Addressing just a few of the points..... see inline

On Fri, 08 Aug 2003 20:42:48 -0700, Walter Epp
wrote:

There is no one in the world who has 46 years of experience with
genetic engineering. The wisdom distilled from multiple generations
of your forefathers does not exist for GE biotech.

Genetic manipulation has been going on for milliennia.
Agriculturalists since the beginning of recorded history have
genetically modified crops. Of course the main methods have been
selection, (which removes genes from the gene pool) but other methods
such as treating seeds with caustic materials, heat, cold and partial
fermentation have all been used. So has cross-fertilisation, both
intra and cross species.

The result is that many crop plants are multiploid, and sterile, and
open to any naturally occurred disease mutation that comes along.
Bananas may be extinct in a few years. A mutant disease could wipe all
the crop plants in a season. Most crop plants *only* survive because
of man's intervention and huge amounts of chemicals.

For example, genetically engineered constructs are unstable - the
artificial mechanisms that enable foreign genes to be inserted also enable
them to jump out and re-insert somewhere else, resulting in unpredictable
recombinations. The realization is dawning that if genetically engineered
crops are planted on a large scale and contaminate large amounts of non-gmo
crops before the cascading instabilities end in a genetic implosion, the
result could be the largest famine in history.

See above. The way that we conduct agriculture is unbelievably
dangerous. And that's got nothing to do with current genetic
engineering.

The fact that GE organisms are fragile is good. They will not stand
against the "natural" organisms that contend against them. Look
someday at the huge numbers of wild Brassicas by our roadsides. They
are nothing more than the descendents of cultivated Brassicas that
have escaped and reverted to type. There is no trace of the cultivars
in the feral plants.

The same would happen to GE organisms. They are *fragile* and would
soon get absorbed by the more robust wild varieties.

It's silly to believe that in a few years we could produce plants
which are more robust than those produced over millions of years of
evolution.

Cheers,

Cliff
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