Note from Health Lover, Ilena Rosenthal:
http://ilenarose.blogspot.com
"A Fist In The Eye of God" is one of most beautiful and brilliant
pieces of GM seeds ... (copied below)
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Nature-Community/2002-08-01/A-Fist-In-The-Eye-of-God.aspx
www.organicconsumers.org/gefood/SmallWonders.cfm
On the other side, the most ignorant & bigoted quote I ever read from
the pro-GM / anti-organic propaganda team S****-oil Team was this one:
"I avoid organic food on principle. the pro-organic, anti-GM lobby are
motivated by genocidal racism and a hatred for the human race,
particularly the poor." Rosalind Dalefield, Member of S****-oil
Vigilantes:
www.BreastImplantAwareness.org/s****-oil.htm#Rosalind-Dalefield
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Nature-Community/2002-08-01/A-Fist-In-The-Eye-of-God.aspx
www.organicconsumers.org/gefood/SmallWonders.cfm
A Fist In The Eye of God
View Point : Reflections on the Genetic Manipulation of Life
By barbara Kingsolver; Illustrations by Paul Mirocha
In the slender shoulders of the myrtle tree outside my kitchen window,
a hummingbird built her nest. It was in April, the ***iest month,
season of bud and court****p displays, though I was at the sink wa****ng
breakfast dishes and missing the party, or so you might think.
Then my eye caught a flicker of motion outside, and there she was,
hovering uncertainly. She held in the tip of her beak a wisp of wadded
spiderweb so tiny I wasn't even sure it was there, until she carefully
smoodged it onto the branch. She vanished then, but in less than a
minute she was back with another tiny white tuft she stuck on top of
the first. For more than an hour she returned again and again,
increasingly confident of her mission, building up by infinitesimal
degrees a whitish lump on the branch—and leaving me plumb in awe of
the supply of spiderwebbing on the face of the land.
I stayed at my post, wa****ng everything I could find, while my friend
did her own housework out there. When the lump had grown big
enough—when some genetic trigger in her small brain said, "Now, that
will do"—she stopped gathering and sat down on her little tuffet,
waggling her wings and tiny rounded underbelly to shape the blob into
a cup that easily would have fit inside my cupped hand. Then she
hovered up, inspected it from this side and that, settled and waddled
with greater fervor, hovered and appraised some more, and dashed off.
She returned with fine filaments of shredded bark, which she wove into
the webbing along with some dry leaflets and a slap-dab or two of
lichen pressed onto the outside for curb appeal.
When she had made of all this a perfect, symmetrical cup, she did the
Most Surprising thing of all: She sat on it, stretched herself
forward, extended the unbelievable length of her tongue and licked her
new nest in a long, upward stroke from bottom to rim. Then she rotated
herself a minute degree, leaned forward and licked again. I watched
her go all the way around, licking the entire nest in a slow rotation
that took 10 minutes to complete and ended precisely back at her
starting point.
Passed down from hummingbird great-grandmothers immemorial, a
spectacular genetic map in her mind had instructed her at every step,
from snipping out with her beak the first spiderweb tuft to laying
down whatever salivary secretion was needed to accrete and finalize
her essential creation. Then, suddenly, that was that. Her busy
urgency vanished, and she settled in for the long stillness of laying
and incubation.
If you had been standing with me at my kitchen sink to witness all
this, you would likely have breathed softly, as I did, "My God." The
spectacular perfection of that nest, that tiny tongue, that beak
calibrated perfectly to the length of the tubular red flowers from
which she Sucks nectar, taking away pollen to commit the essential act
of copulation for the plant that feeds her every piece of it all, my
God. You might be expressing your reverence for the details of a world
created in seven days, 4,004 years ago (according to some biblical
calculations), by a divine being approximately human in shape. Or you
might be revering the details of a world created by a billion years of
natural selection acting utterly without fail on every single
life-form, one life at a time.
The environmental challenges loom as something on the order of a
cancer that might well make personal allergies look like a sneeze.
For my money the latter is the greatest show on Earth and a church
service to end all. I have never understood how anyone could have the
slightest trouble blending religious awe with a full comprehension of
the workings of life's creation.
Charles Darwin was a religious man, blessed with an extraordinary
patience for observing nature's details, as well as the longevity and
brilliance to put it all together. In his years of studying animate
life he noticed four things. which any of us could notice today if we
looked hard enough. They are:
1. Every organism produces more seeds or offspring than will actually
survive to adulthood.
2. There is variation among these seeds or offspring,
3. Traits are passed down from one generation to the next.
4. In each generation the survivors succeed—that is, they
survive—because they possess some advantage over the ones that don't
succeed. Because they survive they will pass that advantage on to the
next generation. Over time therefore, the incidence of that trait will
increase in the population.
Bingo: The greatest, simplest, most elegant logical construct ever to
dawn across our curiosity about the workings of natural life. It is
inarguable, and it explains everything.
Most people have no idea that this, in total, is Darwin's theory, of
natural selection. Furthermore parents who tell their children not to
listen to such talk because "it's just a theory" are ignorant of what
that word means. A theory, in science, is a coherent set of principles
used to explain and predict a class of phenomena. Thus, gravitational
theory explains why objects fall when you drop them, even though it,
too, is "just a theory." Darwin's has proven to be the most robust
unifying explanation ever devised in biological science. It's stunning
that he could have been so right—scientists of Darwin's time knew
absolutely nothing about genetics. After a century and a half, during
which time knowledge expanded boundlessly in genetics, geology,
paleontology and all areas of natural science, his simple, logical
construct continues to explain and predict perfectly the existence and
behavior of every Earthly life-form we have ever studied. As the
unifying principle of natural sciences, it is no more doubted among
modern biologists than gravity is questioned by physicists.
Nevertheless, in a bizarre recent trend, a number of states have
limited or even outright banned the teaching of evolution in high
schools, and many science textbooks, in turn, have wimped out on the
Subject. As a consequence, an entire generation of students is
arriving in college unprepared to comprehend or pursue informed
science. Many science teachers I know are nostalgic for at least one
aspect of the Cold War days, when Sputnik riveted us to the serious
business of training our kids to real science, instead of allowing it
to he diluted or tossed out to assuage the insecurities of certain
ideologues.
We dilute and toss at our peril. Scientific illiteracy in our
population is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or
understand much of the damage we are wreaking upon our atmosphere, our
habitat and even the food that enters our mouths. Friends who opted in
school for English lit instead of microbiology (an option I Myself
could easily have taken) sometimes come to me and ask, "In 200 words
or less, can You explain to me why I should be nervous about genetic
engineering?" I tell them, "Sit down, I'll make you a cup of tea, and
then get ready for more than 200 words."
A sound-bite culture can't discuss science very well. Exactly what
we're losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences
of global—warming these traumas can't be adequately, summarized in an
evening news wrap-up. Arguments in favor of genetically engineered
food, in contrast, are dangerously simple: A magazine ad for an
agribusiness touts its benevolent plan to "feed the world's hungry
with our vitamin-engineered rice!"
To which I could add in reply my own snappy motto: "if you thought
that first free hit of heroin was a good idea ... " But before you
really can decide whether or not you agree, you may need the words
above and a few thousand more. If so, then sit down. I have a cup of
tea, and bear with me. This is im****tant.
At the root of everything. Darwin said, is that wonder of wonders,
genetic diversity. You're unlike your sister, I litter of pups is its
own small Rainbow Coalition, and every grain of wheat in a field holds
inside its germ a slightly separate destiny. You can't see die
differences until you cast the seeds on the ground and grow them out,
but sure enough, some will grow into taller plants and some shorter,
some tougher. Some sweeter. In a good year all or most of them will
thrive and give you wheat. But in a had year a spate of high winds may
take down the tallest stalks and leave standing at harvest time only.
Say, the 10 percent of the crop that had a "shortness" gene. And if
that wheat comprises your winter's supply of bread plustile only seed
you'll have lot, next year's crop, then you'll be almighty glad to
have that small, short harvest.
Genetic diversity, in domestic populations as well as wild ones, is
nature's sole insurance policy. Environments change: Wet years, are
followed by droughts, fakes dry up, volcanoes rumble ice ages dawn.
It's a big bad world out there for a little strand of DNA. But a
population will persist over time if, deep within the scattered
genetics of its ranks, it is literally prepared for anything. When the
windy years persist for a decade, the wheat population will be
overtaken by a preponderance of shortness, but if the crop maintains
its diversify, there will always be recessive aspirations for height
hiding in there somewhere waiting to have their day.
How is the diversity maintained? That old black magic called ***.
Every seed has two parents. Plants throw their *** to the wind to a
hummingbird's tongue to the knees of a bee—in April you are inhaling
***, and sneezing. In the process, each two parents put their
scrambled genes into offspring that represent whole new genetic
combinations never before seen on Earth. Every new outfit will be
ready for something, and together—in a large-enough population—the
whole crowd will be ready for anything. Individuals will die, not at
random but because of some fatal misfit between what an organism has
and what's required. But the population will live on, moving always in
the direction of fitness (however—fitness" is at the moment defined),
not because anyone has a master plan but because survival carries
fitness forward and death doesn't.
People have railed at this reality, left and tight, since the evening
when a British ambassador's wife declared to her husband, "Oh dear,
let us hope Mr. Darwin isn't right, and if he is, let us hope no one
finds out about it!" Fundamentalist Christians seem disturbed by a
scenario in which individual will is so irrelevant. They might be
surprised to learn that Stalin tried to ban the study of genetics and
evolution in Soviet universities for the opposite reason, attacking
the idea of natural selection—which acts only at the level of the
individual—for being anti-Communist. Through it all, the little
engines of evolution have kept on turning as they have done for
millennia, delivering us here and passing on, untouched by politics or
what anybody thinks,
Nikolai Vavilov was an astounding man of science, and probably the
greatest plant explorer who has ever lived. In his travels through 64
countries between 1916 and 1940, he recorded more crop diversity than
anyone had known existed, and founded the world's largest seed
collection.
As he combed continents looking for primitive crop varieties, Vavilov
noticed a pattern: Genetic variation was not evenly distributed. In a
small region of Ethiopia lie found hundreds of ancient wheat varieties
known only to that place. A single New World plateau was astoni****ngly
rich in corn varieties, while another one was rolling in different
kinds of potatoes. Vavilov mapped the distribution of his findings and
theorized that the degree of a crop's diversity indicated how long it
had been grown in a given region, as farmers saved a their seeds
through hundreds and thousands of seasons. They also saved more types
of seed for different benefits. Popcorn, tortilla corn and roasting
corn were derived, over centuries, from one original strain. Within
each crop type, the generations of selection also yield a breadth of
resistance to all types of pest and weather problems encountered
through the years.
By looking through his lens of genetics, Vavilov began to pinpoint the
places in the world where human agriculture had originated. Modern
genetic research has largely borne out his hypothesis that agriculture
emerged independently in the places where the most diverse and ancient
crop types, known as land races, are found: in the Near East, northern
China, Mesoamerica and Ethiopia.
The industrialized world depends entirely on crops and cultivation
practices im****ted from what we now call the Third World (though
evidently it actually was first). In an im****tant departure from older
traditions, the crops we now grow in the United States are extremely
uniform genetically, due to the fact our agriculture is controlled
primarily by a few large agricultural cor****ations that sell
relatively few varieties of seeds. Those who know the seed business
are well aware that our shallow gene bank is highly vulnerable: When a
crop strain suc***bs all across the country, all at once to a new
disease (as happened with U.S. corn in 1970), researchers must return
to the more diverse original strains for help, So we still rely on the
gigantic insurance policy provided by the genetic variability in the
land races, which continue to be hand-sown and harvested, year in and
year out, by farmers in those mostly poor places from which our crops
arose.
Unbelievably, we are now engaged in a serious effort to cancel that
insurance policy.
It happens like this. Let's say you are an Ethiopian farmer growing a
land race of wheat—a wildly variable, husky mongrel crop that has been
in your family for hundreds of years. You always lose some to wind and
weather, but the rest still comes through every year. Lately, though,
you've been hearing about a kind of Magic Wheat that grows six times
bigger than your crop, is easier to harvest and contains vitamins not
found in ordinary wheat. And amazingly enough, by special arrangement
with the government, it's free.
Readers who have even the slightest acquaintance with fairy tales will
already know there is trouble ahead in this story, The Magic Wheat
grows well the first year, but its rapid, overly green growth attracts
a startling number of pests. You see insects on this crop that never
have eaten wheat before, in the whole of your family's history. You
watch, you worry. You realize that you're going to have to spray a
pesticide to get this crop through to harvest. You're not so surprised
to learn that by special arrangement with the government, the same
company that gave you the free seed can sell the pesticide you need.
It's a good M. ficide, they use it all the time in America, but it
costs money you don't have, so you'll have to borrow against next
year's crop.
The second year, you will be visited by a terrible drought and your
crop will not survive to harvest at all. Every stalk dies. Magic Wheat
from America doesn't know beans about Ethiopian drought. The end,
Actually, if the drought arrived in Year Two and the end came that
quickly, you'd be very lucky, because chances are good you'd still
have some of your family-line seed around. It would be much more
disastrous if the drought waited until the eighth or ninth year to
wipe you out, for then you'd have no wheat left at all, Magic or
otherwise. Seed banks, even if they're 11,000 years old, can't survive
for more than a few years on the shelf if they aren't grown out as
crops year after year. they die—or else get ground into flour and
baked and eaten—and then this product of a thousand hands and careful
selection is just gone, once and for all.
This is no joke. The infamous potato famine or Southern Corn leaf
Blight catastrophe could happen again any day now, in any place where
people are once again foolish or poor enough to be coerced (as was the
case in Ireland) to plant an entire country in a single genetic swain
of a food crop.
While agricultural companies have purchased, stored and patented
certain genetic materials from old crops, they cannot engineer a crop,
ever, that will have the resilience of land races under a wide variety
of environmental conditions. Genetic engineering is the antithesis of
variability because it removes the wild card—that beautiful thing
called ***—from the equation.
This is our new magic bullet: We can move single genes around in a
genome to tender a specific trait that nature can't put there, Such as
ultrarapid growth or vitamin A in rice. Literally, we could put a wolf
in sheep's clothing. But solving agricultural problems this way turns
out to be far less broadly effective than the old-fa****oned multigenic
solutions derived through programs of selection and breeding. Crop
predators evolve in quick and mysterious ways, while gene splicing
tries one simple tack after another, approaching its goal the way Wile
E. Coyote tries out each new gizmo from Acme only once, only to be
outwitted by Roadrunner. Crestfallen, Wile E. goes back to the drawing
board.
Wendell Berry, with his reliable wit, wrote that genetic manipulation
in general and cloning in particular: " ... besides being a new method
of sheep-stealing, is only a pathetic attempt to make sheep
predictable. But this is an affront to reality. As any shepherd would
know, the scientist who thinks he has made sheep predictable has only
made himself eligible to be outsmarted."
I've heard less knowledgeable people comfort themselves on the issue
of genetic engineering by recalling that humans have been pu****ng
genes around for centuries, through selective breeding of livestock
and crops. I even read one howler of a quote that began, "Ever since
Mendel spliced those first genes... " These people aren't getting it,
but I don't blame them—I blame the religious fanatics who kept basic
biology out of their grade-school textbooks. Mendel did not splice
genes; he didn't actually control anything at all. He simply watched
peas to learn how their natural system of genetic recombination
worked.
The farmers who select their best sheep or grains to mother the
following year's crop are working with the evolutionary force of
selection, pu****ng it in the direction of their choosing. Anything
produced this will still work within its natural evolutionary context
of variability, predators', disease resistance and so forth. But
tampering with genes outside the checks and balances you might call
the rules of God's laboratory is an entirely different process. It's
turning out to have unforeseen, sometimes stunning, consequences.
To choose one example among many, genetic engineers have spliced a
bacterium into a corn plant. It was arguably a good idea. The
bacterium is Bacillus thuringensis (Bt) a germ that causes
caterpillars' stomachs to disintegrate. It doesn't harm humans, birds,
or even ladybugs or bees, so it's one of the most useful pesticides
we've ever discovered.
Organic farmers ha% e worked for years to expedite the path of the
naturally Occurring lit s****es from the soil, where the bacterium
lives, Onto their plants. YOU Can buy this germ in a can at the
nursery and shake it onto your tomato plants, where it makes
caterpillars croak before sliding hack into the soil it came from
farmers have always used nature to their own ends, employing
relatively slow methods cir***scribed within tile context of natural
laws. But genetic engineering took a giant step and spliced pail of
the bacteriums DNA into a corn plants DNA chain so as tile corn grew,
each of its cells would contain the bacterial function of
caterpillar-killing. When each grain produced pollen, it would have a
secret weapon against tile corn worms that like to crawl down silks to
ravage the crop. So far, so good.
But when Bt corn sheds its pollen and casts it to the wind, as corn
has always done (it's pollinated by wind not by bees), it dusts a fine
layer of fit pollen onto every tree and bush in the neighborhood of
every farm that grows it which is rapidly, for this popular crop,
becoming the territory known as the United States. There the Bt pollen
may infect any butterfly larva in its path. Populations of monarch
butterflies those hold little pilgrims who migrate all the way to
Mexico and back by their tissuethin wings, are plummeting fast. While
there are many reasons for this (for example, their winter inter
forests in Mexico are bering burned), no reasonable person can argue
that dusting them with a lethal bacterium is going to help matters,
So, too will be the fate of other butterflies more obscure, and more
endangered.
And if that doesn't happen to break your heart, just wait awhile,
because some filling that pollinates your food or builds tile soil
also may be destined for extinction. And there's another practical
problem: The massive exposure to Bt now contained in every cell of
this corn, is killing off all crop predators except those few that
have mutated a resistance to this long-useful pesticide. As a result,
those super-resistant mutants are taking over in exactly the same way
that overexposure to antibiotics is facilitating the evolution of
antibioticresistant diseases in humans.
Would you trust a guy in a suit who's never given away a nickel in his
life, who now tells you he's made you some free Magic Wheat?
In this context of phenomenal environmental upsets. with even larger
ones just Offstage awaiting their cue, it's a bit surprising that the
objections to genetic engineering we hear most about are the human
health effects. It is absolutely true that new DNA combinations can
create proteins we aren't prepared to swallow; notably, genetic
manipulations in corn unexpectedly created antigens to which some
humans are allergic, The potential human ills caused by ingestion of
engineered foods remain an open category—which is scary enough in
itself, and I don't mean to minimize it. But there are so many ways
for genetic manipulation to destroy our habitat and Our food systems
that the environmental challenges loom as something on the order of a
cancer that might well make personal allergies look like a sneeze.
If genetically reordered organisms infiltrate natural populations,
they may rapidly change the genetics in a way that could seal the
entire species' doom. A scenario dangerously omnipresent is pollen
escaping from genetically manipulated crops, creating new weeds that
we cannot hope to remove from the face of the earth. Engineered genes
don't play by the rules that have organized life for 3 billion years
(or, if you prefer, 4,004). And in this case, winning means loser
takes all.
What will it mean for a handful of agribusinesses to control the
world's ever-narrowing seed hanks? What about the chemical
dependencies they're creating for farmers in developing countries
where government deals with multinational cor****ations are including
farmers to grow these engineered crops? What about the business of
patenting and owning genes? Can there be any good in this for the
flat-out need of people trying to feed themselves? Does it seem safe,
the world now being what it is, to give up self-sustaining food
systems in favor of dependency on the global marketplace? And finally,
would you trust a guy in a suit who's never given away a nickel in his
life, who now tells you lie's made you some free Magic Wheat?
These are not questions to take lightly as we stand here in the
epicenter of cor****ate agribusiness and look around at the world,
asking,—Why on earth would they hate us?" The general ignorance of
U.S. populations about who controls global agriculture reflects our
trust in an assured food supply. Elsewhere, in places where people
grow more food, watch less TV and generally encounter a greater risk
of hunger than we do, they mostly know what's going on. In India,
farmers, persist in burning to the ground trial crops of transgenic
cotton, and they forced their government to ban Monsanto's "Terminator
technology," which causes plants to kill their own embryos so no
viable seeds will survive for a farmer to replant in the next
generation (meaning he'd have to buy new ones, of course). Much of the
world has already refused to im****t genetically engineered foods or
seeds from the United States. But because of the power and momentum of
the World Trade Organization, fewer and fewer countries have the clout
to resist reconstruction of their food supply around the scariest New
Deal ever.
Even standing apart from the moral and political questions—if a
scientist can stand anywhere without stepping on the politics of
what's about to he discovered—there are consequences in the science of
the matter no one knew how to anticipate. When the widely publicized
Human Genome Project completed its mapping of human chromosomes, it
offered an unsettling, not-so-widely publicized conclusion: Instead of
the 100,000 or more genes that had been expected, based on the number
of proteins we must synthesize to be what we are, we have only about
30,000—roughly the same number as a mustard plant.
This evidence undermined the central dogma of how genes work; that is,
the assumption of a clear-cut chain of processes leading from a single
gene to the appearance of the trait it controls. Instead, the
mechanism of gene expression appears vastly more complicated than had
been assumed since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA in
1953. The expression of a gene may be altered by its context, such as
the presence of other genes on the chromosome near it. Yet, genetic
engineering operates on assumptions based on the simpler model. Thus,
single transplanted genes often behave in starling ways in an
engineered organism, often proving lethal to themselves, or,
Sometimes, neighboring organisms. In light of newer findings,
geneticists increasingly concede that gene-tinkering is to some extent
shooting in the dark Barry Commoner, senior scientist at the Center
for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College, laments that
while the public's concerns are often derided by industry scientists
as irrational and uneducated, the biotechnology industry is
conveniently ignoring the latest results in the field "which show that
there are strong reasons to fear the potential consequences of
transferring a DNA gene between species."
Recently I heard Joan Dye Gussow, who studies and writes about the
energetics, economics and irrationalities of global food production,
discussing some of these problems. She mentioned the alarming fact
that pollen from genetically engineered corn is so rapidly
contaminating all other corn that we may soon have no naturally bred
corn left in the United States. "This is a fist in the eye of God,"
she said, adding with a sad little laugh, "and I'm not even all that
religious." Whatever you believe in—whether God for you is the
watchmaker who put together the intricate workings of this world in
seven days or seven hundred billion days—you'd be wise to believe the
part about the fist.
Religion has no place in the science classroom, where it may abridge
students' op****tunities to learn the methods, discoveries and
explanatory hypotheses of science rather its place is in the hearts of
the women and men who study and then practice scientific exploration.
Ethics can't influence the outcome of an experiment, but they can
serve as a useful adjunct to the questions that get asked in the first
place, and to the applications thereafter. (One must wonder what chair
God occupied, if any, in the Manhattan Project.) In the halls of
science there is often an unspoken sense that morals and objectivity
can't occupy the same place. That is balderdash—they always have
cohabited.
Social norms and judgments regarding gender, race, the common good,
cooperation, competition, material gain and countless other issues
reside in every active human mind, so they were hovering somewhere in
the vicinity of any experiment ever conducted by a human. That is
precisely why science invented the double-blind experiment, in which,
for example, experimental subjects don't know whether they're taking
the drug or the placebo and neither does the scientist recording their
responses, so as to avoid psychological bias in the results. But it's
not possible to double-blind the scientist's approach to the task in
the first place, or to the way results will be used. It is probably
more scientifically constructive to acknowledge our larger agenda than
to pretend it doesn't exist. Where genetic engineering is concerned, I
would rather have ethics than profitability driving the program.
I was trained as a biologist, and I can appreciate the challenge and
the technical mastery involved in isolating, understanding and
manipulating genes. I can think of fascinating things I'd like to do
as a genetic engineer, But I only have to stand still for a minute and
watch the outcome of 30 million years' worth of hummingbird evolution
transubstantiated before my eyes into nest and egg to get knocked down
to size. I have held in my hand the germ of a plant engineered to
grow, yield its crop and then murder its own embryos, and there I
glimpsed the malevolence that can lie in the heart of a profiteering
enterprise. There once was a time when Thoreau wrote, "I have great
faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am
prepared to expect wonders." By the power vested in everything living,
let us keep to that faith. I'm a scientist who thinks it wise to enter
the doors of creation not with a lion trainer's whip arid chair, but
with the reverence humankind has traditionally summoned for entering
places of wor****p: a temple, a mosque or a cathedral. A sacred grove,
as ancient as time.
From the book SmallWonder by Barbara Kingsolver, published by
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright 2002 by Barbara Kingsolver.
All rights reserved. Please see MOTHER's Bookshelf, Page 104.
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