The central problem underlying all of this technology is not just its short-term benefits and long-term drawbacks, but the overall attempt to "control" living nature based on an erroneous mechanistic view. As to other significant hazards we create, nuclear proliferation has been largely contained; chemical pollution could be made to recede. Genetic engineering differs in that its impact penetrates so deeply into the core of life, into the DNA, that end results are not necessarily containable or reversible.
Furthermore, " bioengineering" offers a contradiction in terms. "Bio" refers to life, what is not mechanistically predictable or controllable. "Engineering" refers to making the blueprints for machines that are predictable - but not alive. They are dead. Thus there is the joining of what is living with what applies to the opposite.
What is patentable also needs to be mentally "distinctive" - fixed or mostly unchanging in our minds to obtain an ownership or right-to-control patent. Again, something unchanging is not constantly adapting to its surrounding environment. It is less alive, and strategies to maintain that are often deadly. For example, much of GM technology is directed at eliminating surrounding biological environment - competing animals and plants, soaking them with lethal toxins. Secondly, there are terminator plants that do not reproduce a second generation - preventing a subsequent generation from escaping the controlling patented mold. In contrast to nature's rainforests teeming with life, GM technology has planted forests of flowerless, fruitless "terminator trees." They are not habitats for life, but exude poisons from every leaf, killing all but a few insects. Thirdly, GM companies have gone on multi-billion dollar buying sprees, purchasing seed companies and destroying their non-patented (potentially competitive) seed stocks. Time magazine called the widespread consequences of this effort a global Death of Birth. All of this is why "biotechnology," in its naked essence, has be tagged by some as thano- (meaning death) technology.
http://www.raw-wisdom.com/gmofood
whatya think about that?