Genetically Modified Organisms: A Non-Knee-Jerk Primer
[This post was at first a comment on the Vilsack thread, and after a couple requests to promote it to post status I am doing just that, after correcting a couple of typos. Hope someone finds it useful.]
Unlike a lot of environmentalists I don’t have an across the board objection to the notion of altering an organism’s genome. There is a lot of uninformed and alarmist commentary on GMOs, and it can be hard to separate out objections to the current implementations of GMO technology from more non-specific gut-level opposition.
My objection to GMOs as they are being implemented is that the basic motivation for almost every introduction thus far is profit-driven rather than need-driven.
Probably the best-known example is that of Roundup-Ready crops, developed by Monsanto to withstand applications of Monsanto’s patented herbicide Roundup. Theoretical benefits to the farmer include the ability to grow crops without tilling the soil to control weeds. In actuality, weeds develop resistance to Roundup and yields have been shown not to exceed conventional crops reliably. In the meantime, Monsanto not only gets more income from crop-driven sales of Roundup, but from sales of its proprietary seed, and the company protects its seed aggressively, going so far as to sue farmers whose non-GMO crops have been pollinated by wind drift from neighboring Roundup-Ready farms.
In the meantime, the gene conferring resistance to Roundup doesn’t just transfer into neighboring crops, but also into related weed plant species.
A lot of this trouble stems more from the notion of patenting living things than from the origin of those living things, GMO or not. For instance, without the ability to patent life forms, it’s unlikely that Monsanto would have bothered to come up with “Terminator” seed technology, a genetic modification that prevents the crops in question from setting fertile seed. The idea is that farmers wouldn’t be able to circumvent patent restrictions by saving seed. The reality is that the Terminator genes can migrate into non-patented crops as well, affecting farmers’ ability to save even heirloom, “public domain” seeds. Monsanto has pledged not to use Terminator technology after worldwide public outcry, but they’ve quietly broken that pledge as well, and a handful of other companies have developed equivalent technologies.
Bt corn is another very common GMO, bred with genes from a soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, that secretes insecticidal compounds often used in organic gardening. The European corn borer - a moth larva - is a major pest of corn, and Bt is designed to include the gene from that bacterium responsible for making a lepidoptericidal substance. The larva eats Bt corn and dies, not reproducing, and thus suppressing the long-term pest population. It was thought for a while about ten years ago that pollen from Bt corn posed a threat to other butterflies and moths, especially monarch butterflies. There’s been evidence to suggest that might not be as big a problem as first thought, though many of the findings saying so come from the Bush administration’s USDA, and Bush’s interference with federal science to promote corporate welfare is well-documented. But the Bt gene does escape the patented corn, and prevalence of the gene in other crop populations — as well as wild plants — is a basic precondition for quick evolution of resistance to the insecticide.
The popular conception of genetics is that each trait has a gene that causes it, the unspoken assumption being that genes act in isolation from one another. But genomes are complex systems, and gene expression is affected not only by other genes but also by the environment in which the genome resides, inside the organism or out. Scientist Árpád Pusztai found that when he fed rats potatoes that had been modified to produce a plant toxin known as snowdrop lectin — generally shown to be harmless to mammals — the rats suffered intestinal damage that was not reproduced when he fed rats potatoes mixed with the same amount of snowdrop lectin. His conclusion was that the act of genetic modification itself, not necessarily the action of the implanted gene, had caused the potatoes to become toxic to rats. Making changes in complex systems guarantees unexpected results, and a sane regulatory framework for GMOs would take this into account, using the Precautionary Principle as its guideline.
For his part, Pusztai was attacked by the GMO industry: he was fired from the lab in which he worked and his materials and data destroyed, after the lab received a phone call from Monsanto. The editor of The Lancet, after deciding to run Pusztai’s peer-reviewed paper on the study, received what he described as a “threatening phone call” from a GMO-friendly member of the Royal Society, which had formed a Swift Boat-style “Rebuttal Unit” to counter criticisms of GMOs.
Which is very much reminiscent of the experience of UC Berkeley’s Ignacio Chapela, who found GMO-drifted genes in theoretically GMO-free maize in Mexico. The GM industry and its partisans waged an unsuccessful “dirty-tricks” style campaign to keep Nature from publishing Chapela’s findings, and then eventually forced Nature to partially retract Chapela’s paper, the first time the journal had ever done such a thing, and based on the objection of a single reviewer.
Shorter me: I have some concerns about the safety of GMOs, based on our rudimentary understanding of how gene expression may be affected by change in a single gene, but not enough to make me want to ban research or completely rule out use of GMOs in daily life altogether. But add the profit motive and the ability to patent lifeforms and you get attempts by individual corporations to corner the worldwide market in one species after another, which is bad for farmers and consumers, and you also get thuggish attempts to subvert independent research, which is bad for science.
Comments
Nice concise summary, and for what it’s worth I agree 100% with your conclusions and concerns. For an example of the potential of the technology to do humanitarian good, see “golden rice”
Chris,
Thanks for the non-knee jerk post! It expresses nicely what I’ve been suspicious of for sometime: GMO is not bad per se, but must be handled carefully and viewed skeptically in the hands of companies trying to tie food producers to their products.
I am not so sanguine about GMOs. People screwing around with what took evolution by natural selection hundreds of millions of years to fine tune, something we barely understand, and all for short-term corporate private profits. I think that should we survive ourselves, this period will be known as the ‘crazy age of experimentation’ when people nearly brought it all down by viewing the very building blocks nature as a plaything and the earth as a giant experiment.
And now ameteurs are taking part.
http://www.kansascity.com/811/story/952283.html
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