enough you'll die, or have who knows what kind of health issues.
Upgrade by Blake Crouch is a fiction book that uses gene altering pesticides as a culprit for a global food shortage that triggers a massive famine(don’t worry, that isn’t really a spoiler).
It’s interesting to read fiction and then read headlines like this!
This article also reminds me of "The Sheep Look Up" by John Brunner (1972).
The author is from the UK, but it's mostly set in the US. It contains a brilliant parody of Trader Joes / Whole Foods (from well before they were founded, of course).
Apparently, he wrote a series of dystopias. I've been meaning to read the other ones.
Hard to see serious objections with a sound technical basis arising when literally everything that classifies as food is chock full of random, purposeful, and/or 'junk' RNA/DNA. Different genes, sure, but it's not as if eating spinach turns us green and kicks off mammalian photosynthesis.
I understand your point and agree with you to an extent.
But there are also these cute packages of DNA/RNA in nature that can cause extreme illness in humans - they're called viruses :D
There are also a great many plants and microbes with toxic components - we just happen to have very effectively eliminated them from the modern food system. This wasn't the case for primordial hunter gatherers, say.
So it's really not a good argument against caution and conservative safety protocols, because lots of things in nature _are_ harmful to us.
The point is that the character of RNA is intrinsically different than other classes of chemicals. More formally, the Bayesian prior of an RNA being dangerous/ toxic is far lower, ergo less caution is warranted. (Opportunity cost, wasted effort, etc.)
More concretely as relates to the prior, but can't a person fairly literally eat a spoonful of isolated influenza[0] without getting sick?
You can quite literally inject this RNA product into your arm and nothing would happen. The sequence needs to be specific to a human mRNA in order for silencing to occur. On top of that you have to deliver the RNA into the cell itself intact. The fact this works is this beetle happens to be responsive to environmental RNA, meaning they could simply take a piece of potato and dip it in beetle specific double stranded RNA, and the larvae would eat it as the delivery mechanism. There is probably some fitness advantage to being able to engage in such uptake normally, and this is what is being taken advantage of here for insecticide purposes.
The other response is pretty good. I would add that you won't be injecting this food into your bloodstream unless that's how you take all of your meals. Your body also produces enzymes that degrade RNA in the duodenum. And this particular RNA has no homology to the human genome, so it doesn't even matter if it could make it through your digestive system intact. And even then, it would have no way of entering the cells that it encountered, so it wouldn't even have a chance to interact with the gene silencing proteins.
The reason why viruses work is because they have ways of protecting their genomes and also sneaking into cells, this product has nothing at all to do that. Which again, still doesn't matter since it would be harmless even inside your cells.
It's no different than saying the alphabet produces unique computer code from the same set of characters. These products are targeted to a given species unique sequence for a given transcript. You can validate that your siRNA targets only your species of interest by using a BLAST search against other species.
You could eat kilos of this stuff and it would just be an interesting protein supplement. The sequence is specific to a gene in these insects its targeting. Even if it was human specific I doubt eating it would lead to anything. It would probably be degraded readily.
I mean, would it? How confident are we that there's not a one in a billion chance it might silence a random gene in humans? Or that there aren't impurities introduced in the manufacturing process resulting in substances that silence other genes?
Even if it did do something, there's a finite amount of it and it needs to be introduced into the cell in some way to have any effect. When siRNA experiments are done in a lab setting with human cells grown in a petri dish, one technique to make this happen is to actually shock the cells with just enough electricity to not kill them off, but to allow them to be in a certain state to take up the siRNA internally. Then, the effect only lasts as long as there is siRNA to silence mRNA transcripts. In other words over time normal expression patterns return as the siRNA is depleted and new mRNA is transcribed.
The headline is clearly meant to give laypeople the impression that it makes permanent changes to pest (and presumably human) consumers, so I think it does need to be pushed back against.
I BLASTed the sequence against the human genome and it found no hits at all, so it's not clear to me how this would have any effect on us. You can see the results here for the next two days: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=KE1GEND...
Good reasons to be cautious, but a game changer if it works. This is gene silencing rather than gene editing so in principle risks to humans and the wider environment are relatively low.
It does exist in nature and mechanisms of RNA interference are pretty well understood. The headline is actually incorrect here as the gene isn't altered, but instead the RNA product of the gene is suppressed.
The important thing for safety is that this works at the level of RNA rather than by modifying DNA (which is how things like CRISPR work). Actions at the RNA level are effectively reversible; once the interfering RNA degrades the effect will go away. On this basis you can predict that it's unlikely to have many deleterious long-term effects, although you should still do trials to check.
really absurd that we continue creating things no one's body evolved to tolerate that we continually ingest. And we wonder why chronic illness is skyrocketing in incidence and weird seemingly unsolvable health problems becoming ever more common
what's the annual global expenditure on cancer treatments, these days; and what percentage of oncologists would subject themselves to cancer treatment?
Overall five year survival rates for cancer have risen from about 50% in 1975 to about 75% currently. That includes several extremely difficult subtypes of cancer, which means that many types of cancer have improved much more than the overall trend.
Together this constitutes millions of years of extended life for millions of people. Millions of families given a reprieve from the worst outcome, millions more memories that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Societally, that’s worth a tremendous amount of money, not to mention the other positive effects that we get from spending lots of money on research.
Regulatory capture is a term for a failure mode of representative government wherein a regulated entity amasses and uses political influence to get special treatment and other favors from the government. Your comment isn't even coherent. However, if I assume what you meant is that regulatory capture is a made up thing that doesn't really happen, then you're also wrong.
> I’m not sure what part of my comment is incoherent.
You called a general concept a conspiracy theory. Who would be the conspirators in this conspiracy theory? It's like saying... Breakfast is a conspiracy theory.
Many people think it is a conspiracy theory. I believe it’s the source of so much that ails our regulatory system. I was hoping to spark a conversation with people who both agree and disagree with as little effort as possible. Seems my ambiguity and or brevity earned me nothing but down votes.
