Peter Borst called me out, thusly:

> James, would you care to comment on this:

> "Candidate bee enhancers, chimeric bee/fly enhancers, and other
> modified enhancers will then be tested in transgenic constructs
> introduced into Drosophila..."

If my opinion matters, it sounds like a decent test plan.  Drosophila (fruit flies)
are easy to work with, and something that won't work with the well-known
and oft-modified fruit fly certainly won't work with far more complex creatures.
(Disclaimer - I'm not a geneticist, but I do play one on television.)

In a similar vein to the test plan above, if I were to attach wings to my arms,
and flap them hard enough, I will thus be able to test if I can fly from my barn roof.  :)
(Disclaimer - I, like all humans, have the aerodynamic advantages of a brick.)

But no one needs my view of Peter's quotation of a third party's guess about what
they might do if someone gave them a near-infinite amount of money and time.
(Disclaimer - I have neither infinite time, money, or patience.)

I can simply quote Peter's quotation of yet another third person who is done
speculating, and has moved on to commiserating after the fourth or fifth whiskey:

> "The honeybee stands exemplary for the difficulties to genetically
> engineer arthropods. The problems stem from the complex social
> behaviour and biology of bees. Larvae are reliant on worker-bees,
> and the latter are very discerning and will destroy larvae if they
> appear atypical in any way. This leads to problems in rearing
> transgenic larvae, because workers might detect compounds used to
> protect larvae from desiccation during microinjection and destroy
> them. A second problem is that the eggs are extremely delicate and
> do not survive well after microinjection. Thus, transgenic bees are far
> from becoming reality." (Marshall, 1998).

Wow grammar fans, I'm running out of tenses up here.
I'm up to "third person plural"!
I'll go back to "first person rural" now, thank you.

        jim