RE: [pf] GM Foods & other gene engineering: DM's only comment

At 14:27 22/2/2001 -0800, Jill wrote, under the Subject: GM Foods and the
Pusztai Affair :-
>.. funding does have something to do with scientific research and its
results. And funding also has an influence on peer reviews.
>

· I am sure there is some effect, more now than in the past. The most
common effect is on what is examined; as a scientist you pick things to
study which will bring funding, far more often now than when I started
scientific research in 1963.

· My overall view (I have little interest in the details of who says who
fiddled which results, and by how much - that's swept away in the tide of
history), is that virtually all results in the Genetic Engineering area are
interim. They, if eventually found to be valid, are extremely tiny pieces
in a huge jigsaw.
  So IMO it's far too soon to be trying to put "products" out in "The
Marketplace" - we just don't know enough, even about /all/ the results of
the procedures currently used in research, but certainly we know very
little indeed about long-term effects on mammal bodies, let alone humans,
of eating or otherwise taking in, any of the potentially commercial
"products" (actually prototypes).

· In my view, there have been earlier parallels; the one leaping to mind is
the excitement about X-rays. How "products" were sold to make money for the
inventors and years later to create grief for the users.
  I still remember the time when, among the "find your weight and fortune"
machines on the street and in malls, you would find an X-ray machine of
similar shape, that you stepped up onto, then looked down at a screen
showing the bones of your feet - you could wiggle them and see it
happening. Your body was hit by a blast of X-rays coming up from below your
feet, and likely spread out, hitting your torso. At and before the time I
was born, there were quite a few nostrums for sale by mail order and at
fairs, which you spread on your skin, or even swallowed, containing
radioactive materials.

· I just can't see the reason to rush, when the area of scientific
investigation is so new and so obviously wide-ranging in effect. Going
cautiously, using the Precautionary Principle, is obviously (to me) the way
to proceed here. Commercial imperatives are very much out-of-place.

· This "I want to get rich and powerful" impulse, typical of the human
race, is really leading us all into trouble (by using Americans and others
as guinea-pigs), I'm sure.


David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.geocities.com/davdd.geo/index.html#top
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