Trying to break down some complicates science concepts into easily understood and digestible reading using everyday examples and analogies:
DNA - they're building blocks, just like LEGO. A 4 dot square brick is a 4 dot square brick whether you use it to build a space ship or you use it to build a house. It is not a 'space ship brick' and you didn't build your house outta space ships! There are no fish in your tomatoes, no humans in your rice. Just a pretty blue building block.
Traditional hybriding techniques are basically taking two LEGO houses, throwing them together and hoping you get a better house out of it because one of them has the blue bricks you wanted for the window wells in your yellow house. Genetic engineering in a lab is finding blue bricks in a space ship and saying "oh those will make my yellow house so much better, so you dismantle the space ship to add the yellow bricks in.
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Bt corn - Bt is a pesticide - naturally occurring in the soil, it's poisonous to corn borers, by adding Bt to corn genetics they make their own Bt and corn borers die. It is not poisonous to people. In fact it's so natural and safe, that it's approved for organic farming as a spray. Adding it to the corn structure just means that it doesn't kill the beneficial bugs like aphids and praying mantises while getting rid of corn borers.
Things that are poisonous to one species while being completely harmless to others is not a new concept. Chocolate is poisonous to dogs, so are grapes, so are lots of things that are completely fine for us. I couldn't get through certain times of the month without chocolate and fermented grapes. Dogs being mammals and all are a whole lot more similar, biologically speaking, to people than bugs are. Just because it kills bugs, doesn't necessarily mean it's bad for you.
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Chemicals. Chemicals aren't bad or good or ... they just are. Like DNA (which is made of chemicals) the whole world, and everything in it, is a chemical. Everything we know and touch and eat and are is a chemical. And it even has a chemical name. Everyone knows the Dihydrogen Monoxide joke, but then there's citric acid and sodium bicarbonate these are harmless things we use every day. Lots of other things we may find hard to pronounce or don't immediately recognize are on the labels of foods, that doesn't automatically make them 'bad'. The hype over the yoga mat chemical was a perfect example of that. Yellow bricks and red bricks and blue bricks - just because a blue brick was used to make the yoga mat, doesn't mean it isn't perfectly fine to use it in your bread. There was an excellent British TV documentary series called 'E-Numbers" (in Europe all food additives are given an 'e-number') that talks about how some of those things that sound scary because we don't necessarily understand what they are, are not only useful, and safe, but some time absolutely necessary. It's an excellent watch - all the episodes - for demystifying some of the misinformation around food additives.
As an addendum - just because it was built in a laboratory doesn't mean it's bad, and just because it's 'natural' doesn't make it good. Hemlock is natural, I don't want to be drinking hemlock tea. That may be over simplified and I'm not trying to insult anyone's intelligence, I'm just saying that the same principals of truth that apply to "I don't want to drink hemlock tea, and tea tree oil will kill your dog." also applies to other things that are more complicated. Valarian tea is really good for some people, so is digitalis, but they can also be extremely dangerous used indiscriminately.
Darkness is scary, fear of the unknown is the core of all human fear. Education, information, is enlightenment and the way out of fear. Whatever your particular concern or fear, or issue is, there is information out there - LOADS of it, some of it's a bit confusing, most of it isn't really if you read it with an open and inquiring mind. We live in a time where almost the entire sum total of human knowledge is there available at our fingertips! That's a really amazing thing, and we shouldn't look that gift horse in the mouth.
Originally posted to: The Plan® comment there or here![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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