"Genetically engineered products are an abomination of God's creation"

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

6. Some people might think of it that way. You obviously do.

I don't give a rats about what 'antithetical to nature'. What I care about is actually understanding all of the consequences of what we do before we start doing it everywhere. Mankind has a pitiful track record there. We've got anthropogenic climate change because we have an energy policy that was created before we actually understood the consequences of our actions. We've had decades of cancer because we didn't understand how tobacco affected our bodies. Ditto asbestos. Ditto x-rays, which used to be used in shoe stores for all that may or may not be holy. Mankind simply has an enormous track record of jumping into the deep end before we actually know what we're doing and how it will play out, and then having to spend far more time trying to fix the problems we created for ourselves.

The biosciences are still in their infancy, and we simply don't even know what we need to test for in many ways. A good parallel might be colony collapse disorder in bees, where all sorts of tests seemed to show that various toxins weren't the culprits, because you couldn't even find them in measurable quantities in the dead and dying bees. It took years to find out said toxins might actually be causing birth defects in larvae that left them vulnerable to parasitic mites. And we still don't actually know for sure. But the possibility is there, despite all the past testing that seemed to indicate the toxins were 'safe' and not to blame.

It doesn't matter where the genes come from. What actually matters is how they interact with the extremely complex systems of humans. And we just don't have enough data yet, because we still don't even understand everything about our own bodies.