Animals, having senses more attuned to the  natural world, may have something to teach us.  There's a farmer in Illinois who had planted soybeans on his 50-acre field for years.  He also had a flock of soybean-eating geese that took up residence in a pond nearby.  Being creatures of habit, the geese returned to the pond each year to feast on his soybeans. But then one year, the geese limited their eating to only a portion of his field.  

The geese, it seemed, were boycotting a part of the field where the farmer had planted new, genetically engineered soybeans.  Visiting that Illinois farm, veteran agricultural writer C.F. Marley said, "I've never seen anything like it. What's amazing is that the field with Roundup Ready™ beans had been planted to conventional beans the previous year, and the geese ate them. This year, they won't go near that field."

This isn't an isolated anomaly, as many similar accounts and experiments have been documented since the 1990s involving cows, hogs, squirrels, elk, deer, raccoons, and mice, where there was a choice between GM and non-GM food, and all chose non-GM food.   

Back in 1998, an Iowa farmer at a political rally asked presidential candidate Al Gore to support a recently introduced bill in congress requiring that GM foods be labeled.  When Gore responded that scientists said there is no difference between GM and non-GM foods, the farmer respectfully disagreed and described how his cows refused to eat the GM corn. He added, "My cows are smarter than those scientists."   The room erupted in applause, and when Gore asked if any others had noticed such, many hands in the room went up. 

And even in a formal lab setting - The Washington Post reported in 1998 that rodents, usually happy to munch on tomatoes, turned their noses up at the genetically modified FlavrSavr™ tomato that scientists were anxious to test on them.  Calgene CEO Roger Salquist said of his tomato, "I gotta tell you, you can be Chef Boyardee and the rats are still not going to like them."  The rats were eventually force fed the tomato through gastric tubes and stomach washes. Several developed stomach lesions and seven of forty died within two weeks. [Incidentally, the tomato was subsequently approved by the FDA, but the project was abandoned after Monsanto bought Calgene because it didn't prove profitable.]  

We humans are no longer as finely attuned to the natural world, and for the most part depend on the “experts” to tell us what is healthy and what is not.  This dependance hasn't proved very beneficial though, if you consider that on average less than one forth of what we eat benefits us to some degree, and the remainder of what we eat benefits big industry [or what some refer to as the sickness industries – i.e. agribusiness, food processing, and medical industries].   In the U.S., major media has paid scant attention to GMO issues, in stark contrast to many other countries, so maybe it would be prudent to try to sort our own way through the issues to see if we are missing something that may have serious implications to our well-being.   Being from various sources, many arguments overlap, but what I've pulled together are:   

GMO Pros 

• They are needed to solve world hunger.
• They produce seeds better able to resist stress.
• They produce more nutritious staple foods.
• They make farm animals more productive.
• They produce more food from less land.
• They reduce the need for certain chemicals.
• They produce seeds that grow in infertile land.
• Foods will have longer shelf lives.
• Allergenic genes can be identified, and we may be able to identify diseases more easily and accurately using genetic fingerprinting.
• GM plants are a more efficient approach to producing prescription drugs and vaccines, and will reduce our medical costs.

GMO Cons

• Relative to their GMO counterparts, organic farming (agro-ecology) on average results in appreciably increased yields of food crops, and healthier livestock, and organic food is much more nutritious.  
• With genetic engineering we are growing fewer and fewer species of crops, and monocropping creates a huge vulnerability in the food supply.
• GM crops are destroying the natural ecology,  and with it the viability of  organic farming.
• Even more  chemicals are being used on GM crops than were used on conventional crops in the past, and more medications are needed for GM livestock to get them to market.  
• Genes may jump from one species to another such as from a plant that resists weed killer to weeds, rendering them resistant too. Once released they cannot be recalled.  
• Inserted genes may cause harmful mutations.  
• Sleeper genes could be accidentally switched on and active genes switched off, and the new genes could change the behavior patterns inherent in natural functions.
• GM crops could replace normal crop varieties or compete with wild plants and replace them with the GM version.
• GM crops could create resistant insect species and have already had a harmful effect on insects essential for pollination.
• Allergenic genes may be transferred through mixing plant and animal genes.  
• GMOs thought safe for animals could enter the human food chain with adverse effects.
• Cows on the engineered Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) suffer one-third higher rates of udder infections (mastitis), for which farmers increasingly must administer antibiotics.  
• Marker genes that confer antibiotic resistance are used to show that the process of gene transfer has occurred, and may cause increased resistance to antibiotics.
• GM plants grown to produce prescription drugs may genetically contaminate food plants.   Considerably more medical cost savings could be achieved, without introducing substantial risk, by reducing direct to consumer promotion, physician “persuasive education” and incentives, and government lobbying.  
• Food prices are increasing, in good part, because farmers have to pay much more for proprietary annual GM seeds, for matching proprietary additional chemicals used in growing such, and in many cases realizing lower yields from such.  They are also paying more for increasingly necessary livestock medications.  Subsidizing farmers for losses from higher costs is a hidden cost of food that increases the profits of multinationals.  [The three biggest GM crops in the U.S. are soy, corn, and cotton.  The three most highly subsidized crops in the US are the same three.]
• Gene patenting by multinationals is providing them the means of gaining control of most seed and food production in the world.

To the uninitiated the pros might sound like commercial promotion, and the cons might sound like alarmist language.  Where might the truth lie, and are there any other options?  For us to get a handle on the validity of these arguments, we need a conceptual understanding of genetic engineering, and such begins with a basic grasp of what is known about DNA and protein biosynthesis.

For the sake of brevity herein, understand that the word genome means the complete set of genetic material present in a cell or organism, the word genotype means the genetic constitution of an individual organism, and the word phenotype means the set of observable characteristics of an individual organism resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment. 

Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is found inside the nucleus of cells.  It is a very complex organic molecule with billions of atoms tightly wrapped in a double helix formation like a twisted ladder.  A DNA molecule contains four bases (notationally A,C, G, and T) and the rungs of the ladder each consist of two bases consistently paired (A with T, and C with G).  The sides of the DNA ladder consist of a long string of sugar and phosphate molecules to which the bases are attached.  Each sugar-phosphate-base combination is a base pair called a nucleotide.   A nucleotide is made up of 30 atoms ∓ depending on the base, and the sequence of these nucleotides encode a kind of template for development and maintenance of a life form.  Base pairs taken three at a time yields 64 possible combinations (unique codes), which, with some redundancy, represent the twenty amino acids (building blocks of proteins), and several delimiters.  Think of DNA as a very long string of "code words", arranged in an orderly sequence, that contain the instructions for creating all the proteins in the body. 

Each strand of DNA includes series of smaller sequences, known as genes, that each carry the blueprint for a particular physical characteristic. Genes show incredible diversity in size and organization and have no typical structure.   Only a few percent of DNA has been studied at length so far (the genes), and the remainder was considered “junk” non-coding DNA until very recently.  Increasing evidence is now indicating that this non-coding DNA is not "junk" at all, in seemingly having regulatory roles.  [All cells contain the full DNA, but cells become differentiated and specialized to perform particular functions by some regulatory aspect that “switches on” and “switches off” appropriate genes.] There is little concrete knowledge yet of the relationship between non-coding DNA and the DNA of genes.  Moreover, the interaction of DNA and other biomolecules has been thought of so far as being "microobjects" interacting on a  material basis.  But, here again, new observations indicate a "quantum level" (behavior as particle aggregates and as waves), that obeys different laws than those of material particles alone, and quantum physical theory has so far not provided workable mathematical models for handling the wave mechanics of these aggregates of particles. 

RNA is another Nucleic acid and its function is to convey information from the gene (DNA) in the cell nucleus out to cytoplasm of the cell to build the proteins that control all cell functions, although in some viruses RNA rather than DNA carries the genetic information.

Proteins are, of course, an essential part of living organisms as catalytic enzymes, and as structural components of body tissues such as muscle, hair, collagen, etc.  Other proteins are important in cell signaling, immune responses, cell adhesion, and the cell-division cycles.  The right proteins in the right places in a life form are critically important, so we need to be aware of several aspects of the biosynthesis of proteins that are pertinent herein. 

RNA is transcribed from DNA and is generally further processed. One component of such we'll focus on is spliceosomes (which I'll refer to as code-scramblers herein).  Before RNA fills the prescription for a protein,  code-scramblers cut up the RNA, rearrange it and then reassemble it.  These code-scramblers can rearrange a single RNA code in many ways, creating hundreds and even thousands of different proteins from a single gene. 

A second aspect is that the effect that a particular protein has on a plant or animal can be modified by the addition of molecules such as phosphate, sulfite, sugars, or lipids.  These add-on molecules (which I'll refer to as hitchhikers herein) vary throughout the organism.  Each cell type expresses a unique repertoire of them, and may modify a protein in different ways. 

A third aspect is that, in addition to its amino acid sequence and the presence of hitchhikers, a protein's shape also determines its effect.  In order to do its job right, the newly made protein, a strung-out ribbon of a molecule, must be folded up into a precisely organized structure.  Although most globular proteins are able to assume their native state unassisted, chaperone-assisted folding is often necessary to prevent misfolding and aggregation.  Chaperones are proteins that assist the folding/unfolding and the assembly/disassembly of other macromolecular structures, but do not occur in these structures when the latter are performing their normal biological functions. 

Understand that although we have mapped the genome of humans and other life forms, knowledge of how DNA encoding, together with the biosynthesis of proteins, facilitate a specific phenotype is in its infancy.

In the natural world, the DNA of a species changes and evolves over time, in part, through sexual reproduction, where genes are combined and interact in various ways so that some of each parent are expressed in the offspring.  DNA can also mutate within an organism, and in spite of very intelligent "fix it" molecules in the cells of many species whose job is to repair the DNA, some mutations will not only affect the host organism, but will stick around and be passed on to the next generation.  Additionally it has been recently discovered that gene sections of DNA can “jump” from one organism's genome to another's with which it is unable to cross-breed.  This is termed horizontal transfer.  [Such has been recognized in bacteria for some time, but only recently confirmed in plants and animals.]  This overall “evolutionary” process usually occurs in small steps, in a sufficient time frame allowing for adaptation within the  ecological environment.  Nature is an ongoing action and reaction process that, although very complex and overlapping, usually minimizes the chaotic aspect of change to strive for net positive results in the survival of life forms.   

For centuries breeders have intentionally intervened in this natural process, and cross-bred plants and animals in order to combine desirable traits.  If, say, one type of plant is tasty and another like plant is hardy, the two might be cross bred in the hopes of creating a hardier, tasty plant.  Sometimes the offspring seemingly meets the intended results, and other times it doesn't because something else was involved that wasn't understood.  I say “seemingly” because other unrecognized traits may be lost or show up over time and generations.  One issue with traditional cross-breeding is that many previously unrecognized qualities have been “stripped out” of our lowest-common-denominator crops over the centuries. Many of these qualities not only fight cancer and increase the nutritional value of our vegetables, but also make them taste better while helping plants fight disease.  [We have learned this through mapping plant genomes in accumulated seed banks, which we'll get back to herein.] 

With genetic engineering, breeders have a whole new bag of tricks.  Instead of relying on species to pass on genes to offspring, scientists cut the gene out of a species' DNA, modify it, and then insert it directly into another's DNA.  Moreover since virtually all organisms have DNA, scientists don't have to limit the source of their genes to members of the same species.  They can search anywhere in the plant, animal, and bacteria worlds to find genes with desired traits, or even synthesize genes in the laboratory that don't exist in nature.

Although the genetic code is the universal language of life that all organisms on earth understand, there are "regional dialects."  The genetic vocabulary used by plants is slightly different than that used by animals and other organisms - technically referred to as "codon bias."  Although a plant nucleus is capable of understanding an animal gene, the process works better if the gene uses a vocabulary similar to the one a plant normally uses (and vis versa). This is one reason, researchers do not normally physically move a gene between say animal and plant.  Instead, they create a synthetic version based upon the genetic sequence of the source, but which had been translated into the dialect of the new host to optimize its expression.

Many commercial biotech proponents convey their technology as simply an extension, or logical advancement, of natural breeding that can be accomplished in a much shorter time frame.  One gross oversight of such a view is that natural breeding is limited to single or closely related species that can cross-breed.  Because we can now combine DNA of vastly different species, we are, in reality, redesigning living organisms across previously divided boundaries.  We are, in effect, redefining living organisms, and our ecological environment, that are the products of some three billion years of evolution.  And, we're redefining living organisms in a timeframe that doesn't allow for full expression and adaption, thus promoting chaos in our ecological environment.  So, what commercial biotech proponents are really telling us is that an apple is the same as a fish, which we should know, that even though they share the same types of building blocks, have through many millions of years evolved very different nutritional contributions and ecological niches. 

Moreover, the insertion of foreign genes disrupt the orderly sequence of DNA “code words,” potentially altering normal cellular functioning whereby unexpected and potentially harmful substances may appear.  Such may not occur for many generations of an organism, and may even occur in otherwise non-GM organisms that are, say, inadvertently pollinated from a GM variety.  Chain reactions are also possible, wherein a supposedly benign foreign substance produced by an inserted gene may upset normal cell functioning which may lead to the appearance of new unexpected substances, and on and on.

An additional key difference with genetic engineering is that special constructs of genetic material derived from viruses and bacteria are added to the "desired gene" before  insertion. These constructs don't exist in natural food, but are needed to:
     1. detect cases of successful gene insertion (markers)
     2. ensure that the inserted gene is not rejected by the recipient organism (vectors)
     3. ensure that the inserted gene is active (promoters)

By crossing natural, age-old species barriers, genetic engineers are not simply changing a specific species, but are tampering with the evolution of all species.  The results are essentially new organisms, self-perpetuating and hence as permanent as anything else in nature.  That is, once created, they cannot be recalled.  Whole proteins are being transposed overnight into very different associations, with consequences we can not yet foretell, either for the host organism, or other organisms coexisting in the ecological environment.  This is the essence of why so many concerned scientists, around the world, are adamant that genetic engineering is completely different, and must not be mistaken with traditional breeding practices.  Though both traditional breeding and  genetic engineering alter the phenotype of an organism, the former is limited within the known genotypes  of the organism, or closely related organisms, and is based on empirical evidence.  The latter is an exponentially more complex alteration, that we are only beginning to collect evidence on, and all species, including us, are the guinea pigs.

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There might be some benefit in genetic engineering if we really knew what we are doing.  The problem is that we haven't even accurately identified all the players in the game yet, let alone have any real understanding of how the game is played.  Given that in the natural world there is no benefit without payback, without a sufficient understanding of the development and maintenance of life forms how can we honestly believe that we have any idea of the potential scope of adverse consequences?  Without knowledge there is no real foresight.     Even the current technology of genetic engineers is like comparing the technologies (tools) of our earliest ancestors to todays technologies. 

For example, gene insertion might be assumed by a reader to be a highly precise method of gene transfer, however it is anything but that.  With presently used techniques, whether bacterial, viral, or mechanical (gene cannon or microinjection), it is impossible to guide the insertion of a gene.  Gene insertion occurs, if at all,  haphazardly in the midst of the ordered code sequence of DNA, and results in disruption of the genetic blueprint of the organism with totally unpredictable consequences.  The BBC's Tomorrow's World Magazine explained it this way: "Genetic engineering is generally a hit and miss affair. The genes may be inserted the wrong way round or multiple copies may be scattered throughout a plant's genome. They may be inserted inside other genes - destroying their activity or massively increasing it. More worryingly, a plant's genetic make-up may become unstable - again with unpredictable results. Genes may switch on or off unexpectedly with possible . . . unexpected or unknowable effects. Genes can hop around the genome for no obvious rhyme or reason. Rogue toxins may be produced or existing ones amplified massively.  Such problems may only arise hundreds of generations after the crops are originally modified."

A change in the host's DNA due to the process of inserting a foreign gene is called "insertion mutation."  In human gene therapy, studies have verified that insertion mutation can lead to leukemia in children. Such an effect is so widely recognized, there is even a term, "insertion carcinogenesis," to describe it.  In plants the disruptions may be similarly dangerous, producing unpredicted toxins, but they haven't been studied closely.  

To get an idea of how adverse consequences might occur, let's begin with the pertinent points I mentioned relative to protein biosynthesis.  Say a gene never before present in an organism is inserted.  The organism has never seen such before, so how does a code-scrambler know to rearrange the DNA code  to produce a suitable protein, and considering that one gene can give rise to multiple proteins, might many unintended proteins be created?  The relationship between genes and the code-scramblers has evolved for billions of years, right along with the evolution of DNA itself. We do not fully understand how they work together in the same species. We certainly can't predict how they will work when a gene from one species, or synthesized version of such, meets a code scrambler from another. 

Unlike genes from plants and animals, bacterial genes are usually not scrambled because most do not include introns (intervening non-coding sequences that are spliced out).  To facilitate protein production, introns  are synthetically added to bacterial genes and thus recognized by code-scramblers. 

Then there are the hitchhikers.  If the protein is further modified by the addition of add-on molecules, differently of course by each cell type, will these variations perform relative to cell type only as intended.  How will each cell type “know” what to do with a protein since they have never been exposed to it before?  

And, there is the issue of the protein being properly folded.  Will the protein fold itself, or will a chaperone assist, and in either case will the folding result in the desired trait?  The protein is in a whole new environment so how would it “know” to fold itself properly for such, or if a chaperone assists, how does it “know” to properly fold a protein it has never seen before? 

Moreover, given what little we actually know about  protein biosynthesis, how can we be sure that some other aspect of such might not lead to adverse consequences?  Even if a desirable trait is achieved, and no adverse consequences are observed, what effects might there be from changes in the organism's environment and natural gene mutations throughout an organism's life cycle?  Put this together with variations in succeeding generations, and/or natural happenstance cross breeding, and with the probabilities of further change, and the potential of adverse consequences are increased exponentially.  

To keep this piece manageable, I've skipped over more detailed concerns and probabilities associated with the intermediate gene synthesizing such as markers, vectors, and promoters noted in the foregoing.  There are volumes of scientific and anecdotal information that may be researched by those interested.

Of further concern is the even more negative impact of GE plants grown specifically to produce pharmaceutical drugs.  Several years back there were already about 300 test plots, in the open, in North America.  In the US there are six major drugs being produced by plants, which are, as far as I can learn, vaccines, industrial enzymes, blood thinners, blood clotting proteins, growth hormones and contraceptive drugs. Scientists from universities in Indiana, Ohio and Nebraska have noted that there is already cross-pollination with close cousins of these species. The pharmaceutical plants are primarily sunflowers and corn, or maize.  Besides cross pollination, there is also the very real danger of horizontal gene transfer.

Basic to our understanding should be that we are utterly dependent on healthy soil.  From such we derive our plant foods, and the foods for our livestock.  Modern molecular DNA testing at Cornell University has shown us that healthy soil is a complex resource of natural genetic and biochemical diversity.  Each teaspoon of healthy soil or compost is a habitat for 40,000 species of bacteria, 10,000 species of fungi, and thousands of microarthropods and nematodes, as well as earthworms and insects measured in tonnes of living and dead biomass per acre. These micro-herds function as a soil food web to provide farmers with soils that have an inherent capacity for fertility, water storage, disease and pest suppression, and resistance to stress, all without chemical and GM inputs. 

Plants fix energy from the sun and send half to their roots, where it is used to make plant root exudates that are pumped into the rhizospheric soil to feed nearby beneficial fungi, bacteria, and nematodes. Each plant species produces it own unique flavor of exudates to attract its own special set of mycorrhizae and bacteria. When GM crops are planted in the same soil, their plant roots exude toxic compounds that poison the whole system.

In thinking about just the herbicidal and insecticidal GMOs, one might see a correlation herein with the arms race between countries.  As weeds and insects counter our efforts, will we create ever more toxic variations?  Waging war with nature has profound negative implications for our own life form – there is no benefit without payback in nature's cause and effect scheme!

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All these concerns are mind boggling in their complexity, and might be dismissed by some as overactive imagination, but we're talking about the complexities of life which we know scant little about, and some of these concerns have already been observed.  By way of example, I'm noting just of few of these observations.

• Superweeds  (weeds resistant to herbicides) were discovered in the UK just two years after the end of a three year field trial for GM oilseed rape. The discovery, made by scientists from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH),  came as they were monitoring gene flow from Bayer's herbicide-resistant GM rape seed to wild plants. The weed in question is charlock, and it is found alongside rape seed throughout Europe. What is most disturbing about this new discovery is that industry scientists have always insisted that "horizontal" gene flow in this manner is impossible.

• The Bt cotton debacle in India is the subject of a documentary and many articles, so rather than devote sufficient space herein, I'll let the reader fill in the blanks.

• Snowdrop genes were inserted into Scottish potatoes to combat the greenfly. After greenflies fed on the potatoes, 50% of the ladybugs that fed on those greenflies were killed.

• Bt toxins (from bacterial genes) are supposed to be harmful only to specific insect groups, depending on the variety of Bt genes inserted into the crop plant. Unexpectedly, a variety “specific” for caterpillars also killed lacewings that fed on caterpillars with a Bt diet.

• To reduce insect pests, organic farmers use Bt as a bacterial spray. Small-scale use of this “bio-pesticide” is unlikely to lead to resistance in the insect pests, because they are rarely exposed to it. In contrast, when Bt toxin genes are inserted into crops, the plants constantly express the toxins over widespread areas. Bt crops exude 10-20 times the amount of toxin as in organic sprays. Such overuse of the pesticide allows resistance to develop very rapidly in the pests. By 1997, the cotton bollworm developed resistance on 40% of the farms using Bt cotton.

• Cows on the engineered Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) suffer one-third higher rates of udder infections (mastitis), for which farmers increasingly must administer antibiotics.  Those antibiotics end up in the milk we drink, increasing the risk of antibiotic resistance in human pathogens. Furthermore, rBGH increases the levels of another growth hormone in milk (IGF-1), which is a likely carcinogen.  The FDA has approved rBGH, various state governments have banned “No rBGH” labels, and Monsanto sues businesses that attempt to use such a label.

• Soybeans engineered with genes from Brazil nuts induced severe allergic reactions from people who had never been allergic to soy.  People allergic to a product from an inserted gene would have difficulty avoiding it, because transgenic food is not labeled in the US.

• Mexico gave corn (maize) to the world, and many there take pride in their thousands of varieties of native corn.  With the advent of NAFTA though, many millions of tons of cheep Bt corn have been dumped on Mexico from el norte.  As would happen anywhere, a little illegal planting of the Bt corn, and cross-pollination, are overwhelming the native varieties and altering this priceless genetic base.  This cascading ecological misfeasance also threatens an even older Mexican tradition: the miraculous annual migration of millions of monarch butterflies from the northeastern United States to fir groves 150 miles west of Mexico City.

• You likely already know about the Monarch butterfly problem as it is one of the very few GMO issues that has been widely disseminated in U.S. major media.  Monarchs, migratory Lepidoptera that feed on milkweeds, are the best-known butterflies in North America.  A well-publicized study of GMOs showed that Bt maize pollen was toxic to laboratory-fed Monarch butterfly larvae. A study later collected pollen-covered milkweed plants, which were found growing naturally next to Bt maize fields. A significantly larger proportion of Monarch butterfly larvae that fed on these field-collected plants died compared with those fed pollen-free plants.  What will happen if horizontal gene transfer results in a variety of Bt milkweeds that spread through the natural varieties in the wild?

• Scientists have discovered a paradox that crops up when new genes are deliberately inserted into a fish’s chromosomes to make the animal grow larger. While the genetically modified fish will be bigger and have more success at attracting mates, they may also produce offspring that are less likely to survive to adulthood. If this occurs, as generations pass, a population could dwindle in size and, potentially, disappear entirely.  Farmed fish frequently escape into the wild, and a wild a population invaded by a few genetically modified individuals would become more and more transgenic, and as it did the population would get smaller and smaller.  Farmed fish also receive more antibiotics per pound than any other livestock, which one should understand by now is a losing battle with nature.

• There are also several very serious problems with the proliferation of GE trees.  To fully understand these issues, I would urge you to view the documentary “A Silent Forest” narrated by Dr. David Suzuki.

The main issues with GMOs are 1) ecological impact, 2) the health of and danger to our food, and 3) the rights of farmers in pursuing their livelihood versus the intellectual property rights of multinationals.

In researching GMO issues I have found considerable misdirection and misinformation, directly and indirectly, from the multinational corporations with a financial stake, together with some overenthusiastic geneticists.  I have also found more that a little “stretching” of the issues, together with some outright fabrications, by overenthusiastic opponents of GMOs.  So what are the realities of the issues?

A corporation, by its very existence, is concerned with developing and increasing short term profit.  Factors like morality and ethics only enter the picture as perceptions to further profits.  A sure fire course for any entrepreneur is to identify or create a need and monopolize supplying such.  This doesn't mean that business for profit is necessarily bad, as the advancement of our societies has been achieved by such.  However, when there isn't enough balance in the system, the results have been historically adverse.  [Do you see a pattern with nature here?]  After the widespread ecological and human disasters brought on by the multinational chemical industry, it shifted focus to GMOs.  The perception is on improving food production, but the focus is on proprietary annual seed sales tied to proprietary chemicals necessary in growing such,  and for  proprietary enhancement drugs, and the maintenance medications necessary with such, for our livestock.  Unchecked, this course could lead to monopolization of the world's food sources by a few multinational corporations.  Very telling here is that, at least in the U.S., these multinational corporations have been able to prevent our even knowing what foods contain transgenic ingredients.  What happened to free choice in a free society? 

Yes, GMOs have increased the productivity of growing foodstuffs, if not necessarily increasing comparable production, just as dangerous chemicals did in the past, but again at an ever increasing cost to the ecology, the economy, the sustainability of food sourcing, the quality of our foodstuffs, and the viability of traditional farmers trying to produce in a sustainable ecological friendly manner. 

As to the proponent position that GMOs produce more food on less land, such has not been the case on average so far relative to organic farming.  This is a carryover argument from the chemical industries, and is further destroying the fertility of our soil even if it were true.  So what's the payback here – will the battle royale with nature escalate to the point where we are trying to squeeze blood out of rock? 

Another proponent position of producing seeds that grow in infertile land is an oxymoron.  Plants, like animals, require fuel (food) to grow, so the less nutritional the soil, the less healthy and nutritional the plant. 

Neither do we need GMOs to alleviate the problems of world hunger.  A major contribution to world hunger is not a lack of food, but the uneven distribution of food and unplanned/misguided agricultural policies.  Also, an aggravating contribution of late is big industry's bait and switch scam of biofuels [see my climate change piece].  This “solving world hunger” guise is perpetrated by the multinational corporations to shape the agriculture and stock raising sectors of all countries to monopolize a basic need with immoral patenting of life forms.  Our role in the U.S. of allowing food aid in the form of GMO foodstuffs, and entertaining biofuels as an energy alternative, is facilitating the goal of these multinational corporations. 

What I see here is Frankenstein in a business suit. 

On the other hand, in my research I have discounted GMO oppenent material that I could not verify with the work and opinions of multiple concerned scientists, and there are still ample concerns and evidence.  Basically, if one has an inkling of just how little we really know about the natural world we are dependent on, and places any value on our role in ecology, one has to come down on the side of caution.  I believe the GMO opponents case is well made, and doesn't need the distortions introduced by the overzealous faction.  Very telling here is that many of these concerned scientists are being attacked in much the same way Rachel Carson was when her book “Silent Spring” was published in 1962, and inspired widespread public concerns with pesticides and pollution of the environment. [Even the major antagonists are mostly the same.]  

What I fear is not the experimental science in controlled lab environments, but the fundamentally irrational decision to let GMOs, and especially pharmaceutical transgenics, out of the laboratory into the real world before we truly understand, or can even reasonably estimate, what adverse payback is associated with perceived benefit.  What I find most abhorrent is the for-profit rush to monopolize life-forms because it facilitates dominance and undermines individual rights. 

If we are going to try to improve on nature, we need to begin by shedding our locust and lemming traits, and work towards being responsible stewards.  Then maybe we will realize that such is an abstract goal, relative to the overwhelming intricacies of nature's cause and effect phenomena, and understand that real net positive results can be achieved only by working in concert with the natural order.

If you remember, near the beginning I wondered if there were any other options.  Actually there is one that makes use of our new found scientific knowledge, but applies it in concert with the natural order.  Something called “Smart Breeding” greatly improves on traditional breeding, benefits the organic model, and thus far advanced in the public domain thwarts the abusive nature of  the multinational corporations.  

Using our new found knowledge of plant genomes, and the ability to "tag" critical genes with dye, lab-bench hybridizers can create and test new crop varieties in a fraction of the time once required by generations of trial-and-error field testing. In some cases, they can simply coax a plant to start using a desirable but dormant trait it possessed all along.

Organic Agriculture is Farming with Principles. That is, interacting "in a life-enhancing way" with plants, animals, soils, and water supplies; to eliminate polluting outputs; and to conserve and recycle natural resources. It works in a closed loop system, and the obvious outcome that most people recognize is producing food of high nutritional quality. 

Smart Breeding and Organic Agriculture could result in “super-organics” if we don't get lost along the way.  By understanding the genomes of plants, we can use a "smart breeding" strategy to facilitate the exploration and utilization of natural genetic variation. Using a marker-assisted approach to specific generic traits in DNA provides a noninvasive road map to efficiently breed in useful traits.  With smart breeding we can access nature's reserves of genetic diversity, without violating natures divisions of life forms.  We must understand though, that GMOs can reduce the viability of this approach by contaminating (introducing unnatural genes) plants not yet in our precious gene banks, and even the results of this approach. 

So far this work is mostly funded by university dollars, and the resulting open-pollinated seeds are handed out to local organic growers, and the expanding counter-agribusiness food movement.  Think of it as ag's version of open source. 

The reader is encouraged to research this topic further, and I'll end with an example of how Smart Breeding works.

• THE MISSION:  Develop rice that's resistant to bacterial blight and will thrive around the globe.

• SEARCH:  Food scientists scour the rice gene bank, consisting of 84,000 seed types, in search of varieties with blight immunity.

• INSERT MARKER:  Scientists extract DNA from selected varieties and tag the blight-immunity gene - previously identified by researchers - with a dye (not the antibiotic resistance markers used in GE).

• CROSSBREED:  A network of researchers around the world cross disease-resistant varieties with thousands of local versions. With some plants, this means merely putting two varieties in a room. Self-pollinating rice requires manual pollen insertion.

• ANALYZE:  The offspring are analyzed to detect the presence of the immunity gene. Those containing the gene are planted in a field.

• TEST:  Mature plants are exposed to bacterial blight to confirm resistance. Those that don't die, and maintain desired traits from the local variety, are distributed.

             Unless?

• REPEAT:  Sometimes, the process reveals several genes responsible for a trait. Three genes confer resistance to different blight strains. In such cases, breeders repeat the crossbreeding until all such genes are turned on.

• END RESULT:  A rice plant with broad resistance to bacterial blight that will thrive in local conditions. 

I gratefully acknowledge the work of many honorable and thorough scientists, and many other writers, on the issues of GMOs, whose work I have simply tried to present a synopsis of for the layperson.  I also gratefully acknowledge the help of several friends in critiquing this attempt at disseminating the important GMO issues.