Would you like to have your morning cornflakes served with milk, fruit, and bugkiller … or would you just as soon pass on the bugkiller?

Unfortunately, you might not have a choice. Aventis Inc., a biotech seed conglomerate based in France, sells a genetically-altered corn seed that it calls StarLink. The company's bioengineers have genetically inserted into these seeds a protein that acts as a pesticide, killing bugs that feed on corn plants.

Such tampering with Mother Nature can have consequences, of course, and one of the human health problems posed by this pesticide-spiked corn is that it might prompt allergic reactions in our bodies--reactions ranging from rashes to a fatal case of shock.

Because of this, the EPA has approved StarLink corn only for animal feed, not for human consumption. But--whoops--there was no labeling and tracking of the altered corn, which was planted by U.S. farmers on 350,000 acres this year. So, instead of going strictly to animal feed, StarLink corn has become mixed into our food supply. Aventis faces a $100 million loss if it has to recall all of this crop from grain elevators, food processors, and supermarkets.

But, wait--Aventis has a better idea! It has asked the EPA simply to grant its pesticide-contaminated corn a special four-year approval for human consumption. This is perfect--the corporation won't have to eat a big loss, the industry won't have to fuss with a recall, and within four years the corn will have worked its way through the marketing system. The only downside is that the StarLink corn also will work its way through your system. But, hey, you're just a consumer, so shut up and eat your cornflakes.

A biotech company has taken out a Europe-wide patent on a process which campaigners claim would allow "chimeric" animals to be developed with body parts originating from humans.

An Australian company was granted the patent last year, which covers embryos containing cells both from humans and from "mice, sheep, pigs, cattle, goats or fish."

Details in the patent do not make it clear what use these mixed-species embryos would be put to, but experts are in no doubt that the potential is there to create a hybrid creature.

Dr. Sue Mayer, director of Genewatch, said: "The company is saying that it wants a patent on a process which could produce chimeric animals using cells from a whole range of species, including humans. Many people will find the thought abhorrent."

A spokesman for the Catholic Church said: "To patent a process where human life is used as a kind of bank to deposit into animals is morally indefensible."

The European Patent Office recently claimed it would never grant a patent on mixed-species embryos, as they are considered against "public order and morality." But this patent, discovered by a researcher in Greenpeace's German office, was taken out in January 1999.

Human Genome Project: big deal or big hype?
Frankenstein Time
Cloning and genetic engineering? Pandora's pantry
Cloning's risks indicate nature may know best
From genomics to eugenics?

James Watson has never been a man to mince words. Co-discoverer of the famous double helix of DNA, Watson has become a vociferous proponent of genetic engineering. Before a British parliamentary committee in June he demanded, "If scientists don't play God, who will?" In recent years, gene scientists have made startling "progress" towards such a goal. Gene technologies now in development suggest that at least demigod powers will soon be within reach.

The technologies in question fall into the category of what is known as germline genetic engineering--that is, genetic engineering carried out at the stage of the fertilized egg. Any modifications made at this point have the advantage that they will be expressed in every cell of the adult body.

What kind of modifications might scientists want to make? Dr. John Campbell, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist at UCLA, outlined for me the kinds of "improvements" he imagines. What about a gene that confers resistance to HIV? Wouldn't it be great, Campbell suggests, if no one ever got AIDS again? What about cancer, if there were genes that protected against cancer? Other potential "enhancements" include genes for improved memory (one has already been demonstrated in mice), and genes that might protect against obesity.

Anyone who has watched a loved one go through chemotherapy or radiation knows how desperately we need better cancer treatments. But even if this mechanism proves medically feasible, behind the techno-jargon lies a deep philosophical sand trap. A hint of this trap is to be found in the very name of the paper where the research was announced. Here it is in all its glory: "ecdysteroid-dependent regulation of genes in mammalian cells by drosophila ecdysone receptor and chimeric transvectors." Don't you just love the poetry of scientific language, all so clinical and proper sounding? But there is one word here that no amount of technical jargon can gloss over--"drosophila," the fly. Yes siree, what we are talking about is mixing ourselves with fly genes!

The marriage of man and fly is one of the great sagas of modern science fiction. But this is not a movie; it is real life. Is this a path we really want to go down? Campbell envisages a future where every child (at least those whose parents approve and can afford it) will be loaded at conception with all sorts of genetic modifications.

It is an extraordinary vision. It is also the stuff of nightmares.

Dressed in white, his thinning hair tied in a bun atop his head, the leader of an obscure religious group [the Raelians] stood before a smattering of onlookers in a Montreal hotel to make what he said was a momentous announcement: His group, which believes that human cloning is the key to "eternal life," had found a wealthy American couple willing to finance the group's effort to clone a person for the first time.

The leader, a former sportswriter who has taken the name of Rael, was joined by his scientific adviser and five young women wearing identical necklaces, part of the group's bevy of 50 would-be surrogate mothers who had volunteered to carry cloned human embryos in their wombs.

The first to be cloned, Rael said, would be the American couple's child, a 10-month-old girl who recently died from a medical accident and whose cells have been preserved.

The Raelians, who say they believe that humans are clones of extraterrestrial scientists, offered no evidence that they have any of the medical skills required to reach their goal, or that their claim was anything more than a publicity stunt. Their announcement, made on Sept. 21, went largely unnoticed.

But while no one knows whether this group will really try to clone a human being, experts familiar with recent scientific advances say there is no longer much debate that human cloning can be achieved with existing technology. A flock of dedicated believers willing to tolerate a few dozen miscarriages along the way could probably clone a person in less than a year, leading scientists said.

It was all over the news recently--the completion of the initial sequencing of the human genome. What does it mean?

An M.D./Ph.D. posting his comments online wrote this: "These are just sequences, folks. Even after we identify the proteins they encode, it may take thousands of years to figure out what the proteins do, how they interact with each other, and how they relate to health. Imagine this: somebody gives you all the words in the book Catch 22--in alphabetical order. How far is that from putting together the book? Multiply it by a million. This is where we are now. In all likelihood, it will result only in very gradual changes, over thousands of years." In short: No big deal.

Contrast that with the big press conference on June 26, with President Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and two key scientists who led the research. We heard statements such as, "Understanding the human genome will revolutionize the practice of medicine...." Frances Collins, a professing Christian who heads the National Human Genome Research Institute, said on national TV, "We have caught the first glimpses of our instruction book, previously known only to God." In short: It's a big deal.

So is it a big deal or big hype?

Look at it this way: Picture a deck of cards--a really big deck. This deck has roughly 3.2 billion cards. What the joint work of the U.S. government's National Human Genome Research Institute (public) and Celera Genomics (private) has accomplished is figuring out, in simple terms, what "card" is in each position in the deck.

So we've learned nearly the entire sequence of the cards. Yet we can identify the function in only a tiny percentage of them. We know their chemical sequences, but we don't know what they do. By comparing sequences with individuals who have known genetic disorders, we know some of the harmful sites, and we can now discover others fairly quickly. The potential for medical advancement is staggering--truly great news. We could very well see some "risky" genes identified such as those for cancers, early heart attack or diabetes.

How, then, should we respond to the public announcement of the sequencing of the human genome? First, the good side:

• Praise God that we have been permitted a glimpse into a yet smaller frame of our construction. The more we discover, the more we can stand in awe of our complexity.
• Marvel that we are "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14) from a template of merely four basic blocks mixed more than 3 billion times.

But what about the cautions? What are the dangers?

Here's the "down" side of all this research: We are now positioned to predict more accurately those persons who are at high risks for developing genetic disorders. Unfortunately, a person diagnosed as being "at risk" genetically might also find his or her diagnosis economically and socially "risky" long before any signs of disease develop. Depending on who has access to personal genetic information, businesses could discriminate by refusing to hire someone with a higher-than-average risk for cancer or debilitating disease. An insurance company could easily deny coverage to the very group of people most needing their financial resources.

Looking even further down the road, how would genetic information affect social interaction and marriage? If you knew the genome of your prospective mate, and thus for your offspring--and the potential for such diseases as cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's--would we use this information to keep our "family gene pool" strong? Could the state require a blood test to be sure folks with recessive genes don't marry? Would a certain type of genome be required to fill government posts? The possibilities are endless.

Pope John Paul said scientific progress created wonderful possibilities, but warned of its terrible potential. The Pope, addressing university lecturers from around the world gathered at the Vatican, appealed to scientists to always weigh moral acceptability and the limits of science. "The progress of science and technology today lies in the hands of man, possibilities which are magnificent but also terrible," the 80-year-old Pope said. Addressing an international conference on transplant techniques in Rome last month, the Pope praised science for its dedication to preserving human life but condemned cloning. "What is technically possible is not for that reason morally admissible," he said.