Minister of Agriculture Israel Katz asked the Finance Committee of the Knesset to approve regulations regarding the use of genetically modified seeds and plants
Avi Blizovsky
According to the regulations, the plant protection services will be in charge of testing the seeds and plants that will undergo genetic treatment
Minister of Agriculture Israel Katz asked the Finance Committee of the Knesset to approve regulations regarding the use of genetically modified seeds and plants. According to the regulations, the plant protection services will be in charge of testing the seeds and plants that will undergo genetic treatment.
Member of Knesset Roman Brompman told our reporter Shimon Vilnai that he demands that any product treated with gene therapy be clearly labeled. The consumer should be given the option to decide if he is ready to eat such a product. According to Brompman, whoever eats will be a guinea pig for the food manufacturers.
This topic is currently used as a reason for an economic war between Europe and the USA. The Europeans applied the nickname "Frankensteins" to the Americans, followers of changes in plants and food products by genetic means. The Americans in response call the Europeans "Lodes" - after a labor leader from Nottingham, England, Ned Lode, who in 1811 organized a campaign to dismantle machines designed to save manual labor, in a fruitless campaign designed to prevent the introduction of machines in the early days of the industrial revolution. The current dispute involves business owners, farmers, scientists, philosophers and politicians, alongside activists of green organizations with rich experience in media struggle, and representatives of religious organizations who see genetically modified food crops as "interference in the act of creation" and disruption of the sacred balance in nature. Dissident groups in Europe now alternately hold violent, very flashy protest actions, accompanied by vandalism.
At the beginning of July, Kibbutz Nir Etzion in Carmel hosted the first conference in Israel that dealt with the issue of genetically modified food products - for and against. One of the lecturers at the conference was Professor Yedidia (Didi) Gafni, director of the genetics department at the Field Crops Institute in the Agricultural Research Administration in Beit Dagan known as the Volcanic Institute. In an interview for my article that will be published in the next issue of the "Galileo" magazine, he says that there will be no escape from genetic modification of agricultural products. Without genetic engineering there would not be enough food for everyone. "Today six billion people crowd the earth, in twenty years their number will reach ten billion. The cities are occupying agricultural areas and instead of having more areas for agriculture, they are actually shrinking."
The possibility of genetically modifying any organism is a notable victory of man over nature. This is nothing less and nothing more than breaking the sex barrier in nature. A species is a group of animals or plants that can interbreed and have fertile offspring. Until now it was possible to try and improve plants or animals through hybridization. All dog breeds known to us have been cultivated and developed through controlled breeding. The breeders made sure to hybridize the desired creature (pigeons in the case of Darwin, peas in the case of Gregory Mendel).
This is how we got cows whose milk yield is enough for an entire herd of calves instead of one or two individual calves of that cow, chickens that lay unfertilized eggs in commercial quantities, dogs that are adapted to hunting, varieties of rice that made it possible to feed more and more residents in Southeast Asia, and much more.
But there was a limit to the possibilities. The wet dream of the cotton growers is to grow blue cotton for the production of pants without the need to dye the fabric, Prof. Gafni himself is engaged in the development of a seedless tomato - which will be a hit with food manufacturers - especially ketchup. In Israel, flowers with a longer shelf life have also been developed through genetic engineering.
Already today, plants are given resistance through genes that have been introduced into them from bacteria. A certain toxin produced by a gene inserted into the plant from bacteria is used as an insecticide. The peak of the research deals (and as a diabetic it is very interesting to me personally, AB) in the introduction of genes from humans into plants. In particular, it is a gene that produces insulin. This is how the hormone mechanisms of the plant world are harnessed for the benefit of man.
In plants it is easier to carry out genetic manipulations because a plant can be produced from its single cell, and if a gene from another organism is inserted into this cell, during division this gene is transferred to all the cells of the plant, and from here on a new plant is created that carries within it additional traits that were artificially implanted into it. In animals it is a little more complicated because it has to be done in the fertilized egg and even then the success rate is relatively low.
