Are transgenic foods safe to eat?
In the light of our new knowledge, one must also ask whether transgenic foods are safe to eat. Although natural viruses and other parasitic genetic elements are to varying degrees specific in the range of host cells they will infect or multiply in, current transgenic vectors are designed to overcome species barriers so that they are much more likely to infect a wide range of hosts. In a study to test for the ability of bacterial viruses and plasmids to infect mammalian cells, it was found that plasmids of E. coli carrying the complete poliovirus can be transferred to mammalian cells and the polioviruses recovered from the cells, even though no eukaryotic signals for reading the genes are contained in the plasmid. In the same paper, the authors review experimental observations made since the 1970s that the lambda phage of bacteria, and the baculovirus, supposedly specific for insect cells, are also efficiently taken up by mammalian cells; and in the case of the baculovirus, transported
