http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/transgenic.htm Yesterday the Independent reported alarming new results from official trials of genetically modified crops. The results, in a new Government report, show for the first time in Britain that genes from GM crops are escaping the bottle and interbreeding on a large scale with conventional ones.
"The report is so devastating to the Government's case for GM crops," the article read, "that ministers last week sought to bury it by slipping the first information on it out on the website of the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on Christmas Eve, the one day in the year when no newspapers are being prepared.
The report, the result of six years of monitoring GM crops in Britain, is particularly politically explosive and it gives the first results from the official farm-scale trials, which ministers have been running to test the suitability of growing GM crops in Britain.
Most worryingly of all, the report shows that the GM crop readily interbred with weeds, wild turnips, giving it resistance to herbicides and thus raising the prospect of the development of "super weeds".
Other studies from elsewhere in the world have shown that GM interbreeding occurs, and English Nature, the Government's wildlife watchdog, has said super weeds will "inevitably'' emerge in Britain if GM crops are grown commercially.'"
Despite the bad publicity surrounding genetically modified foods, and the danger that all such mutations will eventually escape their trappings and interbreed, the science of genetic modification and transgenics is moving forward. When it includes 'enhancing the human species,' Raiders News Update believes the Bible has something to say.
Genetic modification, cloning and transgenics are not limited to Railians, the cult group that claimed recently to have given birth to the world's first human clone. Numerous scientists and laboratories argue the unique opportunity to study gene development and disease processes through research-cloning and transgenics [a transgenic is a person, plant or animal whose genetic structure has been altered through introducing other-specie DNA into its genome] is forward-thinking and bolsters related advanced medical treatments such as organ development for human transplantation ("xenotransplantation").*
Evidently the government agrees as transgenic research will capture 20% of this years government-funded research grants.
But across Europe where the scientific community has aggressively moved into the mostly unregulated field of transgenics, concerns are now being voiced by researchers themselves over breaching the species barrier. Nobody knows for sure what pestilence the mutations could eventually spawn.
Conservative Christians are especially concerned with such ramifications, not only because the plagues released through transgenic research could be of Biblical proportions, but because cloning, genetic modifying and transgenics is an affront to "the divine order."
The Bible says that God requires humans, animals, and plants to reproduce "after their own kind." Species integrity was therefore required by God. Transgenics not only violates this order but opens a Pandora's box to a potential molecular nightmare.
Transgenics may also violate Biblical laws concerning bestiality (sex between humans and animals). Leviticus 18:23 says "it is confusion," and the punishment for participating in such intercourse was death. The Hebrew word confusion (tebel) means a "violation of nature or of God's divine order."
The Levitical code therefore surpasses the physical act of intercourse and speaks to the issue of 'confusion' of the species. By this standard transgenically altered humans are no longer human at all. In fact, they are indefinable, because introducing animal genes into human DNA creates an unclassified mutation outside the 'divine order.'
Another potentially serious problem is that molecular biologists classify individual genes by function. Nobody knows for sure if a gene's coding will function the same way from one species to another. Interspecies differences could measurably effect the gene's protein interactions, altering hereditary traits for generations to come and ultimately producing animal characteristics within humans.
One cannot help wonder what apocalyptic horrors cloning, GM crops, and transgenic mammals could unleash, but there is no doubt that for humanists, this is evolution in reverse and a violation of nature. For those who subscribe to the science of catastrophe, it's Jurassic Park. For believers in God it is an assault on His creative genius.
The willingness of the scientific community to conduct such research underscores the need for people of faith to debate the ethics of science when and if it violates God's divine order.
And no matter how one slices the redefinition of the human species, the original transgenics of the Old Testament - the Nephilim - must be rolling over in their huge graves.
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