'Americans have been eating GE foods for years, and I can't see a pile of
bodies'


Proponents of GE foods say that Americans have been eating GE foods for
years and no problem has come to light. To hear this astonishingly
unscientific statement from the mouths of scientists beggars belief. The
truth is that no harm can be found as long as nobody is looking. No
controlled human feeding experiments on GE food have been done. And
industry has ensured that in the United States and Canada, GE foods are not
segregated or labeled. Even in Europe, which mandates labeling, it is
believed that widespread contamination through lack of segregation at
source means that GE ingredients often escape labeling. If problems occur,
the line of traceability (as with the Starlink contamination) simply is not
there.

Insofar as traceability does exist, the news is not good for GE foods. In
1989, a batch of the amino acid food supplement l-tryptophan produced with
GE bacteria killed 37 Americans and permanently disabled at least 1,500
with a rare illness22. Minute amounts of a new toxin were found in the GE
batch that had not been found in previous batches not made with GE bacteria.

The U.S. government slapped a ban on all l-tryptophan, in spite of the fact
that natural (non-GE) versions of the supplement had been consumed for
years without ill effects. They also did their utmost to exonerate the GE
manufacturing process from blame. But since the company destroyed the GE
bacteria after the story broke, we probably shall never know the truth.

Critics of GE point out that the cause was only spotted because the disease
was so novel that a surge in the number of cases stood out. If the ill
effects caused by the l-tryptophan had been more common, such as cleft
palate or cancer, the culprit probably would have remained hidden. Because
of the dogma of substantial equivalence, no toxicological testing of the
GE-manufactured l-tryptophan was required, so the new contaminant escaped
detection.

Is GE food inherently more risky than non-GE food?

Several hundred scientists have signed a statement saying that they believe
GE foods pose unique risks to health and the environment that have not been
investigated, and they are calling for a moratorium on further releases23.
One of their main areas of concern is the vectors and promoters used in all
GE foods.

Vectors and promoters are bits of disease-causing viruses and bacteria that
are used to ferry the transgene into the host plant and force it to switch
on (express). They are designed to overcome the natural species barriers
that, in traditional breeding, prevent a cross-species transfer, for
example, between a monkey and a soybean plant, or between a fish a
strawberry plant. Traditional breeding allows breeding only between close
relatives such as donkeys and horses. In genetic engineering, species
barriers are overcome and "cross-breeding" between different species is
possible.

GE vectors and promoters circumvent the host plant's natural tendency to
repel foreign invaders. This process, scientists point out, results in
random insertion of the transgene into the host's DNA, with unpredictable
results, including mutations, new viruses, cancers and increased antibiotic
resistance24.

The Cauliflower Mosaic Virus promoter used in most GE foods on the market
has come under particular suspicion. Pusztai has called for tests to be
carried out on the CaMV promoter. He believed that it might have been the
cause of the apparent gut abnormalities suffered by his GE-fed rats, which
had the characteristics of viral infection. Studies suggest that the CaMV
promoter is active not only in plants but also in animals. The form of the
virus used in GE is not the same as the natural form, which has safely
evolved by the side of man for centuries. It is a form of "naked DNA"
stripped of the protein coat that helps our bodies to recognize it as an
invader and restricts it to its usual hosts.25 It is unstable and prone to
recombine with other viruses or with the DNA of other organisms.26

Breeding ignorance into food

What's the problem with a future of GE food, genes tweaked this way and
that to enhance desirable traits?

Genes expressing new proteins have never been in the human diet before, so
the effects on health are not known. And as we've seen, nobody seems about
to do the tests to find out.

With living plants and animals, one gene does not equal one characteristic.
We talk about "the gene for herbicide resistance" or "the gene for
intelligence" but genes work in complex relationships with one another and
with their environment. These relationships are so poorly understood that
the field of GE has produced one nasty surprise after another.27 For
example, a gene that conferred herbicide resistance in soy also affected
its production of lignin, needed to make the stems robust. So GE
herbicide-resistant soy plants split in hot weather due to lack of lignin.
GE salmon grew faster but also turned green and became deformed28; GE
cotton bolls mysteriously dropped off in the field before they could be
harvested. President Bill Clinton's pronouncement about the decoding of the
human genetic code, "Today we are learning the language in which God
created life," is accurate only insofar as a child who has learned to write
the letters of the alphabet can be said to understand Shakespeare.

GE ensures that our current ignorance of which genes do what and how they
interact with the environment will be enshrined forever in the gene pool of
our food crops. There's no going back. Will we still think 50 years from
now that it's a good idea to engineer a pesticide or a spider venom into
our food plants? We'd better not change our minds on this one, because once
these things are released, we're stuck with them. Even nuclear pollution
decays with time, but genetic pollution replicates, spreads to wild and
cultivated relatives and moves between species.

How GE genes spread

The biotech industry's "solution" to the problem of spreading GE genes is
to engineer plants with the "terminator technology" in which plants are
programmed to produce sterile seeds. That way, the theory goes, they can't
cross-pollinate, and the GE genes stay put. One wonders if they have heard
of a concept called horizontal gene transfer, which covers the many ways
that genetic material can be exchanged between species other than by
cross-pollination. This can involve infection of different species by
bacteria and viruses, insects or birds feeding on the GE material or
inhalation of GE pollen or dust by humans -- or simply by direct
incorporation of "free" DNA.

The viral vectors used in GE are designed to enable genes to cross species
barriers. The research on viral DNA should give us pause for thought before
we allow the large-scale release of these substances into the environment
and into the food chain.

Viral DNA fed to mice reaches white blood cells, spleen and liver cells via
the intestinal wall, and is incorporated into the mouse cell genome29. When
fed to pregnant mice, viral DNA ends up in cells of the fetuses and the
newborn animals, suggesting that it has gone through the placenta as
well30. The study's authors say: "The consequences of foreign DNA uptake
for mutagenesis birth defects and oncogenesis cancer have not yet been
investigated31." Professor Hans-Heinrich Kaatz from the University of Jena
has shown that GE genes can be taken up via pollen by the gut bacteria of
bees.32

German research has shown that soil bacteria may take up GE genes,
including the antibiotic resistant genes used in GE.33 Does anyone recall
the techno-fixes that scientists told us in the 1950s were mankind's
salvation? Nuclear power, DDT, heavy dosage X-rays for pregnant women and
to fit children's shoes. In the 1980s, in Europe, the next generation of
scientists told us that feeding dead cows to living cows was another great
idea. Now we're living with the fallout from risky technologies that seemed
like a good idea at the time: poisoned land, poisoned people, escalating
cancer rates and people with "mad cow" disease. We feel bad about these
things. But imagine how much worse we'd feel if we knew that we, our
children and our children's children would have to live with those
consequences forever.

So when the biotech industry promises us a new wave of GE "nutrifoods"
engineered to contain more of a certain fat, vitamin or protein, we'd
better make sure that our knowledge of what's desirable in nutrition never
changes from this day forth. Think of the discoveries we've made about what
types of fats are harmful and what types are useful, and think how often in
the past 50 years we've added to or contradicted previous theories. It's
hard to think of a single nutrient that hasn't at different times and by
different bodies been slated as a potential toxin and lauded as the next
new anti-cancer treatment. Then think of the current state of nutritional
knowledge. Imagine that this state of partial knowledge is written into the
language of life -- with consequences that no one, however clever he thinks
he is, can predict or alter.