A Budding Cell Biologist Looks at Genetically Modified Plants

I don't trust them, to put it bluntly, but not because of some paranoia about the companies (though Monsanto has a rather horrible history) or the genes themselves. It's the unknown technicalities that make me question the swift spread in the market and the wide-open development of GM crop plants. Most of the engineering thus far has been done for Roundup readiness, inserting a gene so the crop plants don't die when doused with an herbicide. What vector is used? Is glyphosate itself used for the selection, or are antibiotic resistance genes in the vector? And how do they select for Bt expression?

Now they are talking about inserting up to 8 genes in upcoming varieties, for everything from drought tolerance to decreased nitrogen use to higher yield. For one thing, decreased nitrogen use (to build proteins) and higher yields (requiring more protein to make seeds or fruit) contradict each other unless some other part of the plant is weakened- making stems or roots less likely to hold up the plant during storms, perhaps? The more genes you try to incorporate into an organism, the more fragile it gets, at least in cell culture and mouse work. The modified organism often requires special nutrient supplementation, and a special germ-free environment, or it dies.

 I'd much rather look for rust resistance in traditionally bred plants than insert genes for it, thus disrupting some important function in the plant that I didn't know about, which does not become significant except in times of stress not encountered in test plots. It might take less time than selection by farmers (or not) to genetically modify a plant, but greater risks persist. What if most farmers choose to grow these new engineered seeds, only to find that they are horribly dependent on a narrow temperature and humidity window, need lots of chemical supplementation, and cannot deal with the normal soil microbiota in some climate regions?This would be typical of lab-engineered cell culture lines (animal and bacterial in my experience) and animals. Are the plants different? What if the pollen spreads indiscriminately and contaminates previously productive varieties, making them frail, too?  

These are the questions in my mind, and the reason I'm leaning more and more toward traditional, "open-pollinated" varieties.