In sci.med.nutrition Moosh:] wrote:
On 22 Jul 2003 00:46:26 GMT, Brian Sandle
wrote:

Gayle C. Ferguson,1 Jack A. Heinemann,1^,2^* and Martin A. Kennedy3

Department of Plant and Microbial Sciences, University of Canterbury,1
Department of Pathology, Christchurch School of Medicine,
Christchurch, New Zealand,3 Norwegian Institute of Gene Ecology,
Tromsø, Norway2

Received 5 November 2001/ Accepted 16 January 2002

Thanks.

Heinemann is not getting sufficient grants, I presume because partnership
with immediate profit-making would not be easy in his field. Well that is
a bit strange when you think of the tremendous public-funded sink
going/having gone into GM and not paying off, except to sell herbicide.

He says his work might eventually yield insights into the design of
fundamentally different anti-infective agents for the control of
antibiotic resistance and infectious diseases as well as being relevant to
"the volatile debate on assessing the risks of genetically modified
organisms to teh environment".

There the bacteria coul dbe protected from
antibiotics while exhanging the genes for antibiotic resistance and the
genes that make bacteria better at causing disease. Laboratory tests
proved that genes do transfer between these bacteria even when antibiotics
are present.

The ability of bacteria to exchange genes insdie human cells also suggests
the bacteria could transfer genes to the human genome. However, Heinemann
says, `This is not necessarily going to cause the transfer of bacterial
genes to our sex cells and to our children, because these bacteria do not
normally have access to our sex cells'" - Deborah Parker, UC Alumni,
Winter 2003, p 19.

Though who knows, when, as I posted in the `apocalypse' thread, GM can be
used to make, in corn, antibodies which will destroy human sperm.

And this would be injected into what site on the body?

I don't know if they have to be injected.

Well how will these proteins survive the gut?

As you may have now read, my post of Schubbert et al, the GM green
fluorescence marker gets in and even crosses to the unborn embryo/fetus.

What is the route of the anti-sperm antibodies that vasectomised men may
start to produce?

Well it's already in the bloodstream, so it needs NO route of
introduction.

And these GM proteins get in.

Why would you want to manufacture anti-sperm antibodies?
Contraception?

If it could be put in food it might be a political tool.

Wow. Machiavelli lives

By saying that you imply I am two faced: that I support such political
control, and further imply that I support the technology, a total about
face.

If I preach against murder and say guns can be used to kill people do you
then say I am Machiavellian and imply I support gun killing?

What sort of intelligence are you hoping to sway/sell to?

These are only just proteins, BTW


it is necessary to take more care with drug
resistance genes.

Is not sufficient care already being taken?

No. Things are done with the knowledge of the decade.

What more can you ask?

When you are working with the bases of life take some heed from people who
sacrifice their jobs when they have not been listened to.

Huh?

Scientists from the FDA who did not support `generally recognised as safe'
(GRAS) line of FDA.

We should not be feeding drug resistance genes to people
en masse, not checking up with control groups if it is triggering
anything.

What evidence have you that this has not been thoroughly investigated?

It has been examined with the old ideas. That genes are transferred from
parent to offspring (vertical movement) was the basis. That is now
outmoded. Genes go horizontally from one bacteria to another, and that is
the more dominant method of passing on resistance. It can happen in human
cells where bacteria are protected from antibiotics.

But how is this well-known phenomenon related to GE?

In GE genes are moved horizontally artificially.

But this "horizontal"/ "vertical" is just an etic grid that you have
put on this phenomrnon. To the organism, there is no difference.

Read again:
*********
This is the html version of the file
http://www.nzige.canterbury.ac.nz/fi...ubmission.pdf.
G o o g l e automatically generates html versions of documents as we
crawl the web.
To link to or bookmark this page, use the following url:
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[...] Submission on AgResearch Application GMD01194
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and I shan't quote the volumes of horizontal gene transfer elucidation,
but shall give:

"
tetracycline

stimulates HGT rates by controlling expression of the genes that cause

these elements to transfer (Salyers, 1995)."

As further comment on an earlier point of yours about bacterial
gene-swapping always being all-on.

And I
believe you are assuming that banana genes are different from human
genes. Let me tell you a little secret, they are not. Genes are just a
sequence of genetic material that occurs in all living organisms.
Just shows that we evolved from the same primitive organisms.

Yes, we share 80% of genes with a rice plant. That is why we should be so
careful about tinkering with rice.

And it is now known that the genes themselves are not sufficient to
explain the complexities of mammals.

They are engineered
in a package which makes it easier to move in. They will then be
more potently available to bacteria.

But bacteria have just about any gene available to them now. Why
should a few already existing ones be a bother?

That's like saying an orchestra has so many violinists a few more won't
matter. But it only takes one playing a bit loud to spoil the other 12's
effect. And the genes have strong promoters packaged with them.

Heinemann's work was `recognised by the American Society for Microbiology
as teh best published in April 2002. The society publishes 600 of the many
thousands of articles submitted to its journals each month, and of the 600
published last year, the Canterbury research was singled out as "best of
the best."'

Fine. Bacteria swap genes. As they can multiply "vertically"
from one to 4,722,366,400,000,000,000,000 in just one day, I think
this is probably not all that fantastic

Fritjof Capra already in 1996 reports about Kauffman (1993):

`sytems biologists have begun to portray teh genome as a
self-organizing network capable of spontaneously producing new forms
of order. "We must rethink evolutionary biology," writes Stuart
Kauffman. "Much of the order we see in organisms may be the direct
result not of natural selection but of the natural order selection
was allowed to act on... Evolution is not just a tinkering ... It is
an emergent order honored and honed by selection."'

Surmise.

You yourself agreed when you said survival techniques from the past are
helpful for the present. But we do not realise the extent of that.