Genetic modification

4. Problems of application

GM has been subject to various types of objection. It has been pronounced unnatural, held to pose an unjustifiable risk to the environment and to human health, and felt to bring us unacceptably close to being able to manipulate human genetic make-up. Only the last of these is specific to GM, and then not to new GM – concern about eugenic policies antedates modern biotechnology.

The charge of being unnatural has been levelled at a host of targets. Those who bring it in this case still have to explain what is specifically unnatural about new GM that it does not share with many long accepted procedures.

More serious is the contention that new GM threatens unintended, undesirable and perhaps also unforeseeable environmental and medical consequences. It brings the risk of the escape of organisms, or at least their genes, into wild populations. For example, the spread of insecticidal proteins into wild plants could confer a competitive advantage on those plants, disrupting semi-natural systems. Likewise, effects on insect populations could be significant. Although having herbicide-resistant crops will decrease herbicide use, it will increase the effectiveness of applications, reducing weed densities and thus continuing a decline of wildlife that has been going on since agriculture began.

Exposure of human populations to large amounts of novel proteins that have never previously been in the human food chain could cause unpredictable problems. In particular, allergenicity could cause problems that would be difficult to detect, as symptoms can take a long time to develop.

Issues involving new GM and animals raise a further range of ethical questions (see Animals and ethics). They also suggest the potential for the transfer of GM technology to humans and its use as an instrument for manipulation of human genetics – giving rise to the fear of its use for objectionable ends, or of damage to human life as an unforeseen consequence of well-meaning actions. The thought here may be that there are limits to the powers with which human beings are good enough, or clever enough, to be trusted.

These issues, however, concern only particular applications of new GM, not the technology per se. Since it has so many applications, generalizations about the whole technology are difficult. Most features of most applications of new GM are not profoundly different from the processes that have been performed on plants and animals for the past 10,000 years, so objections to new GM need to be carefully formulated to address its unique features.