Another study released this summer proudly showed pictures of rats raised on GMO corn that were riddled with tumors and cancer seeming to prove that the GMO corn was dangerous to our health, but there was a problem. The researchers did not tell the whole story. They did not tell the public that they used rats that are used in Cancer research. The rats were modified to be very susceptible to cancer so scientists could test cancer treatments. The unethical researchers also did not tell the public that the control rats fed on normal corn had more cancer than the rats fed on the GMO corn. The corn in question was modified so that they had a toxin that was lethal to insects. The theory of the flawed research was that the toxin would be toxic to mammals too, but the toxin is inert in mammals but there is a similar toxin that is toxic to mammals, but not present in the corn.
Other famous GMO was the grain that had grasshopper DNA to allow it to be more frost resistant. I imagine that people thought the wheat would taste like grasshopper, or that the plants would have wiggling insect legs. The modification just allowed the plant to produce a protein that allowed the plant to survive a light frost and extend the growing season for the crop.
The other thing is that humans have a very long history of genetic modification of our plants and animals. The original corn had a cob smaller than your finger and grows only in Mexico, the native peoples took that plant and selected plants that had bigger cobs and over thousands of years we got the corn crop that we have today, wheat, apples, oranges, cows, carrots which were originally not orange, have all been modified over the years. Granted the modification took years to become set, but they were all modified.
Canada has a history of modifying crops. Our northern climate is bad for many crops, late and early frosts limit the growing season. Wheat was modified to open the western prairies to immigration in the early part of the twentieth century. The researchers combined the three best choices together to produce the first wheat for the northern prairies. It has three times the DNA of a normal wheat plant, but it helped open the west for people and later modifications allowed wheat to grow and feed the world.
That we have been given the ability to do a thousand years of breeding in a few years by opening the genome and placing the desired genes directly into plant genome makes people fear them, but it is not inherently bad.
Direct genetic modification of our foods could do great things for us. When I grew up I used to eat peanut butter sandwiches, but because a small portion of the children in society are allergic to peanuts, peanut butter has been banned. However, if the offending protein is removed from the peanut and the other places it exists, children all over will be allowed to eat more peanut butter sandwiches in schools. All food allergies can be done away with.
Alternatively, nutrient poor foods could be modified to increase the nutrition of the foods. GMOs could bring about the end of hunger and malnutrition. Plants could be modified to need less water, drought resistant plants. They could be modified in a hundred different ways to do a hundred different things that could help people live and survive.
People who are against GMOs need to think about what they are really afraid of and take a long look at what the GMO does before they are against just because it exists. People against GMOs would be against meat produced in a vat that no animal had to die for.
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