The Windup Girl GM food

Earlier today I just took a test in AREC 365, and one of the topics dealt with GMOs. GMOs is obviously a major theme in the book and I noted some of the things I learned in class went along with Bacigalupi’s crazy world. It is interesting to know that already GM food has been tweaked so that genes from plants, insects, animals, and fish can be crossed in food, and when you realize how the coding sequence can be altered to put a gene from an insect in a food like wheat, you can think that it is more than likely for this science to go much further; the windup girl seems not too far away.

We also read about why we would need GMOs to adopt to climate change and diseases such as stem rust of wheat which is threatening areas of Asia and points out how new varieties of crops can be created quickly to adapt to wild climate change. For example things like changing the way rice and wheat preform photosynthesis has the possibility to be changed threw bioengineering which will let them like in hotter and dryer areas.

Anyways with the recent UN report that came out on climate change, it seems that it may very well be necessary for places like Europe and more of Asia to not only adopt GM foods, but to start developing them so that the science behind them can evolve and bring forth foods that are able to withstand climate change, disease, and to increase yields in crops to feed a growing world population.

I believe this will happen and our generation will see an increase in agricultural biotechnology corporations. However if climate change starts to rapidly alter conditions on the planet like The Windup Girl, I don’t believe we’ll be seeing any type to GM humans or cyborgs, or see these corporations taking over the world with private armies or what have you.

Also, I know that there are several concerns dealing with GM crops most notably in conjunction with the book, a possibly for them to promote diseases that are immune to antibiotics like the plague in The Windup Girl, and with human and insect genes being put into crops, viruses could be formed that our immune system can’t handle, although I can’t really see a possible real world connection between GM crops being highly susceptible to disease themselves, as it is in the book, if it is so easy to alter the genes of plants.

As I previously said, I do believe that we will see a rise in agricultural biotechnology, but I don’t believe that something like world trade will collapse do to something like the free market vs. suitability, I think it could possibly have the opposite effect in the future rather than certain places like Thailand to reject world trade and survive by closing borders to keep its sovereignty and to welcome an embargo, but then again maybe I need to change my perspective to a developing country and what effect climate change may have, and if oil gets too expensive for my country to purchase such as Thailand, then what? Possible economic collapse with famine and drought maybe. It would be interesting if we could step in the book and see how life changed in the US because I assume it would be nothing similar to that of Thailand and that the use of technology would very well still be widespread, running off maybe giant elephants, solar panels, and nuclear power if necessary. In any event, I think that the human race will be able to adapt to climate change, similar to how they did in The Windup girl with GM foods, but don’t think we are just going to one day see oil disappear and see slavery and cyborgs along with it.