March 28, 2000 / The Boston Globe / Judy Foreman, Globe Staff
In the early 1990s, while almost nobody was looking, the biotech industry, according to this story, pulled off quite a coup. Led by industry giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Novartis and Aventis, genetic engineers began commercializing an idea they'd worked on for years - tinkering with genes to make crops more resistant to insects and herbicides. The basic idea was clever. If, say, a gene could be inserted into soybean seeds so the plants would be resistant to an herbicide, farmers could spray their fields with that herbicide, killing the weeds without fear that it would harm the cash crop. If a gene could be introduced into corn that would produce a protein toxic to corn-eating caterpillars, farmers could grow that kind of corn without using high quantities of pesticides. The idea has not only worked - it's worked too well in the eyes of the anti-biotech crowd, which has been staging counter-demonstrations this week in Boston during BIO2000, the biotech industry's annual gig.
The story says our digestive enzymes should chew up GM food the same way they process everything else we eat and that, among other things, that means that it's unlikely that, say, a gene from a flounder that's inserted into a tomato (as scientists are doing to make tomatoes more resistant to freezing) would somehow lodge itself forever in the human genome. In fact, if it were that easy to transfer genes, scientists wouldn't have to resort to sophisticated tricks to create transgenic animals in the lab: They could just feed them GM food. Indeed, there's no evidence that any human has ever been harmed by eating GM food. (This is in contrast, by the way, to evidence that some herbal products, which people assume are safe because they're "natural," can be harmful.) Given that 60 percent of the processed food now on the American market contain ingredients that have been genetically engineered (a fact many people don't realize), chances are that if the stuff were dangerous, somebody would have noticed. But none of this is what really irks consumers - including this one - on both sides of the Atlantic.
What is irksome, the story says, is that, even though GM foods may be safe, there's too little testing to say for sure - and there are no labels to guide us. We don't know, for instance, whether the proteins made by genes inserted into plants could cause serious, even fatal, allergic reactions. In one notorious case, scientists inserted a Brazil nut gene into soybeans to increase protein. When the hybrid was lab tested in 1996, human antibodies reacted to the nut gene, a sign that the product could have caused allergies in people. Martin Teitel, executive director of the Council for Responsible Genetics, a Cambridge-based watchdog group, was quoted as saying, "Bioengineering could produce novel protein combinations that the human body has never seen before, potentially resulting in serious allergies that would be difficult to diagnose."
Another concern is that gene-altered foods may have different nutrient value than standard foods. Though the biotech industry disputes it, GM soybeans may have fewer phytoestrogens than normal, a potentially important change, since some consumers eat soybeans precisely to get the hormone-like effects of these plant estrogens. Opponents of GM foods also worry that gene-altered crops might contain pesticide residues or, worse in the eyes of some opponents, genes that make pesticides in every cell in the plant. (On the other hand, with some gene-altered crops, farmers can use fewer pesticides than normal.) And then there's the concern that these crops could increase antibiotic resistance. Bioengineers use antiobiotic-resistance genes as markers to see whether the genes they put into plants get into the DNA. The worry is that eating the altered food could allow the marker genes to pass into bacteria in the human digestive system, making people resistant to potentially life-saving antibiotics.
Val Giddings, a geneticist and vice president for food and agriculture at the Biotechnology Industry Organization in Washington, was quoted as saying, "That argument is totally bogus for two reasons. Number one, the antibiotic resistance genes used as markers in biotech do not [cause] resistance to antibiotics used to treat human disease. Number two, those resistance genes are already present in the human digestive tract." Furthermore, "crops improved by biotechology have been subjected to more scrutiny in advance, depth, detail and rigor than any other foods introduced into the food supply in human history."
(posted without permission)
