But we do it all the time. Are we not men?
Especially at Monsanto, which has been working for years to splice Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt to you and me) bacteria genes into the DNA of cotton, corn, potatoes – you name it. 
See, Bt, which is found naturally in places such as dirt, makes the larva of a lot of crop pests puke and die (such as this Helicoverpa zea, a.k.a. corn earworm a.k.a. tomato fruitworm a.k.a. cotton bollworm shown at left after making mincemeat out of one of my tomato plants a couple of years ago). Organic farmers, or anyone else who wants to, can buy packages containing Bt compounds, apply them to vegetables, and expect to kill off most of their corn earworm et. al. problem.
Only Monsanto’s idea was that if you just slipped the Bt into your corn’s genes, then you wouldn’t need to pay for bags of Bt compound. Instead, you could pay a buttload more for your crop seed, because Monsanto talked the government into letting it obtain seed patents. Now instead of buying seeds, it’s like software – you buy a license giving you the right to buy genetically altered seeds, as long as you don’t do anything stupid like trying to save your own seeds from the crops you’re growing. Instead, you gots to pay Monsanto again for another crop next year.
Nice work if you can get it.
Now, leaving aside little historic details such as the U.S. agri-giant’s apparently purposeful contamination of heirloom corn varieties in Mexico’s (and the planet’s) maize cradle, it seems there’s at least one other little side effect standing in the way of Man’s latest Effort to Bend Nature to his Will.
Real scientists predicted long ago that Monsanto’s attempts to play Vegetable God would hasten critters such as the aforementioned Helicoverpa zea to evolve into Bt-resistant super pests.
Right on cue, cotton farmers started noticing bollworms that refused to die beginning three years or so after Monsanto came out with genetically altered cotton.
Oops. Back to the drawing board.
Or so one might think. But hey, there are always other crops that need Frankensteined, and other pests that haven’t yet developed super resistance. Thus:
Small farmers in India will soon have a cheaper, safer and more effective option for growing one of India’s favorite foods: genetically modified eggplant, developed with Cornell’s help, which continually expresses a naturally occurring insecticide derived from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt).
“The Bt eggplant will be the first genetically modified food crop to be released in the whole of South Asia,” said K.V. Raman, Cornell professor of plant breeding. “The impacts could be really dramatic.”
This will surprise you: Cornell struck a deal with an Indian seed company to help it develop and release open-pollinated varieties of genetically altered eggplants, so that poor Indian farmers could save seed and replant. The seed company is a quarter owned by some outfit named Monsanto.
While the whole thing sounds just swell, past experience with the cotton suggests that in about three years, the pests that plague India’s eggplant growers will become resistant to the new varieties and likely eat more and bigger holes in the fruits than ever before. I hope the Indian farmers have saved a few seeds from the varieties they grew prior to the DNA-altered eggplants.
As for me, a poor south Texas farmer, I have experimented with eggplants, and had the leaves of my big-time hybrid varieties turned into something resembling Swiss cheese by little black flea beetles. I was ready to give up on growing them altogether until I stumbled upon this Italian heirloom variety that the bugs for some reason don’t seem to like. After three years of simply selecting the sturdiest plants with the best fruit and then using their seed, the harvest has only improved.
I’m not saying no bugs ever bother these plants, and I’m not saying it wouldn’t be cool to have bug killer oozing right out of the eggplant leaves. But after the Bt cotton escapades, I think I’ll pass on the veggie mutants, thanks just the same.
