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California Bans Genegineered Fish
Cheeko writes "California regulators have announced that they are blocking the sale of genetically engineered fish. The arguments of the regulators seem to echo some of those discussed earlier here."
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Is there anything stopping California residents from taking a quick trip out of state, buying the little fishys, and then bringing them back home? I can't see how this ban will do much good with today's interstate commerce...
I am a little bit bothered about the general responce to genetically modifying anything. I mean, people just need to get off the possible negative side effects and realise the potential we are holding in our hands.
I mean, lets talk about better living through chemistry breaking to a whole new level.
"Indians" were cross breeding corn with corn. Transgenic canola cross-breeds canola with fish. The transgenic canola is patented. Canola, whether transgenic or not has airborne pollen. So neighbours of farmers with transgenic crops have been sued for patent violation for planting their own seed.
Sure, the geneticists can claim that they could "turn on" sterility in the target animal/plant genome. But that begs the conundrum:
If one modification can have unintended consequences than all of them can. If neither can have unintended consequences, why bother with the safeguard?
Okay, it's an oversimplification of a vastly complex subject, but I think the proposition is oversimplified as well. It is all well and good to cite genetic sterility as a safeguard when making other genetic modifications, but what are the unintended consequneces of genetically inducing sterility? More importantly, the unintended consequnces of the two in combination. After all, at one point, adding an extra Y chromosome might have looked like a viable way to block breeding, but now we know that would have resulted in billions of sociopathic fish (but sterile).
Power corupts, but absolute power is kinda neat... at least until your three hundred pound, opposable thumbed, parthenogenic guppies decide that they are entitled to the six pack of Weinhards in the fridge...
We simply don't know enough to know what we have to do to minimize the impact of mistakes, malice and general human stupidity.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
California is also the only state on the continental US that still bans domestic ferrets. This ban has more to do with opinion and misinformation than fact. And it ignores an estimated 500K pet ferrets already within California's borders.
I'm not suprised the same attitude is applied to fish.
expressing a fluorescent protein in zebrafish may sound harmless, but I think restricting such things for now is prudent.
I have to disagree. I think few people would disagree that biotech is a phenomenally influential tool.
However, I don't think that it's all that efficient to put a hold on biotech work and try to do research out of the hands of the public.
If a zebrafish escapes, it has a gene that is potentially very damaging -- it's easy for predators to see. It's unlikely to do very well. Glowing zebrafish will probably die out in the wild quickly, leaving only regular zebrafish. Nature is pretty robust.
On the other hand, there are a few things that we might want to avoid. One is introducing poisonous variants of nondomesticated edible fish. As long as it isn't too expensive to be poisonous, there's a pretty clear evolutionary advantage to an animal in being poisonous. A poisonous, say, tuna could take over and beat out the nonpoisonous tuna -- and then we wouldn't be able to just catch and eat tuna any more.
As long as we do our best to avoid things that clearly could have very negative side effects (such as the poisonous tuna above), I think we'll be okay. Dragging feet on technology has never worked. We're better off working with biotechnology and understanding it, and learning to deal with it. And enjoying its fruits.
Think of fire. Fire is can have *phenomenal* destructive value. You can literally wipe out thousands of acres of life with a flick of your fingers and the aid of fire. Many people have died from and been hurt by fire (and still are). However, we adopted fire, and learned to work with it, and would never dream of going back.
I agree that we will probably muck up some of the existing state of things. We'll probably wipe out some species and muck up some ecosystems. We've been doing that for a long, long time, though.
Good comment, though I disagree with some of it.
May we never see th
And guess what --- this happens all the time.
Ignoring simple mutation, which can add new encodings to a species' gene pool that weren't there before, there's a well-established and uncontroversial mechanism that allows gene sequences to be passed from one species to another, entirely different species.
It works like this: viruses reproduce by injecting their genetic material into a host cell. The new material hijacks the host cell, which starts producing more viruses.
Sometimes this doesn't work properly, and you end up with fragmented viral genetic material in the host cell, which doesn't work. What does the host do? What it always did, largely. Except that when it reproduces, it will now reproduce the viral genetic material as well. (If the viral genetic material isn't completely disabled, this can cause really odd effects, like cancer.)
What happens if the host cell happens to be a sex cell, like in the testes? Well, the sperm produced will contain the viral genetic material, as well, which will get reproduced into every cell in the offspring, etc. So you've now transferred viral genetic material into the gene pool.
It works the other way, too --- the host cell can start producing viruses containing fragments of host genetic material. So if one of these contaminated viruses infects a sex cell in another species of creature, you've now transferred genetic material from one species to another completely different species.
Does this sound far fetched? Yes, it is. But it happens. There are sections of human DNA that have been positively identified as coming from viruses, and there are sections that show clear signs as having come from other species --- although it's a bit hard to tell.
(Embarassingly, I can't remember the technical name for this process.)
It gets even more complicated with plants, because plants don't have the single-cell-zygote bottleneck between generations. It's entirely possible for several pollen cells to fertilise a plant, and the resulting offspring will be a chimera. (This happens surprisingly frequently with humans, too.) There are also some specialised processes for incorporating foreign genetic material that I don't really understand or remember enough of to describe.
DNA's not as sacred as you think it is.
This reminds me of nuclear power. Done right, you can make a nuclear power plant that is incapable of having a melt down, yet people are so afraid of the nightmares of science fiction that they refuse to look at the facts. France has 59 nuclear reactors that supply 77% of the total energy to them, and you don't see a bunch of glowing frenchies now do you? Yet this stupid knee jerk reaction people have to technology has caused us to remain dependent on fossil fuels for our power, and no doubt contributed to the energy crisis in California. I'm not saying that there aren't ANY problems with nuclear power. Obviously there are, but the point is that the positive easily outweighs the negative when viewed in a rational light, and the decision not to use the technology comes from people's emotions/fears and not reason. Genetic engineering is a lot like nuclear power, with the exception of the bar to entry being a lot lower. Unlike nuclear power, all you need to do genetic research is the scientists, the money, and a few cute helpless animals. People trying to block genetic manipulation (either the sale of it or the research) are just going to force it to go underground, or to another country that lacks regulation where there is a much higher probability that something WILL go wrong. The solution is not to outlaw it, but to regulate it closely.