I hope you are right.
There's no history, however,
for what happens when
people start switching
genes from species to species.
Because we're the first
people to do it.
That's why I said we have to
only imagine
the consequences.
There are no precedents for
transgenic transfers.
Or, for that matter,
for nanotechnology.
These technologies
are not updated,
simple extrapolations
of past nuts and bolts.
They are profoundly
different with their own unique
characteristics.
Maybe the future
will have the same ups and downs
we saw in the past.
But just as may be
it is reasonable to
worry that the new
ups and downs will be
different from the past as
the technologies
themselves differ from
past technologies. In fact,
the differences
led Bill Joy to write,
"Why the Future Doesn't Need
Us" -- Not because he's
a luddite. Rather
because the particular
characteristics
that let computers
radically change cyberlife
are coming "on line"
in the non-cyber,
real, material world in
the guise of things like
transgenic work and
nanotechnology. Don't
panic. But don't blink.
These people are objecting to eating - not planting, eating - corn meal. Which is mostly starch, which human digestion reduces to sugar, and small amounts of plant protein, which human digestion reduces to component amino acids. This is madness. They are pretending it is "poisoned", as in "possessed by some unseen demon" that will "curse" them with "sickness".
Why? Because the corn plant the kernels grew from is resistent to this or that pest. As though anything about the corn's genetic program is being used in their digestive tract. As though sugars and amino acids are "dangerous poison" if they don't come from a "natural" (read, sinless and therefore magically pure) corn plant.
The reason we can eat every variety of ground grain, including all the strains we have ever developed by selective breeding, is because the differences between those strains don't matter a tuppenny darn in our digestion. Because the difference between the plants and -us- don't matter in our digestion. That is -why- we can eat them and get nutrition out of it.
We build our bodies by -our- genetic programs, not those of the things we eat. That is why we can eat all sorts of things, from a fungus (mushrooms) to a cow (steak). But these luddites play on popular ignorance in the matter, and mystical nonsense growing from such ignorance. The proteins and sugars from which cellular structures are made do not change one iota from life form to life form; that is why we can eat them. They likewise do not change one iota from "natural" strain to GM strain.
Which, no surprise, is why an American populace that has been eating GM food for decades is among the healthiest in the world. Our main problem is that we overeat because we have such abundant access to cheap food in whatever quantities we desire, including the poorer among us. Not exactly what the scaremongers were selling in the early 1970s, is it?
When starving people are denied corn meal out of superstitious fear, and die in consequence, those peddling those superstitions become murderers. Being wrong about the "population bomb" and other such nonsense was plain stupid, decades ago. Trying to make up for it by attacking GM food today - which is exactly what is going on - is practicing genocide rather than admitting past error. It is disgusting, and does not deserve defense.