I think the big difference (speaking as someone who hasn't set foot in a bio lab since ninth grade), is that when you cross tomatoes, you get tomato DNA + tomato DNA, which can basically only yield tomato DNA; you really are doing nothing different than nature has done for billions of years, or animals/people have done for millions.
However, when you want to put insulin production into your eggplants, or whatever (which is a totally cool goal, actually; the medical uses of GM seem a lot more worth the risk, to me), you're mixing eggplant DNA + pig insulin DNA. Which nature hasn't been doing, as far as I know. So, while you might be getting insulin just fine, there's no precedent for what else these two disparate DNA's will do together. Clearly, it's not the deoxyribonucleic acid itself that you're concerned about when you eat the GM food; it's the organism itself, and its products and byproducts.
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Originally Posted by LabRat
when i taught my undergrads as a grad student, and we were on the topic of biotechnology someone would always bring up how eating bioengeneered food could be harmful. so i explained it this way:
no matter what you are eating, carrot, pork chop, filet mignon, you are consuming (among other things) the dna of that thing. you have yet to turn green from your side salad, or sprout udders after cosuming a big mac, because the dna is degraded in your stomach.
human beings have been 'genetically engineering' food for as long as they have been around. we select two of the most proliferative tomato plants and cross pollinate them, so we get a whole batch of proliferative plants. then we take the most productive two from that batch and do it over. i did this for a summer when i worked for pioneer except we were criossing soybeans for their oil content. this is also BTW how natural selection works...only mother nature is doing the selecting.
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