I ran across this article today about scientists figuring out a way to spin spider silk from the milk of genetically modified goats. What do you think about this? (please read the article before your respond so that you know what it's talking about)

"Genetically modified" seems to be a real hot button for many people today. In many cases, it can mean as little as selective breeding, which has been done for eons.

Since spider silk is more than five times stronger (by weight) than steel, yet extremely flexible, being able to "farm" spider silk would enable us to make lots of very useful items, from sutures to bulletproof clothing and bio-degradable fish nets. It would arguably be of great benefit to society.

Are there any ethical dilemmas in your mind about using goats or other farm animals in this fashion, provided that the genetic modifications are not severe or harmful in any way to the animals? If they have found a way to slightly alter the chemical composition of the goats' milk so that they can use it to spin spider silk, is there any moral dilemma in doing so?

I'm always interested in other people's viewpoints. What do you think? Again, please read the article (published at new scientist magazine online) before responding.

-- Chuck (woah@mission4me.com), January 18, 2002

Answers

Yep, read about this about a year ago. I do not like it any better now than I did then. They said in the article..there was nothing they could make out of it..then why in the world did they do it? Call be backwords, a religious nut, etc. but God made everything perfect and man is not going to improve on that. I am so tired of men trying to improve my food by combining genes from this and that. I DO NOT want to eat that stuff. And I am tired of the powers that be calling the shots on what my family and I are going to consume. I feel we are all guinea pigs and one day..one of these HAEMLESS experiments are going to go awry...very awry.

-- Sher in se Iowa (riverdobbers@webtv.net), January 18, 2002.

I read about this a few years ago on one of the goat lists. I would have to disagree with the statement that genetic engineering is not much different from selective breeding. We hear this a lot, and people who are ignorant of basic genetics, plant breeding etc, are easily mollified by this statement( Oh, it's no different for what we've been doing all along), but it isn't the truth. Selective breeding is choosing the best out of a population and then picking the best from their offspring, and so on. Hybridization is crossing two plants. It may be two corn plants or it may be a plum and a cherry. Genetic engineering is entirely different, in this case they have modified the genes of the goat by inserting the spider genes. There is no way that a goat and a spider could or should ever mate, but the scinetists have found a way to circumvent that.

My thoughts on it are that the fallout and negative consequences are going to be so great and so tragic that any benefits will be negligible. Maybe not with the goats, who are enevr allowed out of the farm, and where tight security is maintained, but what about the millions of GE corns plants with BT genes, that kill any insect that touches their pollen, AND spread their genes far and wide to non GE corn fields. Monarch butterflies could easily become extinct, and what about honeybees? Not only honey, but also the pollination provided by them could become either very rare or non existent.

And then there is the issue of how GE crops affect farmers. If you are growing a filed of canola, that is an open pollinated, non GE variety, and your neighbor, or some farmer miles away, grows a GE variety, and your field gets tainted, Monsnato can sue you, and destroy or claim as it's own, your entire crop!! That is right, they did just that to a farmer in Canada. He tried to go to court to defend himself, after all, the variety he grew was a very special one he'd bred himself and been working with for years, and now it's ruined, years of his work down the drain. He found no justice, Monsanto is too powerful and has patents on their GE varieties.

By polluting the genes of entire species, such as corn and canola, they are effectively creating a monopoly, they will be the sole owners of all corn and canola and what else? They will have complete control of all the corn in the US and it looks like Canada and Mexico too. That seems like an incredibly bad thing to me, and probably the death of the small farmer at last.

-- Rebekah (daniel1@itss.net), January 18, 2002.

I have no fundamental, nor religous objection to it. Just to put the record straight, if you eat any cultivated crop you are eating human modified plant species. If you eat any domestic meat, the same is true. If you have a dog or a chicken or basically if you homestead at all, you are raising things and utilizing them for whatever purpose whose genetic makeup was purposefully modified by humans.

Now, I agree that that is not the same precisely as direct genomic modification. However, let's not pretend that every domestic variety was there at the "beginning" whenever that was.

I have a real problem with corporate ownership of the genetics of a crop and I applaud companies like Monsanto for their business model and I dislike them for their short sighted business practices...at least their ag business. Before all genetic engineering is condemned though, ask yourself how many diabetics you know who can only take human insulin. Ask them where they get that insulin and they will tell you at the pharmacy. More than likely if they take human insulin they take what has been manufactured by bacteria via genetic engineering. Many other examples like this exist. So do you say to them, die sucker because there is not enough pancreatic tissue from cadavers to supply the need and so porcine (pig) insulin will have to do even if you are allergic? So here is a problem for me when I try to black and white this issue. So call me gray in my stand. i choose to eat food that has not been genetically engineered in this direct sense for the simple reason that i do not wish to support large chemical/seed compay conglomerates, not because I feel that it is somehow bad for me to eat some Bt protein or phosphatase enzyme which modifies Glyphosphates (roundup) to be harmless.

Back to corporate ownership. If you make a hybrid plant and propagate it you may patent it to sell. Or if you isolate a sport (vegetative mutation) and propagate it you may also patent it. This has been done for over a hundred years with roses and many many other ornamental, friut, and vegetables. If you grow a hybrid variety in your garden to get that sweet sweet corn, you are paying a royalty to do so. Is that OK as long as it is not direct genomic modification? I have mixed feelings about this too.

Finally, I believe that like nuclear energy and so many other discoveries, there will be very good with very bad fallout from the direct modification of organisms genomes. Do I object to using agricultural animals in such production? Absolutely not. If you drink milk from any animal other than Homo Sapiens Sapiens then it seems to me a catch 22. So my ancesters drank milk and so it is OK to exploit a domestic animal for that, but it is not OK to find new ways to exploit it??? I just don't know how to rationalize that incongruity. What if producing spider silk saved the world billions of gallons of crude oil or some other ecological benefit? How can you know if you never venture a foot into the future? Or, what if the experimental analysis of getting spider silk production in goats had some other far reaching benefit that had nothing to do with fiber? I am not willing to take the risk that these discoveries might not change our world in amazing and wonderful ways to say NO! I would be in favor of a calculated, well analyzed approach though to see if we can avoid some of the disasters which we inevitably bring upon our selves. We were given brains, or we evolved them. either way I believe it is immoral to not use them in every aspect of our lives.

Oscar

-- Oscar H. will III (owill@mail.whittier.edu), January 18, 2002.

I really NEED to thank this lab for allowing me to have the opportunity to buy the last of one of the top Alpine dairy Goat herds in the United States last Nov. OK.... I can hear you wondering how this was possible if they never sell the goats. Well.... the breeder was all set to sell the last of her fine does to this lab, then had a last minute change of heart because if she had, her bloodlines would never have been carried on.

I'll write more tomorrow when I am more awake.

-- Bernice (geminigoats@yahoo.com), January 18, 2002.

I'm torn...I can see the potential benefits of genetically modified plants and animals, but don't feel 'they' know all the ramifications yet. It's waaay too early to tell how safe these products are. Nature follows evolutionary rules. What if the GE corn cross- pollinates with the corn field two fields over, and it cross- pollinates with the one next to it and so on and so on. Eventually mutations will occur, some of them successful. These will cross- pollinate with the neighbouring field, and more successful mutations will occur. How do we/they know that eventually the corn won't becom toxic to humans as well as insects. Monsanto claimed RoundUp doesn't harm animal life, but they now know it kills earthworn and other 'lower' life forms in the soil.

Re: goats and silk...I don't like it. It's not natural. They don't know the ramifications for the future. Look at Dolly the sheep. First generation and already she's got arthritis. Coincidence???? What about the fifth or fifteenth generation?

Like I said, I'm torn. But I'm leaning toward the side of I DON'T LIKE IT.

Russ

-- (imashortguy@hotmail.com), January 19, 2002.