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The American public is not aware that there might be potential allergenic and toxic reactions. With regular food, at least people know which foods they have an allergy to.
The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you’re a farmer and you’re growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm.
The interesting thing is, while we die of diseases of affluence from eating all these fatty meats, our poor brethren in the developing world die of diseases of poverty, because the land is not used now to grow food grain for their families.
The position I took at the time was that we hadn’t really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.
We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn’t do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.
We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.