FOOD IS POWER ...
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later development of genetically modified organisms and the Gene Revolution. 7 Notably, the Rockefeller-funded genetic scientists in the new field of molecular biology congregated at the same Cold Spring Harbor site of the Eugenics Records Office, financed by Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, to hold major scientific symposiums on the "genetics of micro-organisms" beginning in 1946 just after the war's end. 8 Reducing Life Risks entailed weren't interesting to the Rockefeller group. Their methodology went back to what was termed "reductionism" by Rene Descartes, and to the method of Charles Darwin, namely that living creatures were machines whose only goal was genetic replication-a matter of chemistry and statistics. The Rockefeller methodology was an extension of the belief that a complex life form cold be reduced to a basic building bloc or "elementary seed;' from which all traits of the life form could be deduced. It was of little interest to Weaver and others at the Rockefeller Foundation that scientific reductionism had been thoroughly refuted. "Who pays the Piper picks the tune." They had a social agenda and their reductionist genetics supported that agenda. One scientist critical of the risks of GMO research, Prof. Philip Regal, who organized the first meeting between leading university ecologists and molecular biologists, genetic engineers in industry, and representatives from government agencies, at the Cold Spring Harbor Banbury Center in August 1984, defined the flaw of the molecular biologists' reductionism: In the case of DNA, this molecule is stable in a test tube. But it is not stable in populations of reproducing organisms. One cannot reduce the behavior of DNA in living organisms to its chemical properties in a test tube! In living systems, DNA is modified, or "destabilized" if one prefers, at a minimum by mutation, gene flow, recombination, and natural selection. This would make it extremely difficult or even impossible to have a true genetic engineering, in the sense of which it had been spoken. Many molecular biologists certainly "knew" facts
