Hattix

You know what puzzles most genetic scientists? That there’s any controversy at all. After reading about a field of GM potatoes being grown nearby to myself I figured I’d do my bit to set the record straight.

There never was and never will be any health risk to humans from GM foods. It’s quite simply impossible. There is, however, quite a large health risk to humans from starvation.

The high priests of the anti-GM movement (Largely “greens”, paradoxically) have founded what approaches religion with their hate filled rhetoric which has no foundation in reason or fact.

 The basics of genetic modification are really simple. Genes control what proteins a cell manufactures and how. What we do is take a section of this control code that does something we want it to do and add it to the existing code. In the above link, the potatoes, the scientists took a gene which makes the potato roots emit a certain chemical, which nematode worms use to locate roots to eat. They then broke the gene so it doesn’t work; The roots no longer emit that chemical, the worms can’t find them, the potatoes aren’t killed.

We could do, and have done, the exact same with selective breeding. If you think your pet dog isn’t genetically modified, think again. It’s not a wolf, we genetically engineered it into the dog by thousands of years of selective breeding; This is genetic modification. Same for the cow from the auroch. The pig from the boar, the chicken, the turkey, all staples on our dinner tables, all genetically modified and not found in nature.

What science is giving us are tools to do those same modifications in years rather than in millennia. Now we can directly modify the traits and characteristics of plants and animals; A good example are fungal infections in plants. We can spray on bacteria which poison the fungus, or we can include the genetic code from the bacteria which produces that fungicide into the plant’s own genome and make plants which are immune to the fungus and we don’t need to spray on the bacteria.

So what’s the problem? Well, we make ’supercrops’ which could escape into the wild and out-compete native plants. Which, of course, we’ve been doing for millennia! Rapeseed plants (Canola over the Atlantic) are springing up all over the European countryside. Wheat grows wild, but doesn’t even exist in nature. This environmental ‘disaster’ that the high priests of anti-GM preach their sermons on isn’t just a ‘disaster’ but it’s already happened and has been since we first invented agriculture 8,000 years ago! As we can see just by looking outside (I can anyway), the original forest of Britain has been almost entirely obliterated to make room for agriculture. The prairie of the US has had its herds of bison massacred and wheat planted, roads cut across it.

We’ve already done the disaster. Let’s just make the best use of the land we’ve claimed so we don’t need more. Genetic engineering allows us to make that best use. The anti-GM high priests would rather have us slash and burn rainforests than be content with what we have already; With that objective in mind, can they ever label themselves ‘environmentalist’ with a straight face?