...Ms. Caruso makes quite a few faith-based assertions.

It looks like a genuinely interesting read, if you are among the enraptured with such. Otherwise, it is interesting as a purely objective reference as to how individuals can view technology and science, not unlike our ability to marvel at the "creationist" interpretations.

Either way--whether you're reading it because you've fallen hook-line-and-sinker for the anti-science propaganda, or you're interested in why people enjoy dogma over objectivity--it looks intersting.

I'll check it out if my public library orders it' I'd like to understand this base sort of mentality. Doing so may help me better understand the fundamentalist ideology to which I am admittedly quite ignorant.

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I haven't had the chance to read her book, obviously, but judging by the chapter summaries it was written with the same approach that the creationists use when they try to argue against evolution. If she knew a lot more about how genes work (I recommend a few books on evo-devo), she might have a different feel on the "risks" that seem to terrify her.

The other aspect that is not quite as prominent in the chapter summaries as it is in most of the discussions about genetic engineering by those who know little about the subject is the same problem Bush has in his war against terrorism. Fighting a process is useless. What you need to do is evaluate each situation on its own merits. The same arguments about seeing what technology can do before using it would have prevented the development of vaccines, antibiotics, and many other of the medical advances that have made life so much better for us.

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Below is an exerpt from Barry Commoner's article in the Feb. 2002 Harpers Magazine and can be accessed in full here:

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0209-01.htm
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The wonders of genetic science are all founded on the discovery of the DNA double helix - by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953 - and they proceed from the premise that this molecular structure is the exclusive agent of inheritance in all living things: in the kingdom of molecular genetics, the DNA gene is absolute monarch. Known to molecular biologists as the "central dogma" the premise assumes that an organism's genome - its total complement of DNA genes - should fully account for its characteristic assemblage of inherited traits. The premise, unhappily, is false. Tested between 1990 and 2001 in one of the largest and most highly publicized scientific undertakings of our time, the Human Genome Project, the theory collapsed under the weight of fact. There are far too few human genes to account for the complexity of our inherited traits or for the vast inherited differences between plants, say, and people. By any reasonable measure, the finding (published last February) signaled the downfall of the central dogma; it also destroyed the scientific foundation of genetic engineering, and the validity of the biotechnology industry's widely advertised claim that its methods of genetically modifying food crops are "specific, precise, and predictable" and therefore safe. In short, the most dramatic achievement to date of the $3 billion Human Genome Project is the refutation of its own scientific rationale.
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The article goes on to demonstrate why the current state of GMO engineering is based on junk science and is a moral and technological monstrosity.
S.

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