In my humble opinion there's a big difference between:
directly altering
the genes
vs
splicing two plants together to produce a
hybrid
Splicing the plants together let's nature take the reins and decide
whether or not that combination is going to work and how it will work
out.
Modifying the genetics without fully understanding the full
relationships of that change can far too easily end up being deadly. Quite
possibly in a way that's not noticeably deadly till the long term.
Take
dogs and chocolate as an example. Chocolate is poison to dogs. But it's not an
immediate poison. As a vet described to me, dogs bodies aren't built to get rid
of the toxicity. Over time, as you feed a dog chocolate the toxicity builds
until it reaches a level where it's fatal.
As I understand lead is
similar in humans. You could handle a very small dose of it (potentially).
However, it takes years for the body to dispose of it. So if you get very small
doses that you could otherwise handle in a time frame that your body can not
dispose of the previous amounts - it'll reach a toxicity level that your body
can't handle.
While others are free too choose these new modified
products, I'd rather let a few million guinea pigs over the space of 50 years
check it out first before I change my diet.
Note: I don't know what
Monsanto actually means when they say "genetically modified". I envision what
they did in the movie Jurassic Park where they combined the dna of frogs filling
in the gaps to the dna of dinosaurs.
I don't have a problem if what
they're doing is - for example - taking the hardiest plants that survived and
splicing the stalks together to try and come up with a hardier strain. Like
breeding two fast running breads of dogs together to try and get an even faster
dog.
My problem is if they're doing the Jurassic Park kind of genetic
modification.
Given they acquired patents on their work:
I don't
believe they should get patents if all they did was the equivalent of breed
particular breads of dogs. This is after all an act of nature which is supposed
to be non-patent-eligible.
So to acquire what I would view as an
appropriate patent: they had to gene splice!
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