Cult Cloning, Transgenics and GM
Crops
by Thomas Horn
A transgenic is a person, plant or animal whose
genetic structure has been altered through introducing other-specie DNA into its
genome.
Recently the Independent reported
alarming new results from official trials of genetically modified crops.
The results, in a new Government report, show – for the first time in Britain –
that genes from GM crops are escaping the bottle and interbreeding on a large
scale with conventional ones.
"The report is so devastating to the Government's
case for GM crops," the article read, "that ministers last week sought to bury
it by slipping the first information on it out on the website of the Department
of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on Christmas Eve, the one day
in the year when no newspapers are being prepared.
The report, the result of six years of monitoring
GM crops in Britain, is particularly politically explosive and it gives the
first results from the official farm-scale trials, which ministers have been
running to test the suitability of growing GM crops in Britain.
Most worryingly of all, the report shows that the
GM crop readily interbred with weeds, wild turnips, giving it resistance to
herbicides and thus raising the prospect of the development of "super weeds".
Other studies from elsewhere in the world have
shown that GM interbreeding occurs, and English Nature, the Government's
wildlife watchdog, has said super weeds will "inevitably'' emerge in Britain if
GM crops are grown commercially.'"
Despite the bad publicity surrounding genetically
modified foods, and the danger that all such mutations will eventually escape
their trappings and interbreed, the science of genetic modification and
transgenics is moving forward. When it includes 'enhancing the human species,'
Raiders News Update believes the Bible has something to say.
Genetic modification, cloning and transgenics are
not limited to Railians, the cult group that claimed recently to have given
birth to the world's first human clone. Numerous scientists and laboratories
argue the unique opportunity to study gene development and disease processes
through research-cloning and transgenics [a transgenic is a person, plant or
animal whose genetic structure has been altered through introducing other-specie
DNA into its genome] is forward-thinking and bolsters related advanced
medical treatments such as organ development for human transplantation ("xenotransplantation").*
Evidently the government agrees as transgenic
research will capture 20% of this years government-funded research grants.
But across Europe where the scientific community
has aggressively moved into the mostly unregulated field of transgenics,
concerns are now being voiced by researchers themselves over breaching the
species barrier. Nobody knows for sure what pestilence the mutations could
eventually spawn.
Conservative Christians are especially concerned
with such ramifications, not only because the plagues released through
transgenic research could be of Biblical proportions, but because cloning,
genetic modifying and transgenics is an affront to "the divine order."
The Bible says that God requires humans, animals,
and plants to reproduce "after their own kind." Species integrity
was therefore required by God. Transgenics not only violates this order but
opens a Pandora's box to a potential molecular nightmare.
Transgenics may also violate Biblical laws
concerning bestiality (sex between humans and animals). Leviticus 18:23 says "it
is confusion," and the punishment for participating in such intercourse was
death. The Hebrew word confusion (tebel) means a "violation of nature or
of God's divine order."
The Levitical code therefore surpasses the physical
act of intercourse and speaks to the issue of 'confusion' of the species. By
this standard transgenically altered humans are no longer human at all. In fact,
they are indefinable, because introducing animal genes into human DNA creates an
unclassified mutation outside the 'divine order.'
Another potentially serious problem is that
molecular biologists classify individual genes by function. Nobody knows for
sure if a gene's coding will function the same way from one species to another.
Interspecies differences could measurably effect the gene's protein
interactions, altering hereditary traits for generations to come and ultimately
producing animal characteristics within humans.
One cannot help wonder what apocalyptic horrors
cloning, GM crops, and transgenic mammals could unleash, but there is no doubt
that for humanists, this is evolution in reverse and a violation of nature. For
those who subscribe to the science of catastrophe, it's Jurassic Park. For
believers in God it is an assault on His creative genius.
The willingness of the scientific community to
conduct such research underscores the need for people of faith to debate the
ethics of science when and if it violates God's divine order.
And no matter how one slices the redefinition of
the human species, the original transgenics of the Old Testament - the Nephilim
- must be rolling over in their huge graves. END
© 2004 RaidersNewsUpdate.com
Researchers Create GM Trout With
“Six-Pack Abs”
In
my research and writing, I have not broached the subject of using genetically
modified fish in farms, so I don't feel prepared to write about the subject.
But I couldn't help posting this video about the GM
fish with "six-pack abs" developed at the University of Rhode Island, and its
apparent benefits to fish farming.
Researchers at URI have developed rainbow trout
with 15% to 20% more muscle mass than normal trout, which if put on a global
scale could have a significant impact in the amount of flesh harvested.
According to URI, fish farms in the United States and Europe raise roughly
500,000 metric tons of rainbow trout each year.
In the United States, those farms are concentrated
in Idaho, New York, Pennsylvania and California and produce roughly $80 million
worth of trout annually. By my calculations, GM trout would boost the harvest to
as much as 600,000 metric tons without increasing the number of fish or the
amount of feed. Of course, there's plenty of debate to be had about the use of
genetically modified livestock to feed people, but in a purely quantifiable
sense, the idea would seem to be a boon for fish farmers.
"If we were able to get these fish to the point
where they would be accepted and could be grown, it has tremendous implications
in increasing the mass of fish and increasing the profitability of fish
culture," says Terry Bradley, the URI professor of fisheries and aquaculture
that is leading the project.
We'd also have to get to a point where we could eat such ugly suckers.
SOURCE:
The New Aquaculture: Researchers create GM trout with "six-pack abs"
Original Research Article:
News - University
of Rhode Island
In Minnesota last year
researchers at the Mayo Clinic created pigs with human blood
flowing through their bodies.
