Suggested Genetic Engineering Reading

Genetic Engineering, Food, and Our Environment
by Luke Anderson

Great for first time investigating GMOs - mindfully.org

Explains why genetic engineering has become such a critically important issue, providing an introduction to social, environmental, and health implications arising from the commercial use of this technology in food and farming. Reviews concepts surrounding genes and DNA, defines genetic engineering, and discusses genetic engineering's impact on the environment and farming. Also discusses patents and the World Trade Organization, government and public attitudes, and labeling. The author writes, campaigns and speaks internationally on issues related to genetic engineering. - Book News, Inc

Got (Genetically Engineered) Milk? The Monsanto rBGH/BST Milk Wars Handbook
by Dr. Samuel Epstein

Got (genetically engineered) Milk? is a unique resource manual on rBGH milk. It presents a comprehensive summary of the scientific literature since 1985, and Dr. Epstein’s relatively inaccessible trail blazing scientific publications on rBGH over the last decade. These publications have played a major role in influencing foreign governments to ban rBGH milk. -Seven Stories Press

Fateful Harvest
by Duff Wilson

Duff Wilson has documented a horrifying tale of toxic waste turned into fertilizer that is contaminating the food supply. This is efficiency gone mad. Coupled with a corrupt system willing to turn poisons into profit, it makes unwitting victims of us all. What I always wonder is what the bosses of these companies eat. Perhaps they are more highly evolved and simply live on their own press releases. Woe to the rest of us who need clean food. -Nichols Fox, author of Spoiled: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It

Dinner at the New Gene Cafe
by Bill Lambrecht

Dinner at the New Gene Café lays out the battle lines of the impending collision between a powerful but unproved technology and a gathering resistance from people worried about the safety of genetic change and the power of those who own the technology ....

Author Bill Lambrecht has watched the technology from its inception and traveled the world to witness its introduction. Timely and important, Dinner at the New Gene Café examines the growing international struggle over a matter that is vital to everyone on the planet: the very nature of our food, who shall shape our food supply, and who shall own it.

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye-View of the World
by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is a sensualist and a wonderful, funny storyteller. He is so engaging that his profound environmental messages are effortlessly communicated. He makes you fall in love with Nature. - Alice Waters

This book is as crisp as an October apple, as juicy as an August tomato, as long-awaited as the first flower of spring. Michael Pollan has conceived a new and powerful understanding of who we are, and how we stand in relation to everything else—and the stories he tells to prove the point make the world seem a richer place. - Bill McKibben, author of Long Distance and The End of Nature

The Human Body Shop: The Cloning, Engineering, and Marketing of Life
2nd edn., by Andrew Kimbrell

What Ralph Nader did to the auto barons, what Rachel Carson did to the pesticide pirates, Andrew Kimbrell has now done to biotechnology. He has thrown himself against that remorseless machine and brought it to a shuddering stop—or at least he would do so if those who elect our lawmakers were to pay him the kind of attention he deserves. He has succeeded in dismantling the biotechnology myth: that Progress requires defining life down, and the more ruthless the biological reductionism the more benefits for mankind. - Bernard N. Nathanson, First Things, The Journal of Religion and Public Life

Fast Food Nation
by Eric Schlosser

Schlosser is a serious and diligent reporter . . . An avalanche of facts and observations . . . Pretty compelling . . . A fine piece of muckraking, alarming without being alarmist. At the very least, Schlosser makes it hard to go on eating fast food in blissful ignorance. - Rob Walker, New York Times Book Review

Against the Grain: Biotechnology and the Corporate Takeover of Your Food
by Mark Lappé and Britt Bailey

Is biotechnology the world's new risk-free breadbasket? In this impassioned report, the authors reveal that the quest for corporate profits has ridden roughshod over questions of public health, freedom of choice and ecological stability. From environmental issues of biodiversity and increasing use of chemicals to health concerns about eating genetically modified food, Against the Grain provides a comprehensive and devastating picture of biotechnology and food. - Common Courage Press

Stolen Harvest
by Dr. Vandana Shiva

A leading thinker who has eloquently blended her views on the environment, agriculture, spirituality, and women's rights into a powerful philosophy. - Utne Reader

Genetically Engineered Food A Self-Defense Guide for Consumers
by Ronnie Cummins and Ben Lilliston

Cummins and Lilliston are clear, accurate and compelling. If you want to understand the dangers of genetically engineered food, this is the book you need. And if you want to make safe food choices for your family, this is the book you should buy. - Cheryl Long, Senior Editor of Organic Gardening Magazine

Genetically Engineered Food: Changing the Nature of Nature
by Martin Teitel, Ph.D., and Kimberly A. Wilson

By far the most accessible and informative publication on genetic engineering in food production that I have read to date. It is written so that the non-scientists can fully understand the scope of this technology. An excellent book. - Katherine DiMarreo, Executive Director, Organic Trade Association

Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare?
by Mae-Wan Ho

[This edition] describes how much progress has been made in public awareness of the dangers in the use of genetically modified food and crops. It will spur the campaign for controls and labelling and do much to challenge governments' support of the multinational industry. This edition will become even more established as the authority in its field. - Institute of Science in Society (ISIS)

The Ecological Risks of Engineered Crops
by Jane Rissler and Margaret Mellon

Based in part on a 1991 National Wildlife Federation-supported experts' workshop, this expanded version of an earlier report by Rissler [and Mellon], Perils Amidst the Promise: Ecological Risks of Transgenic Crops in a Global Market (1993), . . . recommends a feasible, experimentally based protocol for identifying those transgenic crops most likely to have an adverse ecological impact, either by becoming weeds or transferring engineered genes to weeds. . . . This book is largely accessible to readers with limited biology backgrounds. - W.R. Morgan, Choice

Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering
edited by Brian Tokar

The biotechnology industry has taken us beyond natural evolution into the unknown terrain of a never-to-be-natural-again world, with self-replicating novel constructs of recombinant DNA that have never existed before... Science without ethics is blind, and biotechnology without bioethics is a danger to all... The excellent and wide-ranging coverage of this complex subject by the contributors to this book will help us all awaken to the costs and potentially harmful, even catastrophic consequences of this new technology... - Dr. Michael W. Fox, Senior Scholar, Bioethics, The Humane Society of the United States, Washington, DC

Toxic Sludge Is Good for You : Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry
by John C. Stauber, Sheldon Rampton, Mark Dowie

In a series of short but informative chapters, sprinkled with humor and packed with insider information, the authors illustrate how the PR industry works round-the-clock to manipulate and deceive. ... Now a $10 billion enterprise, PR has evolved far beyond press releases and other standard devices into 'crisis management,' the hiring of spies, the suppression of free speech and even the manufacture of 'grass roots' movements. ... In a world suffused with corporate lies and propaganda, the authors show, one cannot trust the 'Workplace Health and Safety Council'--actually a corporate lobby that opposes health and safety regulations--any more than one can safely join 'Californians for Statewide Smoking Restrictions,' a front for Philip Morris. ... If you are among those convinced that at least the spin managers haven't got you fooled, read this book. You will surely think again. - The Nation

Hungry for Profit
edited by Fred Magdoff, John Belamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel

This penetrating set of essays explains why corporate agribusiness is a rising threat to farmers, the environment, and consumers. Ranging in subject from the politics of hunger to the new agricultural biotechnologies, and in time and place from early modern Europe to contemporary Cuba, the contributions to Hungry for Profit examine the changes underway in world agriculture today and point the way toward organic, sustainable solutions to problems of food supply. - Amazon.com

Mad Cow U.S.A.
by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Most accessible and informative... a lively account...The language is clear and straightforward... Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber tell this larger tale with style, aided by accounts of some richly colourful characters. ... Their exhaustive exploration of the people, the ideas and the growing understanding of TSEs is thought-provoking... dancing prose. - New Scientist

Trust Us, We're Experts
by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Stauber and Rampton have once again exposed the ugly underbelly of corporate America's psychological war on our citizens. - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.