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One upcoming example: BT. BT is a bacteria / toxin used by organic farmers for decades to kill certain insect pests. At the previous rate of use- as a spray- there was a very, very low probability of insects developing resistance. Decades of use hadn't produced it. BT has now been spliced into crop plants: Monsanto got a patent simply for moving the gene from the bacteria to plants. (Its like Microsoft getting a patent for GUIs just by porting them from Macs to PCs-- not by writing new code, just a port. I don't think simply moving a gene from place to place meets the new and original requirements of patents. Taking "a method for killing insects via a gene that produces a toxin" and simply moving it from bacteria to corn really isn't unobvious)

The widespread planting of monocultures of BT crops means BT resistance is increasingly likely. As this happens the non-organic farmers can move onto other pesticides. But the organic farmers whose old standard- BT sprays- became useless have no backup. There was no system set up to compensate these farmers from their soon to be broken standard. Nor was there any "royalty" paid to these farmers who'd discovered BT in the first place.

BT resistance so far has been limited, because of BT's complexity, strict regulation, and additional pesticide use when outbreaks happen. But all it will take is planting in a non-regulated country- a place without enforcement for either of the manditory 20% nonBT plants or the use of secondary pesticides- and BT resistance could- and based on history, will- quickly show up.

This is just plain silly -- loose vs. well attached genes?

I'm talking about horizontal gene tranfer. Transgenic technologies, by definition, use techniques that make it easier for genes to move from one species to another; I don't think it's silly to speak of that as "loose".

They'll probably kill you too.

Two words: Lung Cancer.

That is the alternative, and pollution from traditional power generation plants is killing people every day, and sickening many more.

There is not a single permanent disposal site world-wide. no one can guarantee the safety. the U.S. government even has a website on _just this problem_. Ready-made dirty bombs are driven in trucks all over the country. GREAT IDEA.

If someone wants to kill a lot of civilians, all they need is a garage lab to produce chemical or bio agents. Much more effective, much easier to deal with, even more scary (1 gram of the right bio agent could kill millions). See the recent research on mouse pox for some really scary stuff (did that story make /.?). How 'bout a bio agent that'll only wipe out one ethnic group? The research is just about there. It is always hard to evaluate relative risk, but to me nuke power is way down the list.

BTW, as far as nuke disposal, there's a good reason for a lunar colony... =) Name another major energy source where the pollution could realistically be taken entirely off-planet.

Also BTW, I hope some of the recent solar energy developments lead (finally) to competitive photovoltaic power generation on a distributed basis (that'll tick off the power companies!). One of the more exciting developments is solar fabric, which can be used in curved building designs.

Two words: Lung Cancer.

That is the alternative, and pollution from traditional power generation plants is killing people every day, and sickening many more.

There is not a single permanent disposal site world-wide. no one can guarantee the safety. the U.S. government even has a website on _just this problem_. Ready-made dirty bombs are driven in trucks all over the country. GREAT IDEA.

If someone wants to kill a lot of civilians, all they need is a garage lab to produce chemical or bio agents. Much more effective, much easier to deal with, even more scary (1 gram of the right bio agent could kill millions). See the recent research on mouse pox for some really scary stuff (did that story make /.?). How 'bout a bio agent that'll only wipe out one ethnic group? The research is just about there. It is always hard to evaluate relative risk, but to me nuke power is way down the list.

BTW, as far as nuke disposal, there's a good reason for a lunar colony... =) Name another major energy source where the pollution could realistically be taken entirely off-planet.

Also BTW, I hope some of the recent solar energy developments lead (finally) to competitive photovoltaic power generation on a distributed basis (that'll tick off the power companies!). One of the more exciting developments is solar fabric, which can be used in curved building designs.

Retrovirii (mainly adenovirus, I believe) are very good devices for invading human cells. Unfortunately they also insert themselves randomly (the altered adenovirus, not the wild-type) and can cause cancers. Not to mention the fact that your body will see it as invader and try to attack it.

This site has a brief overview of some technical problems with gene therapy.

well you would only have to simulate the part of the universe that was relevant to us, that means anything closer to us than x light years,
where x is the number of years you want your simulation to run.
anyway i think that most modern physicists agree that you would not be able to emulate the world completely because you would not be able to take a complete snapshot of the world as it is(not because the task would be to enormus but because you would only have 50% chance of reading the state of each individual photon in the universe without altering it).
There is a lot of reading on the net about simulated worlds mostly anything you read about quantum mecanics touches on the subject http://www.i-sis.org.uk/QuantumComputing.php is as good a place as any to start.

There's absolutely nothing about a modified gene that would make it more mobile.

The oft-repeated refrain that "transgenic DNA is just like ordinary DNA" is false. Transgenic DNA is in many respects optimised for horizontal gene transfer. It is designed to cross species barriers and to jump into genomes, and it has homologies to the DNA of many species and their genetic parasites (plasmids, transposons and viruses), thereby enhancing recombination with all of them [2].