Genetic engineering crosses a fundamental threshold in the human manip — Genetic engineering

"I know its a long shot and people would say its too absurd… but Im doing this with hopes of making a Mickey Mouse some day."

"The genetic material for modification may be either derived from natural organisms using standard recombinant DNA techniques, or produced by DNA synthesis, the latter being much less labor intensive. In recent work, DNA sequences on the order of 1 million base-pairs have been synthesized entirely from digitized genome sequence information, and the resulting organisms were phenotypical and capable of self-replication."

"I went to Monsasnto, and I spent a lot of time with the scientists there, and I have revised my outlook, and Im very excited about telling the world. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world."

"Development of novel (i.e., not known to be naturally-occurring) GMOs exhibiting unique designer characteristics requires substantially greater knowledge and capability. Many industrialized nations have laboratories capable of analyzing which immune response modifier genes in humans and livestock, when inserted into an organism together with pathogenicity (e.g., adherence and invasive) factor, will yield highly infectious pathogenic organisms."

"When we wrote Ecofeminism we raised the issue of reductionist, mechanistic science and the attitude of mastery over and conquest of nature as an expression of capitalist patriarchy. Today the contest between an ecological and feminist world-view and a worldview shaped by capitalist patriarchy is more intense than ever. This contest is particularly intense in the area of food. GMOs embody the vision of capitalist patriarchy. They perpetuate the idea of ‘master molecules’and mechanistic reductionism long after the life sciences have gone beyond reductionism, and patents on life reflect the capitalist patriarchal illusion of creation. There is no science in viewing DNA as a ‘master molecule’ and genetic engineering as a game of Lego, in which genes are moved around without any impact on the organism or the environment. This is a new pseudo-science that has taken on the status of a religion. Science cannot justify patents on life and seed. Shuffling genes is not making life; living organisms make themselves. Patents on seed mean denying the contributions of millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of farmers’ breeding. One could say that a new religion, a new cosmology, a new creation myth is being put in place, where biotechnology corporations like Monsanto replace Creation as ‘creators’. GMO means ‘God move over’. Stewart Brand has actually said ‘We are as gods and we had better get used to it.’"

"By using genetic engineering, biological researchers have already developed new weapons that are much more effective than their natural counterparts. Countless examples from the daily work of molecular biologists could be presented here, not least the introduction of antibiotic resistance into bacterial pathogens, which today is routine work in almost any microbiology laboratory. Indeed, many research projects in basic science show—sometimes unwillingly and unwittingly—how to overcome current scientific and technological limits in the military use of pathogenic agents. Furthermore, genetic engineering is not merely a theoretical possibility for future biowarfare: it has already been applied in past weapons programmes, particularly in the former Soviet Union. One example is the USSRs invisible anthrax, resulting from the introduction of an alien gene into Bacillus anthracis that altered its immunological properties (Pomerantsev et al., 1997). Existing vaccines proved to be ineffective against this new genetically engineered strain."