board). The point is, that the usual way that society deals with this, is to withdraw from a technology when and if it is realised that the benefits are outweighed by the impacts. This was the case, for instance, with asbestos... and lead in petrol... and chemicals like PCBs and benzene ... and drugs like thalidomide... and the CFCs that disrupt the ozone layer... and (now increasingly) fossil fuels... In each case, our response to learning about initially-unknown side effects was to try to withdraw from the technology and (where we could) reverse the impacts that had occurred. As living organisms, the particular issue presented in this regard by many GMOs is that they are not as reversible as many of these other examples. This is true, both in social and environmental terms. Changes that become embodied in living genomes are extremely difficult to reverse. And once farmers become dependent on a practice, it can become especially difficult to escape it. This may not be thought a problem, where we are fully confident in a risk assessment -- which says these possibilities are negligible. But where we recognise that our knowledge on this score is necessarily incomplete, then we should take this reality correspondingly seriously. Put simply, the science of GM presents us with particular reasons for humility. But it is often treated as if the reverse were true., Yes, that is pretty well established by now. That's also why all and any GM crops/foods need compositional analysis, laboratory and