/sci/ - Science & Math

long term studies don't exist, that's the real problem

we know that taking some new untested revolutionary product and mass marketing can be incredibly harmful, like say CFC's. unfortunately it's a good business that can be used to bully farmers into paying, so there's no incentive to do the long term studies

currently the only research that exists on the health effects is similar to the early research into the health effects of tobacco, just paid advertisements by the industry

independent studies show some negative effects in animals but again there's no incentive to carry that research to human testing

fundamentally it is an unknown since genetics are so complex, a genetic sequence can have a different meaning depending on the state of other genes in the sequence, for example some genes work different when you're a baby from when you're an adult as things get switched on and off by hormones

additionally there's layers of meaning, different proteins can be made from seemingly unrelated parts of the code being reconfigured and brought together, so there's an embedded meta code

and this is not accounting for the fact that large portions of this code is "non-coding", that is, we don't know what it does, if it does anything, or if it could do anything in a different configuration

genetic manipulation today is at a level where it can be compared to open your windows folder with a hex editor, and changing random values to see what happens the next time you boot the system

you might change the colour of a pixel in the background slightly, or you might cause a memory leak that shows up after 12 hours uptime, or you might brick the system with a single bit that gets loaded deep in a com chain on boot, there's no way to know

that is before we talk about the organisms that deliberately have toxic genes added to them to help fight pests, and which may very well have some effect on humans

and of course pesticide resistance will increase the usage of those