TeqSmart Tequipment's List: Frankenfood

• • What types of images does "Frankenfood" conjour up? Is there a negativity inherent in the term?
• A Boston College professor coined the word  "Frankenfoods" for genetically modified (GM) food in 1992. It aroused images of  the mad scientist creating an uncontrolled monster. A few years later, Prince  Charles famously pronounced that scientists working on GM foods had strayed into  "realms that belong to God and God alone."
• GM crops have the potential to supply missing nutrients to the undernourished,  improve the environment and alleviate hunger.

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• The concept behind GM foods is simple. Identify a gene (or genes) that confers a beneficial property to some organism and insert that gene into a food plant that you want to have that property

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• However, genetic manipulation  is a powerful tool, too powerful according to its opponents, a high-powered  rifle compared to the scatter-gun of earlier technologies.

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  • Im not sure I agree . . .
• he biggest challenge facing farmers lies ahead. The number of people on Earth is projected to grow by 3 billion by the middle of this century. The authors observe that, "Many -- probably most

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• Despite the Frankenfoods  moniker, genetic modification is just another tool in mankind's 10,000-year  history of altering food plants
• • Have you ever eaten a genetically modified food? Probably! If the red grapefruit was created in the 1920s using similar genetic modification, why all the uproar today over other GM foods considering the benefits that many are championing (such as increased crop yields in a growing global society and the ability to make nutrient rich foods)? Comment and then check out http://www.healthfreedomusa.org/?p=729 to read about the possible cons of "Frankenfoods".
• By the 1920s, scientists had  learned how to cause mutations by blasting plants with radiation. The popular  red grapefruit, Rio Red, was created by exposing buds of ordinary grapefruits to  radiation at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Much of the wheat we consume today  was made by similar methods. One popular variety of rice grown in California was created by  exposing seeds to gamma rays from radioactive cobalt.

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• ood Ranger
• created from genetica

  • hello
• Back when we were in school and in our mother’s kitchens
• • Hello there

  • What about long-term effects of "Frankenfood"? Check out http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1147635/British-scientists-condemn-using-children-GM-food-trials-unacceptable.html and think about how GM food is tested, how it should be tested, and potential benefits vs. dangerous effects.
• What effect do they have? The independent science carried out so far is  uniformly damning: GM “foods” are dangerous in both the short term (as the  tryptophane tragedy showed), in the intermediate term (as the studies in France,  Russia and Scotland show) and in the long term … who knows? No studies have been  carried out.

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• Rather, it was that long-simmering European anxieties over genetically modified  (g.m.) crops, like an ocean-hopping virus, had finally spread to the U.S.
• • Why do you think that the debate over genetically modified crops began in Europe and the spread to the U.S.? Should Americans be more concerned about genetically modified foods and how/if production is regulated?
• Unlike Britons, whose concerns about what they eat have been on the rise ever  since "mad cow disease" (even though it had nothing to do with genetic  engineering), Americans have seemed indifferent to g.m. foods.

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• • Is Golden Rice a solution to global hunger issues, a way for biotechnology companies to increase profits, or a combination of both?
    
• Yet the more one learns about biotechnology's Great Yellow Hope, the more  uncertain seems its promise -- and the industry's command of the moral high  ground. Indeed, it remains to be seen whether golden rice will ever offer as  much to malnourished children as it does to beleaguered biotech companies. Its  real achievement may be to win an argument rather than solve a public-health  problem.
• • If Asian countries tend to prefer white rice and if brown rice is already full of nutrients, why the push for GM Golden Rice? Are there other campaigns that would help to combat malnourishment? Should money be spent on GM food that would have to be introduced into a culture or should money be spent analyzing how hunger can be combated within a cultural context?
• Proponents of golden rice acknowledge that persuading people to eat it may  require an educational campaign. This begs a rather obvious question. Why not  simply a campaign to persuade them to eat brown rice? Or how about teaching  people how to grow green vegetables on the margins of their rice fields, and  maybe even give them the seeds to do so? Or what about handing out vitamin-A  supplements to children so severely malnourished their bodies can't metabolize  beta-carotene?
• As it happens, these ridiculously obvious, unglamorous, low-tech schemes are  being tried today, and according to the aid groups behind them, all they need to  work are political will and money.
• Ordinarily, evaluating a P.R. strategy in terms of morality rather than efficacy  would seem to be missing the point. But morality is precisely the basis on which  we've been asked us to think about golden rice. So let us try. Granted, it would  be immoral for finicky Americans to thwart a technology that could rescue  malnourished children. But wouldn't it also be immoral for an industry to use  those children's suffering in order to rescue itself? The first case is  hypothetical at best. The second is right there on our television screens, for  everyone to see.
  

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