As some wisely pointed out, human beings have changed the plants we eat, have been doing so for about 6000 years, hybridizing, cross pollinating and so forth. The wheat we eat today is not the wheat in the song “America, the Beautiful”, there are no “amber waves of grain”, the wheat grown today is short and stubby and fat, both to increase yields and make it easy to harvest (and it may or may not be as nutritious as what we once harvested).
@gmt: Of course there is a profit motive, take it from me, Monsanto is not doing that out of the goodness of their hearts, beancounters have no hearts. in some ways, it is no different than drug dealers giving their products away for free, then getting people hooked. GMO seeds from what I know are like hybrid seeds, in that you cannot do what you do with heirloom plants, you cannot save the seeds from the plants to plant next year, the genetic changes in the seeds get lost in the children that spring from those seed. more importantly, you get gmo eggplants in there, and suddenly there is a clamor for GMO grains and tomatoes and so forth, so they are doing what marketing people do, create a new market.
as far as GMO’s go, the problem isn’t with GMO’s per se, it is that they are being allowed to do the modifications without any significant testing of what it might do to those who eat them. Yeah, I hear those who say we have been hybridizing plants for thousands of years, but that is cross breeding plants, plants whose genes we routinely are exposed to because we have eaten those plants and plant products. Make a nectarine by crossing a plum and a peach, those genes are already part of what our body reconizes. But take something like a gene from a pig being put in a tomato to make it insect resistant, or a gene from a frog to make a bean resistant to herbicides, we don’t know what the impact is to human beings. The assumption is it will cause no harm, but we don’t know, because they haven’t been tested, it is just assumed they are okay. I don’t think GMO’s should be banned willy nilly or not used, but I think that it is much like Michael Crichton’s criticism of gene science in Jurassic Park, he said that they are doing these things in secret, patenting the genes, and the FDA rather than requiring them to show these modified foods are safe, takes their assurances they are. For all we know, a modified tomato might cause allergic reactions or inflammation, a genetically modified plant might cause problems with endocrine systems or cause genetic damage that leads to cancer, that is my problem. There is also the potential that modified pig genes that work in a tomato plant to suppress insect damage, might end up jumping to other species and cause a blight, for example, because there has been little work done on that.
It doesn’t mean GMO’s aren’t safe, it means we are assuming safety in a field where a lot of things are murky.
As far as gene therapy goes, it didn’t really pan out, they thought it would allow curing diseases like cancer and such, and it hasn’t really worked. However, what the latest and greatest in biotech is in studying someone’s genome and using that to determine how to treat them. For example, there is excitement about cancer therapy that in effect uses the genetic basis of the person’s immune system to go after cancer, it is individualized, and the article I read said it is working on cancers that standard chemo and radiation don’t do well with.
