[AlternativeMedicineFourm] Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering

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Misty L. Trepke,

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Genetically Engineered Organisms Invade Our Planet - What's the Harm?

By Gary Feuerberg

Epoch Times Washington, D.C. Staff

http://en.epochtimes.com/news/7-3-13/52710.html

[Worth reading in full - Jagannath]Mar 13, 2007

 

 

A RISKY BUSINESS: Denise Caruso, innovation columnist for the New

York Times, has written a new book on the risks of using genetically

modified organisms. (Nathan Shedroff / Hybrid Vigor Institute)

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.

 

 

Population reduction, a globalist goal, allows monopoly ownership of

the earth's resources – less population means more for them! War,

famine, suppressed cures for catastrophic diseases, abortion

acceptance, and health-destroying, cancer-producing Monsanto

monopolized genetically modified foods all reduce world population

and produce big profits. - Deanna Spingola, Political Researcher.