Agronomist - from the first study you cite:
Some studies find increasedyields and returns to farmers (Gianessi and Carpenter 1999) and while others do not (Hyde et al 1999). As resistance increases, the yield drags will increase...Re the expansion of GE: 13 million farmers - that's around 2% of the farming population of China. Not exactly the dominant form of agriculture. Note that I raised this in the context of claims by you and others that opposing Ge was equivalent to calling farmers stupid...That's an idiotic argument.

I'm an ex software engineer, gravely concerned about GE from a technical (not moral or political) point of view. I don't believe that GE products can be tested, for the same reason that software cannot be tested without a thorough understanding of the process.

Gene sequences are of course compared to computer programs. The software analogy could prove most instructive in respect of the huge challenge of proving program correctness.

Even moderately complex software cannot be completely tested: there are simply too many branches and input combinations for every test case to be tried. Software verification therefore remains an art, blending empirical product testing with code inspection, quality assurance of the development process, and formal methods (most of which are barely out of the lab).

What is proven with mathematical certainty is that there are fundamental limitations on what can ever be known about software behaviour. Best known is the "Stopping Problem": it is not possible to tell by formal method if any given program is ever going to stop. If it's impossible to even tell if a program is going to stop, what hope is there of proving if it fully works as expected?

Software engineers know that their validation tools remain terribly crude; for this reason and this reason alone, I'd like to know how genetic engineers can tell that their products are working as they intend?

Natural genomes have evolved over vast periods of time. As such, they have been verified to degrees of confidence that software engineers today can only dream of. It is received wisdom in software engineering that most bugs arise from changes made to older code. So genetic engineers should not be messing with nature’s “legacy” designs without the very greatest caution.

Stephen Wilson
Lockstep Consulting
www.lockstep.com.au