Quote:
|
For all the people who profess to operate in some scientific capacity on this board, you ought to reconsider your strong stance against those of us who argue more research ought to be conducted on the implications of manipulating genetic structures without knowing the results of one's actions before proclaiming "full steam ahead."
|
Well no matter how much research we conduct on the consequences of genetic manipulation, we still will not know the results of our actions with 100% certainty. In fact this is true for all scientific manipulation, it's not restricted to genetic manipulation.
There seems to be an assumption here that genetic engineering is a more dangerous (to humans) kind of biological manipulation that requires more care than other kinds of biological manipulation. I don't know where this assumption comes from. There is no evidence within biology that would prompt one to come to that conclusion that I'm aware of.
The truth that genetic engineering overcomes natural barriers to exchanging genes does not in any way imply that genetic engineering is more risky or dangerous to humans than simply making a cross that has never been done before. In fact it is easy to argue the reverse: namely the cross is more dangerous because it creates a new mixture of 10s of thousands of genes, whereas the engineering just creates one new gene in a background of 10s of thousands.
I seriously don't understand where this fear comes from. If the assumption is basically "new combinations of genes can be very dangerous" then this implies that natural crosses between inbred lines or between outbred individuals are far more dangerous (by a factor of millions) than a simple gene transfer.