tommrr wrote:So if a baseball player eats the rice, would he violate the MLB drug policy concerning human growth hormones?
You do realise that liver enzymes and HGHs are different substances, correct?
Quote:While generally true that diseases are less likely to cross species barriers, the ones that do can be deadly.
Naturally. Diseases hate harming the host (anthropomorphically speaking of course) it's only by missing the left turn at alberqerque and ending up in the wrong species that they become deadly.
Quote:mad cow is not only one of the latest, but also troubling, in that it first occured in sheep
Creutzfeldt-Jakob is a rather complex issue, I'll leave off discussing it for now and focus on the thread. However it's not your average disease, it's a prion which makes it quite different from viruses and bacteria. Hardly a typical example and its very versatility in crossing species barriers makes it entirely irrelevant to this discussion. (by being able to cross 3 barriers as you pointed out, a minor increase in simularity between two species will not significantly alter its probability of spreading).
Quote:So i think extreme care is called for when making a GMO using human genes, to ensure there won't be some freak recombination that produces a lethal human disease.
Minor care is called for, perhaps even negligable care.
The circumstances by which a virus develops in either the human or rice population, in which the production of a single enzyme in the liver makes the difference between it being able to jump species barriers (in this case
KINGDOM barriers) and not being able to, is so improbably unlikely that I would almost consider it impossible.
Far more likely would be for the rice to suffer as a microscopic organism adapted to dwell inside rice turns out to be hostile to the new form of rice. Or that by spreading genetically identical rice a monoculture develops which causes the rice to suffer heavy losses to disease.
However, the implications of this genetic manipulation in rice, as it relates to human diseases are negligable worries. Which I'm sure that the scientists working on the project were well aware of when they decided to use the gene.
In the cases where there IS an actual risk from the genetic manipulation the scientists working on it will be sufficiently educated to realise this and take it into account. Mass public hysteria acting from an uninformed viewpoint is not helpful to the discussion. Particularly as this technology presents the possibility of feeding the starving populations of the world.
