Two articles today in the news got me thinking about genetically modified food and bioengineering again. In short, I think we have Ag gone mad, medicine gone mad, and Hey!, we just plain got Science gone mad! What drove HighTech crazy? Unfortunately it is the same thing that is driving all of us crazy, the constant insane drive by our ruling class to find new ways to profit and to max all profits out, and to speedup profit making all for themselves. In short, their greed is doing us all in. Let’s look at the story of Mothra vs Nopalzilla first, to see what got me into a tizzy on this one. It would be comical, except it’s really not.
As we can see, the moth that came to threaten Mexico got its start 90 years ago by an attempt of ‘scientists’ to ‘bioengineer’ in Australia. Some 125 years previously, settlers in Australia had imported a dye producing bug to help color their uniforms red. How important was that! They then imported cactus nopales to feed this bug with the red dye inside. But the nopales ran amuck in Australia like the poisonous cane toads later did, and wrecked havock on the natural habitat. That’s when the genius scientists stepped in with the moth that they took from Argentina to kill the nopales. Great success!
But this moth then made its way from Australia to Florida and started heading south towards Mexico, where 1/2 of all the world’s many species of nopal lives. Stopped in Alabama, the moth decided to hit the Isla of Mujeres offshore in southern Mexico, where now it may be blown a few miles to mainland Mexico in a few days, and then go on to destroy the nopal plants that just happen to hold down much of the soil of Mexico! In short, bioengineering scientists can later be proven that they have been about as adept as the Three Stooges.
So speaking of the Stooges, we have Taco Bell and Monsanto genetically modifying corn. But these stooges forgot the scallions it seems. E-coli, served at Taco Bell in the scallions has been killing and injuring folk now in several Eastern States, and Taco Bell and US health officials initially blamed Mexican produce for that. But just today, the actual culprit had been tracked down to California once again, where just a few weeks previous the Spinach had been killing folk that had bought those nice packaged, clean looking bagged specimens we are all tempted to buy while grocery shopping. Should we really trust people like Taco Bell with the GM corn, when they can’t even get the regular old onions right? I rather think not. Plus, we have the example of Mothra and Nopalzilla, too, to also help make us think twice about the supposed benefits that the HIghTech Ag folk say will come our way with mutating corn and other farm products.
Which brings us to medical bioengineering. It’s just the big thing now to be playing with genes, Dr Moreau. Go to the journals Lancet and Scientific American, and all sorts of groovy things are on the way, they say. Not only farm animals and farm plants are going to be modified right and left genetically, but medicines, vaccines, and lab rats. And you and I are the lab rats, it appears. All disease is going to disappear due to these tinkerings! Never mind the trillions being spent to blow the world up, reduce people down to utter squalor and despair, and to make us …. well…. SICK.
We need a lot less techology guiding the world on behalf of rich pirates that own the ag labs where it is being produced, and more common sense from the peasants. So in regards to genetically engineered foods, we should still say Down With the Food Czars! They are interested in making more bucks, and not interested really in our overall health. Don’t believe that? Walk down the grocery aisles some and ponder it a little more then.
And Doctor Moreau? You scare me the most. Your bizarre experiments on us all through your med labs and hospitals are producing a monstrous world ahead. The net result of the last decades’ practice by the corporate docs, is a world of disease we never ever dreamed possible not even in Hell, all flying our way at once. Don’t believe me? Pay a visit to some of the cancer wards perhaps. Try the burn units. Try the ICUs. Then go to the labs where reaserch is done on Dr. Moreau’s creatures. Hell with George Orwell and 1984. It’s more like HG Wells and his famouns book about the mad doc, instead. Todays’s Dr Moreaus promises us vaccines to cure all diseases that taste just like lollypops to lure us aboard his grand experiment. Yes, the bioengineering story has a little of Hansel and Gretel in it, too.
I love it when you write about medical/health issues. You are always DEAD RIGHT. I went to a doc yesterday who told me that humans currently inhabiting the planet are dealing with 2-million-year-old DNA and are, thus, ill-equipped to deal with what modern life requires of us. So naturally we need the “help” of bio-engineers just to keep our heads above water…..throw global warming into the mix and the water may soon be too high for any of us to long survive, even with their help!
Like the what-seems-like-comic-book-scifi story of the tomatoes?
Before there was corn hybrid with squid.
The theory, and perhaps the fact that it has mysteriously disappeared, is frightening.
See, the idea was to recombine DNA from cod, like the fish, with tomatoes.
The interesting part was that cod, though the swim in water which is several degrees lower than the freezing point of fresh water, don’t freeze.
They know how the ocean water doesn’t freeze at that temp, it is salty.
Not so the codfish. Enter a dilemna with tomatoes. The tomato must be harvested as soon as the skin turns a slightly more yellow shade of green, then ripen on its way to market. Pick them when they are even orange and they will be mushy before they get unpacked at the store.
Refrigeration can slow the process but not much, but what about freezing them?
Well, the problem with this veggie cryogenics is that once frozen, then thawed, the tomato takes on a consistency remarkably like that of the rotted version thereof. Seems the water crystalizes and takes the proteins along with it. But if you found some way to make the water not actually freeze, even at very low temperature, you could theoretically pick tomatoes when red, non-freeze them and keep them fresh for as long as you have the bread to keep the refrigerators running. Re-enter the cod.
Now the focus of this rant isn’t the sick theories of cryogenics, as applied by very rich idiots as soon as they croak in the hopes that one day Death itself might be cured.
There had been cryogenics in sci fi since at least the 50s, Heinlein’s The Door into Summer leaps to mind. The idea starts as a way to fresh freeze troops before the Big Burn or Big Bummer or nucular war as the Chimp would phrase it. Then thaw them out in time to save the rest of the world from the Communist Slavery which would be laid on the rest of us by the survivors of the ultimate Red State.
Then turns into a sci fi love story.
But the sickest part of it comes with what is called same generation mutation, or cell therapy.
The idea is to inject (and this is as far as the Omni article would go) Navy and ostensibly civilian divers with this genetic cocktail, and thus allow them to dive deeper, longer, bigger and uncut but now I’m just getting stupid with the alliterations…. breathe ommm ommm calm mmellloww…
and to dive even in the frigid waters say, off Alaska, or maybe Siberia, hey what a concept right?
Kind of like the glory days of the fantastic four and the X-men.
It would make the ultimate Cold War soldier.