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DomKen -> RE: Food: The Ultimate Secret Exposed (8/1/2010 5:54:56 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Termyn8or
"Every person in the world should know the name Norman Borlaug. Several billion people are alive today because he genetically altered wheat. He almost certainly brought peace to China, India and their neighbors"
Thank you for that statement Ken. It explains alot, I think differently and am totally against genetically altered foods. We are never going to agree on alot of things but my whole being is against people fucking with genetics. And I can explain my reasons for that but it would be metaphorically, most likey related to my profession(s).
There are two possibilities. One is that you don't care and we can do whatever we want, but I think that unlikely. Two, which I think more likely is that you bevieve that human science and all this DNA stuff is part of nature, because as Man is part of nature, Man is allowed to change it.
Many people would call that calling ourselves Gods. Maybe it is, and maybe we are. There are animals out there that could tear us to shreds in seconds, yet we still seem to occupy the top of the food chain. Two different personalities, two different outlooks.
My take on genetic engineering requires a metaphor :
A guy tries to fix his own TV set. Then he brings it in. We find the original problem and his bill might be say $80. but since he wrapped foil around the fuse and blew out a whole bunch of parts, it's $140. Now it is not worth fixing. Who won here ? Everybody lost.
That is my slant on genetic engineering, there has not been enough time and thought put into it and I still assert that they just don't know enough. But it gets done in the persuit of the almighty buck. The fact is, as long as our society operates as it does, this problem cannot be solved. We are now finding out the dawbacks of living in a capitalist society. There comes a point where some win too much and others lose too much. Watch the TV for details.
We need a change in the way business is done, taxation and all that. As long as ADM and their ilk have lobbying money, they'll gladly kill us to get the last dollar we have. That is the true nature of a capitalistic society, is it not ?
My Uncle(s) said twenty years ago :
" PEOPLE BETTER START WAKING UP "
Dead or alive, they get smarter every day.
T
We've been modifying the genetics of plants and animals for roughly ten thousand years. Our entire civilization is based on it.
For proof you neeed look no farther than corn. The plant simply cannot exist in the wild. You would be hard pressed to find a plant and say this is 'wild corn' because corn is actually a hybridization of 2 different species of cereal grasses. Neither one looks anything like corn. We know this hybridization was in conjunction with people because corn cannot disperse seeds without human assistance.
Another stunning example is the cabbage. Red cabbage, green cabbage, brussel sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collard greens and kohlrabi are all the exact same species of plant, Brassica oleracea. We've manipulated the genetics of the plant to produce a huge assortment of food crops which to the unknowing eye would appear to be distinct plants.
Norman Borlaug achieved his major success, dwarf wheat, in the 1960's. It is literally the reason starvation is no longer an issue in India and China. He did his genetic manipulations during that period in the time honored method of selective breeding and hybridization because that was the tools available to him at the time. I'm sure he moved into gene splicing as such techniques became available.
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