> Can you cite an example of an animal we have changed so much it won't
survive without us??

Yes.

Multiple man-made E. coli variants have been created to, for example,
convert sugars in "Kombu" kelp into ethanol:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6066/308

There's another that DuPont is starting to use to make BDO, a precursor
chemical used in making plastics.

Those are very neat tricks, but one wants to be very sure to avoid the
"Ice-Nine" scenario from Kurt Vonnegut's "Cats Cradle". In the story, the
army, wanting to cross rivers without stopping to build bridges, created a
way to "solidify" water. They used it without thinking through the
implications, and the river solidified, as did all connected streams, the
oceans, and so on, until the entire planet had no liquid water, thus making
the battle on the other side of the river about as moot an issue as anything
could ever be.

So, the E. coli is modified so that will not survive unless "fed" specific
artificial man-made amino acids.  This is to assure that they will not
reproduce outside the lab or the industrial process for which they are
created.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7537/full/nature14095.html
http://tinyurl.com/o7y9h9j

I take a lot of guff for mentioning the "hard sciences" here, but yes, we do
live in an age of miracles, and yes, we have developed "creatures" that
depend upon us for survival.

Ah, one thinks, but what if the artificial amnio acid has a natural
counterpart somewhere?  
Or what it the E. coil mutates to somehow be able to survive WITHOUT the
man-made amnio acids?
What about the "Andromeda Strain", the Michael Crichton book and classic
1970s dystopian film?

The developers offer this statement:

"The RE.coli changes are dispersed throughout the genome; therefore, either
not enough genes come over in such a swap-known as horizontal gene
transfer-to allow proper protein manufacture and survival or the bugs trade
so much genetics that the tweaked E. coli loses its other tweaks, too. The
Harvard group, 'either they didn't take in enough DNA to escape or they took
in so much DNA that they overwrote the whole genome' "

I'm not sure what scenario, if any, could be posited to overcome the above,
and be a basis for concern about run-away bacteria eating seaweed and
creating "oil slicks" as they do.

And I checked even though some of the team members are from Harvard, our
friend Dr. Lu of Harvard is not involved in this effort at all, so there's
no need to worry about errors in basic math. :)

In other modern miracles, my father had cataract surgery last week.  They
did both eyes in one sitting, each took seconds to do, and he was home
happily reading the paper that afternoon.
 

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