By Guthrie Worth
With all due respect to Ms. Gutsch”s Dec. 12 concerns, I think the letter is another example of a non-objective, emotional, qualitative effort, laced with fear words, to frighten people beyond reality.
Her basic worry is with genetically engineered/modified organisms essentially designed to increase the production of food for the growing world population and disprove Dr. Malthus.
Problem is, this process has been going on since life began.
People have been seeking product improvement since there were people and, probably, even people are the product of genetic manipulation ? it is called evolution when it is not negatively interfered with.
Going back to Father Mendel who proved hybridization did not have to be random; think of the benefits and the vast numbers of people who are better fed with “improved” corn, wheat and rice.
Now that we know how to accelerate the process, the human race is better off for it.
Probably be even better off if some developers didn”t have patents and charged so much.
Certainly there are problems to many, simply because they refuse to understand that perfection (100 percent) is not possible. And that change may not be bad.
When one says “could it be that bees are affected …” is a good example of misleading. Of course it could be possible, but little likely. And one of the goals of salmon manipulation was sterility. Works 97-plus percent and very few (in total) escape.
Gutsch mentions “the real issues at stake,” but feels it is not necessary to detail them, such as, “injecting rabbit DNA into strawberries.”
And the fear words do their work. Far too many people interpret “could” to mean “will” in the immediate short term. Same way with “might.”
I suspect that people are going to have to come to grips with what is the better course of action with regard to the vast majority of the world”s residents and learn to live with the few things in life they don”t really like.
When people have issues, fine, bring them to our attention, but accompany any worries with non-emotional, objective proof of their claims so they meet cost-benefit analysis criteria and offer people examples of what if on both sides.
Seems fair and proper to mention all of the human engineering work that is going on at great expense to counter evolution and the survival of the fittest.
Apparently that is acceptable even when that adds to our problems.
Perhaps people will worry about that when we start to run out of food.
Guthrie “Guff” Worth
Lakeport
