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The following HTML text is provided to enhance online readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML. Please use the page image as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy. add to the confusion. They come already littered with philosophical and ideological debris, which combatants pick up as ready-made shields or weapons. Holistic medicine, industrial agriculture, vegetarianism, free-market economy, corporate control, and consumer lifestyles all become part of the arsenal, and the resulting melee quickly obscures the particular details of biotechnology and its tools. Once we get down to specifics, the path may be straighter but the going may be no less rough. For example, is it a good thing or a bad thing to add genes for growth hormones to salmon? Let's see:
Of the four points made (and more might be added), two are positive and two negative. But the degree of certainty of each statement declines as you read down the list. This example is fairly typical. We can often be more sure about the economic outcomes of biotechnology than we can about health or environmental outcomes. And that, to many people, is a big problem. Uncertainty is a stock-in-trade of the prediction business. The inherent complexity of the interactions that produce healthy people and a healthy environment |
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