Population duped by genetic engineers

"...GM techniques which in the precise and targeted way bring in a couple of genes that you know what they do and you know where they are is vastly safer, vast, vastly more controlled than this so-called conventional breeding...."
Sir Robert May, UK Government Chief  Scientist 1995 - 2000, and current President of the Royal Society, UK
(BBC interview 9th March 2000)

July 2001  

The biotechnology sector 'ISB News Report' for July 2001 includes a revealing piece by two biotechnology consultants from New Zealand which by default exposes the degree to which the technical risks associated with genetic engineering have been regularly misrepresented by the scientific community.

Constantly we hear the refrain about how 'precise' genetic engineering is. But this claim is not supported by the facts and many governmental advisers on GM biosafety have been 'taken in' by it.  

The purpose of the New Zealand consultants' report is to highlight possible future technical improvements in order to reduce the lack of precision and control prevalent in current genetic engineering techniques. However, in so doing they reveal in some detail the technical basis for the inherent risks associated with those genetically engineered organisms which have already been approved.  

Below are some of the comments made by the article's authors Kieran Elborough and Zac Hanley in relation to the technology used to create the GMOs that are already being released into the global environment and food chain:

• "Plant biotechnology often requires the use of various imprecise methods of transformation to introduce additional genetic material. These processes cause severe changes to cell metabolism by disrupting existing architectures or by activating defense mechanisms designed to cope with entirely different assaults. Methods that release cells from the restraints of higher orders of hormonal control (i.e., cell culture, a prerequisite for some transformation systems) can cause wholesale and detrimental changes in metabolism via somaclonal variation, as most probably occurred in the examples most frequently cited by the anti-GM movement."
  
  
• "Plants can also prevent the expression of virally introduced genetic material via methylation of DNA, although this can perturb the normal regulation of other genes. Such changes in the chemistry of DNA in turn activate transposons, which propagate throughout the genome with disruptive effects on all systems. This phenomenon can be exploited as a tool for functional genomics but is generally undesirable if a novel plant is to be considered substantially equivalent to an existing food crop."
  
  
• "Undesirable outcomes also arise from the method of DNA introduction (which mimics pathogen attack) or from the random insertion of the transgene into sensitive areas of the genome, often many times per genome. In particular, the effects of imprecise insertion may not manifest themselves in early generations since different DNA error-checking mechanisms are activated during growth, reproduction, embryogenesis, and development."
  
  
• "[Gene] 'silencing' observed in later generations [is] caused by methylation of the transgene, which can occur in more than 50% of the transgenic plants in any one experiment.... the mechanism of methylation silencing activation is unelucidated..."
  
  
• "[Post Transcriptional Gene Silencing] is responsible for the useful genetic modification technique called antisensing .... Antisensing results in reduced expression of the native gene but is an imprecise method of altering gene output.... for example, to increase the storage time of soft fruits such as tomatoes.... contrary to the textbook orthodoxy, the presence and position of introns can affect the outcome of transgenesis considerably."
  
  
• "It is clear from the above discussion that the introduction of novel DNA into a genome involves the concomitant introduction of gene-derived material into other systems, processes, and mechanisms (for example, the introduction of novel protein into the proteome). All such introductions may alter the behavior of the system and, via the multi-level integration of these systems and processes, the whole cell...."
  
  
• ".... the use of transgene elements such as the 35S promoter from Cauliflower Mosaic Virus to force the subjugation of cellular processes to our whim will be seen an unnecessary and inelegant use of power, akin to the proverbial use of a sledgehammer to crack a nut."

However, perhaps the most relevant comment by these authors is their contrastingly different description of the overwhelmingly sophisticated and precise operation of system functioning in natural non-genetically engineered organisms:

• "The finest examples of powerful yet precise control of biological processes are found in living organisms, whose systems, after millions of years of evolution, are well-honed, robust, adaptable, and capable of rapid response, yet are also fail-safe, highly redundant, self-monitoring and -repairing, and subject to both automatic and executive control or veto at multiple levels."

As the authors' piece makes clear it is exactly this evolutionarily necessary precision which is typically absent from the processes of genetic engineering currently being used to modify the world's biological environment. This dangerous combination of scientific ignorance and technological crudity lies at the very heart of an irresponsible and commercially driven genetic engineering stampede which is fuelled by the irresistible lure of monopoly-generating intellectual property rights. It is a stampede which specifically evades even the most primitive consideration of the basic evolutionary context of biological systems.  

If the analysis by Elborough and Hanley is correct (and it is already well supported by peer-reviewed published scientific literature - see footnotes) it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that the general population as a whole - including numerous governmental advisers - has been deliberately deceived by the more influential members of the genetic engineering community.

It seems most likely that this apparent process of deception has been entered into purely to protect investment in an area of infant science whose use in applied technology has at the very least been introduced in a scandalously premature fashion. In reality, however, it is clear that even the basic conceptual thinking underpinning the development of genetic engineering is wholy misguided.  

As part of this process it appears that an attempt has been made to simultaneously dupe both the public and their political representatives - always assuming, that is, that the latter have not been consciously compliant. It can only be a matter of time, however, before those elements of the scientific community which have encouraged such distortions of scientific knowledge are brought to account.  

NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX
nlpwessex@bigfoot.com
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex

Footnotes:  

1. Full 'ISB NEWS' July 2001 issue available at http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2001/news01.Jul.html.

2. Related material has also been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals by Europe's leading plant biotechnology laboratory, the John Innes Centre. See: www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/gmrisk.htm
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/compliance.htm
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/camv.htm

"In a recent survey of at least thirty companies developing transgenic plants for use in agriculture, all companies observed some transgene instability ........... In a recent study in our laboratory, one hundred Brassica napus [oilseed rape] transgenic lines were produced and half of them displayed unstable or unusual transgene behaviour....."
Dale et al (1998) Transgene expression and stability in Brassica. ACTA Horticulturae 459, 167-171

3. GE methods disturb rice genome: Plant Cell Reports Volume 20 Issue 4 (2001) pp 325-330
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00299/bibs/1020004/10200325.htm

Fundamental scientific conceptual errors in the development of recombinant DNA technology
Transgene insertion causes low yields in world's biggest GM crop - 'Roundup Ready' Soya
Scrambled Genome of Roundup Ready Soya - ISIS report

Don't swallow recombinant DNA - eat pure food