Genetic Engineering

            
             Imagine a world where people didn't have to donate organs anymore or if vegetables were so big and the plant produced so much that many farms wouldn't need to be utilized anymore. Genetic engineering could change the world, as we currently know it. Technologies already exist that could alter the nature of the human species. Private companies are seeing the potential for vast profits from new genetic engineering technologies. Technologies exist that enable scientists to change plants, animals, and even human beings at the gene level. The technologies in genetic engineering have grown very quickly over the past ten years.
             The new technology in planting crops and other plants is to genetically enhance them with biotechnology. Most of the crops are corn, soybeans, cotton and pototatoes. These crops have been engineered to produce their own pesticides. "Many Americans have already begun to eat genetically engineered vegetables but research confirms that hardly any of us know it (Pollan 603)." The biotech industry has decided that people don't need to know they are eating bioengineered foods, so those foods don't care any identifying labels. "Throughout Europe the public has demanded that biotech food should be labeled in the market.".
             .
             Klusmann 2.
             Biotech crops will probably increase yields, but they will also speed the process by which agriculture is being concentrated. It has only been a few decades that farmers have been buying their seeds from big companies (Pollan 604). .
             "A new biotechnology called the Terminator which has been developed by the U.S.D.A. is a complex of genes that can be spliced into any crop plant where it will cause every seed produced by that plant to be sterile." (p604) Once the Terminator becomes the industry standard, control of the genetics of crop plants will move from the farmer's field to the seed companies.
             A popular variety of corn that has been genetically modified to resist insects may also be killing monarch butterflies.