A4 - Friday, August 10, 1984 --North Shore News

~ NEWS photo lan Smith

WEST VANCOUVER firemen are happy with a new home now that the Caufeild fire hall is open for business.

Strictly personal

by Bob Hunter

HE DEBATE about genetic engineering has
warmed up again with the news that an
unknown Canadian company has applied for
permission to import a weird new substance called

‘“‘minus-ice’’ (shades

of Kurt

Vonnegut Jr.’s

famous world-destroying Ice 14!) and field-test it

somewhere in the north.

What ts controversial
about this move 1s the fact
that a WS) district) court
yudge has forbidden
American companies to test
the same substance on the
common sense grounds that
the stuff might’ cause un-
forseeable disruptions to the
ecological balance

On paper, “minus ice”
sounds great, the sort of
thing a farmer would give his
left lung for Simply, it is a
man-made bacterium = that
would render plants unmmune
to late spring or carly autumn
frost

Under existing Agriculture
Canada regulations, such a
substance has to be defined
as a pesboide ttisn’t its a
genetically modilicd
organism = It lives

There are semous practical
questions about tts
even its testing
well to

use, Ot
us all very
want to spate
temperature sensitive plants
that require a freezing period
inorder to grow?
\f minus icc was released
ov escaped, into the northern
covironment, we could casily
wind up with a helluva loc of
potatoes, but no pumpkins
And then there are all the
other side cffects nobody can
pect

which arc inevitable

Botig leo
with oa mutant
bacterium chat cats the guts

hooyou are play

around

veut crf vee ety staals oa the cust

side of plants.

Like, bye, bye Arctic ice
packs?

It was Only 10 years ago
in July, 1974 when a dac

tor at Leeds University an.
nounced that three test-tube
babies had been created in
Europe. Already, most of us
are quite adjusted to the idea.
The ethical arguments now
focus on such issues as the in-
heritance rights of frozen
sperm -— an ecene replay of
the medieval debate about
how many angels can dance
on the head of a pin

To keep our sense of
perspective, remember that
not even the most vistonary
science fiction writers in the
40s and 5Os dared to fantasize
that only a few years after
reaching the moon, humanity
would have come within in
ches of grasping, through the
medium of genetics, the very
controls of evolution itself
This was something thought
to be 600 years in the future.
in the cra of Aldous Mypage
Brave New World ~

Bur the dilemma is here,
how deisa’t arriving inthe
(form of supermen suddenly
shamDling about oon
midst Phas Coming in fits and
starts there oa
there a giant mouse

And over

Oud

bacterium

here. a litthe dis

ing ocrcaturc, cteated on
labovatoties, that poes out
and kills ae

Po onothe ln recent) Com

,000 Nixons?

ments that geneticist-curned-
broadcaster David Suzuki
doesn’t) sound quite as
paranoid about genetid
engineering as he used to, but

he sull warns that ‘‘there wall
be a

price to pay with
brotechnology probably
something out of lett) field,

and we will not know what y
is until to has happened.”’
The role of Cassandra hgs
fallen to author and
vironmental commentator
Jeremy Rifkin, who launche
the temporanly  successf
bid to stop Amenican ex-
periments on minus-ice.
Rifkin says flatly we could
easily wind up with an An-

Betcha didn’t know

ae

©

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dromeda_ Strain situation,
where a rampant man-made
bug gets loose, causing havoc
that would make acid rain
look hke a benign shower.

If that doesn’t make you
nervous, consider this: while
still president, and
presumably seen as a ‘‘great
man,’” Richard Nixon agreed
to donate some of his sperm
to a frozen-sperm bank. It is’
presumably sull on tap, so to
speak. What this means is

that, thanks to the
bioengineers, a thousand
Nixons might someday
blossom.

Now are you worrned?

Runner grabs

A LATE night waik cost a
middle-aged North Van-
couver resident her wallet
and a sore neck.

The woman was walking
to her Lower Lonsdale home
when she heard someone
running behind her. Think-
ing it was a jogger, she mov-
ed to one side of the side-

woman’s wallet

walk to let the runner pass.
Instead, the woman was
struck on the neck and her
wallet grabbed. The woman
chased the young man — in
his late teens or 20s —
but he escaped wi the
wallet, containing personal

papers and less than $10 in
cash.

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reasons you've given yourseff...

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