Loren Michael wrote:Gallstones wrote:Loren Michael wrote:Gallstones wrote:Selective breeding is not the same as gene splicing.
What is the qualitative difference in terms of potential for harm?
I have no freaking idea.
Quite frankly I dont' think we can know what the consequences would be down the line for splicing coelenterate DNA fragments into that of a tomato.
Do you believe we have any reason to suspect that there is a qualitative difference, such that we should be concerned?
Selective breeding has been going on for millennia and this long experience shows that it certainly doesn't pose any potential for harm to human consumers of selectively bred foodstuff plants.
Genetic modification of foodstuff plants is, in effect and/or by comparison, a brand spanking new undertaking that involves manipulating the very foundations of plant life, with a paucity of field testing or experience and hence is an area that probably shouldn't be considered absolutely risk free in terms of harm to humans at this early stage.
Usually in such circumstances, the wise approach is to err on the side of caution and prudence. But this usually goes right out the window when there are tens or hundreds of even $billions of dollars at stake in a highly competitive industry like big ag.
I won't come as any surprise to anyone here that I'm not one to trust private corporations to always do the right thing, not so long as their primary interest is making money, and we've seen numerous cases go by in our own time of corporations lying through their teeth to sustain their business, need I say BIG TOBACCO?
Is there any real difference betwen Monsanto, Inc. and R.J. Reybolds Tobacco, Inc. I happen to think there's not and hence my distrust of what Monsanto's doing with regard to GMO foods. The seed aspect of it alone appears to be a horror story in and of itself to me. I'm a long time and rather thoroughly experienced vegetable grower, with 40 years of doing this under my belt. I have been taking (some of) my plants to full maturity and harvesting their seeds for future use, a practice that's common in my world of growing foodstuffs and one that both myself and others in my community will keep doing. This is pretty easy to do with corn for example but can be much less easy with other crops.
I learned the fine art of growing food crops from my Russian neighbors, people who came to Canada from Ukraine a hundred years ago as simple peasant folk with a very long history of growing food crops
... without the use of pesticides or herbicides. Having learned from them my gardens have never been subjected to applications of chemicals of any kind for any purpose and I'm pleased to know that this is routine for growers in the valley of my residence, so that we enjoy clean topsoils throughout this valley, and have managed to keep our highways department from spraying our roadsides with herbicides and convinvced them to mow instead.
I don't know to what degree the government in America has been overseeing the development and deployment of GMO crops but I'd hope at least they are doing this and doing it thoroughly and responsibly, although something tells me this wouldn't be a good bet knowing how corporate giants like Monsanto can co-opt such efforts and "capture" regulatory agenc
ies, the way BP captured the Minerals Management Agency, which lead to the blowout in the Gulf that brought such ruin to the gulf fishery and coastal ecosystems.
Given the scale of the greed that's infected US businesses over the past 20 years or so I'd not be inclined to trust any of them, but hey, to each his own.
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