Letters to the Editor
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Great
Where's it end? Limbless immobile pigs stacked in boxes like so many watermelons? Designed to grow at four times the rate?
Can you see eating that stuff, the mysterious and severe obesity that hits you years later?
Can you see the karmic price you pay for abuse of sentient creatures?
Your Bush and his cabal of evil animal abusers would be delighted to sell your very soul downriver if it nets them more dough in the here and now.
Buy organic and strengthen that market.
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We also control the market
A couple weeks ago I finally decided to just end all meat consumption that didn't come from cruelty free environs. So that means if I do not know where it came from, I will not buy it.
I do not have to buy this meat. That is a choice I can make. No one...literally, no one has to buy this meat. We can be as in control as we want to be in this market. Stop complaining about Chilean grapes and Chinese peaches and join a CSA, support local farms.
Do not complain about the dreadful conditions in factory farming while eating your $.99 a pound bacon. Instead, pay more and support something you believe in. And if you can't afford to pay more, then maybe just don't eat the bacon.
You do not have to buy these things, you do not have to eat them, you do not have to support businesses or farms that try to sell these things to you.
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Profit before safety
All biotech methods that I am familiar with (I'm a retired biochemist) involve the use of antibiotic resistance genes. Most of the time, these genes end up in the final product, be it swine or soy. As anyone who has taken an introductory biology course could tell you, many bacteria will incorporate DNA from their environment and useful genes will even be transmitted between species. Thus, by releasing these biotech "products" into the environment, we are hastening the end of the golden age of antibiotics. Great job geniuses.
As if that isn't bad enough, consider the virology issues involved with interspecies tissue transplants. A virus well-adapted to swine would be nonlethal to swine; In fact, it may cause no clinical manifestation whatsoever. That same virus, when introduced into a human, may prove to be quite lethal. Consider that the current model used to explain the emergence of HIV postulates that it was initially transmitted to humans from bushmeat (primates), probably by direct blood to blood contact. So, these transplant-ready swine can be HIV- and hepatitis-free, but what surprises do they hold? I seriously doubt the clinical trials will be large enough to assure our safety.
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Whatever that transgene does, it doesn't break down phosphorus.
As any high school chemistry student can tell you, phosphorus is an element, not a molecule, and as such cannot be broken down further. Any implications to the other are plain pigshit.
Perhaps you mean Phosphate anion, [P04]3- ? Phosphates are used intensively in agriculture as a fertilizer...
Anyway, I am all for transgenic food. Lets do the timewarp again!
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Thanks, Pete M.
That was indeed a minor error made in editing. Now corrected.
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@ human power
"All biotech methods that I am familiar with (I'm a retired biochemist) involve the use of antibiotic resistance genes." (from your letter).
This needs some explanation - it makes no sense to complicate the transgenic process by having more DNA involved than necessary. Are you saying it's unavoidable? How? The golden age of antibiotics is much more in danger from the overuse of antibiotics in cattle.
You also mention that pig transplants still involve dangers of viruses that won't kill a pig but will kill a human. Possible, but our biochemistries are very similar, so it's not likely. However, that is not the point. You can raise a pig in a sterile environment; we rarely do that with humans. Folks who donate organs have been out in the virus-laden world; pigs raised for transplants have not.
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Creeping, and creepy, desensitization
These piggies, along with other transgenic creatures, are also an experiment in social conditioning.
We get many "noble" causes--pigs that pollute less, pigs that grow human organs. Then we get a few weird outliers--glow-in-the-dark kittens that we are allowed to reject.
There will be many excuses to apply "rational" thought to radically altering our global evolutionary and domestic breeding inheritance to better serve the human market. The people making these value decisions will be scientists, which is to say, corporations.
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Control and Ownership of life, ITSELF!!!
Once they patent a life form, it is theirs to control, sell and profit from. Once the patent expires (it is possible, but unlikely), the owners are free from any responsibility or liability for any problems or costs caused by their new life forms.
Are they liable while the patent is in effect? Probably only if it means more money for the corporations.
What about natural life forms that provide economic competition for "private" life forms. Would it not be in a corporations interests to put legal restrictions on natural products in order to protect profits? Wpouldn't they like to make "natural" pigs illegal? After all, they are "natural", "wild", "unclean", "uncertain", "chancy" and downright subversive to the very idea of capitalism.
If you don't think it will happen, that is precisely why marijuana is illegal, to protect corporations from competition from natural products.
I'll have three strips of Monsantos and two Perdues over easy and some ADM herbicide resistant corn meal with imitation butter flavor pretending to be grits.
HMMMMM! GOOD!
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Is there any actual evidence or it is just a vague sense of dread?
Seriously, which is it?
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USDA law?
Can the USDA pass 'laws?'
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Like so many widgets
"This enzyme...could solve one of the major environmental problems associated with industrial pig farms...Scientists at Virginia Tech are trying to clone cattle that would be genetically incapable of developing mad cow disease, a deadly brain-wasting illness spread by feeding cows, normally herbivores, the meat and bone meal of infected cattle."
So this is basically the superhigh-tech way of conforming food animals to factory production. Essentially the same as pumping cows full of antibiotics because their stomachs aren't designed to eat pounds of grain, but rather grass. And instead of cleaning up the manure ponds, they'll just make sure the pig poo that seeps into your well water has less phosphorus - how nice.
I don't expect this pork or beef to be very tasty, just cheap!