What a wonderful concept, to manipulate the basic building blocks of life to improve nutrition, make medicines, make people healthier! Unfortunately none of these things is being done. The only genetically engineered crop plants are plants which tolerate higher levels of herbicide. This sells more herbicide as higher levels are applied and leaves higher levels of toxic residue in the food WHICH YOU EAT. Didn't want that little ancillary conclusion to slip by you.
We don't need genetic engineering to increase nutrition and truthfully it will NOT work. Why? Because your body needs a huge, diverse array of nutrients each day. Oxygen is the most necessary - hold your breath and try to tell me different when you are done - and the average person uses 35 pounds/day. There are major minerals and trace minerals. Major minerals are those like Calcium which have over 600 known biological functions in the body and are needed in relatively large amounts. The trace minerals are needed in small amounts although large amounts can be toxic. An example would be selenium; a study examined over 200 bodies that died from myocardial infarction (heart attack) and found that every single body had a selenium deficiency. Similarly copper; a similar study studied victims of stroke and found that every single body had a copper deficiency. Copper makes the blood vessels elastic so they expand under increased pressure instead of blowing and damaging the brain. Both of these trace minerals are toxic in large amounts.
We can theoretically engineer plants to be loaded with vitamins, enzymes and other good aspects of living food. The problem is that if you don't have any selenium in your soil, if your growing medium has no calcium, you will not obtain any of these items through eating them, and in fact every vitamin, enzyme, or healthy biological function requiring missing minerals will fail. The plant may survive. It may even look green and healthy. But it will be more tempting to bugs which tend to prey on sickly plants. It will not fulfill your biochemical and nutritional needs.
We don't want medicines in our foods. Do you want to take prozac with every bite of lettuce? Oops, you had a potato and it is having a horrible medicinal synergy with your carrots, you die. Or you are constantly being forced to take medicines which you may not need or almost certainly are harmful to you.
Now pretend that Barney is in the lab working on the latest project. He is developing a flower and he wants the purest colors he can attain in the petals, stamen, pistils and calyx. The appropriate enzyme is injected and the sequence he wants is removed. Next he injects the "desired dna strand" . Unfortunately this (according to the last time i'd studied the process) is a crap shoot. A group of dna is injected which includes but is not limited to only the theoretically desired sequence, and something grabs hold. (or not?)
Barney doesn't know it, but he just made a dna sequence which makes the cell reject chlorophyll. No more green to muddy the colors! Hallelujah, science has again worked a miracle! Yeah, and that simple flower goes out and the Chlorophyll killer dna starts spreading. Quickly, and the planet is dead within six months. Slowly and it may take years. Our oceanic algae dies out killing the krill. No fish food. No whale food. No fish, no crabs, no ocean life. The trees die off. The grasses are gone and the little bunnies that eat them. The livestock which used to make up your primary protein source. No lettuce or radicchio. Soon there is not even enough plant material rotting to feed the mushrooms but long before that happens people are dead.
Oh, there are a dozen in the biosphere and in quickly constructed biospheres around the world wherever one could put one together, but the seals will fail. The windows will crack. The framing will corrode or rot. and not one has enough plant diversity to re-establish life on the planet. Goodbye.
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