Genes are nothing to play around with. This is not a lets-pretend attitude-adjustment mental game where if you just feel happy enough about something, it will never, ever hurt you. DNA is it, baby. You don’t argue with DNA, DNA argues with you. And wins. Mess with that and let the genie out of the bottle and you don’t know what will happen, but once it happens and it’s bad, you won’t be able to stop it, either. Think about the birds of Hawai’i, or about the dodo, or about rabbits in Australia and consider that those were biological incidents/accidents (in terms of unintended consequences) having nothing to do with gene-splicing. Now consider what happens to human beings when one little thing goes wrong with their genes or chromosomes during intrauterine development (pregnancy/gestation). Now get scared, because if Nature knows what it’s doing and still makes mistakes, and here we are with zero understanding of the new toys we play with…

The tragic part is there’s no reason to do it. If we lived more in harmony with the apparent laws of nature (again, we do not have sufficient understanding and can only go on evidence which is at times ambiguous), there are a lot of problems for which GMO is touted as a cure which we just… wouldn’t have, or wouldn’t have enough of to be turning to mad scientists to “cure.”

I despise Monsanto, and have ever since I visited their website back in the late nineties and found vitriolic rants against people who are against GMO, casting slurs against their spirituality and that kind of thing. I was shocked that a corporation posturing itself as the Great Savior and Feeder of Humanity would stoop to such levels. They had particular vitriol reserved for “new age” types, as I recall. Anyway, they’re still trying to cover their butts. Check this out.

http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto_today/for_the_record/default.asp

Hope this helps!

Are hybrids GMO’s as well since they have been messed with–or just some? Or are hybrids just a cross between 2 plants?

As Rebecca points out, hybrids aren’t GMOs, in that they don’t have genes from other organisms inserted into them. I was calling anything created by selective breeding genetically modified (note the letter casing) because that’s what they are. You start with one plant, you cross it with another plant, and the genetics of the offspring are different from the parents, hence genetically modified. If used properly, transgenes can be used to save time and effort needed for traditional breeding methods to create the same product (such as introducing disease resistance from wild plant species into cultivated plant species (within the same plant type, i.e., potato, tomato, wheat, barley, etc.)).