No time to reply to all the various comments on my comments on GM.
Suffice it to say that I disagree with most of the intended rebuttals.

Many are setting up straw men to attack which I have not created, or 
simplifying or misconstruing my points (no doubt because I failed to 
explain them well enough :-).

A few comments from the one I chose to reply to, but I could equally 
comment on many others.


> ... It should be no surprise at all that a mutation occurred in a 
> virus just because we were helping it
> reproduce.  Far greater mutations happen more often in the wild.

It is not suggested that vaccinia is a mutation of the original 
smallpox vaccine. It just, as far as cab be established, "appeared" 
and took over. Sourec unknown. Date unknown.

>> In that time it *could*
>> have been wreaking havoc somewhat akin to HIV worldwide unnoticed 
>> and
>> with a carefully organised international delivery system to many
>> people worldwide.

> No, it couldn't.  Large effects would have been noticed,

Several straw men or just wrong meaning taken.
"Large effects would have been noticed" and "akin to HIV" are, of 
course, incorrect. HIVs effects are large by any measure but took 
literally decades to notice. If vaccinnia had a capability even 
essentially identical to HIV as well as its intended one it may also 
have not been noticed due to its effects for decades.

> and of course much
> much less likely to have occurred in the first place.

On what basis do you establish "likelihood".
How "likely" is/was HIV to occur?
How do you measure this probability?
Why would something that entered the vaccine system be unlikely to be 
HIV like?


>> BUT it flew through the N 9's of safety that
>> such an industry is assumed to have, completely unnoticed.
>
> Minor mutations occur all the time ...

But whole new unrelated organisms are a little rarer :-).

>> By comparison we are scatter-gunning GM products across the fields 
>> of
>> earth which is *certain* to ultimately produce utter catastrophe.
>
> This kind of emotional and unfounded assertion only serves to 
> undermine the
> credibility of real science.

That sort of emotive and unfounded and unscientific response to a 
wholly factual and scientific statement serves to undermine 
credibility. While "scattergunning" is clearly meant to be a 
metaphorical allusion, it in fact closely matches actual practice 
(more recently less favoured)(Google on "gene gun" if you aren't aware 
of this method). I defined "certain* in a footnote. Google on "craig 
venter don't know shit" to see what one of the worlds top GM experts 
thinks about how much we understand about what we are doing. (Father 
of the private portion of the human genome project and THE reason it 
completed many years early). I happily stand by my emotive statement 
and all its implications.

> You have no way of knowing the risk of an "utter catastrophe", 
> however that
> is defined.

Absolutely !!!!
My point throughout.
We have no way of knowing how dangerous almost any of what we are 
doinfg might be.
We have some statistical guidelines based on what we haven't managed 
to do to ourselves so far.
But we also have clear warnings that unconscionably severe outcome are 
possible and that they are wholly unpredicable. The interleukin mouse 
virus and the bean/pea gene transfer bad protein result are just two 
examples.

As in California, it is only a matter of time until the big one. But 
we don't know how big and how long.

> Certainly there is a risk in humans deliberately altering the
> genetics of certain organisms.  There are also benfits.  The 
> benefits are
> real and much easier to measure.

The truth is that the benefits of GM are far fewer and less real than 
the sale people would like us to think. I'll say again as I said a few 
days ago, I am not a Luddite. I approve of technology in its place. 
But GM is over sold, under produces and often enough costs people in 
ways which are not initially obvious. When you tamper with vastly 
complex machinery which you don't understand even 1% of the functions 
of (cf Venter's comments) then you have no certainty that what you 
wnat will be what you get. And that's what we see. GM had one very big 
very visible win very earky on and since then there has been nothing 
to match it. The win was, of course, synthetic insulin (not without 
its problems) but its a rare jewel so far. All the rest tends to make 
money for the developers and less for the users. Glyphosate resistant 
crops anyone?

> I think the risks are largely overstated.

I'm sure you do. And I'm completely certain that you are wrong. The 
only uncertainty is the degree of uncertainty. That GM could be as 
fatal ti eg human life as anyone could possibly conceive is not in 
question. That people as intyelligent as you are consider that this is 
an overstatement show how poorly the dangers are generally understood.

> Nature already performs random genetic alterations on all organisms 
> all the
> time.  While these are random, their sheer numbers guarantees that 
> many many
> genetic experiments we haven't even dreamed of are being tried all 
> the time.
> The vast vast majority are either too minor to care about or to 
> major to
> survive and we therefore never hear about them.

I agree with all the above. But it's irrelevant to my point. See my 
commenst elsewhere about nature ring-fencing its very bad disasters 
and leaving the remains there for us to dig up and "exploit".

> Every once in a few zillion
> rolls of the dice we get a new flu virus, AIDS, SARS, Brazillian 
> Buporic
> Fever, or whatever.  There are checks and ballances in nature that 
> pretty
> much guarantee a pathogen can't be both highly virulent and easily 
> spread at
> the same time.

Absolutely.
And we have bypassed the limit switches, taken off the guards, 
disabled the governors and are playing with the supercharger. Aeons of 
checks and balances are being vaulted over with no idea whatsoever 
about what may happen.

And there is nothing in nature that guarantes that you can't make a 
hybrid with most of the 'advantages' of each of its contributors.
You elsewhere mentioned my "worst case" sceario as Ebola. It wasn't. 
My worst case, and only an example one, was a HIV/common cold/Ebola 
like virus. As infecyious as the CC - spread by aerosol transfer. 
Incubates like HIV over literally decades with no symptoms. Comes on 
like a freight train and destroys its target WHEN it suddenly does go 
live. Something like this would be contracted by essentially everyone 
on earth over say a decade. Then when it was riggered by whatever it 
would overburden all health services involved. Ebola kills 50-70% of 
victims in high care situations and kills a %age of its expert carers 
as well if they make the slightest of mistakes. If 10% of your 
population came down with it over a year and if the ensd state 
infection was infectious in its own right, as Ebola is, then you'd ALL 
be gone.  FWIW.

> Every once in a while one gets its genes reshuffled and is a
> little better tradeoff than before.  A few million people die, but 
> some
> always survive too.

Indeed. The machine is well balanced. But i assure you that we can get 
it up to billions dead with little effort.

> Think of the nasty diseases of the past before there
> were antibiotics and vaccines.  We took a beating but are still 
> here, all of
> us descendents of the survivors.  It's hard to imagine anything we 
> create
> accidentally in the lab having anywhere near as big an impact as the 
> things
> nature is cooking up all the time and has and will again throw at 
> us.

failure of imagination is one of the great problems here. And thinking 
that WE are the ones who cook them up in alab is another. The problems 
are thjose which nature has locked in its storehouse. We are simply 
raiding the store and distributing bits and pieces far and wide with 
no knowledge of the results.

> In the mean time we do know and can measure how many people die of
> starvation every year.  It's a cost/benefit tradeoff, and you can't 
> ignore
> the benefit side to get a good picture.

GM has the potential to do well there.
BUT so far it has done poorly overall and non GM techniques would 
allow us to do far better than we do now shoukd we wish. Wishing to is 
a problem.

> In the end human overpopulation of
> the planet seems like a bigger threat to me, and is partly to blame 
> for the
> starvation toll.

Most things can be blamed for something :-). But starvation is as much 
'caused' by human nature not being willing to do what is required to 
alter things. Whether there is a moral or whatever imperative to do so 
is another issue (forestalling comment from Mr J ... ;-) ).

> If you really want your kids to inherit a better world,
> have fewer of them.

No. :-)
If you really want your kids to inherit a better world, work towards 
other people having fewer of them. :-)

The Balrog is coming (nice that someone actually recognised what I was 
quoting :-) ).
Doom, doom ... :-)




        Russell McMahon
        Applied Technology Ltd. :-) fwiw.

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