blarryg

I call this type of question, the Sci-Fi (or Star Trek) fallicy. That is: IF we change this one tech, then this could happen. But techs don't change one thing, they all advance together. IF it indeed were true that some gene editing of a plant hurt bees, then some gene editing of bees could fix that.

In reality, our super productive agricultural systems that support our population simply won't function long term w/o genetic manipulation technology. I know that a large chunk of soybean production (Brazil) only exists via a genetic modification to change its response to lighting so that it can grow in Brazil.

I work in AgTech -- robotics. I see globalization ending for a few decades which will probably result in mass starvation in Asia and Africa among others before (my guess) America reasserts globalism in a few decades hence. The only hope I see of food security in many of these places is genetic adaptation of core food groups.

What is happening in CRISPR with agricultural plants?

A globalized world produces enough food. Wait until that breaks apart and it is breaking apart now, not years from now. This year's harvest was already planted, wait to see what simply taking one nation, Ukraine out of the food supply chain causes. Look at pre-fertilizer Africa growing regions, and look now. Mass starvation will happen unless we rush other means to the market. We almost certainly won't and partly because of the attitude you have. Having become involved with actual farming out in the field I don't worry about genetic modifications -- it takes so much just to have crops survive and let up for a moment and weeds outcompete the crop. This is universal: humans optimize for some production goal, evolution optimizes for survivability and reproduction.

Most crops are already sooo engineered by other means that they are nothing like their original wild variant and have become too monoculture -- we'll have to use genetic tools to get more variety into the crops anyhow.

As for Star Trek, for example, characters develop health problems or risk their lives being on the "away crew". But with Transporters, this is all silly since one could just record what was transmitted and retransmit it. It would be silly to even have a crew that weren't all clones of the top people ... the battles were all silly, at relativistic speeds, any battle would long be over before Captain Kirk said "F ... i ... r ... e ...!". It would all have to be done by computer, of which they seem to have a completely intelligent one at that. And so on. Most of the "problems" are already solved by the tech they are already using.

To bring this to real modern times: Jet travel means that a disease in Asia can land in San Francisco w/in a day. But other advances in tech means we can already produce a vaccine for it in a year, soon w/in days. Genetic engineering is going to allow us to bring back or enhance Smallpox ... but better do that w/in 10 years because a defense for it will also be able to be produced almost instantly. If we only had the bad side, we'd be doomed, but we have both sides.

Honeybees have been suffering because they are a monoculture that is being hit by Varroa mites that we spread around by bringing hives around. OK, but soon we can gene-drive those mites out of existence as well as genetically bolstering bee's resistance to them.

There's some out-of-the-box thinking!