Interviewee: Robert Pollack. Renowned biologist and philosopher Robert Pollack reflects on his concern over the potential danger of Janet Mertz's experiment inserting a cancer-causing gene from a monkey virus into a bacterium that lives in humans. (DNAi Location: MAnipulation > Revolution > Players >The controversy > Bridging evolutionary barriers)

I posed to her the simple question, whether she had thought about the fact that she was bridging evolutionary barriers that had existed since the last common ancestors of bacteria and people, by putting a viral genome from a primate virus into a bacterium, and whether that might jump a species barrier and cause someone to develop colon tumors from transformation of their colon lining as this bacterium established itself in their gut.

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