science for sale

human beings have been modifying plants and breeding animals for selected traits for millennia, always aiming to inprove yields,shelf-life or flavor. Today, genetic engineering could allow us to accomplish what has so far been impossible:feed every hungry mouth, end malnutrition and vaccinate everyone on Earth. Vitamin A has already been spliced into rice and oral vaccines integrated into fruit- and this is only the dawn of GE technology

But: we still have no idea what the long term ramifications of GE technology will be. Wjat we do know as Amory Lovins has noted, is that biotechnology speeds up biological evolution "by roughly a billonfold, from a measure pace in which innovations are rigorrously pretested over cons... to the frenetic pace of next quarter's earnings reports:" if that sound like exaggeration hers the same idea as expressed by Rodney brppls director of the Artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT "Our 30 year goal is to have such exquisite control over the genetics of living systems that instead of growing a tree, cutting it down and gbulidinga tabe out of itk, we will ultimately be able to grow the table"