The main thing that's new about genetic modification is that we can now take genes from one organism
and introduce them into another organism, something that would not happen in the course
of nature.
The process by which this is done, there's potential to cause all sorts of collateral
damage in the genome of organisms and it's very hard to foresee all of the downstream
consequences of making those changes.
For example, flounders have an antifreeze protein that enables them to swim in very
cold water and not freeze solid.
So you can take the gene that makes that protein and put it into strawberries and at first
glance that sounds like maybe this is a good thing it will enable you to grow strawberries
at higher latitudes, longer in the year, that they would resist freezing, there would be
more strawberries for everybody - that could be good.
On the other hand, who knows what might happen if human beings start eating this flounder
protein in greater quantity than they ever did.
It might cause allergies, it might do other things, we don't know.
And it just seems to me that if the people doing this are, first of all trying to foresee
all this stuff, that would be okay but I doubt that they are, and if they are doing these
things to produce fruits and vegetables of higher quality with better nutritional profiles,
that's one thing but that's not what they are doing.
They are doing it to either make things that are more resistant to shipping or so forth.
And there is a body of scientific evidence showing that animals that are fed genetically
modified crops develop ranges of health problems.
It's an area in which I would be cautious and at least we should not have these things
foisted on us without our knowledge so at least there should be clear labeling on the
products that are genetically modified so we can choose whether we want to buy them
or not.
There actually are already a lot of things out there that we are eating that we can't
do anything about, but this is one of the good things about the federal organic standards
- if something carries that label from the Department of Agriculture, it cannot be genetically
modified.