reviewing for my Genes final

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I'm reviewing for my Genes and the Human Condition final.

Here are three quotes from the lectures:


The satirist Jonathan Swift told us that it was not possible to reason someone out of a position that they didn’t reason themselves into.  

and

Around the world, more than 170 million hectares of land are under engineered crops, sustained by 16 million farmers in 28 countries, with no reports of apparent damage to health or the environment.

"...no reports of apparent damage to health or the environment."  NO reports.  That's a pretty strong statement.......

Another quote:

In fact, as the European Commission itself found in a 2010 survey of hundreds of scientific studies, there is simply no evidence that transgenic crops put the health of humans or the environment at increased risk. Overwhelmingly other independent surveys show the same thing.


I know that humanity has nearly always been gung-ho to do whatever seems to serve our short-term interests, without regard for what will happen next.  (Hence the disappearance of passenger pigeons -- once "the most common bird on the planet," with flocks in the billions -- we killed them all, every last one.....)

I also know that I should take into account what a speaker's bias is, when I listen.  I know that my genetics professors are working on transgenic projects in their own labs (one is working on a fungus which will kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes AND the malaria-causing protozoan they carry!).  Their bias is that biotechnology is the way of the future, opening doors for amazing progress on many, many fronts.

The benefits they dangle are tantalyzing -- better treatments for cancer, vastly lessened use of pesticides, the possibility of fixing (not treating, FIXing) some genetic diseases, increased crop yields (c4 photosynthesis rather than c3, for one change), and -- bringing back species we exterminated, like passenger pigeons.  Just to name a few.....

Looking at history, I am sure there will also be unexpected negative consequences (and some of those will be disasters)..........................

And yet.  The potential benefits from many of these areas of study are so big it's hard to get my mind around them.

Currently we spread an unconscionable amount of poison everywhere, all the time.  Insecticides, fungisides, you name it -- if we don't like it, we poison it.  Even though we are clear, now, that there are enormous long-term consequences.  If we enable plants to better resist predators, in ways that are much more closely targeted to their particular predators, we could lessen our use of pesticides -- which we KNOW are harmful to us and to the planet.

Chemotherapy poisons everything it touches, with the hope that the disease will be killed while the patient lives.  A much more focused approach makes more sense.  Both because it is more likely to kill the cancer's rogue cells, and because it will be less harmful to the body's normal cells.


I'm not thinking that slamming the door on biotechnology is the right thing to do............................

Another truth is that a lot of these changes are meant to benefit the most needy.  Stopping malaria, for example.  Or -- what about Golden Rice?  Golden Rice, a transgenic plant, has significant amounts of vitamin A (hence the golden grains of rice for which it is named).  It grows in places where large numbers of people suffer from vitamin A deficiency (which causes blindness, for one thing, and hampers children's immune systems, for another). 

People in the developed world, who have access to all the vitamin A they want, are preventing use of Golden Rice by people who desperately need that vitamin A.

We trashed the world, any old way we pleased, getting to our "developed" status.

It seems to me it is pretty darn hypocritical of us to deny others the benefits of technology, because "something bad might happen".............  (Especially when we are still strip mining, and fracking, and spreading pesticides which have been banned in other places.........)

It is in my nature to look for all of the bad things that might result from a change.

But I am thinking that the benefits of our current biotechnological direction(s) are so vast that we need to be really careful to listen to the science, rather than to emotion, when we make decisions about what are, and are not, good directions to take.

Let us NOT be those people Johnathan Swift was referring to, who are unmoved by reason!

What is the *evidence*?  

If the truth is -- "NO reports of apparent damage to health or the environment," then we need to let that be our guide, rather than letting our fears of what MIGHT happen stop us from doing some amazing things that might even go a long way toward repairing the damage we've done in the past.................

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