h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The British regulations for GM field trials are so lax that they can be planted close enough to organic crops that cross-pollination is just about certain (if sufficiently similar plants are being grown on both sides). The organic label might become increasingly doubtful.

If cross pollination occurs the British Soil Association rules mean that organic status is lost. The organic label, in the UK anyway, remains secure but maybe there will be very few organic producers left.

Who decides that a crop should be tested for GM cross-pollination? What kind of sample is taken? From the edge of the field or all over? How is cross-pollination detected? You'd have to grow the next generation, by which time the crop in question would have been sold, eaten, or destroyed just in case.

If you really care about your status as an organic producer you might make a noise, fight, and lose. If you keep quiet nobody will come looking.

One of the real problems of the GM situation is that so many people are ill informed. The headlines for example 'Frankenstein foods' and suchlike is blatant scaremongering. Yes, there are possibly effects of genetic modification of which we are unsure, but this is the case with that other alternative - deliberate selection of the most desirable individuals in a population. A gene is just a string of nucleotides coding for the production of a particular protein. If genetic modification were unilaterally banned, as some seem to desire, a lot of people would be in a lot of trouble. Look at diabetics - many people with insulin dependent diabetes use human insulin, derived from genetically modified bacteria.

Yeah, more people ought to know things like that. And also think about how most of the stuff we eat has been bred for it.

I saw an article recently, I can´t remember where. But the woman in it said something I think is true. GM can be dangerous, but it is more important to worry about new species being introduced in ecosystems. What is going to happen when people today demand exotic pets?

I think she's mistaken: the traits introduced with GM can potentially have a much more destabilizing effect on ecosystems given that in many cases the modification may be something that's not possible through evolution in nature and is thus inherently more unpredictable than the effects of introducing a well-known species into a new environment.

As for the use of GM technology to develop new sources of insulin or similar techniques, that's not a problem in the same way: as long as the GM organisms are in a laboratory then there's no potential for harm. It's the introduction of GM organisms into the wild that's reckless.

With the insulin thing, it is just that people think genetic modification can´t be used for _anything_ good.

The problem with the term 'wild' is that it is so loose. The smallpox virus was isolated and kept in a controlled environment, but it still managed somehow to kill a researcher at Birmingham university in the late seventies (as my father continually tells me).

As for the well-known species in a new environment, Australia is the textbook example for the problems involved. Look at cane toads, and now fire ants. Also enormous areas of water plants are being endangered by (I think) a particularly fast developing water hyacinth brought over by someone who thought they'd look pretty in his pond. Also, in the UK look at the case of the poor old red squirrel - again a victim of competition with a garden novelty.

I say again: how can the Soil Association say that a crop is not organic if there has been some cross-pollination with a GM species? You harvest the crop which grew from the "natural" genome, and the GM alterations have no effect.

Signed, devil's advocate

I'm afraid I'm going to play devil's advocate as well.

What about the form of genetic manipulation which occurred before DNA research? Corn came from a form of grass (teocinte) which had a largish head of kernals, and was bred to be what it is today through natural and human cross-pollination, by the INCAS. And I believe that Horses and Donkeys came up with Mules on their own, originally.

For that matter, the idea of manipulating for desirable traits in crops/animals probably resulted from observation of what occurred in nature.

Fact of the matter is, we have been dabbling in GM for a couple of thousand years; we've just invented the means to include genes from a larger pool recently.

SC

Humans have been selecting crops and animals for desirable traits, and influencing breeding, and grafting one plant onto another for a very long time. That's not quite the same as jacking up a tomato chromosome, hammering at it to make an opening then welding a fish gene in - more or less solidly - to make something that will stay red and luscious for a couple of days longer than the last wonder-breed.

I agree. I think there's quite a lot of difference between selecting for natural traits and full-on GM.

Someone asked about 'modified starch' earlier. I'm fairly certain this refers to a purely chemical process of the finished product and not GM.

For my two cents worth, I think the biggest problem are the unforeseen effects. Some scientists will tell you that they've tested everything and there are no possible side-effects. I think that just shows ignorance (possibly intentional given the amount of money at stake). Scientists didn't even know that prions existed until recently. They thought there was no way that feeding infected meat to cattle could get the infection into the food chain! A similar thing has, apparently, already happened with GM. There was evidence in one trial that a modifier protein (which shouldn't have been in the finished product at all) got into the food chain. This is very serious because this protein is specifically designed to modify DNA. What might it do? It might do nothing, finding no matching DNA to act on, or it might do something catastrophic. I think anyone who say there's 'no risk' is just dangerous.

(BTW, I'm an ignorant person with just enough education to be concerned - 'a little learning is a dangerous thing' - and I have a lot of trouble discerning 'truth' in what is published about GM, so all this may just be complete rubbish)!

We can't really find out what damage to the environment GM crops will do, if any, unless we do field trials. One of the fundamental tenets of science is that one answers speculative questions by experiment. And the likes of Greenpeace seem to be hell bent on us not even asking any questions by destroying the trials. Are they afraid of the truth, methinks?

I'm not particularly pro or anti GM technology myself, I believe it will have a role just as the reviled DDT still has a role in preventing malaria, or thalidomide in treating cancers. We are uniquely favoured in the UK in being blessed with a temperate climate, good soil, highly honed and abundant natural resources, so we can afford to get picky about how our food is grown, and a lot of GM technology seems to benefit only the producer.

Other people in less prosperous countries don't have these advantages and for them the choice is a good deal more stark: increase yields, or starve. Many of the protestations against these countries adopting GM technology come from the likes of us rather than them: this is an insidious new form of neo-colonialism. Why don't we trust them to make up their own minds on the issue? Or do we still view them as simple, unsophisticated, gullible 'savages' still?

I just think they were way too quick to take it out of the lab. They should have done more lab tests, before doing field tests.

What I find scariest is that this GM research is being conducted by huge multinational companies who will have no qualms about introducing potentially harmful crops into the environment if they are financially viable.
Its due to these companies that we now have diseases that are tolerant to various antibiotics, for example, due to their use in meat production.
We really dont know what goes into our food and have no way of regulating this without growing it all ourselves.

Very scary - does food come under the same food labelling rules ?

Mund, about your questions re the Soil association rules - I wasn't ignoring them, I've been away. Not that I can answer them anyway, I just know that those are their rules at present. The HDRA's (Henry Doubleday Research Association - there's a link on my homespace if anyone wants to know more about who they are) Ryton HQ was under just such a threat from nearby GM trials. They did shout and the trials were stopped.

The Soil Association and HDRA are not radical campaigning groups in the way that Greenpeace is. They appear to be pretty solid citizens to me! And they have scientists among them. (Not that I want to imply that Greenpeace don't have solid citizens and scientists among their supporters, they may well have.)

Introduced 'natural' species are a problem as well as GM introduced ones.

It isn´t just companies that have overused penicillin. Also just normal farmers, and regular doctors have done it.

Do we actually know yet though what the ramifications of growing a GM crop in the field IS? I don't think we do. I haven't seen any hard evidence yet to suggest that GM crops are actually environmentally harmful compared to the normal practise of drenching crops with pesticide. When I do, I'll modify my open-minded position.

The problem with this issue is that it's not simply a case of 'organic good, GM bad'. It's a lot more complex than that. However, complex issues don't make for snappy headlines and don't sell newspapers.

A lot of the opinions people hold upon this subject are not founded on fact but on suspicion of science in general and governmment scientists in particular. I don't believe we should turn our backs on a potentially immensely beneficial development just because of suspicion.

The key in that last posting is the word "potentially". Any benefits to mankind from genetic modification are entirely dependent on the whims of the private corporation and the government involved in the particular product. An example would be "golden rice". This is rice whose DNA has been combined with that of carrots--to increase the nutritional value of rice with the vitamins garnered from consumption of carrots. Supposedly ideal for areas of the world where the main staple of an impoverished diet is rice, right? However, one must consume tremendous amounts of golden rice to reap even a small benefit--by which time the government of the country who purchased the rice to feed its people would have become indebted to Archer Daniels Midland, ConAgra, or any other of the world-wide agribusiness companies selling this new product.

In addition, many GM agricultural products force farmers to re-purchase new seeds at the start of each season. Often, the seeds from the old plants are deliberately rendered sterile by scientists within the company, thus insuring a built-in client base. When you have land already owned by agribusiness conglomerates, as is the case in many parts of the United States, there is no problem. One arm of the company simply supplies the other arm with genetically modified products, the chemicals to spray on them, and the political kickbacks to influence state and federal regulators to look the other way when it comes to environmental damage. However, the cost of GM products will force family and small farmers out of business. Not to mention the loss of hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables lost to growers as foods are produced for mass consumption (one of the goals of GM agricultural development)--it's easier to ship nutritionless iceberg lettuce or red delicious apples than an antique or "unusual" variety that takes a lot of time and care to produce.

Plus, in many parts of the US I can be sued because of that statement. I just violated "food libel laws". These were passed in many state legislatures (the most well-known example being Texas) at the behest of some of the same companies who are at the forefront of genetic modification research. If public interest groups are silenced, then consumers will never know about the dangers inherent in this sort of scientific experimentation. Not exactly "potentially beneficial" is it?

My biggest worry as far as genetic manipulation goes is that someone will come up with a GM crop or animal which manages to interact with the world in an incredibly destructive way.

My biggest worry as far as the argument goes is that we will allow ourselves to believe that there is a single answer to the question "is GM safe?".

Every GM genotype is potentially different in the techniques that produce it, the source of the "host" and the introduced gene. The way these genes are expressed may or may not be reliable, predictable or even repeatable.

Lab tests probably get us to a "reasonable" level on mosts of these tests - the big corporations don't want seeds that don't work. But then people argue that you want field trials... to check safety, but you won't know whether it's safe until it's too late to recall the genetic material from the environment.

And who's really going to test that a GM variety of maize can be grown in one area with no effect on the environment, and cannot interact destructively with a particular fescue grass surrounding another site fifty miles away?

I'm sorry, if a zebra and a Shetland pony can produce a viable offspring when the number of chromosomes in the two species differs by something like 20, I can't discount the transfer of manufactured genetic material from fish to tomato to tree to bacteria to fungus to toadskin to...

And if we want to feed the poor people in the world, there are simpler arguments than "let the rich companies sell them GM seed". Try seeing them as people, for a start. Try cancelling the stupid debts that have disfigured creditor and debtor alike for decades. Try working with them on everything from irrigation to husbandry. Try going there and demanding that the local kids have safe water to drink like you do.