[3/18/2001 12:21:33 PM | link]
How's this for coporate welfare: Companies damaged
by the Starlink debacle are eligible for federal funds
usually reservered for natural disasters
victums. Ummm, once you screw with the genes, it's not
natural any more....
Notice this article mentions that the role of pollon drift
in spreading the genetically modified protiens. Isn't this
exactly what Monsanto claimed wouldn't happen with
their terminitor seed technology ?
---- rant-on -------
I'm not opposed to genetic engineering in general. I think it has it's place in developing new medicines and chemical processes, but I am against genetically modified lifeforms being introduced into the environment at large.
Let's assume an ecosystem is a legecy system and a biotech company is like an IT consulting firm coming in to make some small modification. Like many legacy systems, the ecosystem comes with no decent documentation, and it's been modified and tweaked over time to deal with all sorts of new requirements that cropped up over the years. It seems like no one involved with the system really understands why they are doing some things and what implications doing things differently might have. Things seem to work on the surface, but if you dig down a little bit everything is duct tape, rubber bands and chewing gum. Probably not the most glamous portrait of evolution, but that's what you get with incremental change. Nature does not refactor.
Now into this legacy mix comes our biotech consultants. They analyize a portion of the legacy system that they are interested in, come up with some small fix that should take care of some imperfection with the system and they claim the changes will be localized.
Fine. But once you reach a system that's made up of a significant amount of spaghetti code, how can you
possibly test what effect changes will have ? With an ecosystem you're dealing with a system that is millions of years old, and has no human design decisions behind it. Remember how much time and effort was wasted dealing with the simple Y2K date fixes on systems that were way less than 50 years old ?
Currently I don't think anyone can get anywhere near testing what the side-effects of seamingly simple changes will be. Maybe in 50 years when we know the genetic makeup of everything and can model ecosystems on super computers to see what effect a seemingly simple protein change will have on the global ecosystem over say a 1000 year interval.
Needless to say, I don't see a for-profit venture going to make the effort to make sure their product is safe, especially when the government is bailing them out whenever they screw-up.
----- rant-off-------
