> OK Russell - what happened 700 years ago - the plague I guess. Yes - "The Black Death" aka Bubonic Plague. Carried by fleas which were carried by rats which throve due to poor sanitation. Major cities were a fine target. Plague occurred before and after that but there had been a substantial respite in Europe before this - many centuries since a major outbreak. Here's a reasonable resource site http://www.iath.virginia.edu/osheim/ They say about 1/3 to 1/2 of Europeans died, which is a greater portion than I recall having heard elsewhere. They also say 2/3 of the population of major cities died which is more believable as the concentration of people, poor sanitation and high infectiousness made transmission probable. Incidentally, at about the same time a "mini-iceage" was getting underway and over several centuries a large % of the populations in Northern countries dies from starvation and extended cold conditions. GM is unlikely to have the same sort of "vector" as the plague if it gets away on us as, hopefully, it won't. Fleas are too easy to deal with nowadays. Examples in () in following are typical ones only - in most cases there are many more and most will be aware of lots of others. The ability to make man-tailored GE organisms that would fill the bill has been demonstrated (Polio made by New York State Uni. HIV as easy they say. Nobody mentioned variant HIV with eg aerosol transmission but the ability to "mix and match" is a given. The ability to transform minor viruses to major ones by adding a single gene has been demonstrated. (Australian mouse pox research). [This is the "best" example so far known to the public. If this example had been discovered in a germ warfare lab (whether US, Russian, Hamas, Iraq ...) do you think we would now know about it?.] The inability to contain with certainty a virus that everybody KNEW was very dangerous and really believed in being careful about has been demonstrated. (Smallpox escape in UK that caused last known smallpox fatality).(And any number of other events but smallpox is a good exemplar), Or even a fish - (NZ GE king salmon (Chinook) possible escape 1999)(Fish escape from captivity as a matter of course seems to be acknowledged by most experts) Or even a plant. (Despite their very short legs and well known non-propensity for running GE maize grain that were never meant to be there are presently leaving NZ fields in flocks - eaten by pigeons. We recently had a GE "shock" when seed imported for hybrid seed production was found to be GE contaminated AFTER harvesting. The harvested seed is being burned but the fields with grain left over are left unattended and birds are literally helping themselves.) In the US this would be a non-event - GE plants are everywhere and grown without controls of any sort. All are almost certainly quite safe. Almost certainly :-(. The ability of intelligent people who really really really should know better but who rush or trudge steadily on into disaster in the face of near certain outcomes is demonstrated time after time after time. (Challenger (which this thread is/was about), Enron, Chernobyl, 3 mile island, Moscow (Napoleon & Hitler amongst others), and many many others). "Industry leader". "World renowned" and "Nobel prize winner" are strong incentives indeed. The lack of real belief in the dangers of GE or the ability to follow ones own rules has been demonstrated time after time. Even when regulations are set in place they are ignored not only by the operators but by the regulators. Nobody REALLY believes there is any hazard. (Scottish "farm scale trials" of oilseed rape by Aventis have just been found to be producing seed with about 2.8% of the seeds having GE contamination with genes that confer resistance to two antibiotics neomycin & kanamycon.). The main problem in the above case is not what the "foreign genes" do (which IMHO is less benign than Aventis claim) but the fact that the company AND the authorities have been monitoring and certifying this trial over a 3 year period and it can STILL slip through. Contamination of 2.8% is barn-door wide when it comes to GE detection. (With that much S-35 Cauliflower Mosaic Virus based promoter in it you could just about taste the cauliflowers)(not really). It seems highly likely that the watchdogs have not been watching or, until now, barking and it's hard to imagine what the company has been doing or how it allowed this potentially expensive mistake. Regardless of how this happened and regardless of how 'bad" this particular event is it shows that it CAN happen at farm scale level and the implications for wider scale production will probably be clear to all but the most rabid apologist. If we do not believe in the safeguards we are taking they are worse than worthless. If you don't REALLY believe that the mains will probably kill you then you have a high chance of being electrocuted if you play with things electrical. If we KNOW that adding a single gene to something relatively harmless can and MIGHT create a killer human disease of unheralded capability then our clever postgrads may well kill us totally unawares. If we do not utterly believe in containment precautions that we are required to take after learned gentle-people have pontificated then we will behave like people often do now and not take all the precautions because it is uncomfortable and inconvenient to do so. (Trust me on this (and I'm not going to tell you how I know) - that's what happens on occasion now.) If we have GE regs and a GE accident but pigeons are flying away with the grain unhindered (photos thereof in our local papers) then we have little hope of avoiding the serious disaster when it does arrive. Any one GE event is almost certainly unimportant. Spotting the unimportant one after crying wolf for ages beforehand is almost impossible. Compared to what we risk, the loss of 7 astronauts and a Space Shuttle are truly minor. Russell "I hope I'm wrong, I think, alas, that I'm right" McMahon -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads