GM FOOD HAZARDS AND THE SCIENCE WAR
by Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
Consumer Choice Council, Seattle, December 1, 1999
Thank you very much for inviting
me here and thank you all for being here.
I am very honored, especially to be in a session moderated by Senator
Dennis Kucinich who has introduced such an important bill for labeling
genetic engineered foods to the US Congress. I am a senior academic in the
Open University in UK, a geneticist and a biophysicist, also advisor to the
TWN and other public interest organizations on biotechnology and biosafety
since 1994. I have debated biotech issues in more than 20 countries and
written a book, Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare? The Brave New World
of Bad Science and Big Business.
I am here on behalf of more than
140 scientists from 27 countries to
deliver an open letter to all government delegates at the World Trade
Organization, calling for a moratorium on genetic engineered crops and
products because they are dangerous, and for patents on life-forms and
living processes to be revoked and banned because they are deeply immoral.
As you have already heard, they give unaccountable corporations a monopoly
on life and our life-support system.
There is a lot of misinformation
and dis-information put out by the biotech
industry and their supporters including our governments. Only yesterday,
U.S. Senator Kit Bond gave a press conference in which four scientists, all
biotechnologists and friendly to the industry, told reporters how,
We absolutely need genetic engineered crops to feed the world. (You
have just heard that myth soundly exploded by David Bryer of Oxfam.)
The miracle crops are just around the corner. (We have been promised
miracle crops that fix nitrogen, resist drought, tolerate salt, increase
yield and so on for at least 30 years. They have not materialized. It has
been a series of broken promises.)
There is no difference between genetic
engineering of crops and
conventional breeding, except it is much more precise. (That is
not true, and I shall deal with that in detail.)
Genetic engineered crops offer no
new risks. (Again I shall deal
with that in detail.)
No one has died yet from eating genetic
engineered foods. (Well,
there has been no segregation, no labelling and no one has been looking!)
Genetic engineered food is the most
tightly regulated and
scrutinized for safety than any other food. (I'll deal with that later too.)
Let me add that engineering crops
to enhance nutrition ignores the root
cause of malnutrition, which is the industrial monoculture crops that have
led to a deterioration of the nutritional value of food within the past 50
years, and the destruction of natural and agricultural biodiversity on
which a healthy balanced diet depends. We don't need vitamin A enhanced
rice when we can eat carrots with our rice.
The latest surveys on genetic engineered
crops in the U.S., the largest
grower by far, showed no significant benefit. On the contrary, the most
widely grown genetic engineered crops -- herbicide-tolerant soya beans --
yielded on average 6.7% less and required two to five times more
herbicides than non-genetic engineered varieties.
Genetic engineering agriculture is
a dangerous diversion and obstruction to
the real tasks of providing food and health around the world. To put it
bluntly: the existing technologies are crude, unreliable, uncontrollable,
and unpredictable. They don't qualify as technologies, let alone
patentable inventions. And they are inherently hazardous, more so because
they are misguided by a scientific paradigm that is fundamentally flawed,
out of date, and in conflict with scientific findings. They call that sound
science. It is really the ultimate phony science.
That was the ruling paradigm before
genetic engineering really got underway
20 years ago. It offers a simplistic, reductionist view that ignores
interconnections and complexity of real processes. It has no concept of the
organism as a whole, nor of societies or ecosystems -- only individuals as
isolated atoms each competing against all the rest. The organism is seen as
a collection of traits, each tied to specific genes which do not, by and
large, interact with one another, nor with the environment, and these genes
are passed on unchanged to the next generation except for very rare random
mutations. If this were true then genetic engineering would be as precise
and effective as is claimed.
Unfortunately, scientific findings
within the past 20 years reveal an
immense amount of cross-talk between genes which function in complex
networks. Genes are nothing if not sensitive, dynamic, and responsive to
other genes, to the cell or organism in which they find themselves, and to
the external environment. They can mutate, multiply, rearrange and jump
around in responding. Genes may even jump out of one organism to infect
another one. This is called ‘horizontal gene transfer', the transfer of
genetic material directly to unrelated species, to distinguish it from the
vertical gene transfer from parent to offspring which happens in normal
reproduction. (Horizontal gene transfer across species barriers is the
process exploited by geneticists in genetic engineering.) The genetic
material is so flexible and dynamic that geneticists have coined the phrase
"the Fluid Genome" to describe the situation.
Genetics has changed out of all recognition.
It is more accurate to see the
genes as having a very complicated ecology, and that for genes and genomes
to remain constant, you need a balanced ecology. So the new genetics is
radically ecological and holistic.
Now, what is genetic engineering?
You know the children's joke of what do
you get when you cross impossible things like a spider with a goat? Part of
the joke is knowing you can't because there are biological barriers between
species which only allows one to cross closely related species, such as
horse and donkey. There are good reasons for keeping species distinct, they
have to do with the balance of the ecosystem. When viruses cross species
barriers, for example, we have outbreaks of infectious diseases. Genetic
engineering bypasses all species barriers, and it is not a joke anymore.
Genes are being transferred in the laboratory between any and every
species, many of which would never interbreed in nature. Indeed, spider
genes have been transferred into goats in an attempt to make the poor
female goats produce silk in their milk, and human genes have been
transferred into cows, sheep, mice, fish, and bacteria.
The most immediate dangers are random
and unpredictable, basically because
the genetic engineer cannot control where and how the foreign genes are
integrated into the genetic material of the organism. Genetic engineering
of animals is an act of cruelty. There are high failure rates and even the
so-called successes are often monstrously deformed. Genetically engineered
plants may end up having new toxins and allergens. Dr. Arpad Pusztai, an
eminent scientist in the Rowett Institute of Scotland, lost his job when he
released findings showing that two GM potato lines were unexpectedly toxic
to young rats.
A more insidious danger is horizontal
gene transfer. The genetic material,
the DNA, can survive indefinitely in all environments after the organisms
are dead. It can be taken up by other organisms and become incorporated
into their genetic material. This has the potential to create new viruses
and bacteria that cause diseases. Why?
In genetic engineering, new genes,
many from viruses and bacteria,
including antibiotic resistance genes that make infectious diseases
untreatable, are introduced into our crops and livestock. They are combined
in new combinations that have never existed, and introduced into organisms
by invasive methods that make the foreign genes (or transgenic DNA) more
unstable and more prone to transfer horizontally than the organism's own
genes which have been adapted to stay together for hundreds of millions of
years.
Another danger is that the transgenic
DNA can jump into the genetic
material of our cells and cause damages including cancer.
In its interim report (May 1999),
the British Medical Association called
for an indefinite moratorium on the release of GM crops pending further
studies on new allergies, on the spread of antibiotic resistances, and on
the effects of transgenic DNA.
These hazards are acknowledged by
sources within our governments. U.K.
scientists advising the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food are now
calling attention to the same dangers.
Our regulatory system is still based on the old reductionist paradigm.
*They are in denial on the evidence
accumulated over the past ten
years that DNA suvives in the environment and can be taken up by all
cells. The U.K. Health and Safety Executive regards DNA as a
chemical, and as it is in all organisms, it is not considered a hazardous
chemical and therefore not subject to regulation. One of the scientists in Kit
Bond's press conference yesterday even referred to genetic engineered crops
as the ultimate organic crops, because it involves manipulating "the
totally organic substance DNA".
*The reductionist paradigm of regulation
means that insufficient
attention is paid to unintended, unexpected effects.
*Because they assume there is no
difference between genetically
engineered crops and those obtained from traditional breeding, regulation is
largely based on “no need to look, so don't look”, and you don't
see
anything. The principle of substantial equivalence on which risk assessment
is
based is a farce. Anything passed as substantially equivalent is
supposed to be safe. But the genetically engineered variety can be
compared with any and every variety within the species, it can even be compared
to a
collection of unrelated species. It is like saying that someone who does
theoretic physics like Einstein and plays baseball like Mark
Macguire is substantially equivalent to another who plays baseball like
Einstein and does theoretic physics like Mark Macguire.
There is a science war on. It is
between a reductionist, mechanistic
science and an emerging holistic, organic science which is reaffirming and
restoring the deep ecological perspectives of indigenous sciences around
the world. Contrary to reductionist western science, these indigenous
sciences have enabled people to live sustainably with nature for tens of
thousands of years, but they are being destroyed and marginalized.
Intensive mechanised agriculture
has taken the soul out of farming. It has
turned farmers into tractor-drivers. Food is more than just the combination
of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, or vitamins and other micronutrients.
It is an emotional, aesthetic experience.
To really do us good, we have to
know that our food is produced, not just
without agrochemicals, but also without exploiting our fellow human beings,
without cruelty to animals, and without destroying the earth. Most of all,
we want to know that it is produced with love and creativity of farmers who
are poets and artists at heart, who know how to work with nature to make
both human beings and nature prosper. That is the real agenda for civil
society.