The study breaks significant new ground in the way it bridges the worlds of science and ethics, bringing together geneticists such as Ian Wilmut, leader of the team which cloned Dolly the sheep and Mike Wilson, one of Scotland's top researchers in genetically modified crops, with leading thinkers in ethics, sociology, animal welfare and risk. This very special blend of expertise and insight seeks a balance between different viewpoints. It not so much that genetic engineering crosses some forbidden line, as that it affects patterns and relationships in the natural world that we still only partially understand. It is a reductionist approach to biology, its strength is in varying single effects, and its weakness is the difficulty in relating individual changes to the whole organism, or to overall ecological complexity in nature. In the givenness of the created order, there is a wisdom we do well to respect.
Wider relationships matter as much as the single effect desired by the scientist.
Genetically Modified Food and Risk Environmental and safety concerns have been much exaggerated in the media, but there are serious questions to be addressed especially in assessing the increasingly complex long term ecological relationships. The precautionary principle should be the basis, but calls for a general moratorium on genetically modified food are not supported. Three years more research would not magically solve all such complex questions, nor reflect that not all applications raise the same degree of risk. A balance needs to be struck between a due concern for possible dangers which in hindsight were obvious, and an aversion to risk that demands minimising every conceivable hazard, no matter how tiny the probability. It seems appropriate at present to concentrate on applications that are restricted in scale, and which confer strong human or ecological benefits.