-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.economist.com/1yffsV36/editorial/freeforall/current/index_st4724.ht ml <A HREF="http://www.economist.com/1yffsV36/editorial/freeforall/current/index_ st4724.html">The Economist</A> ----- Seeds of discontent The British press is in a tizzy because a single experiment has suggested that there might be a health risk from genetically modified crops Trading transgenic crops The GM foods row Frankenstein foods Bioethics HISTORY, according to Marx, does repeat itself—once as tragedy and once as farce. In the case of Arpad Pusztai and his transgenic potatoes, however, Marx may have got it the wrong way around. In August 1998 Dr Pusztai (then a researcher at the Rowett Institute for Agriculture in Aberdeen) stirred up a brief media frenzy by announcing on television some preliminary and unconfirmed results about the effects of genetically engineered potatoes on laboratory animals. These surprised nobody in the field, and had no implications for human health. Fortunately, no harm was done (except to Dr Pusztai, who was forced to leave the institute). Now, however, he is back—and his story seems a bit stronger. His original claim was that engineering genes for a certain class of protein into potatoes, and then feeding the potatoes to rats, was bad for them. Nobody, however, was proposing to feed the potatoes to people. But this time he and his supporters are arguing that the damage to the rats was caused not by the protein but by the method used to put it there. Since this method is widespread in commercial genetic engineering, the media have found something to get their teeth into. At the moment, Dr Pusztai’s second claim looks as questionable as his first was unsurprising. But that is almost beside the point. In Britain, and to an extent in the rest of Europe, public opinion has turned so strongly against the genetic engineering of food crops that any negative result will produce headlines. In such circumstances rational debate is almost impossible. Dr Pusztai’s potatoes were engineered to produce a molecule called Galanthus nivalis agglutinin (GNA). This is a natural insecticide, normally found in snowdrops (or Galanthus nivalis, as they are known to botanists), and there was some thought that transferring it to potatoes might make them resistant to the attentions of aphids. Unfortunately, when Dr Pusztai fed potatoes with an added GNA gene to rats, their growth was stunted and their immune systems suppressed. That might have been the end of the matter. But a score of scientists were so disturbed by Dr Pusztai’s fate that they rallied round and took a second look at his data. And on February 12th a subgroup of them, led by Stanley Ewen, a pathologist from the University of Aberdeen, suggested that there was something more to worry about. This was because there seemed to be more damage in rats that had been fed the genetically modified potatoes than in a control group that was fed ordinary potatoes with GNA mixed in. And that suggested that the additional damage—thickening of the gut lining and poor development of organs such as the kidney and spleen—might be due not to the GNA, but to something in the genetic-engineering process itself. It is this assertion that has had politicians shouting for moratoriums, and shops pulling products containing genetically modified soya flour from their shelves. Dr Ewen suggests that the blame may lie with a bit of genetic material known as the 35S cauliflower-mosaic-virus promoter. Promoters are DNA switches that turn on genes. All genes have them, but it is possible to replace a gene’s natural promoter with another that is more amenable to manipulation. The 35S promoter is particularly popular in biotechnology, and is found in a number of widely planted crops that have been genetically modified, including bt-maize, which produces a natural insecticide that protects it from the attentions of the corn-borer moth, and Roundup-Ready soya beans, which are immune to a common herbicide used to kill weeds. That promoters can end up in the wrong place in a chromosome, and therefore start switching on the wrong genes, is a known phenomenon, according to Jim Dunwell, a plant biotechnologist at the University of Reading. That could account for Dr Ewen’s observations. But it is by no means the only possible, or even the most likely, explanation. Attack of the killer potatoes Maarten Chrispeels from the University of California, San Diego, who is one of the researchers who initially supported Dr Pusztai, is now particularly sceptical. He points out that potatoes are chock-a-block with nasty compounds, and that these poisons differ widely in concentration depending on how the potatoes are grown. This phenomenon is known as somaclonal variation, and it makes experiments that involve feeding potatoes to laboratory animals hard to interpret properly. It is not enough, for example, simply to give the same amount of potato to the test animals and the controls. The cultivation of the experimental and control potatoes must also be uniform, otherwise the chemistry of the tubers may vary in ways that have nothing to do with the engineered gene. On top of that, even rats hate raw spuds—so their diet must be supplemented by protein from different sources, adding yet another variable. Dr Chrispeels says he has seen no evidence of such quality controls in the data that he was asked to support. And so, before he is willing to accept this “revolutionary indictment of genetic engineering”, as he calls it, he wants proof that somaclonal variation is not the culprit and that the alleged effect occurs in different strains of potato (cooked, as well as raw) and in other plants as well. In fact, the results he has seen are so preliminary that he is not even convinced that they make it unsafe to use GNA as a genetically engineered insecticide in the first place, even in foodstuffs bound for the cooking pot. Nor have similar observations been made in other publicly known experiments involving the 35S promoter. Charles Arntzen at the Boyce Thompson Institute in Ithaca, New York, for example, is using it to introduce bits of disease-causing bacteria into crops, in a bid to create cheap, edible vaccines. He has done feeding experiments on people, as well as on mice, with none of the adverse effects that Dr Pusztai has described. Indeed, the subjects’ immune systems have actually been boosted. In any case, existing safeguards make it highly unlikely that jumping promoters could be causing problems in established genetically modified crops. The effect is so well known that regulators in both America and the European Union require good evidence that plants do not suffer from such instabilities. So far, that evidence has been provided. Don’t mention the “F” word Why, then, are people so jittery and so ready to believe the worst of genetic engineers, particularly in Europe, and especially in Britain? The technology has already brought economic benefits to agriculture. According to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications—admittedly an interested party, since it is largely financed by biotechnology firms—bt-maize has increased yields in fields where it is planted by 9%. On top of that, in 1997, when 2.8m hectares (7m acres) of American soil were planted with the stuff, farmers saved $190m in insecticide costs. And even herbicide-resistant soya beans need less spraying. Instead of applying weedkiller before sowing a crop, which requires heavy doses to kill the weeds as seeds, farmers spray after germination, when the weeds are more vulnerable. That reduces the amount of nasty chemicals by between 10% and 40%—which ought to please environmentalists. Yet such advantages seem to count for little with European public opinion. In Britain, a big part of the explanation may be mad-cow disease. The dissembling and cover-ups that characterised that unhappy episode have made people unwilling to accept any official reassurance on matters of food safety. As a corollary, they are easily persuaded that there is a problem even by the thinnest of scientific evidence. There is also the question of who benefits from the technology. Apart from the firms who own it, the beneficiaries are, for the moment, mostly farmers. Genetically modified crops are no tastier than their unmodified counterparts; they simply have better yields. That is not an enormous incentive to any consumer to leap into the unknown (retail prices are not much affected, because the cost of ingredients is but a small fraction of the total). Another part of the blame, however, lies with an author who died a century and a half ago—Mary Shelley. In the figures of Victor Frankenstein and his creature she managed to create images so powerful that they have haunted biology through the headlines for decades. Transplant surgery, in vitro fertilisation and the genetically modified bacteria used to produce a number of drugs have all in their days been seen as unnatural, Shelleyesque abominations. In these cases researchers were able to exorcise the revenant by proving the value and safety of their work. In the minds of many, the genetic modification of crops has yet to do that. Only when no writer would dream of using the “F” word in an article about it, will the technology truly have been accepted. ©1999 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All Rights Reserved. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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