The organic food lobby has been successfully demonizing safe and effective biotechnology for the last two decades. Part of their strategy is to create a false dichotomy between GMO (genetically modified organisms) and non-GMO …. There are real differences among these various techniques, but they do not divide cleanly into two categories ….
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[A]lmost nothing you eat [looks] anything like [its] evolved ancestors. The simplest technique for altering plants is …. saving seeds from plants with the most favorable characteristics. This is a powerful technique, but takes a lot of time.…
In the last century the technique of hybridization became popular. This involves pollinating one cultivar …. with a related one …. Breeders looking to speed up the process turned to [chemicals] or radiation to speed up the mutation rate …. hoping to find a “[helpful] monster.”
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Then there are a variety of new techniques that …. alter a specific gene, or silence a gene that is already present in a cultivar. Or you can insert a new gene, and that gene can come from any species …. So, using radioactivity to mutate a plant is non-GMO, and using a precise technique to silence a gene already present in a plant is GMO.
This is arbitrary nonsense. There is also no inherent objective difference among these techniques in terms of safety, either for health or the environment.
Read full, original article: Fighting Back Against GMO Pseudoscience
