Genetically Engineered Organisms Invade Our Planet - What's the Harm?
Pastor Dale Morgan
Genetically Engineered Organisms Invade Our Planet - What's the Harm?*
Mar 13th, 2007 7:32 AM
By Gary Feuerberg
Epoch Times Washington, D.C. Staff
For a long time now, Americans have been told by the scientists who
developed genetically modified (GM) crops and organisms that GM is safe
and wonderful.
This was done with the blessing of government regulators, such as the
Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA). It was alleged that GM crops, such as Bt and Roundup
Ready, to use the best known biotech products, are good for
biodiversity, increase yields, are resistant to pests, reduce the need
for pesticides, are more profitable for the farmers, and less labor
intensive.
But a close examination of the benefits of transgenic crops will reveal
that the benefits, if they occur, are way overstated, and the costs are
often ignored.
Denise Caruso devotes a chapter in her new book, Intervention:
Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech
Planet (2006), to assessing the evidence.
She cites a thorough study of Bt cotton in a state of India, funded by
the government, where the results were less than stellar: farmers spent
more than twice the money for Bt seeds than non-Bt seeds, and the
reduction in pesticide use was only 12%.
Meanwhile, the farmers' net profits for Bt were less than non-Bt hybrids
and yields were about the same. This transgenic cotton had been hyped up
and so the results would be disappointing to the Indian farmers.
Potentially more disturbing than the economic side of the technology,
the transgenic cotton had some peculiar "side effects." After two years,
the primary cotton pests were developing resistance to the Bt toxin,
which could have a devastating effect on other crops in the area.
Also, the Bt was somehow mysteriously infecting the soil so that no
other crops would grow in the same soil. Apparently too, the advocates
for Bt didn't consider that Indian farmers would make their own illegal
hybrids of Bt, using their own seeds. This means that a substantial
amount of Bt is being grown all over India with unknown consequences.
From this single example, we can ask the general question, should the
scientists, the industry and the regulators have been more open to the
possible problems with GM, and considered these before embarking on this
course?
With so much unknown about this new technique, should there have been
more caution before going pell-mell into the production and marketing of
biotech products?
Denise Caruso thinks so. "There is no such thing as risk-free living,
with or without genetic engineering. Progress has never been risk-free,"
says Caruso in Intervention. The book is written for the lay person, the
non-scientist, who wants to understand better the nature and
implications of genetic engineering.
Caruso is a veteran technology journalist, who from 1995 wrote the
popular Digital Commerce column for the New York Times, and after
leaving that position in 2000, co-founded the Hybrid Vigor Institute, a
research and consulting practice. Beginning in January, she resumed
writing for the New York Times.
It is short-sighted to place all the focus on the presumed benefits of
Biotechnology, argues Caruso. On the surface, it sounds good to save
human lives by a genetic alteration so that a pig organ could work in a
human being, or a mosquito that doesn't transmit malaria, or to save
human labor and expense by transgenic corn and soybeans that need less
herbicide to grow.
But the problem, according to Caruso, is that important questions about
the possible negative consequences of biogenetic engineering—the real
risks—are not typically investigated or even asked by the scientists
creating the technology or by the industry that is profiting from them.
Furthermore, they greatly resent having their assumptions and approach
to science questioned.
Biotechnology is far reaching and mind boggling in its implications.
Scientists can now isolate genetic material of a cell and insert the
"synthetic" genetic material into the natural genetic material of the
cells of a different organism or even a different species, thereby
creating genetically modified organisms—living hybrids with new
"desirable" traits that could not be created by traditional breeding
techniques.
An example of this technique, called "recombinant DNA," mentioned in the
book is transgenic pig organs that scientist want to develop for human
transplants. This transgenic pig would be one whose organs presumably
are best suited for human use.
This technique should not be confused with the pig and cow heart valves,
used frequently nowadays in human patients, as these are no longer
living tissue. If this new technology succeeds, living pig cells would
be exchanging proteins and genetic material with human cells.
The most immediate concern posed by transgenic pig organs inside a
living human being is the very real possibility that some "dormant
retrovirus from the pig's cells would somehow reactivate inside the
human body" and risk of this happening are "incalculable," says Caruso.
The rewiring of genetic material of living organisms is a monumental
act—changing a species in the most fundamental way. This is man
"intervening," to use Caruso's word in the title of her book, in a
natural process at a very deep level of the organism.
To a religious or spiritual person it would seem to have tremendous
moral and ethical meanings. Caruso doesn't dwell on this side much, but
is content to point out the potential biological nightmare that such
alterations could have for humans and the environment.
"It is not especially difficult to come up with scenarios whereby
mucking around in the genes of living organisms leads to serious
biological, social, and/or economic disruption," says Caruso.
When the transgenic technique of recombining DNA from different species
was first discovered in the 1970s, geneticists worried that the powerful
new technology might create new viruses and bacteria that cause
diseases, and enhance antibiotic resistance to make infections
untreatable, says the Organic Consumers Association.
As a result, at the Asilomar conference in Monterey, Ca. in 1975,
scientists imposed on themselves a moratorium on these experiments until
safety protocols in the laboratory could be designed. When nothing
visible regarding these dangers appeared, the technique came to be
regarded as safe.
The focus of Caruso's book is not the risks in the laboratory, whose
outcomes are inert, but the products of transgenesis that create new
kinds of living organisms.
"Billions of transgenics have already been released into the market
place and thus into our food, water and the air that we breathe,
breeding and exchanging their genetic material with each other and with
us." Caruso says these organisms are alive and numerous and much less
predictable than what is acknowledged.
Responsible Decision Making
In the pig organ example mentioned above, Caruso and Baruch Fischoff, a
risk expert and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, convened a
"diverse" group of six experts for a meeting, lasting less than a day to
consider the risks. They developed various possible scenarios that
scientists working directly on the problem might not even think about.
For example, how to dispose of the carcasses of which there would have
to be in the thousands—all contaminated. And what about the manure that
leaves the pig, entering the environment, where pig transgenic
contamination is available to insect and rodent carriers? If you could
manage to somehow "sanitize" the pig, what happens when the organ
resides in the "dirty" human body and its viruses, which could kill the
pig organ?
This kind of open discussion of the potential problems, "a weighing of
the real risks against the real benefits," is the only way a responsible
public policy decision can be made on the risks of this controversial
medical process.
There is no precedent, no way to ascertain an exact answer, a
probability based on past experience with this biotech product. Yet, the
regulators from the FDA and the USDA, and the genetic scientists are
disinclined to convene such a panel and have such expanded conversations
about risk.
Caruso is not saying that human intervention into biological functions
is wrong, a view that she believes is too extreme. But Caruso believes
no one—not the scientists or the regulators—knows the safety or danger
of biotech products, because of the flawed methods that are used to
assess their risks.
"Yet neither knowledge of history nor dark-side scenarios has tempered
the zeal or the speed with which the products of genetic engineering are
being dispatched into the global marketplace," Caruso writes.
It may already be too late to prevent untoward effects of biotechnology.
Caruso cites USDA figures for 2006 that show that 68% of all soybeans
planted in the U.S. were transgenic, as were 69% of the cotton planted,
and 26% of corn acreage.
Now there are countless transgenic organisms out there, reproducing and
evolving, without control or monitoring. The planet earth has become a
giant genetics experiment, according to Caruso. It is troubling that
this all happened without the risks of the products and processes of
genetic engineering being rationally discussed and investigated.
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