Reply #31: A very good point, Mr.Shakespeare... [View All]

[tom_paine]

I completely agree. The process to create insulin and other compound by "bacterial production menthods" are not the same to creating genetically modified foods and releasing them into the wild.

There are all manner of unpleasant effects that could be unintentionally caused, and even breeding "sterile" plants does not insure 100% certainty that mutants won't be able to reproduce. In biology, it is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to creat anything with 100% success. Usually, we in this field talk about log-orders of magnitude (ie. 99% vs 99.9% vs. 99.99% and so on).

And I am a molecular biologist, so I am not entirely ignorant of what I speak.

I am not totally against GM foods, and I completely support bacterial production methods such as those used to produce insulin in a controlled environemnt.

To me, the problem rest not so much with the science of molecular biology/genetics, but with the science of ecology which is younger as a science as molecular genetics and, with so much less money and research-hours being put into it (damned lib'rul hippie scientists!), is infinitely less well understood.

What Shakespeare is trying to say (I think), and what I wholeheartedly agree with, is the ECOLOGY of GM foods is not well-known. THAT is the problem more than the GM-aspects of it as theys tand alone.

For instance: There is already a burgeoning issue with genetic uniformity in corn and wheat crops, and the potentiality for unforeseen consequences doubles when not only do you have genetic unifromity, but when they are also not naturally occurring phenotypes.

Just my 2 cents