Word: cornelis
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...mind-bogglingly apathetic about the implications of new science, especially bioscience. Americans apparently don’t have a problem with their carrots being genetically modified so they’re resistant to powerful herbicides. They don’t mind if the sweet crunch of that ear of corn or bunch of seedless grapes is the result of years of tinkering in a lab. This way of thinking has given rise to a powerful industry that, with the collusion of the government, thwarts any attempt to control, test or label genetically modified foods...
This attitude needs to change. Americans can no longer ignore the G.M. issue. Although there is a shocking dearth of clinical and agricultural testing, the few results we do have don’t look good. Double-blind trials have shown that the StarLink variety of corn, developed by Monsanto, causes allergic reactions in some subjects, while a Royal Society report, commissioned by the British Food Standards Agency, shows that a significant proportion of people who ate genetically modified soybeans had picked up antibiotic resistance from the food...
...eradicated or at least controlled, this is an alarming prospect. Imagine one of those bacteria in your gut happens to be strep or staph or tuberculosis—something nasty, but controllable with standard antibiotics. Now imagine that they pick up a plasmid from a genetically modified piece of corn. What happens? The antibiotics don’t work any more. At this point it might be worth buying some life insurance and making sure your will is in order...
...meager Harvard training quickly proved insufficient to handle the rigors of FSU social life. By day seven of my research excursion to FSU, even the milk in my morning corn flakes started to reek of the taste of Natty Light. My inability to withstand seven days of the lifestyle that many FSU students have spent four (or more) college years perfecting proves that nature may be a limiting factor in one’s quest to become the perfect partier. Yet, even if the average Harvard man or woman is not meant to party like they mean it every night...
...great issues of science, religion and politics right into your living room, where we can sort out what they mean to you. That's what we hope will happen at this conference. We will be talking about everything from human clones and designer babies to biowarfare and genetically modified corn. Will millions of other life forms go extinct before we have a chance to count them, as E.O. Wilson fears? Will artificially intelligent robots inherit the earth, as Ray Kurzweil predicts? And if genetics is a gold mine, as Wall Street promised, where is all the gold...