Researchers are creating more and more of what some people are calling Frankenstein plants. In case you don't know who Frankenstein was, he was the fictional doctor that created a living monster out of the parts of dead people. This is not exactly what is going on with plants, it is more like using the parts from plants and animals and putting them into living plants and bacteria. It is definitely a freakish branch of research and one that is producing some very strange plant life, or should I say hybrid life to be more accurate. The life is far more plant than animal that is produced, but it does sometimes contain genes from animals. Before we get the idea that all this is bad, because some of it is, I want to emphasize the fact that many new medicines are and will be produced this way. When you think about it, it is a feat that no one would have believed possible a mere 50 years ago. There are some tremendous up sides to this, but there are also downsides.

One of the greatest threats that these things pose, is that they may get out of the controlled fields and greenhouses, where they are being grown and some of their genes may mingle with other plants. Another threat is that they may start to grow uncontrollably in other places. If either of these two things happen, there can be secondary effects. One effect is that some of the main food crops might become contaminated. A secondary effect is that birds and animals might eat these plants and some of their genetic material might enter the human food chain. If you believe what the scientists say, when they say that this could never happen, remember that they said the same thing about plastic containers and now most of us show traces of the chemicals that make up plastic in our blood. Look what has already happened with the genetically altered food crops, they have contaminated much of the regular food crops. Maybe the scientists really knew this was going to happen all along and figured that after it happened, there was nothing that we could do about it? Anyway, so far, I have seen no evidence that the genetically altered food crops present any danger, but it could take decades to find this out. A nutritionist stated in a recent article, "There's also the inherent danger of genetically modifying entire crops and exposing them to the open air. The risk of cross-pollination with other plants leading to out-of-control destruction of native plant species is very real, and yet it remains routinely ignored by those involved with these sorts of projects."

There are a lot of people that are against genetic engineering. There is also another field that is being researched that also has many detractors and that is genetic mapping. Genetic engineering is where the natural state of something is changed by altering or adding to or taking something from it's genes. Genetic mapping is where researchers try and find out the function of each gene. Genetic mapping can be used, as they say, for good or evil. When it is used for good, it can be used to find out what genetic disorder is being caused by what gene. As you can imagine, this is very helpful to the medical community and may lead to all sorts of gene therapy, and it may also lead to genetic engineering, which we talked about first. Many believe that we are not advanced enough to play with genes, especially in animals and humans. It has to be admitted that genetic engineering is a relatively new science and the problem with new sciences that are now popping up, is that they are very complex and we only know about them because our technology has advanced so much in recent years. The problem is that we truly don't understand all the ramifications yet. An example of this could be us modifying a gene to cure some disease, but in doing so we set some gene changes into motion that we don't suspect. These changes start to get hold in future generations and we have changed the entire human race of the future in some ways that we just can't understand now. Aside from that, there are people out there that would exploit this ability for money or a misguided sense of religion or patriotism and endanger the entire human race.

I guess it is time to look at the other side of the coin. It seems like almost a miracle that we can get plants to act like chemical labs and do our bidding. In a primitive way, we have already altered many plants by selective breeding, which has altered genes and caused vegetables like corn to grow from about an inch long to about 6 inches long. Believe me when I tell you that the yield in many plants has already been increased this way. So we had a form of genetic manipulation for hundreds of years. The difference now is that we can get even better results in a far shorter period of time. Now we go directly to the gene responsible for growth and re-engineer it. So why are so many people up in arms about genetic engineering in food? It is because when you adjust plants by selective breeding, it allows all the genes to get used to each other over time, but when you do gene engineering you are asking for things to happen immediately and the non-engineered genes around the engineered ones haven't had a chance to get used to their new companion. No one knows what the effect of this may be in the future.

Making drugs could be one of the most beneficial functions of gene modifications in plants. Can you imagine getting a plant to produce anti cancer drugs. If the drug companies decided to treat us fairly, these drugs would cause the prices of drugs to drop drastically, since all you would have to do is grow them. A paper was published in Nature on June 26, 2003, it stated that the genes in some plants that regulate transport of growth hormone are related to human genes, it is thought that this might allow doctors to better regulate cancer medicine in the human body. I guess plants are pretty amazing when you think of them. They have been the main source of our medicine for thousands of years. Now we want to continue to use them, but not in a way that nature intended. Transgenic plants are plants that possess at least one gene from a different species. The first genetically engineered medicine was synthetic human insulin in 1982. Bacteria was inserted with plasmids that contained the directions for creating insulin. Right after that, human growth hormone was developed. Bacteria live in both humans and plants. As plants are being coaxed into developing medicines, many see hope for medicines on the horizon that will cure many of humanity's scourges. It just might turn out that the 21st century will be remembered for the great revolution in medicine that extended the human life span, or the century that released all sorts of mutations into plant life that destroyed most of the world's food supply.

An article published in The Register, tells of some drug producing, genetically altered plants that got into fields in 2006 and contaminated everything in those fields. It seems that the genetically altered plants carried drugs in their stems. The article goes on to say that these altered plants are spreading more rapidly than first thought, because of illegal planting and corporate cover-ups. Here is the part that scares the heck out of people. The article states that one man said that as more of these plants spread, they could mutate and this might spread to humans. Yipes, this is getting to be more like a science fiction story. Another article from the New York Times, stated that Dr. Rebecca J. Goldburg, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, stated that, "This research demonstrates that there is a cause for environmental concerns. This is a flashing yellow light." She might have said this because a Danish study showed that it only took one generation for a transplanted gene to cross from a crop to a wild plant.