genetic engineering kick my dog

[Ab]

http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot....ppen-here.html

[[Malks] Pixie]

The hysteria from both sides is hilarious - each as bad as the other.

Pixie

[Ab]

Well I see hysteria on one side, and on the other side I see a bunch of scientists going "wtf"

[[Malks] Pixie]

I wonder how many fewer chemists we'd have if we'd banned chemistry sets... They hunted down and destroyed classroom chemistry sets. And Kiwis make fun of Kansas classroom creationists.

Pretty hysterical - considering the sets aren't banned - it's what's produced which falls outside of what is allowable under the law, which is easily fixed (see below).

Then the government makes it too hard to do IT research in New Zealand that might require GCSB approval under TICS, and requires MPI approval for any new organism, hindering GE research.

Also fairly hysterical considering that the HSNO Act has been in place for almost 20 years now and anyone working in a science field (in particular labs) will be very aware of its requirements, including how to get approval for a new organism (which if it is benign as quoted would be a very straight forward process which only needs to be done ONCE and then all the kits would be usable).

Who knows, the funding for the approval could even come from MinEd's discretionary funding (which has been done before to facilitate educational organisations becoming compliant with the HSNO Act).

I also notice the repeated use of the anecdote about gut microbiome, which did indeed happen. However people seem to be leaving out the fact that those organisms were then added to the register of organisms at no fee - it literally didn't hold back ANY science, and added to the pool of publicly available information. Yet the anecdote has been now rolled out on multiple occasions as some sort of "TEH GOVT IS INTERFERING WITH SCIENCES, IT DOESN'T KNOW WHAT ITS DOING! YOU CANT STOP US!!", which really IS hysteria based. They are literally are complaining about a public register of substances and organisms which are in the country (and what risks they present).

What strikes me as ridiculous about this entire thing is that one quick call to ERMA would have sorted out exactly what the institutions in question needed to do and everyone would have been happy (and legal).

Pixie