That means that the organisms to which the foreign genes have transferred will die out either immediately or in the long run, by the principle of the survival of the fittest. During question time, I asked for direct experimental evidence to support this but was given the techno-babble which puts fear into the hearts of the scientifically uneducated. My questions remained emphatically unanswered. I know of no experiments to support such statements, nor from my own two dozen years of research experience on GM plants, genetic recombination and gene jumping between species, can I conceive of any credible biological mechanism that would permit it. My reply to Lichtenstein's attack on me has been sent to the letters section of The Guardian, and is reproduced at the end of this report.
Variations are neither rare nor random, and they arise in organisms as they are 'selected'.
Furthermore, horizontal gene transfer means that microbes actually cooperate by sharing their most valuable assets for survival, instead of competing against one another. As far as antibiotic resistance is concerned, the assumption, that the marker genes will disappear from the population when the 'selection pressure' is no longer there, has been shown to be false both in the laboratory and in the field. Many papers on the ISIS website give detailed references to the relevant scientific literature. The debate he described was arranged by the US Embassy for biotechnologist, Dr. C.S. Prakash, sent by the US State Department to promote GM agriculture in Europe. I agreed to participate because I believe in promoting critical public understanding of science and to draw attention to well-known and relevant scientific knowledge that is being ignored.