| Product: |
GM and cloning |
| Date: |
05/07/01 (30 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: The possibilities are endless, endless I tell you!, No really.
Disadvantages: Trials needed, more trials
You don't? But how do you keep your weight down?
What on earth is he talking about, I hear you saying in a weird from-the-future-echo type way. I on about GM being the next Big Thing in fashion, home cooking, and above all, choice. You see at the moment, we can make a GM tomato. Like a normal tomato, but with a few slightly different bits. Yay. But people look at it and say 'why?'. Why indeed. It looks, smells and tastes like a normal tomato, so why risk the obvious ecological catastrophe that everyone says it is?
Well, you won't, will you. Neither will the rest of the neighbourhood, nation and world. No obvious benefits, so GM gets the thumbs down. But what if instead of using the JCB to plant flowers, we actually dug with it? GM is about picking up a gene for a particular property, and transplanting it wholesale into a different organism. Take the world of food for example. At the moment, microwaves are okay but not great, tasty food always has too many calories and you can't cook to save your life. But GM can change all that. Watch:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, prepare to meet the BlueFruit. It has the entire RDA (recommended daily allowance) of vitamins, tastes of orange and mango, with a hint of lime. It contains just 3 calories, ladies, so don't worry, and it is an amazing shade o luminous blue, perfect to go with our YellowMeat, GreenVeg and WhiteTato products".
No, I'm not in lala land, but a dream of the future. The above examples are the tip of the iceberg, which is submersed in a sea of ice, on Planet Ice. GM tomatoes are boring. So you can ignore them. But if a new product cam onto the market that tasted like perfectly cooked lamb, contained only good things like protein and starch and vitamins, had minimal calories and was cookable in the microwave, could you avoid buying it? Simply engineer a mushroom and you can make it do all this. The BlueFruit above could have been an orange origin
ally. All it takes is a few years, when the companies have worked out what makes certain flavours, etc and they'll start arriving. Why bother making a 3 course meal in two and a half hours when you can serve a perfectly manicured one with amazing taste for a fraction of the bother?
I can tell you that I for one would buy any product that improved my health, weight, eating habits and tasted good. Students wouldn't be able to resist. And with any trend, it would spread.
Can we, will we stay away from GM? Supermarkets, keep them off your shelves at your peril.
I'm not some kind of immoral heathen, actually a Christian but I can see how it will happen. I do understand that trials need to be done, and that manufacturers should be careful, but the possibilities that the GM world has to offer are amazing.
GM is dead. Long live GM.
Summary:
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Last comments:
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- 05/07/01 ross, I haven't ignored them, but all the other ops seem to concentrate on these more 'mundane' uses. That kind of thing is the swopping of a few genes. You don't care exactly which transistors are in your mobile phone, you jsut care what it does and how it looks. GM can do the same. Some changes will be unnoticeable, and these are the current ones... |
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- 05/07/01 Interesting op. But you seem to have ignored some of the more 'down to earth' uses for GM. For example, you can modify a crop to be resistant to diseases, or to grow faster, thus reducing or eliminating the need for pesticides / fertilisers, and we all KNOW that these can damage the environment while we are still waiting for one piece of sound scientific evidence that GM food will do anybody any harm. |
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