The Once and Future Threat of the Petrochemical Industry to the World of Life

In the last 50 years, the petrochemical industry has massively introduced thousands of synthetic organic chemicals into the environment, only recently acknowledging that most of them are hazardous to living things. The industry has unwittingly appropriated from the living world its once-exclusive capability to produce organic chemicals, but has created substances, such as DDT, dioxin, and PCBs, that do not occur in living things and are therefore untested by the long course of evolution. Now, transmuted into biotechnology, the industry is making the same mistake. This time, again unencumbered by precautionary testing, it is creating transgenic organisms that are incompatible with the natural systems of inheritance. Once again, an informed public is needed to prevent an ill-conceived industrial venture far more threatening than the one that we are still struggling to remedy.