Comment by thecrash

> The extreme suspicion of commercially introduced anthropogenic agents seems a bit ridiculous in both natural ecology and the human microbiome. Prove this compound conclusively safe, but not these other ten million compounds we're just going to allow to run wild.

With endemic organisms (or viruses) they just are going to run wild regardless of how we feel about it. There's no point in banning a naturally occurring algae because excluding it from the environment is not a practical option.

The only time when we have any strong control over what organisms are in an environment is when they don't yet exist there, but we have the ability to introduce them. This is our only technical choke-point, so it makes a lot of sense to make a big deal of that decision, and probably to be quite conservative about it. You can always let the cat out of the bag later, but you can never get it back in.