Take your daily bread, for instance. For thousands of years, farmers selected wheat seed that was larger, slowly engineering high-yielding wheats. For the last 100 years or so, cereal grain breeders would merge two plant varieties by shaking the pollen of one that survived a drought over the head of another with bigger seed, trying to get a wheat that would provide more bread even after a drought. In the last 10 years, while scientists have continued to use the old way, they increasingly have gone into cells to make sure the genes they want are moved. Learning to identify and insert a specific gene is difficult, but inserting one that has been identified and moved before is said to be as easy as following a cookbook recipe.
Genetic outcomes are difficult to anticipate.
Both scientists and consumers need to question how and why new genetic techniques are used. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal August 12 said that we are able to feed twice the world's 1950 population on the same acreage as before because of improved crops, preserving about 15 million acres that otherwise would have been plowed. The impact on monarch larvae near genetically engineered corn fields is not yet known. Our estimation of what is right and wrong often change when the stakes go up. We may be against genetic manipulation until some day in the future when only a cloned kidney will save our child's life.