Letters to the Editor
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The problem is that biotech foods might be good for us
I am more worried about biotech foods that are healthful for people than those that cause illness or death. Healthful foods will be more attractive to consumers, and the power of the market will swing behind them if they contain more value for the buck.
Profitable genetic alteration will need to more genetic alteration, which means more of the biome will become subject to human needs, and more environmental resources subject to human consumption.
I would rather see humans decrease their total consumption of environmental resources.
The real issue isn't ending the FDA's oversight per se. The larger problem is that there is no voice, no organization, no system at the table that represents any value other than markets and profit. We will live in world that is increasingly artificial and "owned." The problem has never been that chimeras will be defective, just the opposite, the problem is that they will outcompete wild and selectively bred domestics. We will have an increasingly less diverse biosphere.
Let's just hope that these pigs really are frankenfoods, and make us sick. I fear that they are not.
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Pigoons, Racunks, and Snats...
Oh my!
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The Doomsday Seed Vault
Just in case...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
And there are more pieces to the puzzle than Genetic Engineering. The other two pieces are Nanotechnology and Robotic. Just ask Bill Joy...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html
THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE
First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite - just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.
Maybe we really will become more like the animals?
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It's all just a Jesuit conspiracy
I saw Kirk Cameron walking his Crocaduck yesterday. Everything's fine.
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@ A Billion Angry Bees
"So, long story short, these genetic pressures go on all the time. The difference being, what time scale do you want to be in fear of."
It's still not only a difference of time scale (although I don't dismiss the possibility that time scale could certainly account for some of the poorly articulated fear, and it could also be one of the very real dangers).
Yes, mutation happens in nature every day. But it's not just that it's slower than we're seeing in GM foods. In the evolutionary hypothesis called punctuated equilibrium, it is thought that very long periods of very slow and steady evolution--or accumulation of mutations--are broken by interludes of very high rates of mutation and evolution. Maybe because of environmental stress, maybe for no discernable reason at all. But very quick genomic change *does* happen in nature.
Incorporation of bacterial genomes into other organisms also *might* happen in nature. That is one hypothesis of how eukaryotes (anything whose cells have nuclear walls) got our mitochondria.
But what's being done in GM food engineering is something that...we just don't know that much about how it happens in nature, or how often, or what the consequences are--which is the transfer of entire genes into disparate species.
1. We might know a lot about one function of a gene, which is why we want to put it into another animal. But we don't know if it has other functions we haven't noticed and might not like.
2. We don't know how that gene interacts with other genes or other chromosomes in its species of origin. We don't know how its function is modified or controlled by the body or brain chemistry of that animal, or its natural diet, its native habitat, etc., etc. For instance, we're about to find out whether or not there's a very good reason that pigs can't digest certain phosphorous compounds in nature.
3. We don't know how that gene's function is regulated by the introns of the genome of the animal it came from. (For a long time geneticists thought that introns were sections of "junk" DNA and totally inactive, because they were not translated into proteins. Now they're thought to be contribute vitally to gene regulation and the diversity of gene function.) We don't know if the difference in how the gene is regulated in the new animal will make it do something different, or work more, or less, than it normally does.
4. We know hardly anything about how the altered animal fits into its ecological niche, how its altered function will affect everything else in its habitat.
All of these things have possible consequences for every aspect of an animal's functioning and health. And you're right--maybe it's all fine. Maybe. Do you want to trust a for-profit corporation with extensive control over your food supply to find out for sure? Do you think they know enough?