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"It's a swap of sequence. It's a .00000001 percent change, which is a tiny portion," he adds. "The technology has allowed us to add in and create very precise breeding."Though these are the claims of many in the biotech industry, gene-editing and other 'cutting-edge' genetic modification techniques don't always work out as they plan. With GM plants bred to resist pests in the field, the industry inadvertently (some argue purposefully) created super bugs, requiring more and more toxic chemicals to be sprayed.
"Anyone that says, 'Oh, we know that this is perfectly safe,' I say is either unbelievably stupid, or deliberately lying. The reality is, we don't know. The experiments simply haven't been done, and now we have become the guinea pigs." ~ David Suzuki, geneticist
What we do know is that the unintended consequences of the recombinant DNA process employed to create genetically engineering organisms are beyond the ability of present-day science to comprehend. This is largely due to the post-Human Genome Project revelation that the holy grail of molecular biology, the overly-simplified 'one gene > one trait' model, is absolutely false.
Only recently, for instance, a previously unidentified viral gene fragment was discovered to be present in most of the GM crops commercialized to date; a finding which calls into question the safety of 54 commercialized crops already commercialized and being used in both food and feed. There could be hundreds of viral-gene altered proteins within these foods, whose complex interactions with DNA and toxicity have never been characterized.
Comment: As more and more people become fed up with the Troika's inhuman austerity program, European authorities become more and more like their Anglo-American counterparts: intolerant of genuine dissent.
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