Human creativity has no limits.

I don’t see myself as a technophobe, although others may differ - I design computer programs for a living and have been in computing all my working life. But I do think that science and technology are tools for civilisation and not ends in themselves. We need to question constantly their direction, monitor their use and so on. For example, DDT was a scientific wonder but had such bad side-effects that it had to be banned.

GM to boost yield will not solve the real problem, but might fool the public or even decision makers into thinking it has been solved.

I don’t understand what is the fuss about GM and only see it as technofobia. People have been manipulating food since they could. Wheat didn’t exist. Nothing that we eat is natural. Just going one step ahead in knowledge changes nothing, it can only improve our lives.

About the DDT:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/main.jhtml?xml=/health/2006/09/18/who17.xml

As usual this is a scientific plaster over a non-scientific wound. The real problem is growing population, not really food supply. As well as food supply, a growing population will have increased demands for clean water, land, energy and so on. The real fix will be curbing population growth, which is politically v. tricky. Coming up with new miracle grow rice species X that grows 1.34 times as much as the previous best will only be a temporary solution as the population will grow again, and rice X will no longer be enough, so we need newer rice species Y and so on.

The genetic changes caused by breeding have been happening slowly since life began, and the physical limitations about what can mate with what means that the set of genetic changes possible between a parent and its child are relatively small. The rest of the ecosystem has had time to adjust to all this, so nature is as we know it.

The genetic changes caused by GM are arbitrarily large. You could (I think) take any gene and insert into any other young organism and so get glow in the dark potatoes etc.

The trouble is the size of the genetic change possible (not the change itself) - the rest of the ecosystem scrambles to catch up and can’t do so very quickly. Just like our bodies haven’t had time to adjust from the scarcity of calories in our hunter-gatherer days to the (over-)abundance now in much of the developed world. I.e. ecosystem as a whole is out of kilter for possibly a long time, which is generally a bad thing.

Also, the ecosystem catching up can produce unforeseen consequences. The glow in the dark potatoes in the test field can spread their genes to any potato plant nearby, and if it’s genetically advantageous (or at least not genetically a disadvantage) some other potato will start glowing in the dark. I think it’s basically a genie-out-of-the-bottle kind of argument.

I’m sure someone like Chris Haricot could give you more on this, but that’s my view from a position of relative genetics ignorance.