But it doesn't actually work like that. The genes changed are in the DNA, inside the cell nucleus, in a laboratory. The splicing is done in a lab and then its over. It does not remain active after that point. Ignorant people imagine the splicing is something like the Thing, still active, waiting to nab whatever comes close till it starts moving and talking and eating people. Not even a little. It makes for a new horror movie/genre so people eat it up as if Hollywood movies are based on reality. Or that Jurassic Park wasn't a slasher-comedy.
What Genomic crops CAN do is create biodiversity and solve all sorts of problems. Traditional selective breeding is how we went from wild grasses in southern Turkey to Wheat that billions eat around the world. Rice with triple the yield on the same plant, and flowers that look great but don't smell. These breeding techniques are how we do things, and its genetic engineering by trade off. DNA meddling lets us restore the strength of the plants back into their genome, so you can get back the stuff you didn't know you were missing, like resistance to Wheat Rust so you can have sustainable crops and a hardy plant that will grow wild with a high yield and without attendance by a farmer. Imagine how many people that would feed.
There are other crops this is needed for. How about improving Corn so its got healthier nutrients and doesn't cause soil depletion by adding the Nitrogen Fixing Bacteria nodules from Beans to the roots of corn. Now you don't need to fertilize the soil when you plant it. The corn will do that itself. It will improve the soil where it is planted. It could be left unattended and just grow and grow. Add back its native resistance to the various corn plant diseases lost during selective breeding and you'll have a corn which can be a stable crop, feeding billions (again).
Work has already been done to make super-rice, which has around 10x the yield of wild rice. With nitrogen fixing and good uptake of nutrients, rice could feed more people with less effort. Again, a positive. Add better nutrition so brown rice is even healthier and set it up to grow in colder temps so it would work in Siberia, for example, or Canada, and imagine its value.
With Canada and Siberia there's another problem which could be solved. The pine trees are all frost resistant. Deciduous trees are a compromise but extreme cold still shatters them so you can't grow orchards of edible fruit in the Taiga. Its just too cold. What if trees were genetically modified so they could survive, yet the fruits were safe and edible? Bears, moose, elk, deer etc would eat them in the winter. This would be additional habitat. They'd spread the seeds and more fruit trees would grow in more places. Instead of useless Taiga pines, the big frozen north would be overtaken by wild orchards. If birds carried frost resistant rice, the wet swamplands would be full of that too.
Increased carrying capacity, excess of food, is what protects our population from disaster, from the wars that come from famine caused by the unexpected weather changes we thought unlikely and didn't plan for. 74,000 years ago the Toba Caldera eruption nearly killed off our species. Before the eruption we were 2.5 million, worldwide. After? 2,500 or less. The genetic evidence is strong. This is known as the Bottleneck. We knew about the bottleneck before we found the eruption site in Indonesia. Supervolcanoes erupt, and they cause ice ages. That impacts food production and causes famine and die off. We don't want that. Not when we invest so much in our total population in educating ourselves and pretending all human life is valuable. That's a conceit of rich nations who have never known famine. Who don't know the facts of being on the wrong end of the gun, sword, machete. We have gotten complacent, like the Anasazi, and might be eaten by the next tribe to take over.
While seed companies make money on resale, international charity organizations are operating seed banks of heritage seeds to preserve genetic diversity. It would be useful if those traits were recorded so they could be synthesized and added back into the crops, tested for safety, and become part of the general crop. That might be premature at the primitive state of Genetic science, particularly since genetic engineers have poor work ethic, no morality I can detect, and venal aspirations. Quality people and regulation are needed there or you'll get disaster which could kill a lot of people. Imagine a badly designed rice genome, coded to be dominant, which infects all rice causing it not to bloom so no rice kernels grow. The entire harvest fails and the rice crop ends, in the wild, forever. Billions would die, all because lazy researchers screwed up. That's how big the stakes are. And the researchers I've met in that industry? They're exactly that bad. Incompetent and lazy, viciously indifferent, utterly capable of genocide without more than a cynical laugh. Nuclear bombs can't wipe out the rice crop worldwide forever. Genetic engineering can.
Genomic crops are very very dangerous. They can be hugely beneficial, but they can be abused. There needs to be regulation by competent ETHICAL scientists trained in Black Swan detection/prediction so they can ensure protocols and designs are forced into the industry so disaster is either prevented entirely or limited in scope. And there needs to criminal consequences for scientists who violate those protocols. Hard time, prison consequences. Even War Crimes against Humanity level consequences, complete with firing squad and documentary required viewing for all current and training scientists so they know how dangerous their work is. Engineers go through that, applied scientists should too.
Eventually, work will be expanded from food crops to ornamental plants that offer better scents, stronger drought or frost resistance, and all sorts of other positive things the world wants. Weakening species of animals with too much inbreeding can be corrected so the Cheetah won't die out after all, and purebred dogs won't have the hip dysplaysia which plagues the species. And sea otters can be immunized against feline viruses so they won't keep dying because Brittney dropped her cats poop in the toilet and it washed out to sea with active viruses. And maybe figure out a cure for Zebra Mussels in the Great Lakes. And Pike in Lake Davis. Lots of useful things can come from this. None of it will be easy, and all of it needs a Pessimist present to say "What if it gets loose? What if it mutates?" and be taken seriously. Engineers in legitimate industries do this. Genetic engineers need to be responsible, and pay the price when they aren't.
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