The hit or miss technologies associated with many of the 'inventions' are inherently hazardous to health and biodiversity. There is no scientific basis to support the patenting of genes and genomes, which are discoveries at best. B. Hazards 1. GM Bt corn could have lethal effects on the larvae of monarch butterflies if it lands on milkweed, the plant upon which they feed. Forty-four percent of the larvae were killed after 4 days, whereas no mortality occurred in larvae fed nontransgenic pollen.
Transgenic pollen harms monarch larvae.
Nature 399, 214. 2. A recent study on transgenic rice carried out at the John Innes Institute supports previous evidence that there is a recombination hotspot in the CaMV 35S promoter. Furthermore, most of the recombination events analyzed were 'illegitimate' or nonhomologous and do not require substantial similarity in nucleic acid base sequence. The recombination events were also found to occur independently, in the absence of other viral genes. The continued release of such transgenic lines is unwarranted in light of the new findings.