It's not nice to fool with mother nature- ethical issues concerning GM foods

As we should also include some ethical issues in our blog posts concerning our CAJ, I decided to consider some aspects a bit more closely. After having done some research on the Internet and read several useful links, I, first of all, learned that humans have actually modified crops long before newer techniques of genetic modification were introduced. Farmers have always selected which plant they wanted to plant or grow. In short, they ever since chose plants that grew well or at least better than others. The age-old techniques were simply extended through the introduction of genetic modification. Both the traditional as well as the modern way of changing the characteristics of a plant or any organism would not have existed without human intervention. As already mentioned in previous blog posts, this intervention causes lots of controversies resulting in people opposing to or being in favor of genetic modification of plants.

What I came across during the research and found very interesting are the following two paragraphs which demonstrate that language plays an extremely important role in this ongoing debate.

"Allowed to ripe on the vine naturally, this ruby tomato comes to your table with more homegrown taste. By drwaing on the best tradtitions of crossbreeding, biotechnology has created a better-tasting tomato, available year-round."

"Although it may be as pretty as a plastic fruit, this tomato has been produced by introducing modified organisms into the plant's natural genetic material. It is the product of laboratory manipulations whose consequences for consumer health and for the environment are unknown."

Both paragraphs, one for and one against GM food, describe the same tomato and show how language is part of the problem. In general, it can be seen that opponents are good at creating bad images of GM food and at  spreading doubt about it.

Apart from language used in different ways to achieve different aims concerning genetically modified food, the opinion of people, especially of the religious ones, differs very much from people being in favor of it.

The first named group believes that this modern technology changing the genes, the basic building blocks of lives, of any organism interfere in God's creation. 

"Many opponents believe that the genetic code of every organism has evolved over millions of years and that tampering with it is an act of hubris."

Due to my traditions and Indian roots I can understand people who think in that way. What I ask myself is that if it's okay to genetically modify a plant by, for instance, inserting genes of meat to it and then not mentioning this modification on the packaging of a product because it doesn't exceed the 0.9 treshold. In my opinion, this is simply not okay as it leads to the cheating of people and their strong religious beliefs.