Well one example in plant biology that's controversial is a lot of consumers are concerned about unpredictable changes that might occur when you use biotechnology to generate new food. One thing we need to think about though is when we use traditional breeding we also introduce unpredictable changes into a plant.

So if we want to think about it, what we need to do is know that with biotechnology we can produce food that is as safe or safer than food produced with traditional breeding methods. Academic scientists have a very important role in educating the public about biotechnology. So we do that through educating our students or through outreach in educating the public. And I think academic scientists should take a neutral role in biotechnology education. We should provide students with the facts and allow students to make up their minds about the benefits and limitations of biotechnology.

Joan Burnside

Now if we know that consumers would like to know that they have a one hundred percent guarantee that a transgenic product is safe, that can't happen, that can't be offered. Everything has a risk and a benefit and these need to be weighed. We have to consider what aspect of transgenesis we're talking about. The majority of transgenic animals that are in existence right now are mice, by far the majority. And these are used for medical research to model human disease, to test pharmaceuticals. They are invaluable. It is clear that the benefits outweigh the risks when using transgenic mice in research. There's virtually no risk. And in fact we can develop cell lines from some of these mice and use those for testing and thus reduce the use of mice or any kind of animal in research for human disease. Transgenic animals can also be used as bioreactors to produce pharmaceuticals that are important for human disease. This is sometimes referred to as pharmaceutical farming. It's a very cost effective alternative to producing proteins when using cell culture. Cell culture requires huge bioreactors. You have to adjust the growth culture conditions very, very precisely and control it very carefully and then go unpurify the protein, where as an animal can produce much the same protein at a much less expensive cost. Again, you have very few risks and very strong benefits. And in fact there are some animals available now that produce a number of human proteins.

Transgenic animals are also being used to develop organs that can be transplanted into humans. This is of enormous benefit. If you were on an organ transplant wait list. Now we're not quite ready to use these organs. Pig bowels have been used for years, forty years I guess, in treating heart disease in humans, but there's a risk of rejection. But now we can engineer pigs that they would have the histocompatibility antigens on their tissues same as humans. You could even design it to a particular human so that the chances of rejection are really, really reduced. So transgenics, strong benefits.

But then we get to the issue of making transgenic animals for production characteristics, to improve the production characteristics. So we might want to make a beef animal that had more muscle. We might want to make a chicken that had more breast meat, grew faster, used less food. There's a number of production characteristics that you might think about that we have the technology to alter, but then we have the environmental risks and we have the economic impacts that we have to take into consideration.

Perhaps the biggest argument is about reduced speciation, the risk of letting these animals into the wild. I think that students who are undertaking studies of transgenic animals have to realize that this is a cross-disciplinary study and that they have to become aware of evolution. If they're talking about transgenic plants they have to deal with entomology, pest management and what the impact is on the environment from that level. They have to consider various factors all the way down the line besides just the molecular biology of engineering the animal. You have to put aside some of the special interest groups who will dismiss the science in favor of an ethical issue. Those are separate from the scientific issues. They're separate from the economic issues of transgenic animals.

David Schmidt

Well I think biotechnology is a concept that is not understood by many people overall, so depending on what terms are used to describe the technology and what benefits are conveyed, the consumers may react very differently. When more frightening terms are used, such as transgenics or GMO's or Genetically Modified are thrust out to a consumer who is not aware of this technology at all, they tend to think that this is something scary, and think this could lead to a negative product trait, as opposed to looking at it as a benefit, whereas talking about it in terms of agricultural biotechnology and food biotechnology, and conveying why the product is being changed if the product is being changed or improved in the first place, will lead to greater acceptance. So , I think this focus on communicating the benefits in terminology that the consumers can understand, will lead to greater acceptance among consumers.

Carl Winter

It is clear that most scientists and regulators consider the risks for biotechnology-derived foods to be negligible for consumer health- at the same time it's also clear that there are a lot of consumers that are quite concerned about these technologies. Many consumers have the desire to have absolute, one hundred percent assurance that foods produced from a number of technologies, including biotechnology, are absolutely safe. Scientifically, unfortunately, this is an impossibility. We really do not have the ability to absolutely determine in anything is safe. In fact, in many cases, we can only demonstrate the absence of safety under specific conditions.

Scientists need to realize that consumers make their decisions based on a number of factors, including the sciences, but also including several what might be considered less scientific factors, such as whether the exposure is voluntary or involuntary, natural verses synthetic, whether they believe the institutions that are developing the research or regulation the product. I think very importantly, consumers are interested in the equity of the potential distribution of risks and benefits. If the tech poses at least some theoretical risk, consumers want to know that they are also receiving a benefit, personally. We have had some cases of uses of biotechnology where it is very hard for the consumers to see a direct benefit, and even if the risks may be very low, there may still be considerable consumer concern.

It can be argued that products of today's biotechnology, in which we can insert perhaps a single gene to confer the desired trait in the product, may actually be safer in many cases than those produced by conventional breeding processes, because in conventional breeding, we don't have the ability to control the selection nearly as well.

Paul Thompson

Europeans have experienced a number of scares associated with their food, the most dramatic of course was the mad cow disease that struck in the UK and has now spread across a number of European countries. I think that many people look at this incident and what they want is some assurance that when new technology is being introduced into the food system, that all the issues are being looked at, and it is being done in a responsible manner. One of the things that has been happening to the food system before transgenics came along has been a tendency for it to become harder and harder for people who have these religious and culturally based beliefs to have control over what they eat. Similarly, some people are reacting to the result of transgenics in a way that is if not explicitly religious at least very similar to religion in that they don't want to have any part of this food. They don't want to eat transgenic crops and they might have a religious or quasi-religious reason for that. They might say, ÒIt's crossing species boundaries, and I don't want to eat crops that cross species boundaries or foods that cross species boundaries.Ó Or, they might have a concern that they might articulate by saying that it's unnatural or possibly ÒI'm concerned about what we don't know about this concern.Ó In all of these cases, we have a situation in which we have to ask ourselves ÒDo these people have a legitimate right to choose not to eat transgenic foods?Ó And, I'll tell you that my own view on this is that you don't need to have a good reason, at least a reason in scientific terms to decide that you want to eat non-transgenic foods, just as you don't need to have a good scientific reason to choose that you don't want to eat pork or you don't want to eat beef or, for that matter, that you don't want to eat cats and dogs. We have very strong culturally based beliefs in the United States that certain kinds of animals, cats and dogs being the examples shouldn't be eaten as food. Yet there are places in the world where cat and dog are eaten as food, and we've actually built these cultural beliefs into our regulatory system. You can't include cat or dog meat in the American food system. We're protected against that. Is there a good scientific reason for that? Really, there's not. There's no reason why you can't eat cat and dog. This is just an example of a strong culturally based belief that probably couldn't be defended on scientific grounds.