As wary as we are about genetically-modified food, we?re tempted to succumb when new products are created that improve our personal lives, instead of simply making things easier for huge farming conglomerates. Perhaps GM companies will try to win us over to their side by seducing us with some of their new inventions.

One of these new products may be the genetically-modified ?spidergoat.? Scientists at the Canadian company Nexia have figured out how to combine the DNA from a goat and a spider to create a goat which produces silk that is five times stronger than steel. The fiber will be spun from the their milk, since science is not yet up to creating spinnerets on the stomachs of goats.
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When it come to genetic engineering, it?s the Battle of the Bugs. Scientists are producing GM plants that are resistant to certain types of insects?but then they turn out to be even more vulnerable to other insects. Scientists decide to engineer the insects themselves and produce a sterile boll weevil that eventually destroys its own species, but other scientists are afraid this sterility will somehow spread. We?re tinkering with nature, but do we know what we?re doing?
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John Vidal writes in the English newspaper The Guardian that British scientists are genetically modifying and cloning hundreds of thousands of animals a year for no reason other than experimentation, according to the genetics monitoring group GeneWatch.

The great majority of the 582,000 animals genetically altered in Britain in 2000 for medical or agricultural research were mice, but increasingly sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, rabbits, birds, poultry and cats are being experimented on, often with cruel results. The group condemned the scientists doing the work as “irresponsible.”
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Researchers have discovered that the results of safety tests on the type of genetically modified corn that is currently grown in Britain were ignored. The crop, T-25 GM, was tested in laboratory experiments on chickens. During the tests, twice as many chickens died when fed on T-25 GM corn, compared with those fed on conventional corn.

This research was overlooked when the crop was given marketing approval in 1996 by Acre – the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment. Acre’s chairman, Lord Alan Gray, admits the research should have been reanalyzed and that safety tests were not good enough to give a true picture of the risks involved.
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