Messing around with genes is okay CHARLES BURY
Should foods from genetically altered plants and animals be required to say so on the label? Probably. But we'll be starting a few thousand years late.
Genetic engineering is the technology of re-assembling the parts of various life forms to come up with something new and better - like mixing up the parts of several jig-saw puzzles, then trying to put a picture together on the dining-room table. You may find what you're looking for, but you may instead come up with something completely different.
Most varieties of apple trees thrive in the Eastern Townships, for example, but pear trees don't - they can't stand the cold. So a farmer wanting to grow pears in Frelighsburg or Compton might try to improve a pear tree somehow by adding on the part of a local apple tree that makes it hardy enough to live through winter in the snow belt.
Finding which part that might be is a hit-and-miss affair, with the misses far outnumbering the hits. Before finding a winter-hardy combination, the orchard owner may come up with pear trees which produce shiny red fruit, or which can resist cold but not wind, or taste bad, or fall off the tree too early or mature too late, spoil a few days after picking, or have any of a thousand other possible faults.
Twentieth-century DNA technology just makes this easier - the main differences with today's experiments being that it can be done much faster, and the parts spliced together are much smaller - but it's still as unpredictable as next year's weather.
Of course plants have been grafted for thousands of years. The stem of one plant is attached to the roots of another, to produce a plant with some characteristics from each donor. This is called grafting and is basically the same technique now used on humans as well as plants. Another old-fashioned genetic trick is the horticultural technique we call cross-pollination.
It started with insects buzzing from bush to bush, taking some pollen from one plant to fertilize the flowers of another. This is how plants have sex. Somewhere along the way a prehistoric gardener noticed the results, tried a little cross-pollination him- or herself, and selective plant breeding was begun. Today it's done with Baggies.
Yet another old way to breed plants is with cuttings from a root, branch, or leaf. True Love's army of African Violets are literally nothing but a bunch of chips off the old block. The gardener snips a little piece off a favourite plant, then sticks the cutting in water and makes it grow. The result will be a new plant with the exact characteristics of its single parent. Today we call this cloning.
On the livestock side, prehistoric cattlemen did the same thing with deer to come up with primitive cows (ever noticed how they have the same eyes and ears?). The early breeders took the best-built buck they could catch and mated it with the heaviest doe. Then they took that couple's offspring and crossbred them with the neighbour's fawn. The process was repeated over and over for centuries, the deer grew bigger and beefier, until eventually they got to the point where they were no longer considered to be deer but rather a new species called the cow (often pronounced 'kyew' in Brome County).
Same with sheep, goats, cats, dogs, chickens, you name it: each is a new species created by genetic manipulation.
Among the few exceptions to this rule are the fish and other things we eat that come from under water, which are substantially unchanged by man.
The turkey is another exception. That Christmas poultry you're still digesting is in fact the same species as the illusive wild turkey, big bird of the hardwood forest. Being a North American species, the turkey was first domesticated only in the 1600s, so the barnyard variety has not had time to evolve into a distinct species.
As far as we know, civilization began in ancient Mesopotamia, the lushly fertile delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq. The model for the biblical Garden of Eden was there, in Babylon. This was one of the places where gardening and agriculture began, along with the Mayan region of South America - southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize - and a couple of locations in southeast Asia. As early humans first learned to produce more food than they could eat, they were left with a surplus they could trade for something else:
"I give you my grain, you give me your grapes."
"Oh, that's handy, let's live close to each other."
The cradles of civilization were rocked by genetic engineering. Select the best, pitch the rest, and let's see what develops. But don't let the modern equivalent scare you - all we're really doing now is getting back to basics.
Charlie Bury is a freelance writer based in Birchton, Quebec.
Copyright © 1999 Charles Bury/Log Cabin Chronicles/12.99 |