Be prepared for 2016

January 2016

Quite a few dark GM clouds were gathering during 2015.  Be prepared for the storms to break. 

Any time now, expect a raft of industry stunts to persuade regulators and consumers that black is white.  Try these for size...

It may sound like a contradiction in terms, but scientists have decided there is such a thing as "natural GM".  They reason that, therefore, unnatural GM is nothing to worry about and so neither regulations nor safety tests are needed [1]. 

Also, apparently scientists have decided that humanly-conceived techniques to invade and alter the genome according to humanly-conceived specifications don't count as 'GM', and therefore don't need regulations nor safety tests [2]. 

Needless to say, the scientists who are redefining 'GM' for us tend to have a lot of professional and financial incentives to want GM to be natural, unregulated and, most of all, untested. 

Be prepared to give food safety regulators an argument. 

The coming year seems likely to usher into our food chain the first GM animals. 

This could be the beginning of the end of salmon as we know it [3], and open flood-gates to GM meat [4], not to mention GM herds of suffering four-legged drug factories [5]. 

Be prepared to holler in protest. 

Just in case these new versions of the GM game added to the old versions of biotech confusology start tying your brain in knots, here's a timely reminder of why GM, an any form (and GM in any form is artificial by definition), can never be safe. 

Natural DNA (genes and all the other regulatory bits) in a living cell is non-mechanistic.  It modifies itself in a continuous, precisely orchestrated, context-dependent, and very fine-grained way.  DNA changes are negotiated by the organism itself, as a whole, and with reference to its environment [6]. 

The unconnected, mechanistic genetic changes wrought by human hand and conceived by human mind are, at best, a spanner in the works, and at worst, a disease. 

You are what you eat.  Your body reflects the health and coherence of what you eat.  Your food is your medicine. 

Background (1-5 following shortly):

[1]  ARTIFICIAL HORIZONTAL GENE TRANSFER - January 2016 

[2]  SMART BREEDING TOOLS - OR HIDDEN GM? - January 2016

[3]  GM SALMON APPROVED - January 2016

[4]  SUMO STEAKS IN THE PIPELINE - January 2016 

[5]  NEW ZEALAND'S GM COW DISASTER - January 2016

[6]  NATURAL GM - July 2014 

 

SOURCE:

Mónica Fernández, Interview with Mae-Wan Ho, Science in Society 67 Autumn 2015