Transgenic DNA from GMOs in Chinese Rivers-Why is it Suddenly There?

 By Kurt Heidinger

UC Berkeley microbiologist Dr Ignacio Chapela has discovered “the escape and establishment of transgenic DNA from GMOs” in rivers in China.

That’s not good news. The introduction of new kinds of DNA into the bios creates new forms of life and diseases, as Dr. Chapela reports:

“DNA from transgenic organisms have escaped to become an integral component of the genome of free-living bacteria in rivers.” He adds that “the transgenic DNA studied so far in these bacteria will confer antibiotic resistance on other organisms, making many different species resistant to the antibiotics we use to protect ourselves from infections.”

Dr. Chapela notes that his team’s research has discovered

“only a fraction of the many other sequences of transgenic DNA which must be expected out there in the environment, from all kinds of origins, with all kinds of possible functions . the equivalent of the proverbial sighting of the iceberg’s tip. A polaroid photo of a small part of what must be a very large and relevant phenomenon.”

He asks: “why is it that nobody in the ‘West’ has been able to follow up on such leads, or even suggest doing this kind of work? One thinks of the work begun at NYU on soils, which attracted so much negative campaigning, and nary a recognition.”

It is both pathetic & dangerous that no major media source has covered this story. We don’t know the extent of the dispersal of “genetic pollution” and are totally unprepared to deal with its consequences.

Last year, I asked Dr. James Hughes, the Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, why Monsanto enforces patent law only on its GMO Round-up Ready corn and not on the Round-Up Ready resistant corn borers it also produces.

He had no answer. It’s a question he’d never heard before.

It never gets asked, especially at the highest levels.

Read more: http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_27241.cfm