Stewart Brand said it well in his TED Talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_proclaims_4_environmental_heresies.html http://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_bran

Stewart Brand said it well in his TED Talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_proclaims_4_environmental_heresies.html http://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_proclaims_4_environme...): "We are gods, and we better get good at it." (or something very close to that). Also in his talk was the importance of genetically modified foods for the future of our environment, and the well-being of many people. The issue of genetically modified food is not binary, it is not that genetic modification is good, or that it is bad, and when our primary terms of discussion are how much genetic modification is around and whether or not we like genetic modification - well, it’s here, and we’ve been doing it thousands of years slowly, and now we can do it quickly. On one hand you have the kind of work that went on in Mexico and is now making its way into Africa; the works of people like Normal Borlaug (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug) . On the other hand we have Monsanto as the iconic forerunner of delusional-antisocial-take-over-the world-food-supply companies. The binary discussion, is GM good or bad, is misdirection. The valuable discussion is in what is good engineering, and what is bad engineering and what are we going to do about that distinction? This article is taking it in the right direction (even if it has some errors like mentioned in the other comment).