Are you concerned about Genetically Modified Foods? Here’s (GMOs Revealed) a great documentary that addresses many of the questions and concerns most people have today.
In March 2014, scientists from Indiana University
announced that they had conducted research to examine the operations of
the fruit fly genome “in greater detail than ever before possible” and
had identified “thousands of new genes, transcripts and proteins.” Their
results indicated that the fly’s genome is “far more complex than
previously suspected and suggests that the same will be true of the
genomes of other higher organisms.” Of the approximately 1,500 new genes
that were discovered, 536 of them were found within areas that were
previously assumed to be gene-free zones. Furthermore, when the flies
were subjected to stresses, small changes in expression level at
thousands of genes occurred, and four newly modelled genes were
expressed altogether differently.
Why is this important? Because it
reveals how little we know about this planet and the organisms dwelling
on it, yet also how much we think we know. This kind of hubris is found within all areas of human knowledge, but particularly when it comes to science.
Another great example that I’ve used
before is when the populace first realized that the Earth wasn’t flat.
Another is a statement made by physicist Lord Kelvin, who stated in 1900
that “there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that
remains is more and more precise measurement.” This assertion was
shattered only five years later when Einstein published his paper on
special relativity.
When it comes to our genes, and the
genes of other organisms, we really do know next to nothing.
Unfortunately, proponents of the biotech industry (Monsanto, DuPont,
Syngenta, etc.) claim otherwise, and have developed multiple, flawed
assumptions that undergird agricultural bioengineering.
The information presented in this
article comes from a variety of different sources, but my primary
sourceis Steven Druker, a public interest attorney and the Executive
Director of the Alliance for Bio-Integrity. He initiated a lawsuit in
1998 that forced the U.S. Food and Drug (FDA) to release its files on
genetically engineered foods, and recently published a book
about it, which has received dozens of rave reviews from the world’s
most accredited scientists in the field. I draw primarily from his book
for this article.
“This incisive and insightful
book is truly outstanding. Not only is it well reasoned and
scientifically solid, it’s a pleasure to read – and a must-read. Through
its masterful marshalling of facts, it dispels the cloud of
disinformation that has misled people into believing that GE foods have
been adequately tested and don’t entail abnormal risk.”
– David Schubert, PhD, molecular biologist and Head of Cellular Neurobiology, Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Natural Genetic Modification Versus Human Induced Genetic Modification
Biotech proponents have an unshakable
faith in their GE crops, and these corporations also hold major sway
over mainstream media outlets, and close relationships with government
agencies like the FDA. Indeed, several high level industry employees
have also held positions at these institutions. One example is the FDA
Deputy Commissioner for Foods, Michael Taylor, who is also Monsanto’s
former Vice President for Public Policy. While at the FDA, he was
instrumental in getting approval for Monsanto’s genetically engineered
bovine growth hormone.
Druker outlines in his book how the
commercialization of genetically engineered foods was enabled by the
fraudulent behaviour of these government agencies, and how this actually
violates explicit mandates for federal food safety law. The evidence
shows that the “FDA’s falsehoods have been abundantly supplemented with
falsehoods disseminated by eminent scientists and scientific
institutions, and the entire GE food venture.”
This is why it’s so amazing to see so
many scientists within the field supporting the dissemination of truth,
and bringing the falsehoods to light. So if you still think this type of
thing is a conspiracy theory, we now have the documents as well as the
science, which stands on its own, to show that something is terribly
wrong here.
Joseph Cummins, Ph.D. and Professor
Emeritus of Genetics at Western University in London, Ontario, believes
that Druker’s book is a “landmark” and that “it should be required reading in every university biology course.”
There are several presumptions on which
the bioengineering venture was based, and one of them is that natural
breeding is more random and unruly than bioengineering. The
standard argument holds that genetic modification has been occurring for
thousands of years, and what we do now is simply that process sped up
and made better.
Key Presumptions on Which the Bioengineering Venture Was Based
Genetic engineering is based on the
presumption that the genome is just a linear system, where the action of
a single gene will not impact the action of other genes, or disrupt
their normal function.
In 2007, the New York Times published an article outlining how “the
presumption that genes operate independently has been institutionalized
since 1976, when the first biotech company was founded. In fact, it is
the economic and regulatory foundation on which the entire biotechnology
industry is built.”
Basically, genes are viewed as
autonomous, adding to the whole without acting holistically because they
don’t express their proteins in a closely coordinated matter. Another
assumption used to justify genetic engineering is that genes aren’t
organized in a specific way, that the sequence in which they occur is
meaningless From this point of view, a gene would function normally if
it were relocated to a different chromosome or came from a neighbouring
gene. Quite a big assumption, don’t you think? Giorgio Bernardi, a
biologist at the University of Rome III who specialized in the study of
genome evolution, calls this perspective a “bean-bag view of the genome” because it regards the genes as “randomly distributed.”
Druker explains:
Together, these two assumptions
supported the belief that a chunk of recombinant DNA could be put into a
plan’s genome without inducing disturbance — because if the behavior of
the native genes was largely uncoordinated and their arrangement was
irrelevant, there would be no important patterns that could be perturbed
by such insertions. Accordingly, they engendered confidence in the
precision of genetic engineering, because they implied that the outcome
of a gene insertion would be exactly what the bioengineers expected.
How could biotech proponents push the
idea that the target organism would continue to function just as it had
before, and that the change would be limited to the new trait endowed by
the inserted gene? How can it simply be assumed that this would not
alter any of the organism’s other qualities?
These presumptions still underly genetic engineering today. The example of the fly above serves well here. In the New York Times article cited earlier, the author noted that “genes appear to operate in a complex network,” and states that “evidence
of a networked genome shatters the scientific basis for virtually every
official risk assessment of today’s commercial biotech products, from
genetically engineered crops to pharmaceuticals.”
Molecular geneticist Michael Antoniou,
who testified at New Zealand’s Royal Commission in 2001, notes that
agricultural bioengineering “was based on the understanding of
genetics we had 15 years ago, about genes being isolated little units
that work independently of each other.” He also presented evidence showing that genes actually “work as an integrated whole of families.”
Despite the grave possibility that these
presumptions are indeed wrong, they still form the backbone of genetic
engineering today.
Antoniou himself was even selected to
represent multiple nongovernmental organizations to present precaution
reasons to the UK’s GM Review Panel, and a plethora of studies that
clearly justify it. Despite his presentation, and many others’, the 11
other scientists on the panel, who were biotech proponents, dismissed
these studies and continued to argue that it makes absolutely no
difference how genes are arranged.
How can a scientist make such a statement?
What do we have as a result? As Druker says:
Such disregard, denial, or avoidance in
regard to the evidence was essential for maintaining faith in the
venture, because its predictability and safety have always relied on the
genome being largely disjointed; and the more the genome instead
appears to function as a tightly coordinated system, the more
potentially disruptive and unpredictable are the interventions of the
bioengineers.
By slipping it into our food without our
knowledge, without any indication that there are genetically modified
organisms in our food, we are now unwittingly part of a massive
experiment. . . . Essentially, the FDA has said that genetically
modified organisms, or food, are basically not much different from
regular food, and so they’ll be treated in the same way. The problem is
this: Geneticists follow the inheritance of genes, in what we call a
vertical fashion . . . [but] what biotechnology allows us to do is to
take this organism, and move it, what we call horizontally, into a
totally unrelated species. Now, David Suzuki doesn’t normally mate with a
carrot plant and exchange genes. What biotechnology allows us to do is
to switch genes from one to the other, without regard for the biological
constraints. . . . It’s very very bad science. We assume that the
principals governing the inheritance of genes vertically applies when
you move genes laterally or horizontally. There’s absolutely no reason
to make that conclusion.
More Differences
This
is a common argument made by GE-food proponents, and commonly used
whenever an expert brings up a challenge to the technology’s safety. For
example, David Schubert, PhD, a molecular biologist and the Head of
Cellular Neurobiology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies,
commented in Nature Biotechnology that there was mounting
evidence that the insertion of even one gene into a cell’s DNA alters
the expression patters of genes throughout the entire cell. He said
facts like this one, among many others, “cast doubt on the soundness of
agricultural bioengineering — and entail the conclusion that it ‘is not a
safe option.’ “
Predictably, when a professor and a
laboratory director of one of the world’s most prestigious scientific
institutions makes a comment like this, there’s going to be a response.
This time it came in the form of a letter, published by 18 biologists at
respected universities and institutions, stating that Dr. Schubert
failed to properly consider “the genetic realities.” The main reality he
allegedly failed to recognize is that the natural method of plant
breeding is inherently more random than bioengineering.
A portion of the letter reads as following:
We do not take issue with Schubert’s
basic contention that unintended genetic and metabolic events can take
place. The reality is that ‘unintentional consequences’ are much more
likely to occur in nature than in biotechnology because nature relies on
the unintentional consequences of blind random genetic
mutation and rearrangement to produce adaptive phenotypic results,
whereas GM technology employs precise, specific, and rationally designed
genetic modification toward a specific engineering goal.
In his book, Steven Druker offers the following counterargument: “This
letter thus reveals how strongly the GE food venture relies on the
presumption that the natural process driving biological development
are intrinsically more disorderly and risk-bearing than the genetic
interventions instigated by the human mind. And it confirms that this
belief forms the ideological bedrock on which the venture rests.”
In fact, a report published in 2004 by
the National Academy of Sciences couldn’t uphold “even the more modest
notion that bioengineering and natural breeding pose the same
risks.” The panel that produced the report ranked various modes of plant
breeding in terms of their disposition to produce unintended effects.
They were forced to acknowledge that bioengineering produces far greater
effects than pollen-based sexual reproduction. Despite this fact, they
still insisted that this does not mean a difference in risks.
Druker says in response:
Thus, there’s no rational way to
reconcile the fact that natural breeding is less disruptive and more
predictable than bioengineering with the claim that it poses equal or
greater risk, which is why the admission in the 2004 report is a rarity —
and why biotech proponents almost always ignore or deny that fact and
instead assert that natural breeding is more disorderly and
unpredictable.
Randomness
According to the biotech industry,
natural plant breeding could actually result in crops that are dangerous
to human consumption, which is why we should be grateful for genetic
engineering. For example, in the same NAS report mentioned above, they
portrayed what are known as “jumping genes” as more randomly mobile and
threatening, but failed to recognize, as Druker points out, that
although these entities do not pose risks within natural pollen based
breeding, when bioengineering is employed they do because that process
alone “tends to stir them up and get them jumping.”
When it comes to sexual reproduction,
it’s yet another area where biotech proponents state that it’s a random
phenomenon, despite the fact that we now know that it’s not random, and
that there are multiple factors that can and do influence the genetics
of life. Genetic engineering, be it human induced or naturally
occurring, requires a genetic “rearragnement,” a recombination of DNA.
The difference between the artificial way and the natural way is that
the natural way does not disrupt the entire organism, as was discussed a
little earlier in the article and touched upon in the Suzuki quote
above.
As Druker explains:
This natural form of recombination
occurs during the formation of gametes (the sperm and egg cells). It
includes a step called crossover in which two partner chromosomes break
at corresponding points and then exchange complementary sections of DNA;
and every time a gamete is produced, every set of paired chromosomes
engages in it. In this way, all the chromosomes end up with genes from
both parents instead of from only one. However, all the genes are
preserved, as is the sequences in which they’re positioned. The only
changes are in the relationships between aleles. . . . So this natural
recombination augments diversity while maintaining stability. And
without it, except for the occasional favorable mutation, the
composition of chromosomes would stay the same from generation to
generation, and genetic diversity would grow at far too sluggish a pace.
He goes on to mention how natural
recombination preserves the order of the genes, and is predictable in
the way it cuts DNA. The entire process displays a great deal of order.
Despite this fact, scientists who
support GE state, as in, for example, the 2004 NAS report, that “genetic
engineering methods are considered by some to be more precise than
conventional breeding methods because only known and precisely
characterized genes are transferred.” They use the idea that the
randomness and unpredictability of natural engineering make
bioengineering safer.
Yet, as Druker so brilliantly captures:
This misleading tactic fixates on the
predictability of the plant’s specific agronomic traits; and it portrays
traditional breeding as less predictable than bioengineering because
undesired attributes are often transferred along with the one that is
desired. However, those who employ this ploy don’t acknowledge that if
both parents are safe to eat, the unwanted traits hardly ever pose risk
to human health. Rather, they’re undesirable for reasons irrelevant to
risk (such as aesthetic appearance or seed size), and breeders must then
perform back-crossing to eliminate them while retaining the trait they
want. However, although the inclusion of unwanted traits entails
more work, it does not increase attendant risks. Therefore, while
breeders can’t fully predict what traits will appear, they can
confidently predict that the resulting plant will be safe to eat.
This is why the GE stance on natural modification is so flawed and misleading.
Druker goes on:
Although it describes the sexual
reproduction of food-yielding plants as a messy and risky affair that
involves the transfer of “thousands of unknown genes with unknown
function,” we actually know quite a lot about those genes. And what we
know is far more important than what we don’t know. We know that they’re
all where they’re supposed to be, and that they’re arranged in an
orderly fashion. And we know that during the essential process in which
some of them are traded between partnered chromosomes in order to
promote the diversity that strengthens the species, their orderly
arrangement is marvelously maintained. Most important, we know that
their functions mesh to form an exquisitely efficient system that
generates and sustains a plant that regularly provides us with wholesome
food.
This sharply contrasts with genetic engineering.
As you can see, comparing natural
modification to biotech modification is not an easy process, and this
isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. Research shows that it’s not natural
modification that’s more random and risky, but biotech genetic
modification:
The inserted cassettes are haphazardly
wedged into the cell’s DNA, they create unpredictable disruptions at the
site of insertion, the overall process induces hundreds of mutations
throughout the DNA molecule, the activity of the inserted cassettes can
create multiple imbalances, and the resultant plant cannot be deemed
safe without undergoing a battery of rigorous tests that has yet to be
applied to any engineered crop.
