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Man has been "genetically modifying" everything from food to dogs for many centuries; but in the past, the only tool has been selective breeding. For example, if you wanted to create a breed of corn with resistance to a certain fungus, you would plant a plot of corn and see how individual plants did with the fungus. Then you would take seeds from the plants that did well, plant them, look at their performance against …

…over the crop. The crop completely ignores the herbicide, but the weeds are eliminated. Roundup Ready seeds reduce production costs and increase yield, so food becomes less expensive. Other scientists have inserted genes that produce a natural insecticide into corn plants to eliminate damage from corn borers, and a variety of anti-fungal genes can be inserted as well. The list goes on and on -- there really is no limit to what can be done.