Fwd: Two in-depth articles worth reading

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Two in-depth articles worth reading

Tue, 29 Jan 2002 02:03:02 PST

 

News Update From The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods

----

 

Dear Health Freedom Fighters,

 

The January 28 International issue of Newsweek contains two in-depth

articles about genetically engineered foods. The articles are posted

below.

 

The first article is titled " The Tale of the Mystery Corn in Mexico’s

Hills " and discusses the contamination of native Mexican corn with the

transgenes from genetically engineered crops.

 

The second article is titled " Brave New Foods " and discusses plans to

put humane vaccinations in plants, along with providing a lot of

background information about genetically engineered foods in general.

 

It is unfortunate that Newsweek did not choose to print these articles

in the U.S. edition of their magazine. Perhaps this has something to do

with the full page advertisements that the biotech industry has been

running in Newsweek and other national publications?

 

Anyway, the two articles posted below are fairly long, but they contain

information worth reading.

 

Craig Winters

Executive Director

The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods

 

The Campaign

PO Box 55699

Seattle, WA 98155

Tel: 425-771-4049

Fax: 603-825-5841

E-mail: label

Web Site: http://www.thecampaign.org

 

Mission Statement: " To create a national grassroots consumer campaign

for the purpose of lobbying Congress and the President to pass

legislation that will require the labeling of genetically engineered

foods in the United States. "

 

***************************************************************

 

The Tale of the Mystery Corn in Mexico’s Hills

 

A researcher’s discovery embarrasses the government, strikes fear in

farmers and reignites a scientific debate

 

By Alan Zarembo

NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

 

Jan. 28 issue — Olga Toro Maldonado was short on corn seed and slightly

curious. In the spring of 1998, alongside the corn she had always raised

on her hillside plot, she planted 60 kernels purchased from the

government store. “The corn looked good,” she recalls, so the next year

she planted a cross between the two species. The harvest was smaller

than the year before—one ear per stalk rather than the usual two—but the

corn was tasty enough. She ground it into flour for tortillas and fed

the kernels to her chickens.

 

A FEW SCIENTISTS STOPPED by in fall 2000 and took away samples from her

most recent harvest. They returned a week later with some disturbing

news. Toro’s corn contained transgenes—genes from bacteria and other

organisms artificially introduced into the corn to make it resistant to

herbicides or insects. Toro, 40, heard the word “contamination” and

began worrying about her six children, her chickens and whether the

pollen from her corn had spread. “I feel guilty,” she says. “But another

woman told me she planted it, too. I’m not the only ignorant one. We

don’t know the damage we can do.”

 

The head scientist was Ignacio Chapela, a 42-year-old Mexican and a

microbial ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. His team

collected corn from the mountains of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, and

found that several samples contained transgenes. The finding was

startling because the Mexican government bans the planting of

genetically modified (GM) corn. And the agriculture industry has long

contended that contamination from GM crops was extremely unlikely. “I

was dumbfounded,” Chapela says. “I knew it was a difficult political

fray we were getting ourselves into.”

 

There is no evidence that GM corn is dangerous for human consumption.

Chapela and his allies are concerned instead that GM corn might pose a

threat to corn’s biodiversity. Mexico, where corn was first domesticated

10,000 years ago, is what scientists call the crop’s “center of genetic

diversity”—a kind of repository of traditional varieties. GM corn, with

its engineered advantages, could theoretically overwhelm these

indigenous types. That would leave breeders without a source of pristine

seed if a plague struck corn crops elsewhere. “World food security

depends on the availability of this diversity. Having it contaminated is

something humanity should worry about,” says Chapela.

 

Mexico, the corn-consuming capital of the world, has been cautious about

corn. Congress banned GM corn crops in 1998 even while allowing GM

cotton and tomatoes. The current administration has been considering

loosening the ban in an effort to improve agriculture and attract

investment. A combination of decades of bad agricultural policy and

falling trade barriers with the United States has turned Mexico into an

importer of its staple food: 6 million tons of corn a year come from the

United States. A panel of scientific advisers recently recommended

opening northwest Mexico, which has none of the traditional strains of

corn, to transgenic corn crops. “Mexico as a country cannot exclude

itself from biotechnology,” says Victor Manuel Villalobos, the under

secretary of Agriculture. “It is not an intelligent position to say that

because there are risks we won’t touch it.”

 

Chapela’s revelation that GM corn is already growing in the hills of

Oaxaca is an embarrassment to the Mexican government, to say the least.

After Chapela’s paper appeared in the scientific journal Nature in

November, a Greenpeace activist declared the contamination “a worse

attack on our culture than if they had torn down the cathedral of Oaxaca

and built a McDonald’s over it.” The group began urging indigenous

groups in Oaxaca to sue the federal government. Eighty scientists from

12 countries demanded the government take steps to contain the damage.

 

The government’s own tests found transgenes in Oaxaca and neighboring

Puebla, as had Chapela, but Villalobos maintains that more detailed

studies now underway may very well refute Chapela’s findings. Meanwhile,

he warned Chapela in a letter dated Nov. 28 that the federal government

“will take measures... to redress the great damages, as much to

agriculture as to the economy in general, that... your publication might

have caused.” The economic damage stems from a bizarre irony: even

though Mexico bans GM corn crops on its soil, a third of its imported

U.S. corn is transgenic. If public sentiment turns against GM corn,

officials argue that having to import only non-GM corn would raise

prices for consumers.

 

U.S. corn is the most likely source of the genetic contamination. It

arrives in sacks mixed with unmodified varieties and often ends up at

government stores, where it is sold as food for the poor and their

animals. U.S. biotech firms instruct farmers to keep buffer zones around

GM corn to prevent foreign genes from spreading, but the stores of

Oaxaca, where peasant farmers shop, have no warning signs at all.

 

Toro’s corn grows near a hilltop, above the pueblo of Calpulalpan, with

pine-green mountains in the distance. As she points out which corn

stalks are crosses and which are pure, a strong wind sweeps by—strong

enough, perhaps, to spread pollen to nearby plots. Indeed, Chapela found

transgenes on farms where store-bought corn was never planted. As word

of Chapela’s discovery trickled through Oaxaca, villagers were fearful

that the government was going to burn their fields or prosecute farmers.

At the government store in Calpulalpan, the 59-year-old clerk, Elfego

Martinez Perez, claims the corn “can cause a disease called cancer.”

(That hasn’t kept him from selling it or eating it himself.)

 

Chapela’s detractors, including many scientists, accuse him of

exaggerating the dangers. The term “native corn” is a misnomer, they

say, because farmers have been modifying the genetic makeup of corn

through selective breeding for thousands of years. “We’ ve got a lot of

utopian idealists worried about contamination of the old corn varieties

with the new. This is completely idiotic, the way it has been

presented,” says Norman Bourlag, a Nobel laureate and founder of the

International Wheat and Maize Improvement Center near Mexico City. Since

none of the genes found in the GM corn were active, the corn didn’t

exhibit the traits engineered into it. Even if it did, some critics

argue, the GM corn wouldn’t necessarily have a selective advantage

because it was engineered to grow well in the United States, not Mexico.

“Just the presence of one new gene is not going to destroy maize in

Mexico,” says David Hoisington, head of the Applied Biotechnology Center

at the Wheat and Maize center. “It’s not a threat to biodiversity. It’s

just one gene among 50,000 to 60,000 genes.” Officials at Monsanto,

which holds a patent on at least one of the genes Chapela found, makes

the same argument.

 

Regardless of which side in the gene wars is correct, one thing is

clear: now that transgenic corn has been let loose in Mexico, stopping

its spread is next to impossible. Bans on the imports of GM corn, as

Greenpeace has called for, would accomplish nothing. And what if all the

GM corn in Oaxaca magically disappeared? Some of the thousands of

Mexican migrant workers who return each year from the United States no

doubt carry kernels they reckon might grow well back on the hillside

back home.

 

***************************************************************

 

Brave New Foods

 

First, genetic scientists worked to save crops. Now they are engineering

plants to produce human vaccines. But can they get consumers to take the

medicine?

 

By Fred Guterl

NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

 

Jan. 28 issue — Watching plants grow was never Hugh Mason’s idea of a

good time. He was always more interested in organic molecules—DNA,

proteins, viruses—than in the organisms themselves. But these days he’s

spending a lot of time fretting over his tomatoes. They grow in

pots—dozens of them—in a greenhouse at Cornell University’s Boyce

Thompson Institute in upstate New York. At first glance they seem quite

ordinary—bright red and a bit larger than a golf ball.

 

UPON CLOSER INSPECTION, however, there’s something odd about them. What

is it, exactly? Mason pauses, allowing his visitor a few moments of

puzzlement. His boyish face and calm demeanor are reassuring in a

molecular biologist whose specialty is tampering with food. A few years

ago he was inserting foreign genes into plants to make them better able

to resist drought when a colleague suggested a more exciting

possibility: why not find genes that would make common, edible plants

produce vaccines against a human disease?

 

That is precisely what Mason is trying to do. The tomatoes he nurtures

bear a synthetic gene that causes them to produce a protein identical to

the one that serves as a protective shield for the Norwalk virus, which

causes stomachache and diarrhea. Mice that eat the tomatoes

(freeze-dried and powdered) develop immune responses to the virus. Later

this year Mason hopes to serve his fruit to people, and then test its

efficacy by exposing them to the live virus. This research, he hopes,

will lead to radically cheaper ways of making and delivering vaccines.

 

If this technology is ever going to see the light of day, Mason and his

colleagues will have to perform a similarly radical altering of public

attitudes toward genetically modified (GM) foods. When the first GM food

products were introduced a few years ago, they were targeted narrowly at

farmers (and American farmers at that) to protect crops from insects and

herbicides. Partly for this reason, their benefits have gone largely

unappreciated by the public. The next generation, by contrast, is aimed

squarely at consumers. Products being developed in laboratories

throughout the world include not only vaccine-bearing plants like

Mason’s tomatoes but food staples such as rice, corn, soy and other

vegetables and vegetable by-products with enhanced nutritional value.

 

To get there is going to require surmounting a lot of public distrust.

In the past few years agro-biotechnology has joined nuclear physics as

one of the world’s most reviled scientific endeavors. The food industry

and its regulators are partly to blame: they are guilty of serious

bungling, including grossly underestimating the degree to which

people—and in particular Europeans—are sensitive to any tampering with

what they eat. Dark, unconscious fears about what scientists do is one

thing, but who wants to confront them each time you raise a fork?

 

Despite Mason’s benevolent nerdiness, there is definitely something

odd—sinister, perhaps?—about those bright little tomatoes. “Have you

figured out what it is?” he asks. “It’s the leaves. They’re crinkly.”

Sure enough. Unlike the smooth leaves of a normal tomato plant, Mason’s

are wrinkled, as though they had been dried on the stem. It doesn’t

affect the taste of the tomatoes or their safety, he explains. “It’s

just an undesirable result of them being transgenic. I’m not entirely

sure why it happens. Maybe because they have an excess number of

chromosomes. It doesn’t happen in all of the plants. Most of them look

pretty normal.”

 

What are crinkly leaves compared with the potential of tomato vaccines

to prevent illness in thousands of children who die each year because

they haven’t been vaccinated against such commonplace illnesses as

diphtheria, diarrhea, whooping cough, polio and measles? Unlike many

conventional vaccines, food-borne ones wouldn’t need refrigeration. They

could be distributed as seeds and grown locally, making them cheaper to

deliver to remote Third World villages. It’s not hard to imagine how

much easier and safer it would be to deliver, say, a tuberculosis

vaccine contained in the genome of a tomato or banana than in a

perishable serum that must be injected with a syringe.

 

When Mason’s mentor, biologist Charles Arntzen, first proposed

engineering plants to make vaccines more than 10 years ago, Mason

recalls being “stunned.” “The plan sounded a bit crazy, but I couldn’t

think of a reason why it wouldn’t work,” he says. They chose to start

with a vaccine for hepatitis B that was derived from a gene found in

yeast. They spliced the yeast gene onto some plant DNA and used an

“agrobacterium” to deliver the genetic material to cells of a tobacco

plant. From each cell they cultivated complete plants, extracted leaf

cells and examined them with an electron microscope. At last they found

what they were looking for: the hepatitis B antigen—a harmless protein

that, once in a person’s bloodstream, would trigger an immune response

to the disease. They knew they had engineered a plant that contained the

desired yeast gene and that would manufacture the hepatitis B vaccine.

 

The experiment was encouraging, but when the two scientists began

talking about their work at conferences, they realized how naive their

original idea of plant-borne vaccines had been. “The idea was, maybe we

can produce the vaccine in plants, and then with common agricultural

methods you could scale up. If you need a million more doses, you just

plant a few more rows. But it turns out you have to worry about correct

dosages and all sort of things like that. You have to treat these plants

as pharmaceuticals, not food.”

 

Mason and Arntzen have since grown potatoes that express Norwalk virus

and E. coli antigens. They’ve served the potatoes—raw, because cooking

might damage the antigens—to human test subjects and succeeded in

stimulating immune responses. The tests established not only that

vaccines can be grown in plants but that they can survive the trip

through the stomach to the bloodstream. But much remains to be done

before the technology is ready for general use. Scientists don’t know

how much vaccine a person would need to eat to ensure protection and how

often, and how to avoid overdosing. Dosage levels of plant-borne

vaccines are low, so researchers need to find a way to boost them.

Eating vaccines might also lead to “oral tolerance,” suppressing the

immune response and rendering the vaccine impotent. “There’s been some

really excellent work,” says Roger Beachy, president of the Danforth

Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri. “But can we really protect

people or animals with these vaccines? It’s still an open question.”

 

Academic research alone isn’t enough to answer this question. These

research curiosities will first have to be developed into potential

products, which will have to run the gantlet of approvals and trials for

new medicines. The problem is that the current public distaste for GM

foods has made it difficult to find the investment needed to develop

these products in the first place.

 

Europe is the center of opposition. Europe’s antipathy over GM foods

dates back to the late 1980s, when the German chemical giant Hoechst

collided with environmentalists over its plans to use then leading-edge

GM techniques to manufacture insulin at a plant in Frankfurt. Even

though similar methods were already used in the United States, Germany’s

influential Greens could not be convinced that the plant was safe. It

was 10 years before it was finally allowed to open.

 

The insulin affair paled, however, next to the fiasco of St. Louis-based

Monsanto Corp. It blundered into the European market with GM corn and

soy varieties tailored for the benefit of American farmers. French

activist Jose Bove led a group that stormed a Monsanto plant in the

Brazilian town of No Me Toque, trashing several hectares of transgenic

soybeans. The police simply looked on as the experimental plots were

turned into so much genetically modified mulch. The firm eventually

launched a public-relations campaign explaining the merits of GM foods,

but too late. “The message was never fully explained,” says David

Hughes, professor of food marketing at Imperial College, London. “People

just thought that the company was trying to pull the wool over their

eyes.” Monsanto’s perceived arrogance was all the more damaging because

the mad-cow scandal had made Europeans leery of the food industry in

general.

 

The Monsanto case was only one of the food industry’s screw-ups. The

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made the dubious decision to

approve the Starlink variety of GM corn, made by agrosciences firm

Aventis, for animals but not people. In 2000 the corn was found in the

products of fast-food restaurant Taco Bell. The incident made regulators

wary, slowing approvals for research trials. ProdiGene, a Texas-based

biotech firm formed in 1996 to develop food-borne vaccines for

livestock, saw its funding from venture capitalists virtually dry up

overnight. “Venture capitalists got cold feet,” says chief scientist

John Howard. “They started asking, ‘Are you ever going to be able to

market this stuff?’ ”

 

ProdiGene fared better than the Cambridge, England-based Axis Genetics,

which developed edible vaccines for hepatitis B. Two years ago the firm

failed to secure financing for clinical trials and went belly up. Says

former CEO Iain Cubitt: “Public anxiety was reflected in investors’

refusing to have anything to do with GM plants.”

 

Axis’s assets and intellectual property were sold to Dow, the U.S.

chemical and agricultural-sciences company. Dow, as well as several

other large agrosciences firms, refused to discuss its activity in GM

foods for this article. Its shyness about publicity can be explained in

part by the need to keep trade secrets, but the negative example of

Monsanto in the 1990s has clearly put these firms on the defensive.

 

European politicians have also proceeded cautiously. Even though many

ministers take a favorable view of GM foods, the EU has had a virtual

moratorium on new GM food products for the past three years. In an

effort to reassure consumers, EU ministers are instituting rules

requiring labeling of all GM products beginning in 2003. “Unless we

restore consumer confidence in this new technology, genetic modification

of food is dead in Europe,” EU Agriculture Minister Tony Van der Haegen

said recently. But the issue is unlikely to rest there: the United

States opposes labeling as unworkable, and the French government is

talking about new laws that deal with issues of liability. “This isn’t

just French recalcitrance—it’s a big political problem for people in

France,” says Julia Moore, a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington,

D.C. “In Europe, there is no public trust in government’s ability to

keep food safe.”

 

To re-establish that trust, the food industry is going to have to risk

confronting the public’s fears. Niall FitzGerald, chairman of European

food company Unilever, which yanked its GM food products when the crisis

broke a few years ago, has shown some willingness to reconsider. “The

mistake that has been made with GM crops and food is the failure to

reach the consumer,” he said in a speech last week. “We need to begin

afresh. That doesn’t mean following public opinion. It means setting a

lead, communicating directly and honestly with the consumers and

answering all the questions that people have.”

 

A cynic might say that FitzGerald is merely an opportunist: because the

price of non-GM cooking oils has risen recently, Unilever would save

money switching now to GM brands. Another kind of cynic might point out

the children dying from lack of vaccines who might be saved if

investment in food-borne vaccines were more forthcoming. That’s about

how polarized the issue of GM foods has become.

--------------------------------

With William Underhill in London, Marc Scanlan in Paris and Mac Margolis

in Rio

 

 

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