The Anonymous Widower

Vandalism In The Service of Ignorance

The title of this post comes from a phrase, describing the protestors, in the third leader of The Times, which defends the work at Rothamsted to create a strain of wheat , which has a natural repellant effect to pests, by crossing it with mint using gentic engineering,

Genetic engineering is a touchy subject to many, but properly used it should benefit mankind.  The aim of the Rothampsted experiment is to produce a strain of wheat that uses less pesticides.

On the other hand, I would be against genetic engineering, that produced wheat with the so-called terminator gene, that meant farmers couldn’t use some of this year’s crop for next year.

There are now drugs coming on the market, that have been created by genetic engineering using plants or hens’ eggs as a starting point.  Would these protestors stop this process as well? If I suffered from a disease, where the drug could be produced by genetic engineering, I would not be happy.

As I said, provided that the purpose of creating the organism by genetic engineering has a moral purpose, I can see no reason to ban it.

I’m also a coeliac, which is a minor genetic disease. I suspect a few decades down the line, they’ll be able to correct the faulty genes in babies by some clever genetic modification.

May 28, 2012 - Posted by AnonW | Food, Health | Coeliac/Gluten-Free, Drugs, Genetics