IF they tested it, then i am fine. however, whenever someone has started they have been shutdown or they have really screwed it up.
Most[1] GM trials that have been terminated have been because of anti-GM activists either raising the hackles of normal people against the trials or actually going out there and destroying the trial crops themselves.
A few years ago (late '80s, I think), I was privileged enough to receive a sample of tomato seeds that had been brought back down from a satellite. The idea was to see if the exposure to space did anything to this notoriously hardy plant seed. While there were obviously official trials as well, there was an attempt to get people interested in Space Science by letting some try it out themselves.
I donated my own pack to someone who ran a community farm who had the facilities to grow them isolated from other tomatoes, etc. And then some rumour (and this was pre-Internet, so relatively 'quiet' compared with modern manias of this kind) started that was basically "Oh my godzz! It'll be a Day Of The Triffids!" which made this guy (who should have known better) burn the crop without even thinking about it.
I have no love for Big Bioengineering (Monsanto, etc[2]) and I know there are risks, but all I
see is knee-jerk reactions totally out of proportion. And preventing carefully controlled studies from actually legitimately reassuring people
or giving hard evidence that supports their own POV. Just like the furore against irradiated food that tried to convince everyone that it was
radioactive food[3]...
(edit: And labels saying "Warning, this is not 'natural' food" scares people out of all proportion. Which is not to say I think it
shouldn't be labelled, but we need people to realise what this actually
means.)
Anyway, that's a diversion from Space Elevator talk. Unless you want to develop a GM beanstalk, or something out of a Brian Aldiss novel.
[1] Well, most I've
heard of, I haven't got quantitative figures at all... But blame the nay-sayers for causing the publicity bias if I'm wrong. Really, they're shooting themselves in the foot.
[2] Where the big problem is pretty much that their GM crops have in-built self-destruct/no-reseed qualities, thus making farmers that take up the GM seeds unable to do anything but buy their
next GM seed from the same source, not do as farmers have done for millennia and aim to be self-sufficient for future years of crops. But that's the business model, talking, not anti-'contamination' precautions...
[3] The
biggest problem with irradiated food was the tendency to consider putting NSFH foods through the process to kill the marginal amounts of bad organisms that might be contaminating them, but forgetting that this did nothing to deal with the toxins already produced by them... The food doesn't get significantly 'rottener', but is still not as healthy if you relaxed other safety controls.