Genetic Engineering - Assignment Example

Concerns and Key Unknown Factors Regarding Genetically Modified Foods Due to the level of incomplete knowledge that exists with regard to GMOs within food, many nations around the world have banned them entirely. However, the United States and several other developed nations have not. As a means of analyzing the potential drawbacks and negatives that GMO might exhibit within a nation’s health and food supply, this particular analysis will focus upon several of these determinants and seek to provide relevant and up-to-date information as a means to prove why GMO should be restricted from the food supply until a further level of knowledge is able to be derived with regard to its overall health impacts.

Perhaps the first and most obvious reason that GMO food exhibits a clear and definitive concern to the human population is with regard to the unknown level of impact that GMO necessarily poses to human health. Shockingly, very little independent research has been performed on GMOs to determine the level of impact, if any, that they might have with regard to human health. Moreover, seed company agreements forbid the sale or use of any of their seeds for the process of independent research, all but stymieing any attempt that an independent researcher might make in order to draw a level of inference with regard to whether or not GMOs are harmful, beneficial or neutral.

However, the fact that seed manufacturers are so particular about including the caveat that their products cannot be sold or utilised for independent research sheds a level of particular doubt in the mind of the reader with regard to the overall health concerns that use of GMO might present for any society’s food supply.Moreover, another particular level of the unknown that exists with regard to the use of GMO in food is the fact that many of the GMO food sources currently in the market have been proven to have a built-in resistance to certain types of antibiotics.

For instance, Amflora, a type of genetically modified potato, was recently tested by a European committee and found to have a gene specifically built-in to the potato that was predisposed to a type of antibiotic resistance. Although this particular type of genetically modified potato may have little or no effect upon the human being, the mere existence of an antibiotic resistant gene within genetically modified food is able to alert the reader that serious concerns about health may very well exist with regard to genetically modified food.

Although genetically modified food is something that holds a great deal of promise it at the same time holds a great level of unknown and potentially leads to disastrous drawbacks. Although it is not the intention of this particular author to resist technology or improvements in the way that the Earth’s burgeoning population is fed in the future, the fact of the matter is that the use of genetically modified material to affect such an end is something of a very risky bet that cannot yet be determined with existing evidence.

In such a way, it is the understanding of the analysis which is being conducted that due to the high level of unknowns, genetically modified organisms must necessarily be restricted to the testing only phase. Although the United States remains the most economically powerful nation in the entire world, it should very much take a cue from the likes of the European Union and many others which banned the importation and/or inclusion of GMO within their own food supplies. In such a way, the potential health and safety of generations can be assured as well as the potential health and safety of the environment in which such potentially harmful/scientifically mutated organisms would exist.

ReferencesMaghari, B., & Ardekani, A. M. (2011). Genetically modified foods and social concerns. Avicenna Journal Of Medical Biotechnology, 3(3), 109-117.