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[SANET-MG] pathological science



November 29, 2004

Prof. Joe Cummins

The quotes below are from a typical United States west coast academic.
His view reflects a pervasive approach to "higher" education on the west
coast. They, like the German academics of the Hitler years, believe that
the views of any who disagree with them are useless and should be
suppressed.

http://www.techcentralstation.com/112904B.html

When Science is 'Pathological'

By Henry I. Miller          Published          11/29/2004

Henry I. Miller,is a fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford
University and Competitive Enterprise

Institute and a former FDA official, is the author, most recently, of, "The

Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution."

"The new biotechnology, or gene-splicing, is a favorite target of

anti-technology groups such as the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology,

Greenpeace and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Lately,
they claim

that conventional crops have been "contaminated" by the finding of
minuscule

amounts of DNA from "genetically modified" - by which they mean
gene-spliced --

varieties. Their methodology is flawed, but even if the claims were
accurate, they

should elicit from the public nothing more than a collective yawn. Genetic

modification is not new. Virtually all of the 200 major crops in the
United States

have been genetically improved, or modified, in some way. Plant breeders
-- not

"nature" - gave us seedless grapes and watermelons, the tangelo (a

tangerine-grapefruit hybrid), the "canola" variety of rapeseed, and

fungus-resistant strawberries. In North American and European diets,
only fish and

wild game, berries and mushrooms may be said not to have been
genetically engineered in some fashion."

"North Americans have consumed more than a trillion servings of foods
that contain

gene-spliced ingredients, with not a single untoward reaction. In fact,
when

Conventional and gene-spliced seed materials are mixed, arguably the
former should be thought of as contaminating the latter."

In reply to Miller's comments: First, the claim that trillions of
servings of gm foods have caused no untoward reaction. Since the gm
foods are not labeled in the market there has been no scientific way of
determining which of the untoward effects of food are due to the
consumption of gm food. The FDA bureaucrat believes that is how science
should be done!

The claim that genetic modification is not new is a pervasive comment
among the bureaucrats in FDA and USDA.  However, even beginning
genetics students should recognize that the gm foods are constructed
through illegitimate recombination while conventional plant breeding
employed only homologous (legitimate) recombination. Furthermore, the
transgenes used in gm crops are mainly synthetic approximations of
bacterial genes whose codes are altered for productivity in the plant
cell. The synthetic genes have never experienced evolution and are not
equivalent to the original genes. Even though such synthetic genes are
capable of producing proteins nearly identical to the original bacterial
protein, they are  frequently adjusted in their amino acid building
blocs to function in the plant cell. The regulatory bureaucrats have
allowed the use of surrogate proteins made in bacterial cells to be
substituted in safety testing for the real protein made in gm crops.

The west coast universities seemed to have turned their backs on full
and truthful reporting along with demanding that those they disagree
with should be ignored and suppressed.

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