The Pros And Cons Of GMO Foods

I would like to begin my essay by telling the story of the Golden Rice GMO. “Right now, across the world, a quarter of a billion preschool-age children are suffering from vitamin A deficiency. Every year, 250,000 to 500,000 of these kids go blind. Within a year, half of the blinded children will die. Much of the affliction is in Southeast Asia, where people rely on rice for their nutrition. Rice doesn’t have enough beta carotene—the compound that, when digested, produces vitamin A. About twenty-five years ago, a team of scientists set out to solve this problem. Their plan was to engineer a new kind of rice that would make beta carotene. (Make a GMO that caused rice to produce Vitamin A) This was a sustainable solution. It would use biotechnology to prevent suffering, disability, and death. In 1999 they
Many people look at GMOs with a sort of view as if to ask: Why should I eat new GMO crops, when I could eat a crop that has been around for millennia? What they don’t understand, is that there is really no such thing as a crop that scientists just altered. People have been modifying plants since the creation of agriculture twelve thousand years ago. While it may have been done differently back then, the current method of genetically modifying plants is just a more deliberate way of doing what humankind has always done. The only difference now is that people have a scientific understanding of what they are doing and have improved agricultural techniques; advancements in agriculture have moved from the farm to the lab. The reason that I think so many people are opposed to GMOs, is because they don’t understand what they are, and because they think that scientists are doing something radical in making GMOs; they fear the unknown.”(Chrisopher