However the environment comprises many natural and modified ecosystems and GMO’s may have impacts on them. Potential adverse impacts could affect gene pools ecosystems and regions. The environmental applications of gene technology include the possible control of weeds and pest animals, the deployment of GMO’s reducing the use of toxic chemicals and the use of GM bacteria to decontaminate toxic waste sites. The complexity of natural environments and ecosystem processes, and the unknown evolutionary fate of inserted genes, all contribute to difficulties of predicting environmental impacts. We should therefore proceed with caution as once gene technology enhances and is released into the environment it would be difficult or impossible to recall it. With living organisms any remedial action after an event is difficult and costly to achieve.
With genetic engineering, the “natural” limits do not always have to be respected. For this reason, some people consider GMO’s to be unnatural organisms that violate the laws of nature. Others counter than most foods consumed today have been radically modified over thousands of years through deliberate selection or accidental mutation. A feature of the debate over genetic engineering is that frequently different standards are invoked for different categories of GMOs. Some critics of genetically modified crops seem unperturbed by the fact that widely used pharmaceutical products are also genetically engineered.
Some people argue that genetically modifying crops is trying to ‘play God’ but fail to raise similar objections to techniques used to produce insulin, human growth hormone and many commonly used drugs. The possibility that we might see an increase in the number of allergic reactions to food as a result of genetic engineering has a powerful emotional appeal because many of us experienced this problem before the advent of transgenic crops. In other words, someone who is allergic to peanuts might suffer a reaction after consuming transgenic soybeans that had been modified by the insertion of the peanut gene that produces the allergic reaction. Since very few genes produce harmful compounds, the risk of this happening is extremely low. And even if an inserted gene were to result in production of a harmful compound, the chances of it ever reaching the consumer are negligible, considering the rigorous food safety tests that all new products (including GMOs) must undergo.
Genetic engineering (GE) disrupts the integrity of the recipient genome with unpredictable side effects and cannot readily control the number of copies of the gene that are inserted into the host, nor where in the genome they will end up. This can be countered as GE has a precise way of introducing desirable traits and techniques are improving all the time. Another concern is that GE exposes people to the increased dangers of horizontal gene transfer, a process whereby genes are not passed ‘vertically’ down from generations in the usual way but ‘horizontally’ from organism to organism and from species to species.
Some of the concerns over the potential threat posed by GMOs to human health have also been raised regarding animal health. The prospect of antibiotic resistance has been raised by some livestock producers therefore commonly used antibiotics may become ineffective. To date, no evidence has emerged to show consumption genetically modified feeds has affected animal health. But the fact that transformation techniques are no longer based on antibiotic resistance genes suggests that if problems have not been detected thus far, they are unlikely to emerge in the future.
Many developing countries still depend heavily on agriculture, so they stand to benefit from any technology that can increase food production, lower food prices and improve food quality. GMOs may be unnecessary in Britain, where the cost of raw commodities makes up a small fraction of the final price paid by consumers for heavily processed foods. But it is hard to make the argument in developing countries and it is difficult to predict their eventual worth but studies suggest that GMO’s are likely to bring considerable benefits to farmers and consumers.
Alongside all the benefits of this latest technology there are social and financial issues involved as if genetic cloning of genes becomes available in the future availability of information about a person’s genes may tempt health insurance companies to impose higher premiums or even refuse coverage to those whose genetic inheritance makes them vulnerable to illness. Clearly these policies would amount to discrimination, and hence would be morally objectionable. Genetics, like any other technology, is not morally problematic itself. It is our grasp of moral principles and our reluctance to take them seriously when inconvenient, which is the real problem.
Until recently, there were few ethical, social or legal discussions about gene technology, since the scientific consensus was that such a procedure was not biologically possible. With the appearance of Dolly, it now seems that human cloning will become feasible but we may doubt that the practise will come into widespread use. Human genetic engineering will be applicable to a wide variety of traits, it will be more powerful than cloning, and hence more attractive to more people. It will also however, raise more troubling questions than the prospect of cloning has thus far.