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The Spurious Foundation of Genetic Engineering
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| by Barry Commoner |
| SOURCE: Mindfully.org |
POSTED: 05/22/02 01:09:47 EDT |
THE SPURIOUS FOUNDATION OF GENETIC ENGINEERING
Barry Commoner:
"In short, the most dramatic achievement to date of the $3 billion Human Genome Project is the refutation of its own scientific rationale.
"The genetically engineered crops now being grown represent a massive uncontrolled experiment whose outcome is inherently unpredictable. The results could be catastrophic.
"... we must avoid the mistake of reducing life to a master molecule in order to satisfy our emotional need for unambiguous simplicity.
"The experimental data, shorn of dogmatic theories, points to the irreducibility of the living cell, the inherent complexity of which suggests that any artificially altered genetic system, given the magnitude of our ignorance, must sooner or later give rise to unintended, potentially disastrous, consequences.
"Biology has become a glittering target for venture capital; each new discovery brings new patents, new partnerships, new corporate affiliations.
"But as the growing opposition to transgenic crops clearly shows, there is persistent public concern not only with the safety of genetically engineered foods but also with the inherent dangers in arbitrarily overriding patterns of inheritance that are embedded in the natural world through long evolutionary experience.
"Too often those concerns have been derided by industry scientists as the "irrational" fears of an uneducated public. The irony, of course, is that the biotechnology industry is based on science that is forty years old and conveniently devoid of more recent results, which show that there are strong reasons to fear the potential consequences of transferring a DNA gene between species.
"What the public fears is not the experimental science but the fundamentally irrational decision to let it out of the laboratory into the real world before we truly understand it."
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| REVIEWED BY: Rick Rohe |
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