Do you think it is healthy? "Point / Counterpoint: Genetically Engineered Foods Food just isn’t what it used to be. By Rich Maloof for MSN Health & Fitness Consider, for starters, that a mere 25 years ago we had no seedless watermelons, no strawberries the size of apples, no bananas so big and firm they could choke an ape. Improvements in the size, flavor and quality of agricultural foods are largely the result of “smart breeding,” the selective cross-breeding within a species to yield a plant’s most desirable traits. Selectively bred food has been widely distributed since the late 1970s, and the practice meets little resistance today. Far more controversial, however, is the genetic engineering of foods. Biotechnicians who tinker with a plant’s genetic makeup are interested in steering the evolution of plants to make them more ideal for production and consumption. Rather than wait for a natural mutation that would yield crops of finer foods, scientists have figured out how to manually alter plant DNA. ..." http://health.msn.com/dietfitness/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100161706>1=10008
Most of society's response to GM food is kneejerk. Sure, tests need to be done, just the same as any other new food or drug. Just because we've changed the gene rather than selective breeding doesn't magically give it evil, harmful properties.
The tests ahe not been done. The situation is far too complicated for adequate testing in just a few decades. There is a huge difference between using genetic manipulation to speed up ordianry breeding - getting various combinations of attirbutes together from various strains of a plant or closely related plants - and using it to insert genes that the organism has nothing like, from alien organisms or lab assembly. The world is adapted to the one. The other would be something brand new. There is no control over, and no prediction about, the effects or the spread of these bits of genetic material, which are engineered to be easily picked up by bacteria or viruses, and are present in every cell of the manipulated organism. There is no way to remove them from the world, once they have spread from the crops. We would depend on their dying out on their own. If, for example, we find that the recent collapse of bee populations world wide is caused by herbicide genes or insecticide genes inserted into the plants they get pollen from, we may not be able to do much about it. The resistance genes may have already spread into various weeds and other plants visited by bees, and even banning the guilty crops may not solve the problem.
So the genes for resistance can only spread to weeds by pollen from an entirely different species (n this case the crop) somehow "fertilising" (I don't know the proper term) the pisten of a weed? That sounds about as likely as a mouse impregnating a scorpion. Have entirely different species of plants been known to interbreed?
I'm not too worried about GM foods. It's still the same food, but just changed a little. I'm more worried about pesticides and chemicals used to cultivate.
