Genetic Engineering
Dancer raised in his diary the question of how is genetic engineering different to what we've been doing to plants and animals for years? (Selective breeding and such.)

I feel that the main difference between GE and selective breeding is that GE can introduce genetic material into organisms which would never have evolved naturally, no matter how much selective breeding was used. An example would be introducing anti-freeze genes from arctic fish into strawberries.

Do I think that GE is bad? In many cases I do, because I feel that it's being used as quick-fix to many problems and hasn't been thought through properly. A few examples:

• GE "Round-up ready" herbicide resistant plants are engineered. These plants can withstand large dosages of herbicides without dying. The advantage is that you can spray your fields with herbicides and only kill the weeds, not the crop. The downside is that the resulting crop will have an increased amount of residual herbicides, and that any weeds that survive are probably naturally resistant, and will reproduce to give stronger, more resistant weeds next year.
• Plants are GE'ed to make them stronger, tougher, frost-resistant. If these plants inter-breed with wild plants, we can potentially end up with superweeds, which are also tougher and stronger. This is a real possibility with plants like brasicas (spel?) (cabbages, brocolli, mustards) which have a variety of domesticated and wild strains.

In many instances, GE is no different to inventing a new pesticide or herbicide. It works for a few years, but eventually resistant strains result.

If we're using GE to modify micro-organisms to produce useful substances, then that's fine, most of those things won't survive in the wild anyway. If we're using GE so we can spray even more chemicals on our crops, then that's just downright foolish.