Bill,
You are confusing selective breeding or "breeder manipulation" with
"transgenic manipulation". To illustrate consider the following: You can
selectively breed cold hardiness into your bee stock by selecting the
hardiest individuals each generation as your brood source - if any
perceptual change occurs it will take many generations. In the end you very
well could achieve a "cold hardy" stock however these colonies will not be
any more hardy than a "typical" cold hardy bee. You have shifted the average
performance of your colonies towards the cold hardy end of the natural
distribution. This is selective breeding (cold hardy bee mated with cold
hardy bee).
Now consider the transgenic route. Rather than going through continuous
rounds of selective breeding, weeding out the less hardy queens and drones,
we excise an antifreeze gene from an alpine moth species and integrate it
into your bees - this being done in one generation. This is transgenics,
synthesizing new genomes by integrating genes which express favorable
characteristics (bee mated with moth) with dramatic changes in performance
not possible through selective means.
The practice is common place in the industrial microbial world - commercial
preps of enzymes, yeasts, bacterial cultures etc. The public is becoming
concerned because the technology has matured to the point that "higher"
organisms are now being modified (no more of a danger, just more obvious).
Winter flounder antifreeze genes have been introduced to cash crops to
induce cold hardiness; herbicide resistance / pesticide expression genes
incorporated into many crops (e.g. Monsanto's "Round-up Ready" Soy; Ciba
Geigy's modified maize - altered to make it resistant to corn-borer and to
increase its tolerance of certain herbicides), salmon and trout which have
had the growth hormone gene switched permanently "on" resulting in 400%
growth increase.
The up-shot of all this is that the full impact of these technologies have
not been worked out and the resultant products have gone into commercial
production (i.e. out of the lab into the field with no safe guards or
mechanism of regulation) in a climate of "all that matters is the bottom
line". Below are a few of the major concerns along with a single reference
for those who may with to follow up.
Cheers, John
Biotechnology Background and Hazards:
Data on release of genetically engineered organisms in the USA. Union of
Concerned Scientists, Gene Exchange, 5(2), 12, 1994; 5(1), 7, 1994.
Toxic and Allergenic Effects:
Identification of brazil-nut allergen in transgenic soybeans. Nordlee,
J.A., Taylor, S.L., Townsend, J.A., Thomas, L.A. and Bush, R.K. The New
England Journal of Medicine, pp 688-728, March 14, 1996.
Environmental Damage to Soil Quality:
The effects of genetically engineered micro-organisms on soil food-webs.
Holmes, M.T., Ingham, E.R. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America
(Supplement), 75, 97, 1994.
Negative Impacts of Herbicide Tolerance:
Environmental concerns with the development of herbicide-tolerant plants.
Goldburg, R.J. Weed Technology, 6, 647-652, 1994.
Ecological Risks of Gene Transfer to Wild Species:
Foreign DNA sequences are received by a wild-type strain of Aspergillus
niger after co-culture with transgenic higher plants. Hoffman, T., Golz,
C. and Schieder, O. Curr. Genet. 27, 70-76, 1994.
Negative Effects of the Use of Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) in
Cows:
Unlabeled milk from cows treated with biosynthetic growth hormones: a case
of regulatory abdication. Epstein, S.S., International Journal of Health
Services, 26(1), 173-186, 1996.
Risks of New Illnesses and Negative Effects of Trans-Species Gene Transfers:
Ingested foreign (phage M13) DNA survives transiently in the
gastrointestinal tract and enters the bloodstream of mice. Schubbert, R.,
Lettman, C. and Doerfler, W. Mol. Gen. Genet. 242, 495-504, 1994.
At 08:45 AM 7/22/97 -0700, you wrote:
>Maybe someone can help me out here. As I understand it, we are talking
>about gene manipulation to create a plant with "desired"
>characteristics. That is wrong according to the posts I have read. So
>Brother Adam is a bad guy for his gene manipulation with honey bees. And
>I am bad for breeding for winter tolerant bees. And all the seed
>companies are bad for breeding hardier, bug tolerant plants. And nature
>is bad for allowing genes to change in species to allow the species to
>accomodate to changing conditions.
>And to combat it in beekeeping, we should get beekeepers with AFB or
>varroa susceptible hives and put them near ones where the beekeeper is
>breeding for AFB or varroa resistance- because they are making
>transgenetic bees! If we do so, we can stop all transgenic bee
>experiments from succeeding.
>If what I have said is right, I'll try to do all I can to stop the
>terrible evil of transgenic bees.
>Anyone got some AFB? Varroa?
>Bill Truesdell
>Bath, ME
>
>
---------------------------------------------------------
John Volpe
Dept. of Biology - Centre for Environmental Health
University of Victoria
PO Box 1700, Victoria, British Columbia, CANADA V8W 2Y2
TEL. (250) 721 7098
FAX. (250) 472 4075
[log in to unmask]
http://web.uvic.ca/~jvolpe/
Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a
meaning of which I disapprove. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
|
