However, I do get incensed when others make sweeping generalizations or claim I am "anti-scientific" for not supporting genetic food technology. I wrote the response below when someone posted a quote from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), basically stating that GMOs must be safe because they are rigorously tested (false), they are regulated (false) and they are identical to non-GMO food (false). These points are refuted in this excellent article, which responded to AAAS' well-timed release of their statement to influence the California Prop 37 GMO labeling campaign.
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Especially in light of epigenetics, any claim of gmo safety that a parent plant is genetically identical to its offspring is still hard to prove 100%, so any claim of complete safety is tenuous and temporary until new data is exposed. We should wait and see, not rush these "biofood products" to market. Consider the bias inherent in a branch of highly profitable industrial science where researchers must suspend disbelief of the dynamics of living organisms to promote a product, they must feign ultimate control over every aspect of living organisms and ignore awareness of their changing complexity. Science cannot be 100% objective, it is still subject to cultural and societal pressures (i.e. profit motives!!!). To work for any of these GMO giants and admit any nuance or uncertainty is doom to your career, and thus not all the facts are going to be readily published or fully available for scrutiny. Researchers outside this sphere of industry should be allowed to do their own comprehensive testing, but since these are proprietary organisms they are kept secret from the research community even though the consequences of their use are globally distributed.
My main criticism of all gmo organisms is that they were never designed to evolve in nature, as they only exist to produce a profit, and thus must be patented and must remain "genetically fixed" forever in the face of a dynamically evolving environment. Thus, GMO organisms are essentially removed from the context in which they were successfully adapted and then they are cloned to be identical. When they are reintroduced to nature with zero biodiversity they have a greatly diminished "library" from which to draw new material to adapt in the future (of course the GM scientists will adapt them for us, at great expense). This to me is anti-scientific to deny plants the ability to evolve and woefully ignorant to insist that researchers can control the future of their evolution with complete control. This is impossible unless you believe you can turn crops or even all nature into a 100% isolated closed system, under complete laboratory controlled conditions. And I think such a paradise of predictability and (pretend) control would be the best possible future for biotech and the agriceutical industries to profit from.
Last, food "safety" aside, the irresponsible rush to get GM foods into the market has completely sidestepped the environmental contamination issue. Sean, I know you care about the environment, thought it is foolish to support a technology that cannot be fully controlled once it is released into the environment. Basic genetics is understood by many nowadays but it is still beyond human perception on scale not even visible with the highest level microscopes, and so even the best genetic researchers make MANY assumptions. Our ability to sequence a genome or to compare genes across many organisms is not equivalent to a 100% level of awareness and certainty as to what those genes are doing and how they interact in multiple levels of global and local feedback loops. The level of certainty (faith) I feel you are projecting onto GM technology is mistaken, though we can assess many many genes simultaneously the technology isn't as precise as it would need to be to claim safety. Once again, in light of epigenetics, the presumed stability and predictability of DNA in living systems is far from well-understood, it's really in its infancy now that we've finally gotten glimpses of the big picture. We're like medieval doctors who cut up cadavers, thinking because we can see the parts we can completely understand the whole, when we've only scratched the surface of living genetic systems.
Go ahead, keep doing research, keep testing new constructs and growing new strains of algae, plants, whatever, but DON'T release them into the world at large just for profit. Keep them research-only, and continue to research them until others can reproduce the findings- this is a huge expectation but given the potential global consequences to humanity and the entire biome, I don't think that's too outrageous a request.
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http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/epimaize.htm
"New research explains how certain traits can pass down from one generation to the next – at least in plants – without following the accepted rules of genetics."
“The gene changes its expression in an epigenetic fashion and it doesn’t follow standard inheritance behaviors. Those two factors alone have pretty profound implications not only for breeding but also for evolution.”
"An investigation of the affected alleles revealed the nearby presence of a transposon, or transposable element: a tiny piece of DNA that has leapt from one area of the genome to another."
Yes, a self-autonomously copying piece of DNA, poorly understood, yet pervasive in plants and animals and known to unpredictably *change* a plant's genotype and/or phenotype. This doesn't inspire confidence in GMO biofood, there is only an illusion of control.
also check this out, on the bias and aggression towards the scientists when their findings are released, inherent in both sides of the debate...
ReplyDeletehttp://grist.org/food/is-extremism-in-defense-of-gm-food-a-vice/
Perhaps the science community has become polarized because of the crazy behavior of ANTI-GMO activists - who have managed to take the debate out of the lab and the Ag Agencies and made it political? It is highly unusual, in my life as a lay person (non-scientist), to see a situation where fellow lay people seize on newly released studies (Seralini, Carman, Pustazi) that seem to give them the legitimacy they seek, even though they are not qualified to interpret the studies methodological soundness, and are unwilling to wait for or listen to the reaction of other scientists. It is the ANTI side that spreads fear and misinformation like the plague - one minute GMO seeds are sterile, the next minute, they are "infecting" the country-side with cross-pollination. While I am not qualified to assess your objections above, the fact that most ANTI material is unscientific voodoo from people like Jeffery Smith, raises the tension level. Almost daily, I see a new meme claiming that GMO's are responsible for everything from cancer to autism attempting to use correlation as proof of causation of any phenomena that has increased, or seems to have increased, over the past 30 years. It would be nice if the untrained public would take this question as an impetus to become truly interested in science, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
Deletetheres proof now GMO them self are not safe ,cause leukemia ,tumors and so on ,not just the chemicals the actual gene splicing !! watch GMO global alert
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