Genetic Engineering

GENETIC ENGINEERING: A COSTLY RISK:
The Potential Consequences are Frightening
Genetic scientists are altering life itself - dabbling with genes to produce unnatural living plants, and animals. But when the scientists job is done and industry pushes these strange life forms into every area of our lives no-one will be able to control them and no-one can even begin to predict the impact they will have on all our lives.
"This is an imperfect technology with inherent dangers. ..... It is the unpredictability of the outcomes that is most worrying." Dr. Michael Antoniou - Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology - London

How will we know what's in the food we eat when everything from wine to the humble potato could contain strange genes? Current gene sources include rats, moths, scorpions, bacterium, and even humans.
How can we practice sustainable farming and protect our countryside from chemicals when the big companies genetically engineering crops are chemical companies promoting toxic pesticides?
How can small sustainable farmers stay in business when the big genetic engineering companies are trying to patent new crops? A patent gives them "ownership" of both the crop and the genes used to produce it for a period of around twenty years. With a patent, the big multinationals will be able to charge farmers to use seeds. Only rich farmers growing huge acreages will survive. By gaining control of all the world's staple crops, including maize, rice, and wheat, just a handful of companies will ultimately control all our food.
How can we protect our environment from alien crops? If they turn into alien weeds, our favourite flora could be overrun, rare plants could be lost, and insect life devastated by crops which continuously produce their own insecticide.
How will we protect our health when we can never tell what strange genes have been put into our basic foodstuffs? Allergy sufferers won't stand a chance of avoiding ingredients which they are allergic too. They won't even know they're there.
How will we control the search for the "perfect" tomato, or "perfect" chicken? Once industry has made its "perfect" living product it will be able to clone exact genetic copies. The ultimate question is, what happens to the "imperfect" ones left over? And what happens when industry thinks it can make the "perfect" clonable human?

So many questions hang over gene technology that it must be foolhardy even to contemplate releasing these unknown organisms into our world. Yet genetically engineered organisms have already been tested in the environment more than 4000 times.
We might not know what their exact impact will be, but we can be sure of this: genetically engineered organisms will change our world, and if we don't like how it's changing - we will soon not be able to stop it.
WHAT IS GENETIC ENGINEERING?
Engineering means manufacturing something new. With genetic engineering scientists are using parts of living organisms as their basic building materials to change life forms and construct new ones.
We know that DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) contains the blueprint for all the activities of a living cell. A gene is a segment of that DNA. Each gene carries a message encoded in its chemical structure, so that together the genetic make up of a living cell determines all the traits of that organism. The genes carry all the chemical instructions needed to make the organism behave in a certain way, and since they are passed on from one generation to the next, offspring inherit these traits from their parents.
Now scientists are using enzymes to break the DNA strand at certain places, insert new segments, and "stitch" the strand back together again. They can "cut and paste" genes from one organism into another so that the make-up of the organism is changed and its natural traits are manipulated in particular directions.
The danger is they're mixing genes from entirely unrelated species - animal genes are going into vegetables, bacteria genes into food crops, and human genes going into animals. The genetic industry is no respecter of nature's boundaries - boundaries designed to protect the inherent uniqueness of individual species. In effect, industry is taking control of evolution!
As more and more genes are isolated from their natural sources scientists are able to control more and more aspects of life. They can build their own animals, plants, trees, and food crops. The next step is that the genetic engineering industry wants to patent the genes used in their manufacture of new organisms. By claiming ownership of genes they are gradually taking control of life itself. All living things could become profit making products, and multi-national companies - many of them chemical giants - will rule the very foundations of our society - agriculture, food production, and the content of the very foods we eat.
WHAT ARE THE IMPACTS OF GENETIC ENGINEERING?
Genetic engineering creates whole new life forms - completely unnatural - yet it refuses to acknowledge that the risks involved in releasing them are huge. All over the world when non-indigenous species have been introduced into new environments they have caused long term damage. We know that changing one element of the environment sets off a domino effect of cascading changes throughout entire eco-systems. Yet industry maintains that it's foreign species will not cause problems......
THEY'RE ALIVE ....
that means that genetically engineered organisms can mutate, multiply, breed with other living things and go on breeding for generations to come.
THEY'RE UNSTABLE ....
it's nonsense to think that genetic engineering is a precise science. There are literally millions of genes in a living organism and they don't just work on a "one gene, one trait" system. Genes are complex and work together to perform certain functions. Many of the trials conducted on genetically engineered organisms have gone badly wrong- cotton crops, designed to fight off insects, were still devoured. Thousands of hectares of the crop were lost with an estimated $1 billion worth of damage; A bacteria genetically altered to make it clean up soil polluted by a chemical herbicide worked on the herbicide, but killed crucial soil fungi, putting basic soil fertility at risk.
THEY POSE RISKS TO HUMAN HEALTH ....
Never before have genes from bacteria, rats, or scorpions, to name a few, been part of the human diet. Yet tests on the safety of new foods containing strange genes have been terrifyingly inadequate. Tests have focused more on limited field trials and not on the impact on human health and the environment. Governments have expressed fears, for example, that crops containing an ampicillin resistance gene could undermine the treatment of human and animal disease. Ampicillin is one of our most important antibiotics. Its feared the resistance gene could spread to harmful bacteria - making them immune to this vital treatment. Allergies could also increase. Many people are allergic to food plants because of proteins produced by the plant as a defence against diseases and pests. Since genetically engineered plants are specifically designed to produce increased quantities of these proteins, the risk of allergies is also increased.
THEY COULD CHANGE THE ENVIRONMENT IRREVERSIBLY.....
We could be releasing "biological pollutants" into the environment which are even more damaging than chemical pollutants. Because they are alive, genetically engineered crops may end up spreading their genes to related plants growing around them. Pesticide resistance genes could turn weeds into super weeds, and insects into super bugs - both difficult to control without massive use of chemicals. Crops developed to produce their own insecticide could end up killing harmless birds and butterflies. It is also naive in the extreme to believe, as industry suggests, that genetically engineered crops will stay confined to the agricultural field they are grown in; or that genetically engineered fish will stay in the pens where they are bred without spreading further into the environment. (See briefing sheet - The End of the World as We Know It.)
WHAT IS BEING GENETICALLY ENGINEERED?
The majority of the world's most important food crops have already been either tested for genetically engineered versions, or are under development. So far at least 38 different crop species have been genetically engineered and tested in field trials. Genetically engineered flowers have been created and tested as have genetically engineered fish, sheep, viruses and bacteria.
The unrestricted use of certain genetically engineered tomatoes, soybean, cotton, corn, oilseed rape, squash and potatoes has been allowed in the US. In Europe genetically engineered tobacco, oilseed rape and corn can be marketed. Genetically engineered tomato paste is on sale in supermarkets, and genetically engineered soya beans are being imported from America to be used widely in processed foods. In Canada genetically engineered oilseed rape can be marketed.
Meanwhile thousands of new foodstuffs are waiting in the wings. Already in the laboratory a human gene has been added to salmon, trout, and rice; a chicken gene to potatoes; mouse genes into tobacco; and bacteria and virus genes into cucumber, and tomatoes. At the moment resistance to "meddled with" food is high, with consumers, retailers and food producers demanding "real" food, free of genetic engineering. If industry can ride the storm and force its first products on to us, the floodgates could open. So far only soya and maize are available internationally. If enough people protest, it is possible now to stop genetically engineered food from spreading any further into our lives.
WHO SAYS IT'S SAFE?
For something which could cause such wide ranging problems both for the environment and human and animal health, tests for safety are terrifyingly lax.
Although the multinational companies who market the new crops say they are safe, they have done scant tests to prove it. Their field trials are usually short term, and small scale. They rarely last for more than one growing season, whereas it could take years for most ecological effects to be seen. Tiny trial plots cannot possibly reflect the damage that could be done by planting huge tracts of countryside with genetically engineered seeds. And no tests are done which try to accurately reproduce real conditions the crops will meet once grown in the environment. In field trials seeds and pollen are contained so they rarely escape or remain in the soil after the test. This won't be the case once the plants are grown as commercial crops. Then the genetic industry will be testing them on us.
Regulatory authorities who have okayed the use and distribution of genetically engineered products, including the European Commission, the US Department of Agriculture, and the US Food and Drug Administration, for example, have done so on the evidence provided solely by the companies themselves.
With such inadequate consideration of the consequences we cannot hope to predict likely problems. Instead we will discover them as they happen - when it is already too late.