GMOs without foreign DNA

This post is part of the No GMO Challenge Blog carnival.

In an article posted on Science Daily this month, Daniel Voytas, lead author and director of the University of Minnesota Center for Genome Engineering describes a new type of genetic modification being researched for our food.

In the protocol, genes were removed from a tobacco plant, modified and cultured to produce mature plants with chosen characteristics. While this might seem a step forward from splicing DNA across species, the motives for the modification are still suspect. The original modification was to allow the plants to survive exposure to herbicides. This does nothing to reduce the herbicide load in our bodies, our water supply and our soil, instead merely allowing plants to survive greater and greater exposure to the poisons that are killing the rest of the planet.

His next step is to alter rice, a critical food crop of underdeveloped and impoverished nations. When this untested GMO rice enters the world’s food supply, billions of lives will be at stake as people who have no choice in the marketplace are used as experimental animals.

Another frightening aspect, straight from the scientist’s mouth:

“This is the first real advance in technology to genetically modify plants since foreign DNA was introduced into plant chromosomes in the early 1980s,” Voytas said. “It could become a revolutionary tool for manipulating plant, animal and human genomes.”

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, what I believe to be the true motive of genetic modification: manipulating the human genome.