“Yes,” argues Team 1. “It is better to invest in more tests now rather than pay for a mistake later. Despite the clear benefits of GE crops in reducing insecticide use, the long-term effects are impossible to predict. Therefore it is best to put off commercialization. A longer period of safety testing will relieve public concerns.”
Team 2 did not agree. “We need the benefits of GE crops now. People are dying from hunger, malnutrition and pesticide poisonings- not from GE food. It is a waste to spend more money on testing to teach the public about what is already known. Further testing would further delay the changes needed on our farms. If we ban GE crops then there will be less food available globally, which will increase food prices here and abroad. Think about your average college student who cannot afford organic food. Then think about the poorest people in the world; they cannot afford more testing. What is enough safety testing and who defines the limits? After 12 years of testing, without a single instance of harm to human health or the environment, and the support of 25 Nobel Prize winners, it is clear that GE crops are safe and beneficial.”
Team 1 responded, “Just because GE crops are safe now doesn’t mean that they will be safe later. What if new allergens form from the gene that has been inserted? What if farmers only cultivate one variety of GE crops and nothing else? That will diminish genetic diversity and make the crop vulnerable to potentially devastating diseases. Think about the Irish potato famine where the entire crop was killed by a fungal pathogen. Hundreds of thousands of people died and many more emigrated.”
Team 2 pointed out that GE food must be labeled if the gene is derived from any of the common allergic reaction- inducing food such as peanuts or wheat. “It is similar to what is written on your cereal box-’ This product was processed in a facility that uses peanuts’ “.
This is the third in a series of debates conducted by undergraduate students in the class “Genetics and Society” at the University of California, Davis.
Hi Pamela, I like the post – particularly the fact you kept the punchline to the end – it’s teams of debating students rather than squabbling, partisan, government lobbying groups!
This is a pretty bold statement! How easy is it to properly verify its accuracy? And James Watson is probably a good example of why we shouldn’t accept everything that Nobel winners say on certain topics.
I haven’t heard of any research that specifically looks at long-term effects of genetic modification in micro-organisms (but I haven’t explicitly looked into it either). I feel this sort of model system could give us useful insight into transmission of modified genes through populations/communites in a much more controlled manner and shorter time than any farm trials. Do you know of any such work?
Meh. “Show me the data”.
The anti-GMO weenies have nothing except empty rhetoric.
gad you like the posts. The students are doing a great job in the debates. We require that they identify peer reviewed papers to support their assertions. This is working pretty well.
It is true that there has not been a single instance of harm to human health or the environment, and that the use of insecticides has been reduced.
Here is some information and references (although I dont yet have anything posted on microbes):
http://pamelaronald.blogspot.com/2008/08/10-things-about-ge-crops-to-scratch.html
I havent yet confirmed the support of 25 Nobel Prize winners, but will do that when I return from Bangladesh.
I am in Japan and will soon start “Blogging from Bangladesh”
That’s, um, logical, Captain.
I am in transit in the airport in Japan, on my way to Bangkok and then Bangladesh. It sure takes a while to get there from California…
We will be visiting farmers growing our flood tolerant rice
More soon.
Thanks for the link – I’ll check that out soon, right now, I face similar pressures to one of your other posts
It’s sometimes difficult to know where to start looking for this sort of stuff – even though I’m a scientist, I’m a bit of an interested lay person when it comes to GM work. “Bob”: has also been involved with GM projects recently, and I know there’s concern about the release of GM salmonids into the wild and fitness reduction, and I have a friend who’s been involved in modelling of related questions. Once proposals are finished being
writtedwrought, I might add my own contribution about this.That was this Bob
Good luck on your travels!
Hi
You may enjoy the book I wrote with my husband, an organic farmer (Tomorrow’s Table). We attempt to shed light on fact vs fiction.
Let me know if you have questions
The anti-GMO weenies have nothing except empty rhetoric.
That may be true, in the sense that no ill-effects have been demonstrated, but there is a lot of research and thought that goes into concepts such as the “precautionary principle”.
The idea that an organism can be deliberately, rather than accidentally (i.e. by nature) modified makes many people nervous. Gardening is OK because the modification is something that could have happened anyway. I agree with Richard that there is much rhetoric (I am a sympathiser of science living in the UK, so I could hardly not agree!) but I do think that one cannot dismiss these visceral fears as they genuinely exist. People feel that arguments such as “no harm has ever been done” don’t wash, as they remember events like Chernobyl et al. (I know these are irrelevant, but it is how people think.) I am sure books like Pamela’s and Raul’s are doing great work. In the UK, politicians have actually been pretty supportive of GM. I think scientists working in the area, or other “science communicators” can do more than they do, in the main, to engage with the “worried” and not to get into adversarial or defensive (secretive) positions.
PS Don’t take my comment above that I sympathise with the precautionary priciple. It seems to me like a never-ending piece of string in cases where you can’t know the risks or even if there is one. (Unlike, say, being precautionary about a disease in which one knows the agent and/or risk factors associated with it). My point is that there is a lot of investment in concepts such as these, with which scientists perhaps more familiar with pragmatic, reductionist and mechanistic arguments have to deal.
Maxine – Gardening is OK because the modification is something that could have happened anyway.
I have to raise slight doubts here. There is a big difference between random event-driven selection and conscious directed selection (unless you are a creationist, when I presume there’s no such thing as random selection).
There are surely plenty of examples of directed selection producing modified organisms that would never have ‘happened anyway’.
Yeah Maxine. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
Just as Mike’s dragged me into this…
We’d like to collect it by doing experimental releases before we unleash anything particularly bad. But it takes time, and a lot of the modifications that could be troublesome to the environment haven’t been rolled out yet.
The practical problem is that there is such a wide variety of transgenic modifications that we can’t simply say “all GM is safe” on the basis of what we’ve released so far, because the modifications we’ve released have been trivial in terms of how they change the organism. It’s a bit like using the Curie’s discovery of radiation to conclude that radioactivity is safe and won’t harm anyone.
My own opinion is that most GMOs will be safe, but we have to demonstrate this with data, i.e. go through the process of assessing risks, and monitoring releases. We’ll probably find a few that cause problems, but as long as we catch them early on it should be OK. As we do this, we’ll re-assess the risk, and find some consensus. But we can’t show anyone the data because we don’t have it yet.
This is the sort of arrogant rhetoric that causes a lot of the problems with the acceptance of things like GMOs. Yes, a lot of the anti-GMO arguments are awful, but there is a genuine concern there, and there are genuine unknowns that we have to deal with (including the “unknown unknowns”. One of the sociologists studying acceptance of GMOs was upset that Rumsfeld made that phrase his own). Simply dismissing people like that just alienates them, and makes us seem even more elitist and out of touch.
Thing is Bob, it’s quite simple to make a deadly GMO. The people doing this stuff aren’t actors in a B-grade disaster movie.
People with genuine concerns—I’m not dismissing them, nor their concerns. It’s the muppets with the ‘OMG GMO is teh ev1l we’re all going to d1e eleventy!!’ that really piss me off.
Hey Pamela, why not refer a few of the students to this blog post and encourage them to join in the debate online?
It’s the particular modification that may/may not be dangerous, rather than the fact that a modification has been made.
If I modify my beef stew by adding some coriander and turmeric then I have a nice spicy beef stew. If I modify my beef stew by adding cyanide and strychnine, then it won’t be very good for me.
By jove, Frank, you’ve just given me an excellent idea for tonight’s roast!
Richard, WTF? Is your impending facial hair making you a bit paranoid?
I think the
pintwee dram of whisky1 I just had to celebrate a fellowship proposal submission has given me a fresh perspective here.Going with the question that titles this post,
I would say it should prohibit the commercialization, but not the experimental release. This, and many of the points raised above, relate to another discussion that occurred here recently. Humans are part of the natural world. We evolved under the same mechanisms that everything else on the planet did, so we and our actions are natural. Something evolution fashioned us with is the ability to judge the potential consequences of our actions. We’re constantly learning more about the consequences of our past actions, e.g., on the climate and threats to our future financial viability…
So, the precautionary principle advises us to be sure that the obvious and unforeseen consequences of our actions are minimised. We come up with theories about what might happen if GMOs are released/escape into the wild. A first step in the experimental phase is through building simple models (e.g., here2 that include accidental release), which allow us to test what could potentially happen, without driving real species to extinction. Then we can try carefully controlled lab trials before we build up to experimental field trials, if we suspect we can control these sufficiently. Do GM organisms have to go through the same sort of trials as pharmaceutical companies? I don’t know, and would like to in the context of this discussion!
1 Don’t read any further. You’ve been warned. Don’t drink and drivel, kids.
2 Aikio et al. (2007)
doi:10.1111/j.2007.0030-1299.16061.x
Quite. The thinking now is that we have to assess the risks of GMO release on a case-by-case basis. Mike outlines the approaches to risk assessment, and these are being developed more fully (the project I was involved in was developing models with the Finnish environmental agency).
There’s a lot of material about GM safety available. There are formal procedures for risk assessments, but I think they vary by country. The modelling framework really needs more development, but that needs someone to pay for it…
Thanks for your interesting comments everyone. A couple points before I catch some sleep here in Bangkok
1. I am encouraging the students to post their comments. Until now they have posted on my other blog. I will direct them to this one
2. Everything we eat has been genetically modified through conventional breeding processes. Genetic engineering is a distinct process and relatively new (30 years old compared to thousands of years old) but the result is the same: A new variety with traits that interest humans. The National academy of sciences and all other scientific societies that have looked at the process have concluded that the risks presented by the process of GE and the risks presented by the process of conventional breeding are similar. So each new variety needs to be looked at on a case-by case basis. What is the trait and what does are the benefits? If the benefits are reduced insecticide usage (e.g. BT crops) or enhanced nutrition (e.e. golden rice) or higher yield (Submergence tolerant rice), then I say full steam ahead.
Pamela, sorry for the probably ignorant question, but I haven’t really looked at GM foods in depth. I may just have to read your book! But I’ll ask anyway (maybe one of your students has the answer, too):
How can a process like conventional breeding, which takes a long time to achieve results, be ‘equal’ to one that may create new varieties within years? Wouldn’t the ‘gardener’ mentioned above have a lot more time to observe negative effects developing and be able to pull the plug quicker?
And.. I guess I do have a very uneasy feeling about GM quite possibly being monopolised by big corporations whose primary interest is not to save the world and feed the starving.
Conventional breeding mixes large set of uncharacterized genes around, usually by pollination but also by other processes such az embryo rescue and random mutagenesis (none of these approaches take long). The new varieties resulting from these processes are not tested and can be certified organic (even though a process such as mutagenesis induces more unpredictable changes than introducing a rice gene from one species into another using genetic engineering.
For more info, please see
http://pamelaronald.blogspot.com/search?q=10+things
and
http://pamelaronald.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2008-08-13T18%3A05%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=7
in the US most farmers including organic farmers by their seeds from corporations. In Bangladesh, the seeds are shared freely between neighbors.
Capitalism cant do lot but we cannot rely on it to feed the world.
Brian and Richard – it reads as if you may have misunderstood my comment about gardening (etc). This is not what I think. What I was writing is what “people” (“the general public” – neigbours, local parents, friends, etc) think – I’ve heard this argument so many times, and the Chernobyl one, and other similar ones.
You all assume that ‘technology’ (really any kind) is or will be dealt with responsibly (and that there will always be the funds and resources to do so). So far, I don’t think we (humans) have such a great track record. Isn’t that something to bear in mind with all this?
..and I forgot to say thanks for the quick explanation, Pamela.
I want to clarify my above comment a bit more: I am not anti-GMO, just a bit wary of further developments. Pamela in her various posts and Bob above agree that each new variety has to be tested. The tests cost money, and they also need to be mandated. Right now, everything seems to go well – but if/when funding runs out, or the political climate for mandated testing changes?
Sorry, Maxine, should have known better! I did miss the fact that this was ‘other voice’ narration.
I would say that there is a possibility that this technology could cause problems, just like with almost every technology, but it seems hard to imagine any problems with biotechnology being worse than our current situation (or the situation we may find ourselves in if biotechnology is prohibited).
The more testing is done, the more lives are lost. It was claimed in the debate that someone dies from hunger every 3.6 seconds. People are dying from the absence of GE crops, not its presence.
I agree that safety testing is important, but I think that additional safety testing may do more harm than good.
Hello Zack, great to see you at NN.
Do you really think that GE will solve world hunger—or that the lack of GE is what’s causing people to die?
Would it not be more efficient/practical/useful to consider the distribution of the food that we already produce?
Careful, Zack – Richard bites, but it’s nothing personal.
There are lots of examples of how genetic modification is helping farming/alleviate hunger in Sub-African countries. It is this type of outcome that motivated many people to become plant scientists in the first place.
Sub-Saharan African, that should read, of course.
GE alone isn’t going to be a magic bullet that completely solves world hunger. But it will be a great help. Improving distribution is a good idea that can help as well, along with political stability, sustainable practices, and population control.
It is possible to distribute a surplus of rice from one country to a country where the rice crop was destroyed by flooding, but it would be more efficient and practical if the rice grown was genetically engineered to be more flood tolerant and wasn’t destroyed in the first place.
thanks for your comments Zack
I agree farmers need tools that will enable local self sufficiency
Here in Bangladesh farmers need good seed and farming practices
They cannot and do not have money to buy food imported from other countries. This is something difficult for people in the devloping world to understand. Distribution of food is not like distribution of television sets
Well, there are problems of storage, sure—but when you look around at increasing obesity and food yet being wasted you have to wonder if there isn’t a reasonably immediate fix.
Helping poorer countries to be self-sufficient, and using GM to achieve that, is a laudable long-term aim. I wonder if we’re not doing enough to aid people short-term, though. (And things like growing naturally drought-resistant crops. Rice in Australia? Come on).