Maybe it's a subset, but surely genetic modification would also be genetic engineering? You say "Genetic engineering uses specifically micro-organisms", but checking a few definitions (with answers.com), they all seem to be more general than that - human/scientific changes of genetic material in living things/cells.
I'm guilty of having views about these things without properly understanding, and/or not saying what I actually mean. There's not much of that kind of thing that I'd object to in itself - the objections are of course to just some of the uses. Just looking at, say, the Greenpeace website, their headline is "Say no to genetic engineering", but in fact their specific points are much more reasonably defined.
It's something we struggle with at work - what we actually want to achieve and how we want to achieve it is easily enough for a 7 page document (indeed, we have a 7 page document on it). But then we have to get that message across on the back of a postcard to people that have no understanding of the subject, which is pretty tricky to do without over generalising and over simplifying. It would be nice if we could count on more than a few people to read more than a headline and a paragraph, but we can't...
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Date: 2006-02-28 02:02 pm (UTC)I'm guilty of having views about these things without properly understanding, and/or not saying what I actually mean. There's not much of that kind of thing that I'd object to in itself - the objections are of course to just some of the uses. Just looking at, say, the Greenpeace website, their headline is "Say no to genetic engineering", but in fact their specific points are much more reasonably defined.
It's something we struggle with at work - what we actually want to achieve and how we want to achieve it is easily enough for a 7 page document (indeed, we have a 7 page document on it). But then we have to get that message across on the back of a postcard to people that have no understanding of the subject, which is pretty tricky to do without over generalising and over simplifying. It would be nice if we could count on more than a few people to read more than a headline and a paragraph, but we can't...