That some people would question the safety of novel foods — like food developed using biotechnology — is nothing new.
"Even some of the most ubiquitous products endured centuries of persecution," wrote Calestous Juma, director of the Science, Technology and Globalization Project at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, in a September 2003 article in Economic Perspectives. "Claims about the promise of new technology are at times greeted with skepticism, villification or outright opposition — often dominated by slander, innuendo and misinformation."
Coffee, for example, was outlawed or restricted in the past few hundred years in Mecca, Cairo, Istanbul, England, Germany and Sweden. Others tried to discredit the drink.
"The body becomes a mere shadow of its former self; it goes into a decline and dwindles away," wrote French doctors in 1674. "The heart and guts are so weakened that the drinker suffers delusions, and the body receives such a shock that it is though it were bewitched."
A century before, Catholic priests tried to ban coffee from the entire Christian world, calling it "Satan's beverage." They argued it was a Muslim drink that was unfit for Christians but Muslims didn't think much of it, either.
Whole article: "www.whybiotech.com":[ http://www.whybiotech.com/index.asp?id=4176]
Antibiotic resistance countered -
US scientists believe they may have found a way to stop the growing problem of bacteria becoming resistant to current drug treatments (11.7.2007)
The aplication of functional genomics for food microbiology -
The methods functional genomics (it includes genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics) are expected to be crucial in food microbiology, especially in guiding predictive modelling of behaviour of spoilage and pathogenic micororganisms (21.12.2006)
BIO-RECEPTOR BASED METHODS (BIO-ASSAYS) FOR FOOD -
An escalating demand exists for simple, quick and
reliable screening methods in food and environment
monitoring (21.12.2006)
Engineering food at level of molecules -
These ideas are still laboratory dreams (31.10.2006)
A Biotech Fish Food Could One Day Improve Human Health -
Plant biotechnology could one day help make healthy Mediterranean and Pacific diets even healthier for a greater number of people while at the same time helping to preserve ocean fisheries, according to a Purdue University researcher (16.8.2006)
