Column from September/October 2001 issue of ASPB News.

Scenario: You meet a woman in a grocery store holding a new baby. You admire the baby. You chat a while and she asks what you do. She then confides that she is worried about the effects of genetically modified organisms on her child's health. She asks you, as a scientist, to remove all the food from her basket that has been genetically modified. Oh, and please take out anything that contains a mutation, too.

My mind raced as I broke into a squirmy sweat, and I thought to myself: In which century did mankind begin to modify food? Do I subject this hapless woman to a long diatribe about the Fertile Crescent or the breeding of maize in pre-Incan civilization? Where do I myself draw the line between "genetically modified" a la the Greens and traditional breeding?

And oh boy, what do I tell her about mutations in her food sources, possible mutations in her own body and in that of her child?! I stood there looking at the corn in her basket, thinking that over half this genome are transposons, viruses that can cause mutations and cancer!

I talked to myself. "Okay, Dina, think out the options." Option 1: I initiate a long conversation that must not turn into a lecture lest I be dismissed as a snob and lose my audience. Option 2: I trivialize the process and say, "Trrrrust me, Hy'm a scientist." Where the perils of the former are evident, the ethics of the latter are dubious.

As I wove my way through the conversation about food and genes and mutations good-and-evil, it dawned on me that the real danger is that this could quickly become personal. Far from being remote and esoteric, as I once thought ethical issues were, issues such as this one touch our lives everyday if we think about them.

"So, you seen Ellen, these are not simple choices, even for me" I wound up saying.

"Oh well, I trust you," she smiled. "You chose for me."

Inwardly, I groaned. The clerk was waiting for me to choose what this woman and child are going to eat. In the end, the mother and baby left happy, and I scooted home with a sigh of relief.

Later on, I reflected on the core of the problem: Societal evolution has not kept pace with technological change. These things have been "mokita" for too long. The result? We have a long way to go before students in class no longer ask, "If I eat corn with all those transposons in it, will I get cancer?"

Next issue: Ethics in Data Management.

See http://www.aspb.org/membersinaction/bioethics.cfm for additional supporting materials and to read other issues of the Bioethics Imperative featured in issues of the ASPB News.

Dina Mandoli
University of Washington, Seattle
mandoli@u.washington.edu

Supporting materials can be found HERE.