tech Corporation; A modified tomato called the FLAVR SAVR, and in theory this sounds like marvelous invention. It is larger, better tasting, and stays fresh longer than commercial tomatoes on the market. How did they do it? The FLAVR SAVR tomato was created by combining conventional tomato genes with genes of an arctic trout. This was no natural or logical combination of genes and certainly presents a lot of complication when arriving to the market. Will people with a sea food allergy be able to eat the FLAVR SAVR? Would these new trout genes allow new types of bacteria to form on the tomatoes making them especially hazardous to eat? With so many new attributes introduced through this new DNA it is difficult to know the potential side effects from these new foods. For centuries now farmers have been able to cross breed various strains of sweet corn to make it grow even sweeter, or to make potatoes grow bigger, but mixing tomatoes and fish is a match that could only have been made in a laboratory. Since it wasnt until recently that such technology was feasible, there is no real way of knowing whether genetically modified foods would take a negative impact on the body. Many activists tend to cite an incident that occurred in 1989 concerning the nutritional supplement, L- Tryptophan. What was originally believed to be a safe naturally occurring amino acid, safe for human consumption, caused a potentially fatal illness called Eosinophilia Myolgia Syndrome (Jacobs 2000). This GM supplement was taking off the market shortly after the reports of widespread illness among consumers of the supplement. This is certainly reason to be skeptical of genetically modified organisms, but defendants of genetically modified foods have a different argument. In theory since the DNA is simply a miniature list of characteristics held by that organism, the DNA of one plant should be no less harmful than another, just because they were spliced together from 2 di...
