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Paying to find non-GE wild corn?
Moosh:] wrote:
On 30 Jul 2003 10:28:05 GMT, Brian Sandle posted: 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? The latter is as simple as falling off a log. The former is far more complex. What is your proposed mechanism for sorting through the sequences to find something suitable? What criteria would the search engine use? How the living cells control enzymes to repair DNA to such miraculous toerances may not be fully understood either. Recently I gave Mae Wan Ho's words about recombination hot spots in the junk DNA. Here is something else to get us thinking about the complexity of the life which GM tinkers with, their safety message based on the `Central Dogma' which is so lacking. Linkname: The Spurious Foundation of Genetic Engineering URL: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0209-01.htm size: 723 lines [...] Alternative splicing can have an extraordinary impact on the gene/protein ratio. We now know that a single gene originally believed to encode a single protein that occurs in cells of the inner ear of chicks (and of humans) gives rise to 576 variant proteins, differing in their amino acid sequences. The current record for the number of different proteins produced from a single gene by alternative splicing is held by the fruit fly, in which one gene generates up to 38,016 variant protein molecules. Alternative splicing thus has a devastating impact on Crick's theory: it breaks open the hypothesized isolation of the molecular system that transfers genetic information from a single gene to a single protein. [...] Alternative splicing is not the only discovery over the last forty years that has contradicted basic precepts of the central dogma. Other research has tended to erode the centrality of the DNA double helix itself, the theory's ubiquitous icon. In their original description of the discovery of DNA, Watson and Crick commented that the helix's structure "immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." Such self-duplication is the crucial feature of life, and in ascribing it to DNA, Watson and Crick concluded, a bit prematurely, that they had discovered life's magic molecular key. Biological replication does include the precise duplication of DNA, but this is accomplished by the living cell, not by the DNA molecule alone. In the development of a person from a single fertilized egg, the egg cell and the multitude of succeeding cells divide in two. Each such division is precede by a doubling of the cell's DNA; two new DNA strands are produced by attaching the necessary nucleotides (freely available in the cell), in the proper order, to each of the two DNA strands entwined in the double helix. As the single fertilized egg cell grows into an adult, the genome is replicated many billions of times, its precise sequence of three billion nucleotides retained with extraordinary fidelity. The rate of error - that is, the insertion into the newly made DNA sequence of a nucleotide out of its proper order - is about one in 10 billion nucleotides. But on its own, DNA is incapable of such faithful replication; in a test-tube experiment, a DNA strand, provided with a mixture of its four constituent nucleotides, will line them up with about one in a hundred of them out its proper place. On the other hand, when the appropriate protein enzymes are added to the test tube, the fidelity with which nucleotides are incorporated in the newly made DNA strand is greatly improved, reducing the error rate to one in 10 million. These remaining errors are finally reduced to one in 10 billion by a set of "repair" enzymes (also proteins) that detect and remove mismatched nucleotides from the newly synthesized DNA. 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. [...] Because of their commitment to an obsolete theory, most molecular biologists operate under the assumption that DNA is the secret of life, whereas the careful observation of the hierarchy of living processes strongly suggests that it is the other way around: DNA did not create life; life created DNA. When life was first formed on the earth, proteins must have appeared before DNA because, unlike DNA, proteins have the catalytic ability to generate the chemical energy needed to assemble small ambient molecules into larger ones such as DNA. DNA is a mechanism created by the cell. Early life survived because it grew, building up its characteristic array of complex molecules. It must have been a sloppy kind of growth; what was newly made did not exactly replicate what was already there. But once produced by the primitive cell, DNA could become a stable place to store structural information about the cell's chaotic chemistry, something like the minutes taken by a secretary at a noisy committee meeting. There can be no doubt that the emergence of DNA was a crucial stage in the development of life, but we must avoid the mistake of reducing life to a master molecule in order to satisfy our emotional need for unambiguous simplicity. [... & Fair use notice cut] Where is there any evidence of this. I think you are getting carried away with the classifications again. If you run out of hosts you just find more Jump species? You would have to do that before you killed every last one of the previous species. which isn't a problem, those who prey on only one species are very much a minority Lots of viruses tend to be specific to certain classes of hosts. Calici haemorrhagic disease jumped to rabbits in 1970s in China, though I don't know why. Using pig organs in humans in concert with GM is a risk that pig viruses will jump and spread through the human population. What on earth does GM have to do with this? It happens whether or not, surely. Because GM enables more horizontal gene transfer outwitting the past regulatory mechanisms. Why does it enable more horizontal gene transfer? Because gene transfer packages are included in the GM process to get genes to outwit the natural barriers. What regulatory mechanisms? Those like the repair mechanisms of the cell on innacurate DNA copying by itself. This is just speculation, with no firm basis. The research is moving very fast. Like Copernicus those at the forefront are branded as heretics by those who stand to lose power and money. |
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