there are two schools of genetic manipulations when you say GM foods..

One is synthetically produced, or altered by a human..at the DNA level bit for bit.. to have a desired outcome faster then traditional means..tho IMO i don't think its right.. and I notice a diffrence between natural and man made foods.. and the resulting product is often brought to market under pressure despite flawed research and known side effects....

Another is cross-breeding other breeds of the same plant < a good way to GM with less unwanted side effects as you aren't creating something from scratch and inherantly UN natural...> there are also vitamins, minerals and chemicals introduced into the soil.. so the plant does it's thing.. or in bad situations.. the plant just dies.. meaning what you added was too much to acidic etc the plant didnt like it.. If the plants don't like it.. then a human probably would object to it too.. this second process still involves natural processes to occur and natural! not selective evolution to take place..

When you make your own, you can decide what outcome you want.. to a certain degree.. If you want it to cause cancer.. you could "program" that in there.. by introduceing things to do this, before the plant is grown.. so you'll get a plant that might have mutations.. but still retain
it's program.. or dna and will grow regardless.. because you told it to do so.. produceing fruit.. with this crap in it.. and causeing side effects.. because our bodies register this as a foreign substance anyway, and it might have been designed to do just this thing.. which is the scary part of genetic manipulation...

Me too. I would love to see them make something better than "natural" and I believe they can. In my opinion, natural is often not very good.

Most people are unaware of all the natural chemicals that are in plants, such as herbicides and pesticides. Plant have been fighting each other and insects with chemical warfare long before we discovered it. This is one reason that insects tend to be selective of which plants they live on. Many of them can't live on the natural plants we eat because they find them toxic. Just because we don't find them toxic doesn't mean they aren't toxic. Don't feed your dog chocolate.

Plants, even those we eat, often contain natural mutagens. carcinogens, antinutrients (block the use of nutrients even if from other foods), antigens and irritants (such as oxalates).

I think people also don't understand that the traditional, pre GM, ways of cross pollination and hybridization randomly mix thousands of genes at once, with unpredictable and sometimes very toxic results. Compare that with the addition or change in one or a few known genes with GM.

I support fixing natural foods and making them better and I see GM as a tool to do that.

Amen. If we can selectively "tweak" plants to more immediately give the desired result rather than trying the "hope & change" method, I'm all for it.

Gene rice on its way in China



Genetically modified rice cleared for commercial sale could be growing on Chinese farms as early as next year, making China the first country to allow commercial cultivation of GM strains.