Word: geneticists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Germ-line genetic engineering was first performed successfully on animals and plants in the 1980s. By the end of the 2nd millennium, no geneticist doubted the potential for applying the technology to humans as well. But at that time, scientific understanding of human genes was still fragmentary...
...such tinkering can go awry. As even their proponents concede, spliced genes, like any other genes, can be picked up by wild species. The fear is that they will create what geneticist Norm Ellstrand of the University of California at Riverside, calls "a weedier weed"--a species, such as the superweed that turned up in France when sugar beets crossed accidentally with a wild relative, that is both harder to control and more ecologically disruptive. Scientists also fear that as use of Bt crops increases, so will resistance in the very pests they're aimed at, depriving organic farmers...
...work, described in last week's Nature, centers on so-called T-box genes. Common to all vertebrates, including humans, they're important in the development of limbs in the embryo--determining, for example, whether they become hind- or forelimbs (or in chickens, legs or wings). But, says geneticist Juan Carlos Belmonte, the study's senior scientist, "we didn't know if one of these genes by itself was sufficient to send a limb down one pathway or the other...
Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who has long battled what he calls "Darwinian fundamentalism," dismisses the meme as a "meaningless metaphor." H. Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester, isn't much nicer. "I think memetics is an utterly silly idea," he complains. "It's just cocktail-party science...
...extremely wary about what goes onto the family dinner table. Herbert Krach of the Swiss Small Farmers Union notes, "For years scientists assured us that feeding animal-based feeds to cattle was harmless." But the cautions also owe something to romantic--and perhaps outdated--notions about agriculture. Says population geneticist Brian Johnson of Britain's conservation watchdog English Nature: "Conventional intensive agriculture has done more damage to wildlife than anything else." Anyone who thinks that pesticide spraying is safer than biotech crops, he says, "must be nuts...