Title: The Spurious Foundation of Genetic Engineering
This artical by Barry Commoner is reprinted in Seed Savers Summer Edition.
it's a not to be missed. He is still wedded to the "protien admiration society" but he cut the new cloth well.
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0209-01.htm
In Love & Light
Markess
----------
In small part:
The mistakes might be dismissed as the necessary errors that characterize scientific progress. But behind
them lurks a more profound failure. The wonders of genetic science are all founded on the discovery of
the DNA double helix - by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953 - and they proceed from the premise
that this molecular structure is the exclusive agent of inheritance in all living things: in the kingdom of
molecular genetics, the DNA gene is absolute monarch. Known to molecular biologists as the "central
dogma" the premise assumes that an organism's genome - its total complement of DNA genes - should
fully account for its characteristic assemblage of inherited traits. The premise, unhappily, is false. Tested
between 1990 and 2001 in one of the largest and most highly publicized scientific undertakings of our
time, the Human Genome Project, the theory collapsed under the weight of fact. There are far too few
human genes to account for the complexity of our inherited traits or for the vast inherited differences
between plants, say, and people. By any reasonable measure, the finding (published last February)
signaled the downfall of the central dogma; it also destroyed the scientific foundation of genetic
engineering, and the validity of the biotechnology industry's widely advertised claim that its methods of
genetically modifying food crops are "specific, precise, and predictable" and therefore safe. In short, the
most dramatic achievement to date of the $3 billion Human Genome Project is the refutation of its own
scientific rationale.
