What about disease

Plant diseases affect plants because the source of disease can take advantage of the metabolic pathways of the particular plant, and be disruptive to it (if not disruptive, we wouldn't know it's a disease; e.g. having a mitochondria inside a plant cell is not a disease even if it is geneticly distinct from the plant itself). Plant diesease do not usually affect human because most of the time they can not take advantage of human metabolic system; at lease unable to be disruptive. When they do, it's called food poinsoning, like certain types of parasitic fungus on plants can cause food poinsoning.

What's being discussed here is injecting segments of animal/human DNA into plants, not the other way around. Some rice advocates may have ground to fear giving human disease to rice, however improbable that is :-) The risk of getting rice disease into human that way is no greater than that associated with ingesting rice to begin with; that's when the final product finally gets into human, through the digestive tract. So if we really want to be paranoid, in order to prevent all plant disease from affecting human, we should stop eating all plants :-) While we are at it, eating animals are probably even more dangerous as animal metabolic pathways are much more similar to ours than those of plants to ours . . . remember the Mad Cow Disease? So we really should eat nothing :-)

Okay...what about disease?

Alright, I am not a scientist and I do not pretend to be...but I suppose this could be a psuedo-intellectual presumption, so stop me if I am wrong. If they do splice the DNA of humans and plants, could that not open up a big door to mutating plant diseases and human diseases and somehow render a greater possibility of producing a new form of virus etc...?

Re: DNA Patent

I agree with you morally, but there is one benefit to the greed of making the plants sterile, so farmers must buy new seed each season: If the plants can't seed, they can't spread and contaminate the wilderness or other crops. This is a GOOD thing! :)

Second, nobody's holding a gun to farmers' heads to sow these crops. This was tried in India a few years back with GM wheat. When the local sahibs found the crops' seeds were sterile, they dumped the lot and went back to cultivating their old strains and collecting the seed as they always have, and the corporation concerned lost the entire Indian market. So if farmers don't like the sterile seed scam, they can always choose not to sow these crops. A couple of farmers of my acquaintance, here in Australia, are highly reticent about polluting their fields with this GM stuff, notwithstanding the higher costs and the nasty neighbour/consumer backlash that can arise from doing so. Some farmers do grow the stuff, but Australia's labelling laws require any products containing GM crops to be clearly labelled as such. And guess what? Those products aren't selling too well...