To: Electronic Telegraph <et.letters@telegraph.co.uk>
Re: GM FOOD
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1999

Dear Sir,

I would like to make what seems to me to be an important but much neglected point relating to GM-crops and food.

We need to differentiate between risks and RISKS. The chances of something going seriously wrong with GM food, or the crops from which it is produced, may be small, but IF something does go wrong the consequences COULD be so devastating that we (or our children!) will wish that Watson and Crick had never deciphered the genetic code.

I have an similar attitude towards nuclear energy: no matter how small the risk of a serious accident may be, I do not wish to take it, neither on my own behalf nor on behalf of the generations that will come after me (Not that accidents are the only threat, since who can guarantee against acts of sabotage and war for the next thousand years?!).

For the food and chemical companies genetically engineered crops are a commercial opportunity and risk, which they deal with much as they have with past ventures. But they fail - or refuse - to recognise that the risks now involved, thanks to the phenomenal recent progress  made in science and technology, are of a completely different order of magnitude.

One can understand a company's and its employees' vested interest in wanting to go ahead with GM foods. But they conflict with mine and a sane society's interest in not wishing to take ANY risks with something that could, no matter how small the chance, have devastating and irreparable consequences for the environment or human health.

Behind the arguments for and against GM foods (or nuclear energy) there is a basic conflict of attitude towards man (ourselves) and his place in nature. It seems ironical that we should have largely succeeded in doing away with God (i.e. a spiritual authority that man defers to) just when we need Him most. We are like a bunch of silly, arrogant children playing with a box of matches they have found. Although some of us have already been quite badly burned (Chernobyl, BSE, . . . ) we continue to play. What we desperately need is for our father to come along and save us from ourselves, before we do ourselves and our planet irreparable damage.

I do not know when or even if He is going to turn up and save us, but in the meantime we would do well to listen to the man who is often laughed at for talking to the plants, rather than to those who meddle with their genes."