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biotech & famine
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 -- Signed and sealed with Great Seal of the Executive Council of the Internet, by The Master of The Net. |
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