The hidden tragedy of precautionary regulation is that lives lost to delayed deployment never appear on any agency ledger. Visible harms of action always outweigh the invisible costs of stagnation in political incentives.
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.
The Lactobacillus example exposes the core flaw of process-based regulation. When two identical biological outcomes face radically different legal hurdles purely due to their method of assembly, policy stops tracking physical risk.
@vectro I’m sorry to see that you think this an AI slop comment, however, I am writting these comments by myself and your tone and claim are both offensive.
I am only interacting with Substack articles that I find relevant to me and my interests and I leave comments only when I think I could add a valuable input and have a valuable interaction, instead of these fake “Congratulations on your article” comments I tend to see. If this is your goal, good for you, however do not drag other people down please.
I hate to accuse someone of lying but I’m going to do it here. The top level comment was written by AI, or at a minimum heavily edited by AI. One can tell by the way that it is — by the word choice, cadence, sentence structure, etc. — and Pangram agrees. The comment was not (primarily) written by a human.
I do thank you, however, for authoring a reply to my comment yourself. That one I believe was written by a human.
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
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.
The hidden tragedy of precautionary regulation is that lives lost to delayed deployment never appear on any agency ledger. Visible harms of action always outweigh the invisible costs of stagnation in political incentives.
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.
The Lactobacillus example exposes the core flaw of process-based regulation. When two identical biological outcomes face radically different legal hurdles purely due to their method of assembly, policy stops tracking physical risk.
Please stop posting these AI slop comments. Nobody wants to read them.
@vectro I’m sorry to see that you think this an AI slop comment, however, I am writting these comments by myself and your tone and claim are both offensive.
I am only interacting with Substack articles that I find relevant to me and my interests and I leave comments only when I think I could add a valuable input and have a valuable interaction, instead of these fake “Congratulations on your article” comments I tend to see. If this is your goal, good for you, however do not drag other people down please.
I hate to accuse someone of lying but I’m going to do it here. The top level comment was written by AI, or at a minimum heavily edited by AI. One can tell by the way that it is — by the word choice, cadence, sentence structure, etc. — and Pangram agrees. The comment was not (primarily) written by a human.
I do thank you, however, for authoring a reply to my comment yourself. That one I believe was written by a human.
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
The core dynamic here reflects an unresolved dialectic between algorithmic determinism and contextual heuristics.
Please don't post these AI comments.