@ The sharmat - First of all, i appreciate your apology. Now onto the topic at hand...
I have indeed a very good basic knowledge of mathematics 
And i can tell you that the science of counting and probability is not on your side. I am sure you have a better knowledge of biology as i do (i hope so, you studied it after all) but do you work in the actual field of genetics and the manipulation of genes etc.?
I'm still technically a student, but advanced enough in my education that I've actually personally performed transformation of bacterial cells, transfection of mammalian cells, culturing of both bacterial and eukaryotic cell cultures in vitro, DNA sampling and sequencing, etc. So I think I know a bit about the field of genetics, having performed actual genetic engineering myself a number of times.
Your abilities as a mathematician are irrelevant if you don't have the data points to use it.
Though if the process of FDA approval and human trials aren't enough for you, I'd think nearly every living person in the US eating GM foods with every meal for 20 years would be sufficient evidence that nothing significant is amiss with it. How much testing do you actually
need before you're satisfied? If all technology moved at the pace you seem to be demanding then products would go a century between conception and arriving to market.
In any case, you tell me probability isn't on my side. Show me the numbers. I'm curious how you've even begun to calculate such a conclusion.
I admit i haven't updated myself in a longer time, but last i checked scientists working in the field admited that they more or less know nothing about the details. They have just decoded the genom but have no real idea how it works in detail or what would happen if they modified this or that. With that in mind i really hope they do not try it.
We know exactly how gene transcription, translation, and replication works, so I'm not sure what you're talking about here. As to what can happen to every single biochemical pathway in a cell if you modify "this or that", no, we don't instantly know for sure ahead of time. That's why this stuff is tested.
As a sidenote (and i know it's a bit offtopic) - how do we know that some harsher viral stuff (like for example swine or bird flu and the pandemics that loom on the horizon) is indeed not of our own making?! I mean it kind of already is our own fault that those viruses and bacterias ever get more resistant to our medications as we feed our animals with antibiotics or that a lot of people just take antibiotics willy nilly when it wouldn't even be necessary. On top of it, i am still holding to the opinion that this work you're praising so high can as well be our end as it can be our salvation. Most of the time, what happens in science is that the military will use developments first. So gene manipulated super-viruses on the loose are a real posibility (as i am sure all bigger western nations have their very own labs where they manipulate viruses and bacteria).
Firstly there's a difference between viruses and bacteria which I'm not sure you quite grasp. The increased antibiotics resistance in bacteria is indeed partially our fault from overuse of them for frivolous purposes, but it was going to happen eventually anyway, assuming evolution by natural selection is a thing that actually happens. (And it is, trust me.) That problem has nothing to do with viruses. Antibiotics do not affect viruses.
Swine flu and birdflu pandemics are not of our making because they are the result of one strain of influenza that can infect humans and the the reservoir species (pigs and birds) picking up new antigens from infecting a pig or bird that is simultaneously infected with another virus such that their genomes are combined via an accident of genetics. The resulting antigenic shift means that the new virus looks totally different to the human immune system, and therefore the immune system no longer has an acquired resistance to it as it did the old strain. This can be verified with genome sequencing such that we know very much where said viruses came from and what two virus coinfections were involved.
Since this is an entirely natural process and a possibility every time a viral co-infection occurs, it is absolutely, as you would say, just a matter of counting and probability. Given enough time this will happen again to disastrous consequences.
Also I'd point out that genetic engineering did not exist as a science at the time of the global swine flu pandemic of 1918.
In any case the use of viruses as vectors is heavily regulated if those viruses are infectious to humans, and in any case it's pretty rare to make a viral vector replication competent. Most viral vectors are sterile, intentionally so. So this is kind of like worrying that vaccination will cause a horrible viral plague if something went wrong. We have to manufacture virus particles for those too. And we actually inject those in people. Where as the viruses we handle in labs are frozen or sterilized. Not that people ever use influenza as a vector for genetic engineering. It's not the right kind of virus to do anything with.
As for germ warfare: You'd have to be absolutely insane to want to use that as a weapon. There's no way to target it specifically at the enemy. Any good, nasty, weaponized smallpox strain used in an enemy country would probably come right back to the country that used it in a matter of days or weeks. The lack of specificity means that viruses and bacteria are really of little utility from a military standpoint.
Oh and please understand that i am not a particularly religious person...so my "playing god" is just an expression. What i meant is that i don't think we humans have the clearheadedness and oversight necessary to play with the basics of life...if we screw up there, its aftermath will be beyond anything that anyone can imagine.
We've been doing it for ages. We just have better tools now. Humans have selectively breed things for millenia. The only difference here is that our new techniques are faster and more precise.
As a last remark, the ever so often used "there is no real evidence..." line is not the same as "there is no evidence". These manipulated foods are way too young to have big enough data about it and so we can not say if it is safe or not. That goes for both ways. So to say it is safe for humans is just as wrong.
No it's not the same as saying "there is no evidence". It's the same as saying "there is fake evidence". Plenty of studies that have tried to demonstrate that GM foods somehow magically cause cancer and have fallen apart in the face of peer review and statistical analysis.
What is enough data for you? What would ever be enough data, given what's already been gathered? Hundreds of millions of people eat this stuff every day and have been for years. Yet no catastrophe has emerged. This is long after these things went through decades of human and animal trials.
But as food is broken up into basic pieces during digestion and then built into our own dna, i am really not comfortable with the knowledge that now i will just have to accept that there will be artificially produced and/or manipulated material built into my own data. And that without proof that this has no side-effects. I think humankind should have waited with this until we could have shown that this is safe.
You completely lack understanding of DNA and how it works. DNA is composed of repeating units. The order of many tens of thousands to millions of these units is where the information lies. No individual nucleotide carries any information at all. You can't write a novel using only the letter 't'.
When you eat something, the nucleic acids are broken down by nucleases into individual nucleotides. It doesn't matter at that point where they came from. An adenine from a genetically modified corn plant is the exact same chemically to an adenine from human blood or the neuron of an ant or the plasmid of a bacterium. You can no more inherit the genetic modifications in the food you eat than you could become part cow by eating a hamburger.
On top of it, in the foodindustry, this is not used to make better food or food for the hungry in the world, no, it's used to be able to patent natural resources because now they are produced by your firm. And i get sick to the stomach everytime i think about it. In the not so far future you'll have to ask Nestle or other big players if you are allowed to plant corn or potatoes and stuff....this is the peak of hubris.
You don't seem to quite get the intricacies of biological patent laws. Which is understandable as they can be confusing. You can't patent the concept of corn any more than you can patent milk. You can only patent novel organisms and sequences. Or novel techniques. I could patent a specific drought resistant variety of corn, for example, but not the plant corn itself. Nor would my patent apply to every possible brand of drought resistant corn, if it were made drought resistant by modifying it in a different way.
In any case this goes back to before genetic engineering. Farmers have been able to patent specific strains of hybrid plants since long before we were genetically modifying crops. And it hasn't led to having to "ask Nestle or other big players if you are allowed to plant corn". The patents are too specific for that.
Edit: Btw, the die out comment was not meant as a question to the effect of one person and if this person wants to live or not. I meant it in a greater perspective. I for one think the human race is doomed to die out sooner or later. And we will have no one to blame than ourselves. And to be honest, if it is natural selection, i am fine with it too. That does not mean that i am not cherishing life to the fullest! And i think it is totally normal that almost everyone does and wants to do it as long as possible. Just to clear this up.
Any species will die given a sufficient period of time. Why shouldn't we delay that as long as possible?
