Transgenic Crops

To those of you unfamiliar with the MCAT, we have a one hour writing section, in which the test taker has to write two dialectical style essays (thesis/antithesis/reconciliation). I wrote this practice essay a few months ago and the thoughts found within are pretty important to me, so I thought I'd share:


Environmental concerns should outweigh economic concerns in society's decision making. 
Write a unified essay in which you perform the following tasks. Explain what you think the above statement means. Describe a specific situation in which economic concerns might require higher priority than environmental concerns. Discuss how society might balance environmental and economic concerns.

          Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, statistics show an unprecedented growth in the human population, which can be attributed to a variety of factors such as improved standard of living and technological advancements, but amongst the most notable of these factors would be the industrialization of agriculture. Since the 1980s, the agricultural industry has largely profited from genetically modifying certain crops to elicit favorable phenotypes, but as industrial farming has evolved, it has become increasingly apparent that some of these genetic interventions, such as Monsanto’s contested "Terminator Gene," are primarily used to benefit the business at the expense of the environment's natural course of action. The Terminator Gene, as suggested by its name, prevents a flower or fruit from bearing viable seeds, thereby thwarting the possibility of harvesting seeds for future use. No sum of economic profit could ever legitimize this action. This type of genetic modification is inherently unethical because it poses an extremely serious threat to plant biodiversity (a common fear with genetically modified crops).

          However, with a population of nearly seven billion and sustainability currently too difficult to implement in certain parts of the world, genetically modified crops have become increasingly cost effective. This altruistic scientific discovery was initially proposed as a means to eliminate the possibility of food shortages across the world -- transgenic crops were engineered to include pesticide and herbicide resistance genes, while some crops were altered to incorporate even more specific advantageous traits, such as the capacity to withstand extreme weather conditions or the ability to express greater amounts of certain essential nutrients that were otherwise not readily available in countries where famine is common. Although these modifications were carried out at the expense of another organism, the constructed phenotypes ran in parallel with advantageous phenotypes that evolution might have naturally selected in the long run.

          To ensure a proper balance between the environmental and economic concerns, a more transparent discourse between environmental scientists, economists, and transnational government officials should be organized as a means to implement strict legislation that prevents the overcommodification of crops. We must create laws that dissuade corporations like Monsanto from even considering the idea of capitalizing on unethical modifications as offensive as the Terminator Gene. We, as inhabitants of this fruitful Earth, should be thankful for the ingenuous intentions behind the founding of transgenic crops. They have provided nutrition to the masses for the past three decades, but we should also be receptive of the evolutionary risks we run. Genetically modified crops should only be considered a temporary remedy that gives us some time to develop a more sustainable system that depends less, or perhaps completely eliminates our dependency, on manipulating the integrity of other organisms.