Sir, - The most disturbing feature of the genetic modification which is currently taking place is that it interferes with the "karma" of the plant or organism in question. The word karma means not only the range of actions that the plant or organism exhibits, but also its basic nature.
To quote the English scientist Thomas Huxley: "Everyday experience familiarises us with the facts which are grouped under the name of heredity. Every one of us bears upon him obvious marks of his parentage, perhaps of remoter relationships. More particularly, the sum of tendencies to act in a certain way, which we call `character', is often to be traced through a long series of progenitors and collaterals. So we may justly say that this `character' - this moral and intellectual essence of a man - does veritably pass over from one fleshy tabernacle to another, and does really transmigrate from generation to generation. In the newborn infant, the character of the stock lies latent, and the Ego is little more than a bundle of potentialities. But, very early, these become actualities; from childhood to age they manifest themselves in dullness or brightness, weakness or strength, viciousness or uprightness; and with each feature modified by confluence with another character, if by nothing else,the character on to its incarnation in new bodies.
"The Indian philosophers called character, as thus defined, `karma' . . . In the theory of evolution, the tendency of a germ to develop according to a certain specific type, e.g. of the kidney bean seed to grow into a plant having all the characters of phaseolus vulgaris, is its `karma'. It is the last inheritor and the last result of all the conditions that have affected a line of ancestry which goes back for many millions of years, to the time when life first appeared on earth."
It is the integrity found in nature that gives it its stability and adaptability as creation evolves. To interfere on the genetic level is like changing a note or two in a complex musical structure. Although the changes may be tiny, the overall effect can be disastrous for the listener, as well as being a deviation from what the composer wrote.
In a religious context, such manipulations of the very fabric of creation can be seen as an insult to God and the construction of a kind of karmic time bomb.
As most scientific research nowadays is funded by big business, philantrophy is certainly not its guiding force. Unless people of influence do something to at least stall and seriously question what is happening, we may yet see a world where fish do indeed end up needing bicycles. - Yours, etc.,
Jack Lyons,
Ontario Terrace,
Rathmines,
Dublin 6.