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Paying to find non-GE wild corn?
Moosh:] wrote:
On 31 Jul 2003 01:42:57 GMT, Brian Sandle posted: Gordon Couger wrote: "Brian Sandle" wrote in message ... In sci.med.nutrition Moosh:] wrote: On 24 Jul 2003 05:04:37 GMT, Brian Sandle wrote: So you don't read Moosh:]'s articles, I have to economize somehwe **** From: "Moosh:]" Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition,nz.general,sci.agriculture Subject: Paying to find non-GE wild corn? Message-ID: Lines: 89 Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 11:54:52 GMT [...] In the junk DNA there is just about everything that has been tried, if it hasn't been harmlessly corrupted over the aeons. [...] **** That doesn't mean that it is a "memory bank" Just a repository for turned off sequences. What turns them on again is a moot point. Evolution isn't using these if needed, it is being lucky enough to have a random mutation that confers a survival benefit. And when all your non-mutated peers are dying from some environmental change (antibiotics) , you will outcompete them. But what if a mutation in the past had developed an ability to access the junk DNA under stress? Would that be as complex as developing eyes ears and advanced emotions by mutation? What if some thing that are now blue turn green on August 5th, 2005 and we have a new color bleen, blue that turns to green. You stabbing in the dark about thing you have no knowledge of. Do you trust propaganda machines more than scientist that spend their lives working in a field? I am not stabbing in the dark, I am trying to get Moosh:] thinking. You're not going to convince anyone with propaganda and fringe science, and wild speculation. You must become far more discriminating. Linkname: The Spurious Foundation of Genetic Engineering URL: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0209-01.htm size: 723 lines [...] Why, then, has the central dogma continued to stand? To some degree the theory has been protected from criticism by a device more common to religion than science; dissent, or merely the discovery of a discordant fact, is a punishable offense, a heresy that might easily lead to professional ostracism. Much of this bias can be attributed to institutional inertia, a failure of rigor, but there are other, more insidious, reasons why molecular geneticists might be satisfied with the status quo; the central dogma has given them such a satisfying, seductively simplistic explanation of heredity that it seemed sacrilegious to entertain doubts. The central dogma was simply too good not to be true. As a result, funding for molecular genetics has rapidly increased over the last twenty years, new academic institutions, many of them "genomic" variants of more mundane professions, such as public health, have proliferated. At Harvard and other universities, the biology curriculum has become centered on the genome. But beyond the traditional scientific economy of prestige and the generous funding that follows it as night follows day, money has distorted the scientific process as a once purely academic pursuit has been commercialized to an astonishing degree by the researchers themselves. Biology has become a glittering target for venture capital; each new discovery brings new patents, new partnerships, and new corporate affiliations. But as the growing opposition to transgenic crops clearly shows, there is persistent public concern not only with the safety of genetically engineered foods but also with the inherent dangers in arbitrarily overriding patterns of inheritance that are embedded in the natural world through long evolutionary experience. Too often those concerns have been derided by industry scientists as the "irrational" fears of an uneducated public. The irony, of course, is that the biotechnology industry is based on science that is forty years old and conveniently devoid of more recent results, which show that there are strong reasons to fear the potential consequences of transferring a DNA gene between species. What the public fears is not the experimental science but the fundamentally irrational decision to let it out of the laboratory into the real world before we truly understand it. Barry Commoner is senior scientist at the Center for Biology of Natural Systems at Queen's College, City University of New York where he directs the Critical Genetics Project. Readers can obtain a list of references used as sources for this article by sending a request to [see http for email address and fair use notice] Linkname: Molecular Genetic Engineers in Junk DNA? URL: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/MGEJ.php size: 183 lines [...] Perhaps only 1% of the human genome codes for genes, and that's what the human genome map contains. The rest is mainly repetitive DNA, commonly known as `junk DNA'. However, evidence has been emerging that lurking within junk DNA are armies of transposons (mobile genetic elements) that play an indispensable role in `natural genetic engineering' the genome. They make up nearly half of the human genome, and serve as `recombination hotspots' for cutting and splicing, and hence reshuffling the genome. They are also a source of ready to use motifs for gene expression, as well as new protein-coding sequences. These important transposons are scattered throughout the genome. There are two main categories: Long Interspersed Elements (LINEs) about 6.7 kilobasepairs in length and Short Interspersed Elements (SINEs) of several hundred basepairs. The most abundant SINEs are Alu elements, of which 1.4 million copies exist, comprising 10% of the human genome, and are apparently only found in primates. [...] There is increasing evidence that physical and chemical stresses to the cell, such as heat shock, chemical poisons and viral infections, tend to activate Alu elements. The resultant gene reshuffling may be responsible for a variety of chronic diseases (see "Dynamic genomics ", this series). Wild speculation. Perhaps a tiny truth here, but likely insignificant in the washup. [...] Crick's theory includes a second doctrine, which he originally called the "central dogma" (though this term is now generally used to identify his theory as a whole). The hypothesis is typical Crick: simple precise, and magisterial. "Once (sequential) information has passed into protein it cannot get out again." This means that genetic information originates in the DNA nucleotide sequence and terminates, unchanged, in the protein amino acid sequence. The pronouncement is crucial to the explanatory power of the theory because it endows the gene with undiluted control over the identity of the protein and the inherited trait that the protein creates. To stress the importance of their genetic taboo, Crick bet the future of the entire enterprise on it, asserting that "the discovery of just one type of present-day cell" in which genetic information passed from protein to nucleic acid or from protein to protein "would shake the whole intellectual basis of molecular biology." Crick was aware of the brashness of his bet, for it was known that in living cells proteins come into promiscuous molecular contact with numerous other proteins and with molecules of DNA and RNA. His insistence that these interactions are genetically chaste was designed to protect the DNA's genetic message - the gene's nucleotide sequence - from molecular intruders that might change the sequence or add new ones as it was transferred, step by step, from gene to protein and thus destroy the theory's elegant simplicity. Last February, Crick's gamble suffered a spectacular loss. In the journals Nature and Science, and at joint press conferences and television appearances, the two genome research teams reported their results. The major result was "unexpected." Instead of the 100,000 or more genes predicted by the estimated number of human proteins, the gene count was only about 30,000. By this measure, people are only about as gene-rich as a mustardlike weed (which has 26,000 genes) and about twice as genetically endowed as a fruit fly or a primitive worm - hardly an adequate basis for distinguishing among "life as a fly, a carrot, or a man." In fact, an inattentive reader of genomic CDs might easily mistake Walter Gilbert for a mouse, 99 percent of whose genes have human counterparts. The surprising results contradicted the scientific premise on which the genome project was undertaken and dethroned its guiding theory, the central dogma. After all, if the human gene count is too low to match the number of proteins and the numerous inherited traits that they engender, and if it cannot explain the vast inherited difference between a weed and a person, there must be much more to the "ultimate description of life" than the genes, on their own, can tell us. Scientists and journalists somehow failed to notice what had happened. The discovery that the human genome is not much different from the roundworm's, led Dr. Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the project, to declare that humanity should learn "a lesson in humility." [...] The project's scientific reports offered little to explain the shortfall in the gene count. One of the possible explanations for why the gene count is "so discordant with our predictions" was described, in full, last February in Science as follows: "nearly 40% of human genes are alternatively spliced." Properly understood, this modest, if esoteric, account fulfills Crick's dire prophecy: it "shakes the whole intellectual basis of molecular biology" and undermines the scientific validity of its applications to genetic engineering. [...] Thus, in the living cell the gene's nucleotide code can by replicated faithfully only because an array of specialized proteins intervenes to prevent most of the errors - which DNA by itself is prone to make - and to repair the few remaining ones. Moreover, it has been known since the 1960s that the enzymes that synthesize DNA influence its nucleotide sequence. In this sense, genetic information arises not from DNA alone but through its essential collaboration with protein enzymes - a contradiction of the central dogma's precept that inheritance is uniquely governed by the self-replication of the DNA double helix. [prions &c] |
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