Thursday, October 30, 2008

GMO Foods Help or Harm

From the creation of the first Genetically Modified Organisms, there has always been a lot of controversy surrounding the subject. But will GMO’s help or harm humans in the future. I think that in the next 50 or so years that we will know enough about GM crops to see if they are really be beneficial for humans.
I feel as though at his point in time that they are just way to many risks and unanswered questions to have GM crops on every American table. Jonathon Rauch from The Atlantic Monthly states that already in the US 60 percent of processed foods in supermarkets has a GM ingredient.
At this rate people still don’t know if proteins made from the foreign genes will be directly toxic to humans. It seems to me that this problem is occurring in more then one place.
I have a lot of questions that a lot of critics have already brought to the table like Jane Goodall “Author to A Harvest for Hope” stating that GM foods will do harm more insidiously, by hastening the spread of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing bacteria. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Institute for Plant Sciences says that most of the companies performing safety tests on GM crops are often the companies producing these crops automatically creating a huge bias.
There is just too many questions that aren’t answered you cant tell at all by just looking at GM crops whether pollen containing a foreign gene can poison butterflies or fertilize plants miles away.
With all these questions still needing answers I think that even with the great reduction of using pesticides on GM crops that they are still to dangerous to put on the plates of Americans or any other country for that matter.

1 comment:

Luke Ketter said...

awesome topic. there is a ton of debate about this and i think its easy to be torn. with the population what it is, it seems the only logical way to mass-produce enough food is by engineering it to be plentiful and contain required vitamins and so on. but at what cost? there was a cool blurb in National Geographic last month about how one fungus could kill off all the banana plants we use for food crops because they are genetically identical, so now science has to hurry up and manufacture a new species to keep the supply up.