Genetically modified foods

Funny that you mentioned herbicide resistant plants.

It's all a matter of what you want to accomplish.We GM some crops to be herbicide resistant so that we can kill the weeds without killing the crop. But herbicide resistant weeds are the other side of the coin.Balance.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Look, I'm not laying up nights about it.But "safe" according to who? My wife, being an entomology graduate student, works pretty closely with transgenic crops that aren't supposed to enter the food chain. These are the crops that the racoons are breaking into every night and chowing down on.It's ludicrous to suggest that you're going to be able to keep these genes out of the wild. I'm glad you're so sure they're safe, but how do you know? Look, don't reassure me like I'm one of those "frankenfood" kooks. We don't have the science to make absolute predictions about what effects transgenic genes could have in the wild, especially as they combine and recombine with other strains of transgenic crops.

Although it is true that right now we are not capable of predicting the long term effects in this matter, the fact transgenic strains are just combination of already existing strains we find in nature should be reassuring enough that there can't be any damage more devastating than if we would to introduce exotic species into a new environment.

Which, we've discovered, can be devastating.But remember too that while we're introducing genes already found in nature, we're introducing genes never before seen in the biochemical environment of the crop in question. For instance, while a jellyfish gene might have been in jellyfish for millions of years, it's never been in corn before, and its protein products might react in a totally unpredictable way in the unique biochemical environment of the corn cell.But look, saying that these transgenic species aren't any worse than exotic species is still saying that they have the potential to be pretty bad. We've really fucked up some ecosystems with exotic species.

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But remember too that while we're introducing genes already found in nature, we're introducing genes never before seen in the biochemical environment of the crop in question. For instance, while a jellyfish gene might have been in jellyfish for millions of years, it's never been in corn before, and its protein products might react in a totally unpredictable way in the unique biochemical environment of the corn cell.

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Actually, I think the problem is overstated for a different reason. the most likely scenario is the introduced gene will lower the fitness of the GM crop requiring a crap load of extra money to keep the crops from being replaced by natural variants. Even if you work with bacterial vectors, they have a nasty tendency to kick out whatever you want to put in because they don't need it and don't want it...you have to place them under intense (antibiotic) selection to keep your constructs in. In a crop, it is harder to maintain rigorous selection other than uprooting any plant that moves in. Genetically modified animals, we have been doing that for centuries with artificial selection. Most of the GM foods are just going to be expensive duds. Invasion by exotic species is a much more serious threat than GMs.