North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Charles Paradise <machelp@attglobal.net>]

I want to thank Art for his inside the FDA based opinions and I wanted myself 
to add that in my opinion that a
handful of grain is the most important technological development of the human 
race.  Because, grain crops can
smother weeds better than any chemical herbicide.  Because, if the grain 
hadn't produced food surplus none of
the sequential technological developments would have taken place because 
everyone would have been too
preoccupied with finding food to do anything else.

What has already been done to develop plants up from the wild is greater than 
anything that ever will be done
from here on to modify the plants.

And by the way, did no one tell the chemical giants that the way you kill 
weeds in a field is to plant two
successive crops of buckwheat?  One of the few things that'll kill quackgrass 
dead all the way down.
Charlie Paradise
zone 5/Massachusetts

Art Petrzelka wrote:

> I bought the story about curing all of mankind's ailments, too.
>
> But the more I learn about genetic engineering, the less I like it.
> I say this as someone who has spent part of my career in agriculture,
> and part of my career in FDA validation. I have helped set standards for
> internal validation efforts, and have been involved in cosmetic and
> pharmaceutical validation.
>
> The current crop of GMOs appear to have taken a shortcut across the
> normal FDA validation process. They were unique enough that they got a
> patent, but apparently not unique enough that food safety testing was
> done. I don't see how it could be both. I attended a lecture at Iowa
> State University by Dr. Arpad Puszta, from Great Britain, in December.
> Dr. Puszta is the man whose research was destroyed and whose reputation
> was slandered when his study on the nutritional effects of GM potatoes
> showed necrosis in rodents.
>
> It looks like we've been sold a bill of goods with genetic engineering.
> I would be glad to share some references for what I've found off-list if
> anyone is interested.
>
> My main concern is that we not pollute our genetic resources. This isn't
> a concern with Frankenfood, it's a concern about the lack of knowledge
> that we have on the effects of gene insertion, gene removal, and general
> DNA helix tampering with respect to helix sequence and angles. The
> effects of genetic engineering are largely unknown, and what we do know
> is very incriminating.
>
> On Mon, 2004-02-09 at 21:57, Rodney Eveland wrote:
> > The people who genetically modify plants to get a desired result have
> > already developed a PPV resistant plum. Interestingly enough, if you
> > use google and search on a lot of common serious plant diseases and
> > add the word biotechnology to your search you will find that they are
> > trying to solve many of the major diseases by using genetc
> > modification. I don't know where this will take us, but I'm hoping for