transgenic = transgenocide: Bernard Herzog against uncontroled live manipulation

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I smile when I see some applaud and saying : hurrah "Science", congratulations for your wonderful breakthrough. Let’s not be naive ! (*) I also applaud if it can help the human kind, the human being, to feel better. But I get very upset when I discover that it will enslave him more than we think.
We all acclaimed when we learned in history at school that thanks to the French Revolution, man is free and was born free. This was only a very old religious issue. But we still carried on trading black population, amongst others. The slaver-traders did not complain.
Well, as Jeremy Rifkin (**) brilliantly describes in his analysis of the process happening in the USA for the last 20 years, we are facing a similar situation : we will have to fight against slave-traders of a new kind.
(*) Ph. Kourilsky, la Science en partage, 1998.
The writer is right to argue against the simplifications.
But the "scientific" opinions differ on a few fundamental elements and a scientific-technical approach only is not enough to determine and decide.
(**) Jeremy Rifkin, le Siècle Biotech. Le commerce des gènes dans le meilleur des mondes, 1998,
This article is one of the best informed on the process happening in the USA.

Gene Reaction

Lots of bovines were already affected by "mad cow disease" when the Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease was made public, but it was neglected to mention that all that is fed with the same products, i.e. pork, ovine, chickens and even raised fish were not safe. Sure, politicians and health officials quickly imposed regulations advising that this or that cut was not to be eaten. But let’s think. An infected cow, is as much contaminated even if at various degrees, in her brains, in her shins or in her milk. Milk is a protein. But if the experts would have announced it brutally, the agricultural economy and the agricultural trade would have collapsed. This would have started a civil war. Therefore we prefer to see this disease developing and mutating over 20, even 40 years not to frighten the people.

Well without realizing it we are in the middle of a genetic revolution. Our fields are being altered. We will have altered grass, altered flowers, and hybrid flowers. Already the farmers cannot sow what they want because the hybrid seeds forbid duplication and re-sowing.
And these products can be hazardous because "un-natural", i.e. not in harmony with all that is life. We did not make the effort or take the time to bother. (One should also mention the respect for bio-diversity and also respect for the third-world countries, owner of these inheritance deprived by the West through patents) (*)

see Terminator-OGM

see Organic Farming: Survival

(*) Courrier International, n° 383, du 5 au 11 mars 1998, p. 40, "L'Australie voleuse de gènes". Revue Nations Solidaires

Crises and Mutations

Being close to health specialists, I hear through the grapevine very unsettling stories regarding the development of cancer, AIDS and other immune-related illnesses which are taking unexpected shapes. Sure we could carry on and die our mouths full.

Isn’t wiser and more sincere to draw the attention on what is happening so that is does not happen behind our backs? What about the health related expenses and who is going to take care of it ? You complain because you pay too much to the social Security but you are also afraid that it could disappear.

It could indeed disappear one day, insolvent. Well, it is the whole process of living in society that is at risk and could lead all of us to our own ruin. The answer is not to protest for what is wrecked.

see Boycott ? (J. Bousquet)

Transgeneration Suicide

LGeneralized "transgenic" is a joke which could be a bad joke for us and the future generations. Consumers never asked for it, it was imposed.

It is an anthropologic and economic approach we must lead together with a technical proposal. Even if it is not said so, let’s not forget that the reasons are also economical, political, global of course; the motivations are financial, health related, etc. Through our lifestyle, we, ourselves, jointly, create our own miseries. It is then for us to solve them.

Let’s take another example. There is a new issue that starts being talked about in the press : immunity to antibiotics (*). We are using antibiotics in a number of extensive farms, we inject in a type of maize a gene immune to a type of antibiotic. What are we doing ?

Let’s protest actively, through our lifestyle, to keep ourselves and our kinsmen in good health.

see Organic Farming: Survival GMo,

see Boycott ? (J. Bousquet)

(*) Call by scientists of about 30 countries, who gathered in Denmark in September 1998, to the European Union:
"To establish a system to observe microbes immune to antibiotics that became a extensive menace for health in the world".

All Mutants (*)

But yourself, as soon as you are hurt somewhere, you run to your doctor and you swallow antibiotics, again and again. However, antibiotics are designed to fight resistant ailments, fast. Otherwise you become immersed in antibiotics, your body becomes hyper-immune. Which means that you have “mutated” or mutants. Imperceptibly, you become men and women genetically modified and this could lead you towards unexpected and undesired results. Don’t picture yourself with three eyes or with some more arms !

I want to draw your attention to our body’s fundamental inter-changes (**), to the genes mutations that we can induce in ourselves, by inconsiderably using and abusing.
When our lands will be submerged with a new hyper-immune vegetal propagation, we will also have hyper-immune against any remedy germs and hyper-immune virus. It will then be a little too late to pray and to protect yourself in temples if waves of people vanish. The historians will talk about the new plague epidemic. Already cases of new "plague" exist and frightening enemies emerge as our current knowledge cannot fight them. (***).

Not good enough to have discovered some genes, some hundreds of genes, we will find, every day, new genes parity, new organizations. We barely know the consequences. Instead of wasting our time exploiting, very profitably, some scattered discoveries modifying the living, shouldn’t we invest to learn thoroughly the genetic complex, how it works and inter-communicates ?

The present determining view transforms us in apprentice sorceress and so we will learn to be sorceress masters. Watch out if we insist to live ignorant instead of deciding how to live...

(*). Title of one our articles about irradiation of aliments
(**). About fundamental bacterials inter-changes ;
see Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan, l'Univers bactériel, 1989.
Is one of the risks to consider too narrowly "genetic" out of immediate use not to miss inter-communication behavior elementary to life ?
(***). Confirmation of antibiotics immunity to tuberculoses in 35 countries, according to an American study in June 1998. Analysis of Doctors at Harvard University October 1999 expecting the spread of the epidemic to the entire planet and asking for investments in new treatments. Notice also the development of auto-immune diseases… Obesity in the USA has reached very expensive national proportions.