A nice summary on GMO

> Genetic modification and biotechnology are not new. For thousands of years, people have been crossbreeding plants to improve the growth, yield and survival of cultivated crops. Anyone visiting a dog show or going to the races sees the results of the selective breeding of animals over many years. Those processes involve trial and error and so are inevitably hit and miss. The revolution that is modern biotechnology began with the immense British achievement of Watson, Crick, Wilkin and Franklin: the discovery in the 1950s of the structure of DNA--the stuff of which genes are made. Genes are the governors of a plant or animal's development and determine characteristics, such as blue eyes, long legs, wide leaves or yellow flowers. It is amazing that many genes are common across all animals and across all plants, and that some are common to both plants and animals. For example, a gene that helps to fight fungal infection is common to scorpions, shellfish and radishes.

> During the past 40 years, we have developed techniques to manipulate and transfer genes to achieve effects deliberately, without using the hit-and-miss techniques of plant and animal breeders. At the start, that meant that the time-honoured process of plant breeders could be speeded up, but modern techniques for genetic manipulation go much further than that. Effects can be achieved that could never have been produced by crossbreeding and creating hybrids. Essentially, genetic manipulation is like long division; it is a technique for achieving a particular result. You cannot generalise, as many commentators have done recently, saying that *genetic modification is inherently unsafe*, any more than you can say that long division is unsafe because it was used in the calculations that led to the atomic bomb.

Mr. Nigel Beard,  Former Labour MP for Bexleyheath and Crayford

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