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Scientists have announced that genetically engineered wheat, barley and rice could be commercially available within the next 3 years. James Cook, wheat scientist for Washington State University, said Monsanto’s Roundup Ready wheat, used to control weeds, could be available to farmers by 2003. It would join corn, soybeans and cotton, which have already been genetically engineered into specialized versions.

Cook has promised that the wheat industry will not repeat the mistakes made with StarLink corn. Instead, the genes inserted into the food products will receive FDA approval for human consumption first, so that no real effort need be made by the industry to prevent them from spreading far and wide.
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The Toronto Star has reported that the StarLink genetically engineered corn could cost the food industry billions of dollars. The pollution of regular strains of corn by StarLink will lead to dozens of lawsuits. “This is going to come back to haunt the regulators and the food industry,” said Don Westfall, vice-president of Promar International, a Washington, DC consulting firm.
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Without meaning to, Australian scientists have created a virus that could lead to the most devastating bioweapon ever devised.

The scientists were trying to create a mouse contraceptive vaccine to use for pest control. They worked with mousepox, with doesn?t affect humans but is related to the smallpox virus. “It?s a good way to show how to alter smallpox to make it more virulent,” says Ken Alibek, of the Soviet germ warfare program.

D.A. Henderson, director of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University points out that information that can be used for making dangerous microorganisms is regularly published in scientific journals. “I can?t for the life of me figure out how we are going to deal with this,” he says.
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ABC News believes that it has discovered a picture of the new secret invention code-named Ginger, otherwise known as “IT,” in patent documents filed by DEKA Research, the company of inventor Dean Kamen, who’s record includes revolutionary wheelchairs, heart valves and many other valuable inventions.

It seems to be a kind of personal scooter, and a recent patent search would appear to support this. The patent states that the device is designed to move the individual over irregular surfaces and that it uses “a motorized drive mounted to the assembly and coupled to the ground-contacting module.”
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