What would make a sustainable genetically modified organism?

As a policy, I try very hard not to listen to political campaigns. Mailers and other propaganda go straight to the trash. This does not mean I don't care. Several weeks before ballots are due, I look at the candidates and issues. Given my point of view, will reading this bias your views?

Nonetheless, I've heard that the GMO debate rages in my beloved Washington State. Many of my dear friends in my hippy sustainable green echo chamber seem to care deeply about this.

What are we arguing about?  Initiative Measure No. 522, AN ACT Relating to disclosure of foods produced through genetic engineering. So, what is a GMO and how does it how does it differ from regular selective breeding? 522 uses a technical definition:

(3)(a) "Genetically engineered" means any food that is produced
from an organism or organisms in which the genetic material has been changed through the application of ... recombinant deoxyribonucleic ... protoplast fusion ... in a way that does not occur by natural multiplication or natural recombination."

In essence, changing plants and animals much faster than can be achieved using older techniques. Cross species.

I don't want to analyze the arguments for an against 522. Briefly, While most of my echo chamber thinks GMOs are evil, I think GMOs could be great, but currently aren't.  Why aren't GMOs great? Patenting, terminator seeds, monopolization, plants that increase use of pesticides, farmers using them are only motivated by crop yield, companies producing them are only motivated by profit.

An aside: as a software engineer, I wondered why genetic modification doesn't have have open source. In software, closed source, licensed software (Microsoft, Apple) is balanced and challenged by open source (think linux, javascript, and other software).  Of course: software is very easy to read, copy, alter, distribute and even reverse engineer. DNA takes a little more work. Perhaps we'll have more open source genetic modification when gene readers and writers come down a little in price. I wonder if kids will be able to create toy genomes as easily as they can create toy computer programs?

Getting back to the point, I think that the organic, sustainable food movement needs to embrace genetic engineering as an essential control to it's implementation. What would a "sustainable" genetically engineered food system look like?

Open source. Free as in speech, if not free as in beer. Transparency through the entire process. Stop suing farmers whose crops are corrupted by your intellectual property.

No terminator seeds.

Slow, careful pilots and studies. The roll out of GMOs has been too fast for some peoples' comfort. Dismissing concerns about nutrition, affects on humans and affects on the environment reduces time to market but scares people.

Solve problems for people and the environment, not companies' profits. Can we make more drought resistant plants? Can we reduce pesticide use? Can we put our biological resources and efforts into understanding the systems that allow for healthy food production? We've accelerated the pace of climate change so much, that the environment needs as much help as it can to adapt.

Can this happen in the current economic and political climate? As long as the only ones in the game are aggressive, profit driven companies, probably not. We need more idealistic minds to think creatively about how genetic engineering our food production can help us solve the world's problems. We need to think of it as just a faster way to turn teosinte into modern day corn. The danger, and the opportunities, lie in "faster".

The question, Is this worth automating?

No-one likes to do repetitive tasks. Well, perhaps some people do, but programmers should not. We like to automate the tasks. But when should we not? The stock answer would be to turn to a return on investment calculation.

However, I'd suggest that even if a task could be done manually in 30 minutes, where it would take 2 hours to script, you should automate it. If a process could be done in 5 minutes a day, but it would take 2 days to create a program to do it, write the program.

Why? Do you not care about your companies bottom line? Why, thank you for asking: Each time you script or automate something, you get better and faster at automation. What would have taken 2 hours to script the first time will take 1 hour the second, and a few minutes subsequent attempts. Consider what you learn in your decision to automate something.

And, of course, writing a script is much more entertaining than install the ruby devkit manually on 25 windows build agents.