Companies really know beans about moving genes
By Don Maroc News Leader, July 25 2007http://www.cowichannewsleader.com/portals-code/list.cgi?paper=9&cat=48&id=1032118&more=0
The transnational seed, pesticide, and drug corporations have known for five or 10 years that the scientific foundation on which genetic engineering is built is false, but with billions of dollars riding on it they, with the support of our governments, continue to mislead us.
In 1956, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, posited his central dogma of molecular biology, that each gene in the human genome contained the code to construct one protein that contributed one characteristic to a human. An article published by a large group of scientists in the journal Nature (June 14 2007), exposes this as wrong.
For years, independent scientists like Barry Commoner, Joe Cummins and Dr. Mae-Wan Ho have repeatedly pointed this out, only to be ridiculed and attacked by the powerful public relations enforcers for the multi-national corporations.
For two decades Monsanto, Bayer, Dupont and Syngenta have told us genetic engineering (GE) is a precise technology. When their scientists insert a bacterial gene into a corn seed they know exactly how it will operate in its new genome. They have always said that a majority of genes serve no function. They called them junk DNA.
Sorry guys, the new, overwhelming evidence says the only junk is the propaganda you have been feeding us. The collective work of 80 organizations worldwide states conclusively that, "the findings challenge the traditional view of our genetic blueprint as a tidy collection of independent genes, pointing instead to a complex network in which genes, along with regulatory elements and other types of DNA sequences that do not code for proteins, interact in overlapping ways not yet fully understood."
When scientists in their understated way say human genetics functions in ways "not yet fully understood", they are really saying they don’t know beans about what they've been doing moving genes between animals, fish, bacteria, viruses, and plants.
Any undergraduate biology student can now insert new foreign genes in the plants that provide our food. But neither the student nor the professor, nor the biotech corporation technologists, nor the government scientists have any idea what might result from the forceful invasion of the foreign gene.
Of course there is no way to determine whether the inserted gene (in corn, soybeans, canola, and cotton) caused any human malady, triggered allergic reactions, or set up conditions for cancer, because products containing genetically modified organisms are not labelled.
They are often not allowed to be labelled. When an organic grain processing company tried to label their breakfast cereals as "non-GMO" the supermarket told them to take it off the label or take their products out of the store.
In addition GMO and non-GMO grains are freely mixed at the grain elevators. You never know what you are getting, and market experts say that 60 to 70 per cent of all products in your supermarket contain GMOs.
You want to avoid feeding yourself and your kids GMOs? Eat no processed foods containing corn, soybeans, canola, or cottonseed oil, unless it is certified organic.
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