Food and Genetics

In this day and age, when people want to argue about science, they argue mostly about ethics.  Is it ethical to terminate the growth of embryos in order to use their stem cells to help others?  Is it ethical to ignore embryonic stem cells and the cures they may open up to us?  Is it ethical to test on animals?  What age should people be allowed to have genetic testing?  How much genetic testing is too much?

But food is a different story.  People have to eat.  There's simply no way around that issue.  In order to increase efficiency in producing crops, scientists change the genes of the plants.  Using disabled viruses, scientists inject a small piece of DNA with sticky ends into the plant cell.  This DNA travels to the nucleus and inserts itself into the genome of the plant.  This gene could be anything from Roundup resistence to drought or virus resistence.

Santa Clara University Bioethics

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court decision has allowed companies to patent this technology AND specific genes, ensuring that no other company can manufactur their product at all.  This also gives the company the right to sue farmers who keep the seed instead of buying new seed the next year.  The most well-known of this case would be Monsanto's Roundup resistant soybean, as seen in the documentary Food, Inc.  Science is encouraging the coporate takeover in agriculture, leaving smaller farmers to bow to the companies' wishes or be put out of work.  This is not a new trend; at the turn of the twentieth century, farmers were increasingly going bankrupt because of the bad economy and the new technology needed to produce as much as the corporations and trusts could.  But genetic engineering has highlighted the problem again.

Because the world's population is so enormous, humans must find more creative ways to come up with resources, otherwise the entire human population will be subject to Malthus's population laws.  "Miracle seeds", used in India, China, and other developing countries, were thought to have been a large part of the answer, but miracles come at an enormous cost.  Nothing is free, and these miracle seeds, resistent to viruses and able to produce more, have changed agriculture to such a degree all over the world that scientists dominate the growing of food.

Genetic engineering in food crops is not to blame for the ethical issues raised in its wake, just as the science behind the atomic bomb was not what caused the deaths in Japan in 1945.  The people who are using the science, twisting it to their own ends, are the ones that need to be monitored and regulated.  In relation to politics and economics, business people sometimes take the science out of context, trying to find ways to exploit the discipline.  In the case of Monsanto, the practice of the modification of the genetic makeup of the soybean would help the farmer, but the monopoly Monsanto holds on the market of that specific gene has injured agriculture as a whole.