The Cheerful Insanity of Me

So, what with the weekend and everything, I haven't posted about the GM Crops talk at the Dana Centre, so here we go.

They had a good selection of speakers including a government scientific adviser, a scientist working on GM maize for the third world and another person who seemed to know what he was talking about even if I didn't catch who he was. The scientist was unfortunately very difficult to understand as he spoke very fast with a strong Italian accent and had problems with his microphone, so I ended up switching off to a lot of what he said. That said all the speakers had views which lay somewhere near the fence. It might have been more interesting to have had some more extreme views represented to give more information about the pros and cons.

I went with the opinion that there didn't seem anything inherently wrong with GM, although its open to abuse the same as anything else. I also felt there was no real strong drivers to say we had a strong need for it either, except in the third world. It wasn't something I knew a huge amount about though, which unfortunately I feel is probably still the case.

A lot of the issues that seem to be raised against GM seem to be due to large companies developing the crops as a means to their own ends proceeding without any caution, but I don't see that that should rule out the technology entirely.

All in all, I don't think my views have changed much and I don't really feel much better informed on the subject, but it was interesting to think about all the same.

This evening I wondered over to the Dana Centre for a talk on DNA Testing. The discussion was focus on the services of companies like 23andMe who will analyse your DNA and give you details of illnesses you are genetically more/less prone to.

It was interesting, even if the debate was a little one-sided. They had one speaker from a company offering these services, but they were on video link from California, so only gave a brief presentation followed by questions and answers and weren't involved in the rest of the discussions.

There was a random man in the audience who tried to claim that genetics wasn't science, which was unusual, but he seemed to be the only one with that view.

In short, I didn't really have any desire to have my DNA tested, other than pure curiosity, before this evening and as there wasn't really a strong argument to suggest I might these views haven't changed.