noise to signal

Let's finish off the year right

... with a scary )(!* story about the genetic drift activists against genetically modified (GM) food have been warning us about all along:

GM crops created superweed, say scientists

Modified genes from crops in a GM crop trial have transferred into local wild plants, creating a form of herbicide-resistant "superweed", the Guardian can reveal.

The cross-fertilisation between GM oilseed rape, a brassica, and a distantly related plant, charlock, had been discounted as virtually impossible by scientists with the environment department. It was found during a follow up to the government's three-year trials of GM crops which ended two years ago.

The new form of charlock was growing among many others in a field which had been used to grow GM rape. When scientists treated it with lethal herbicide it showed no ill-effects.

[ . . . ]

The scientists also collected seeds from other weeds in the oilseed rape field and grew them in the laboratory. They found that two - both wild turnips - were herbicide resistant.

[ . . . ]

To assess the potential of herbicide-resistant weeds as a danger to crops, a French researcher placed a single triazine-resistant weed, known as fat hen, in maize fields where atrazine was being used to control weeds. After four years the plants had multiplied to an average of 103,000 plants, Dr Johnson said.

What is not clear in the English case is whether the charlock was fertile. Scientists collected eight seeds from the plant but they failed to germinate them and concluded the plant was "not viable".

But Dr Johnson points out that the plant was very large and produced many flowers.

He said: "There is every reason to suppose that the GM trait could be in the plant's pollen and thus be carried to other charlock in the neighbourhood, spreading the GM genes in that way. This is after all how the cross-fertilisation between the rape and charlock must have occurred in the first place."

Since charlock seeds can remain in the soil for 20 to 30 years before they germinate, once GM plants have produced seeds it would be almost impossible to eliminate them.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating. I'm not inherently against GM plants or animals for some nebulous moral reason. I think it's a bad idea because I work in the software industry. Software is human created, using human-created and human-readable programming languages, and it's vastly simpler than almost all genetic codes. And yet... there are uncountable instances where mysterious, unfixable bugs occur because we don't really understand how things interact. Most of them are minor weirdnesses; some of them cause spectacular, data-destroying crashes.

Usually at this point someone brings up cross-breeding, AKA "old skool GM". I have absolutely no problem with cross breeding (although of course it does depend on the ethics of the cross-breeder -- see any number of freakish, over-delicate dog breeds). The most important difference here is that with cross breeding, as opposed to direct genetic modification, we're using the "compiler" that's built into the system. Instead of just changing one line of a code that we have an incomplete understanding of, we're giving two inputs with desirable characteristics to the existing compiler, which changes hundreds of lines of code at once in mysterious and complex ways.

It's not that I think genetic code is inherently too complex for humans to understand; anyone who makes that claim is sure to be proven wrong in some period of time. My concern is that until we can clearly and perfectly understand the complexities of software we created, it's pure hubris to pretend that our partial understanding of code we didn't create means that we can tinker with it safely.