I think it's fair to say that the precautionary principle has not been the mainstay of the regulatory system.
I would also say that I have not seen any credible scientific reports—I mean reproduced in other labs and confirmed—of health effects, even at the laboratory level. Those are scattered reports and they have not been reproduced, to the best of my knowledge. I'm not necessarily defending the technology, but I will defend the science.
Just to turn the coin the other way, there were a couple of papers in recent years showing that when genomes are disrupted by inserting a transgene, there are definitely changes in the transcription--in other words, the readout of genes--from the rest of the organism, and they are stable changes. This is part of what I was referring to when I said there is better science today than what we had ten years ago. We could be doing a better job of monitoring what's going on in those plants. I don't think that necessarily translates into health issues, but it does send a flag up that says putting this gene in is not as simple as the industry sometimes likes to portray it, that we know exactly where it goes, we know exactly what it does, end of story. That's not the way organisms behave when they get a new gene. I think there are some issues that could be addressed better, yes.