Is GE foods safe?

[janelee]

Traditional plant breeding involves crossing varieties of the same species in ways they could cross naturally.For example，disease－resistant varieties of wheat have been crossed with high－yield wheat to combine these properties.This type of natural gene exchange is safe and fairly predictable.

Genetic engineering（GE）involves exchanging genes between unrelated species that cannot naturally exchange genes with each other.GE can involve the exchange of genes between vastly different species， e.g.putting scorpion toxin genes into maize or fish antifreeze genes into tomatoes.It is possible that a scorpion toxin gene，even when it is in maize DNA，will still get the organism to produce scorpion toxin， but what other effects may it have in this alien environment？We are already seeing this problem——adding human growth hormone genes to pigs certainly makes them grow——but it also gives them arthritis and makes them cross－eyed，which was entirely unpredictable.

It will be obvious，for example，that the gene for human intelligence will not have the same effect if inserted into cabbage DNA as it had in human DNA——but what side－effect would it have？In other words，is GE food safe to eat？The answer is that nobody knows because long－term tests have not been carried out.

Companies wanting a GE product approved in the UK or USA are required to provide regulatory bodies with results of their own safety tests.Monsanto's soya beans were apparently fed to fish for 10 weeks before being approved.There was no requirement for independent testing，for long－term testing，for testing on humans or testing for specific dangers to children or allergic people.

The current position of the UK Government is thatThere is no evidence of long－term dangers from GE foods.In the US，the American Food and Drug Administration is currently being prosecuted for covering up research that suggested possible risks from GE foods.

[CarpetDiem]

It depends on your definition of safe. Yes, there is an inherent risk which as you rightly suggest is unable to be properly quantified or qualified. It will takse decades to properly unravel the total risk quantum. It is too the world's worst marketing disaster. I however would like to eat juicy tomatoes all year round and accept the risk of liver failure in 30 years time. Climate change and the pressure and profitability of food production will have an interesting effect on GE's acceptability in the ensuing years.

[Pandaemoni]

That said, you are not genetically assimilating the foods you eat. Your body is ripping them apart so that it can use the molecules of which they are made to form glucose and other substances your body needs.

[dixonmassey]

Even more troubling that governments around the globe (especially American) pushing GM foods down everybody's throat. Conspiracy folks should investigate this zeal in depth. All GM foods are good for - making plants more suitable for industrial agriculture, which is a crime against future even without GM crops. I really don't see common sense point of GM. What the rush? Mankind would be served much better by outlawing agrobiz and repopulating destroyed rural areas (speaking of USA) with small to medium farms. Destruction of rural way of life is seems another things world governments and business "leaders" are bent on. Depopulation of countryside, segregation of human biomass to mega metropolian areas is going on around the world. That's mighty insane but it serves masters right.

[Pandaemoni]

Even more troubling that governments around the globe (especially American) pushing GM foods down everybody's throat. Conspiracy folks should investigate this zeal in depth. All GM foods are good for - making plants more suitable for industrial agriculture, which is a crime against future even without GM crops. I really don't see common sense point of GM. What the rush? Mankind would be served much better by outlawing agrobiz and repopulating destroyed rural areas (speaking of USA) with small to medium farms. Destruction of rural way of life is seems another things world governments and business "leaders" are bent on. Depopulation of countryside, segregation of human biomass to mega metropolian areas is going on around the world. That's mighty insane but it serves masters right.

The point of GM is the same point as the selective breeding that gave us corn and wheat and cabbage and the crops. Humans have been genetically modifying foods for millennia because the altered products are easier/cheaper to grow and have a higher nutrient value and often or more easily digestible than their wild counterparts.

The most discussed example I know of is using genetic engineering to produce additional dwarf and semi-dwarf cereal varieties. Dwarf wheat saved the lives of a billion people by some estimates, but it's been harder to introduce the same trait into other cereal crops using conventional genetic cross-breeding techniques, or so I have read.

[John99]

Is GE foods safe?

It is much, much safer than not eating.

[dixonmassey]

The point of GM is the same point as the selective breeding that gave us corn and wheat and cabbage and the crops.

Not true. The main point of GM, as for today, is to make plants tolerant to the horse doses of herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, mineral fertilizers - the essence of industrial agriculture.



Humans have been genetically modifying foods for millennia because the altered products are easier/cheaper to grow and have a higher nutrient value and often or more easily digestible than their wild counterparts.

Genetic manipulation by artificial selection is not quite the same as genetic manipulation by crapshooting foreign DNA attached to golden particles. In essence, GM is not quite science, it has significant element of "trial and error" craft. G modificators don't really know what they are shooting for. And most importantly they can't even guess full consequencess of their crapshooting.


The most discussed example I know of is using genetic engineering to produce additional dwarf and semi-dwarf cereal varieties. Dwarf wheat saved the lives of a billion people by some estimates, but it's been harder to introduce the same trait into other cereal crops using conventional genetic cross-breeding techniques, or so I have read.

Bull. Dwarf wheat didn't save squat since without horse doses of chemical fertilizers etc. it can NOT produce significant yields. In fact, without fossil fuel inputs (fertilizers etc.) dwarf wheat is way worse, yieldwise, than old varieties. Industrial agriculture KILLS soils. I'm not sure what "life saving" you are talking about. You can extrapolate current soil helth trends in the future and guess the year of the global mega human die off.

[John99]

Everything has to be a struggle.

http://www.gmofoodforthought.com/2008/06/biotech_crops_seen_helping_to.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7428789.stm

[dixonmassey]

It is much, much safer than not eating.

That's how GM is being pushed - saver of the hungry. Ironically, GM saver of the hungry makes people (not so hungry to begin with) fatter and fatter. Truly hungry continue to starve.

Nobody is going to give away GM food to the pennyless hungry (in significant quantities). Economy doesn't work that way.

GM boosts corporate and agrobiz bottomline. All hungry in the world be damned. More GM = bigger cost of inputs = larger and large commercial farms to recoup the input costs = more and more hungry landless people in slums. That simple.

The most important point. Corporations own GM seeds. Farmers (if any left) can't grow and use their own seeds, they must buy seeds every year from a corporation. In a nutshell, in 10-30 years, 3-5 corporations may control food supply of billions. Google terminator seeds. In fact, monsters of GM and Bill Gates foundation are building gigantic dooms day seed vault in the Arctic (afraid of something?).

GM industry is violating rights of non GM growers. Yet, it's a GM corporation will sue a farmer if a bird dropped GM seed on farmers field (famous case in Canada). A farmer cannot sue GM corporation for contaminating his fields with GM crap. Big brother is hard at work.

[dixonmassey]

World's masters are pushing GMO into our throats and definitely not to save starving Africans. It's all about control, power and money.

“Seeds of Destruction, The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” by Stephen Lendman

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/seeds-of-destruction-the-hidden-agenda-of-genetic-manipulation-by-stephen-lendman/

[Michael]

personally I try to eat organic, especially milk and cheese, but meh I also eat Doritos once in awhile - which are 100 pure GM food, the chips actually grow their own cheese flavor...

[Michael]

I wonder, when someone invents a way to grow large slabs of gm "meat", will people eat it? maybe? one could market it as helping people in starving nations get needed protein while at the same time stop animal cruelty. yum yum a 5 meter square chunk of lab tuna or beef...

[Orleander]

， what is this??

[Michael]

huh

[Orleander]

dang, its only on my computer huh. It's FFOC in an itty bitty box and its all over the OP.

[Michael]

ffoc?

[Orleander]

<sigh> yes. OK, they are also Inzomnia's sig line. What is Inzomnia's sig line?
Its my dang computer! It must be.
FF0C, FF0D, FF09, FF08. WTHell!?

[Pandaemoni]

Not true. The main point of GM, as for today, is to make plants tolerant to the horse doses of herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, mineral fertilizers - the essence of industrial agriculture.

Not true. Some GM work is geared towards that (and why? because plants resistant to chemicals would be easier to grow and have higher, edible, yields than the fungus and bug-eaten crops you'd prefer the poor be fed), but to call that "the main point" is you just speaking out of your ass.

In any event chemical fertilizers and the like are good for humanity overall. They also allow for higher yields. GM work that makes them more effective would be a great thing.



Genetic manipulation by artificial selection is not quite the same as genetic manipulation by crapshooting foreign DNA attached to golden particles. In essence, GM is not quite science

Genetic manipulation by selective breeding is, by your standard not quite science either, since it is susceptible to every one of the half-assed criticisms you throw at GM. To wit


it has significant element of "trial and error" craft.

That's unquestionably true of selective breeding. You never really know what the next generation will look like, you can only guess.


G modificators don't really know what they are shooting for.

This was unquestionably true of the early days of selective breeding as well. In the early days, farmers and herders likely didn't even know you *could* select for particular traits and discovered the process by accident.

In any event, it's COMPLETE BS as applied to GM. Believe it or not most modifications do not arise as the result of pulling random DNA from one place and putting it randomly into another. The results they obtain are often not what they's have expected or hoped for, but the same is true of cross-breeders.


And most importantly they can't even guess full consequencess of their crapshooting.

Neither could cross-breeders! Seriously you seem to be under the mistaken impression that "if Nature allows the cross-product naturally, it must be benign and good." In really cross-breeders were tinkering with the genetic codes of plants and animals in a far more haphazard and way more dangerous way than genetic engineers. Engineers have a sense of what they are doing, they are aware of the problem that may arise (no, you are not smarter/more wise/more aware than they are). In fact they take discrete segments of genes and transpose them, whereas traditional crossbreeders transpose how many genes at a time? (Oh, that's right, all of them!). The result is that cross-breeders often found themselves face to face with plants and animals with major health problems and genetic defects because the selective breeding allowed rare and generally recessive traits to fully manifest.

One of the issues the selective breeders have left us with is that there is not really a lot of genetic diversity in our crops, and GM may be able to help with that in the long term.

I am glad that the people afraid of GM foods were not around at the dawn of civilization, because selective breeding would have scared the shit out of you since back then it had no track record.

If you don't want to eat GM foods, that's fine, I support you right to choose. If you feel that those of us unafraid of science should be forced to change our society and economy because you are, then fuck you. If you prefer poor people starve rather than grow/eat GM foods, then fuck you twice over.


Bull. Dwarf wheat didn't save squat since without horse doses of chemical fertilizers etc. it can NOT produce significant yields. In fact, without fossil fuel inputs (fertilizers etc.) dwarf wheat is way worse, yieldwise, than old varieties. Industrial agriculture KILLS soils. I'm not sure what "life saving" you are talking about. You can extrapolate current soil helth trends in the future and guess the year of the global mega human die off.

The Nobel Prize committee disagrees with you.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1970/borlaug-lecture.html

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

Face it, you spout propaganda because you like to believe, in your romantic naivety, that natural farming method are quainter and better. Nature would never steer us wrong ! (Unless you count all those plagues nature throws at us, often coming from the animals and crops that we grow and tend to!) Anything that is contrary to that rose colored vision of the past that you'd like to see made the future, you deny. This is not even to worry about the other flaw in your "many small farms" approach: that many small farms require lots more land, and hence leads to deforestation. That was one of the many well acknowledged advantages of the dwarf wheat solution that you wrongly claim was ineffective, that not only did it save people from starvation, that it saved forests from people pushing your agenda.

You will no doubt say that I spout propaganda, but you'd be wrong. I only care about making things better and I was (and am) open to the notion that there might be a better way, and then I read up on the the way food is produced and distributed and realized that traditional crops are not well suited to the number and geographic dispersion of the people of the Earth.

In any event, you lose. People in the modern age, in general, trust science more than doomsayers. There is no great movement afoot to ban GM foods in the west, and the only real problem is that people on your side have occasionally convinced leaders of third-world nations to let their countrymen die rather than feed them with GM products.

Despite the claims about using many small and plucky local farmers to grow all the food that's needed for a given population, that model has not swept the world.

Why not? Consider it for a moment. You model is inexpensive. It doesn't require industry to produce chemical fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, etc. It seems ideal for third-world nations, and many of those nations are disproportionately likely to face food shortages. The reason this model has not overtaken the third-world as the common sense and superior method is not agribusiness lobbying local governments, it's that it doesn't produce the surplusses you anticipate it producing. The nations relaying on your model alone generally find they are more likely to need to import food from nations with higher yields (i.e., to a disproportionate extent, nations that reject your preferred model.

The dwarf wheat/Green Movement started in Mexico and completely transformed their agriculture, then moves around the planet. THAT swept that world! And that's why Norman Borlaug, father of dwarf wheat, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and was awarded India's Padma Vibhushan in 2006.

Your claim that dwarf wheat saved no lives is nothing more than ignorance. At the time it was introduced in India there were people on your side of the table, arguing that it was dangerous and wrong, and yet it saved India from a looming famine. Again though, your side is very big on telling people "If you do X, you will die" and very poor at giving anyone any practical solutions for problems of food production, save for big talk that works only on paper on on internet message boards.

In the 2006 ceremony at which Borlaug was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the Mexican Agricultural Ceremony said that Borlaug with his dwarf wheat had saved more lives than any other person in the history of the world. In 2005, the President of the World Food Prize Organization (which Borlaug's works helped to create) said of Borlaug:


Dr. Borlaug’s break-though achievements in the 20th Century are credited with saving a billion people from famine, and keeping an estimated one billion hectares of forest and rainforest from being cleared for agricultural production.

Your side has only cost people lives. It takes some nerve to claim that Borlaug hasn't in the face of your side's failures.

[kmguru]

Someday we will have lemon size soybeans...would that not be nice...more food for the population? May be instead of eating that soybean, whole, we could extract the protein, oil etc...which should be free from plant toxins....hopefully...if not, we would be screwed....:D

[Gently Passing]

Bah, the real threat is not GM.

Not to sound like a Hippie, but plant a garden! Or go to a local farmer's market.

The solution is simple: circumvent the machinery put in place by the Corporatocracy and simply buy food from your neighbors.

Problem solved.

[CharonZ]

A question whether the inherent risk of GM food (of course, depending on what actually has been modified) compared to traditional, random mutation techniques, that were used for a couple of decades already.

[iceaura]

The point of GM is the same point as the selective breeding that gave us corn and wheat and cabbage and the crops. To pretend that all, or even most, of the GM currently employed is some kind of analog of ordinary plant breeding is dishonest.

GM techniques can be used to speed up, or make more precise, otherwise help, ordinary plant breeding results, and there is little controversy about that.

Other GM techniques can be used to do such things as insert bacterially derived herbicide sequestration genes into eukaryotic multicellular plant genomes at random locations. That is not at all the kind of thing ordinary plant breeding does, and it is potentially very dangerous.

It is also essentially unstudied in the field. No one knows much about what can happen. The recent finding that herbicide sequestration genes sometimes function in the edible parts of the plant, leading to soybeans with sequestered herbicide that can be released in the human small intestine, is just an example of the tip of the iceberg of the complexity of what these technicians are playing with. Honeybee dieoffs are another possible example - they don't know whether this GM stuff is involved or not. Nobody knows.

You can't get honeybee dieoffs from plant breeding. You can, in theory, get them from the kinds of modifications GM tech accomplishes. This GM stuff is not just ordinary plant breeding made faster and easier. If it were restricted to that, very few people would object to it.

[Pandaemoni]

But, in the Guns, Germs and Steel view of the world, traditional farming methods did give us things like anthrax and smallpox, which crossed over into humans as a consequence of traditional farming. (That is more certain, it seems to me, than the notion that GM caused the decline in the bee population. I am not even sure there's much correlation there, let alone a causal relationship. It's just as likely that the bees are dying off from global temperature changes or a fluke epidemic).

There is no "it's natural therefore better" in playing with the genetics of others.

[iceaura]

But, in the Guns, Germs and Steel view of the world, traditional farming methods did give us things like anthrax and smallpox,
- - - -

There is no "it's natural therefore better" in playing with the genetics of others. And the genetic engineers who are screwing around with a totally new kind of environmental manipulation are launched into something better compared with the agricultural revolution than with traditional breeding.

We've had ten thousand years to adjust and deal and learn to handle the side effects of those early agricultural innovations - and we are still having problems. If the defense of GM is that it will do no worse than reduce the average height of humans by a foot and their average lifespan by a third, while filling the earth with slavery and plagues for the next thousand years, then hey - the prosecution rests.

btw: The implication that the major objections to GM are inherently based on some kind of feckless fondness for "natural" vs "artificial" is also dishonest, along with the pretense that it's just like traditional breeding, that it will regulate itself, and that the multinational corporations doing it are motivated by a desire to help humanity.

[Pandaemoni]

And the genetic engineers who are screwing around with a totally new kind of environmental manipulation are launched into something better compared with the agricultural revolution than with traditional breeding.

We've had ten thousand years to adjust and deal and learn to handle the side effects of those early agricultural innovations - and we are still having problems. If the defense of GM is that it will do no worse than reduce the average height of humans by a foot and their average lifespan by a third, while filling the earth with slavery and plagues for the next thousand years, then hey - the prosecution rests.

btw: The implication that the major objections to GM are inherently based on some kind of feckless fondness for "natural" vs "artificial" is also dishonest, along with the pretense that it's just like traditional breeding, that it will regulate itself, and that the multinational corporations doing it are motivated by a desire to help humanity.

It's not that it will regulate itself, it's that traditional breeding/cross breeding techniques were not really any safer, people are just oblivious to those risks. People develop concerns because they perceive the risks to be somehow of a different kind or magnitude than other things, like people who obsess over the risks of being killed by terrorists, yet who are troubled not at all by more mundane threats to life, like eating red meat. Why are terrorists deserving of more attention than risks posed by red meat (given that red meat is far more likely to kill the average person than terrorists are)?

The reasons are too complex for me to go into, in full, but in part it is because humans are terrible at making rational decisions about low probability events. We tend to implicitly overstate the risks of unlikely harms. In short, I view those people gripped by fears of GM as being in exactly the same boat as people who who are desperately afraid to fly in airplanes. Airplanes do crash and people do die, so there is a risk there, but the likelihood of the risk (especially when measured relative to other methods of transportation) is actually unexceptional.

You also have to weight both benefits and costs. Sure, GM has risks (a cost) and if we want to engage in hypotheticals, we can hypothetically construct doomsday scenarios that involve GM products. If we do that though, why not also imagine the hypothetically possible benefits of GM, like (to go not-so-hypothetical, as that is antithetical to my nature) people around the world living longer because of the resultant increases in the local food supply? Reduced use of pesticides because pest-resistant breeds of plants were developed? Perhaps, down the road, even red meat without all the heart attacks?

Spinning hypotheticals about how GM *might* have killed off the bees is useless, imo, because it's rank speculation. If the worst case against GM is that there's no (none, zero, zilch) evidence for a link between GM and the bee die-off, oh, but wait, let me speculate in an information-free thought experiment about how GM might be responsible for it, then I need not rest my case, I move for dismissal on the grounds that you failed to state a case in the first place.

There are risks in many things. Immunologists work with dangerous pathogens (not hypothetically dangerous ones, actually known to be dangerous ones) and we don't knock them for it. There could always be an escape of those pathogens and problems could ensue, but we all know that immunology is important and overall beneficial so we tolerate the risk. The U.S. having a huge nuclear stockpile and stores of biological weapons has risks that are far more quantifiable and dire than GM has, yet most Americans tolerate that risk too as part of an overall national security calculus.

GM has hypothetical risks, so far, have never been seen to come to fruition in any major respect. It's true I can't dismiss the doomsday scenarios people like you spin, but that;'s just because I am intellectually honest. It's possible that your dire predictions will come to pass. It's possible that the Sun will go nova tomorrow as well. I can dismiss neither entirely. What I can say is that I am reasonably confident that the scientists involved are not madmen, they are just as thoughtful and responsible as you are. I can also say that, thus far, GM crops have not caused massive waves of death throughout the world, but that related initiatives, like the Green Movement, have saved many lives by the standards of most people knowledgeable on the subject.

There's no reason that I can see to put the risks of GM into a special category, separate from the other risks posed by cutting edge scientific innovation. Based on what I have read, I no more expect GM to kill millions than I expect the CERN particle accelerator will destroy the Earth. I can see why people feel compelled to paranoia as a result of either of those, but the fears seem irrational.

What is the alternative anyway? Would you criminalize the line of research? In a modern society it seems to me letting the majority select what research should be done and what forbidden through a majoritarian process is silly. In the U.S., I have no doubt that political forces could be mustered to ban research into evolution. It is not something I'd want to encourage in a free society. (For that reason I was also opposed to cloning bans and bans on use of embryonic stem cells.)

[dixonmassey]

Pandaemoni, it's not wise even for adepts of sci. progress to put their trust in GMO. You simply don't know what (evil?) Mr. X is cooking, Mr. X doesn't know much more than you do. You see, traditional breeding of a horse with an ass, can't produce meat which will make your kidney to disfunction in a subtle way, for example, or affect your sperm count or egg production. GMO foods theoretically can, if "properly" designed. GMO foods can affect lots of things. Just look who financed GMOs. Among founding fathers is Rockefeller foundation famous for its obsession with eugenics as well as Uncle Sam, famous humanitarian. Don't you think masters of this world will not be stupid enough not to try food as a weapon of (subtle) mass destruction/manipulation? They most certainly will try, if not trying it on us right now.

All GMO technique does is taking a piece of DNA of one species and embedding it in a foreign DNA context. As far as current human knowledge goes, this kind of embedding produces results which are hard to impossible to predict. Traditional breeding offers much more predictable, albeit slower, results. There is no danger to create killer chicken meat by breeding largest rooster with the largest hen, for example.

It seems you don't know that mineral fertilizers are NOT regulated to any extent, as far as chemical content goes. Fertilizers industy utilizes wastes of power generation industry and such, that's why fertilizers are loaded with salts containing heavy metals, bon appetit. Aside contamination, mineral fertilizers deliver plant food in the most simple chemical form. Plants may not care much about it (if not overfertilize) but soil organisms care A LOT because chemical fertilizers KILL them. Without those organism soil is dead, agriculture = hydroponics. That's essentially what industrial agriculture become - poison/fossil intensive hydroponics. I will not even start about effect of poisons, tilling, rubber taste and Gulf of Mexico dead zones etc. Suffice to say that industrial agriculture will kill soils and thus us sooner or later .

As far as Nobel Prize for super wheat goes, I repeat, take mineral fertilizers and poisons away and then look at the magic wheat's yields. Nobel prize wheat is extremely well suited for fertilizer intensive industrial farming. It's a really bad choice for organic producers.

Let's look back at green "revolution". Green revolution which have destroyed cultures, ways of life, millions of acres of soil, economies of entire countries. All those sacrifices and people starving anyway. Yup, GMO revolution will be totally different.

[kmguru]

Eugenics? The rich still need customers....even though dumb ones...keep them dumb but alive...may be that is what is going on in Africa....:D

[iceaura]

it's that traditional breeding/cross breeding techniques were not really any safer, people are just oblivious to those risks The traditional breeding techniques are much, much safer, not only because we have ten thousand years experience with them, but also because the kinds of genetic changes possible are much more limited and consistent with what we and the planet have already accustomed ourselves to.



The reasons are too complex for me to go into, in full, but in part it is because humans are terrible at making rational decisions about low probability events. That is especially true of people who are making lots of money by taking risks with other people's lives and landscapes.

There's no reason that I can see to put the risks of GM into a special category, separate from the other risks posed by cutting edge scientific innovation. Try this one: the fuckups are self-reproducing and capable of exponential growth.


Spinning hypotheticals about how GM *might* have killed off the bees is useless, imo, because it's rank speculation. It's an easy example of how little idea the people doing this stuff have of the possible consequences of their actions. How come they can't simply demonstrate the impossibility - or even the unlikelihood - of such an effect ?

What is the alternative anyway? Would you criminalize the line of research? Of course not. I would regulate the research and especially the employment of the products of such research, according to the level of knowledge available of the risks they pose.

So mixing and matching rice alleles, or even specified genes or alleles from related plants, to get better rice, using the much faster and more thorough GM techniques to shortcut ordinary plant breeding, would be very low risk and approved for open field planting and sale to humans for food.

And inserting bacterially derived strings of alien DNA into all parts of a plant to cause it to produce herbicide sequestration or pesticide expression via insect transferable satellite bodies in every cell, planting these things in an open field connected to the general landscape, and then feeding the result to human beings, on less than five years of research none of it into human metabolic effects or based on thorough investigation of the contextual ecology, for the purpose of establishing a hugely profitable business selling both the seed and the chemicals to contracted and contractually dependent farmers, would be punished by a moderate term in the federal penitentiary.

Immunologists work with dangerous pathogens (not hypothetically dangerous ones, actually known to be dangerous ones) and we don't knock them for it. There could always be an escape of those pathogens and problems could ensue, but we all know that immunology is important and overall beneficial so we tolerate the risk. We do not tolerate just any old level of risk. We specify the severely restricted circumstances under which that research may be done, we do whatever we can to prevent mishap including licensing and inspection of labs and people, and we take a very dim view - legally and morally - of people who are careless with that stuff.

And all of that is based on many decades of research and long familiarity with the situation.