Really well done piece, and the history of how the 1986 decision actually got made is the part I had not seen laid out this clearly.
The Lactobacillus example is the sharpest move here. Nothing about those organisms changed in 2020, but the regulatory status of swapping genes between them did, which is about as clean a demonstration as you could ask for that the trigger tracks nomenclature rather than biology.
What your field-trial section suggests is that the replacement axis is already sitting in the data you cite. Persistence and spread are measurable properties of a strain in a given environment, and the two cases you give sit at opposite ends: lab E. coli collapsing 100,000-fold in soil in eight days, and the Estonian phenol degrader whose insert is still detectable decades later. Those two could be identical on the genus test and completely different on the question anyone actually cares about. It would also give the consent order something real to key off, instead of being where applications go when nobody can name the risk.
I looked up the two probiotics companies they mentioned by the way - the anti-tooth-decay one is defunct, but the ALDH supplement for alcohol drinking one looks like it's still active.
They also sell one that turns sugar into fibre. That sounds a lot like nata de coco, that's a type of southeast Asian jelly dessert made by fermenting coconut water with an organism that produces bacterial cellulose. It's got a very different mouth feel than gelatin or agar - the little cubes are quite firm but collapse into a flat material when you bite down, which finally made sense when I learned it's cellulose
So I wonder if they're just selling nata de coco cultures as a fancy biotech product lol
Really well done piece, and the history of how the 1986 decision actually got made is the part I had not seen laid out this clearly.
The Lactobacillus example is the sharpest move here. Nothing about those organisms changed in 2020, but the regulatory status of swapping genes between them did, which is about as clean a demonstration as you could ask for that the trigger tracks nomenclature rather than biology.
What your field-trial section suggests is that the replacement axis is already sitting in the data you cite. Persistence and spread are measurable properties of a strain in a given environment, and the two cases you give sit at opposite ends: lab E. coli collapsing 100,000-fold in soil in eight days, and the Estonian phenol degrader whose insert is still detectable decades later. Those two could be identical on the genus test and completely different on the question anyone actually cares about. It would also give the consent order something real to key off, instead of being where applications go when nobody can name the risk.
This is great, and very practical and actionable. Thanks!
Hannah Ritchie has made related points (as have I): https://mattball.substack.com/p/several-notes-on-gmos
It is incredible how much human suffering there is because of this attitude.
I looked up the two probiotics companies they mentioned by the way - the anti-tooth-decay one is defunct, but the ALDH supplement for alcohol drinking one looks like it's still active.
They also sell one that turns sugar into fibre. That sounds a lot like nata de coco, that's a type of southeast Asian jelly dessert made by fermenting coconut water with an organism that produces bacterial cellulose. It's got a very different mouth feel than gelatin or agar - the little cubes are quite firm but collapse into a flat material when you bite down, which finally made sense when I learned it's cellulose
So I wonder if they're just selling nata de coco cultures as a fancy biotech product lol