Well they&#x27;re equivalent insofar as they used methods outside traditional breeding in order to achieve their goals; namely &quot;artificial&quot; sequence editing.  Will all the modifications have the same potential for harm?  It&#x27;s an open question.<p>We do know that humans do pretty well on things that have been bred using ancient techniques.  Might modern techniques do a better job?  Absolutely yes.  Might these modern techniques also introduce problems?  You can&#x27;t really rule it out.<p>I&#x27;m not suggesting that all GMO are evil and that they should be banned, destroyed, etc.  But what I am suggesting is that when the rate of change we can achieve gets much, much faster than using traditional techniques it&#x27;s entirely possible that we could do something bad that would take generations to shake out.<p>Presuming that we &quot;know&quot; something after a couple of years when it has to do with biology, especially when you&#x27;re talking about humans, is pretty dicey.<p>Soylent seems to be OK for humans so far, but if all you eat&#x2F;drink is soylent for a decade you might find out that it&#x27;s got too much of something, or not enough of something else.  It&#x27;s entirely premature to proclaim soylent 100% safe, that&#x27;ll take a couple of generations.  I feel the same way about organisms that have had their breeding sped up significantly.  Not definitely bad, but I&#x27;d prefer not to be the guinea pig myself.