Fwd: Important scientific report + announcement of Save Organic Food

[Guest guest]

" News Update from The Campaign "

Important scientific report + announcement of Save Organic Food

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 18:56:51 -0600

 

News Update From The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods

----

 

Dear News Update Subscribers,

 

This e-mail will discuss an important scientific report that was released

today and announce the launch of a major new effort by The Campaign

to Label Genetically Engineered Foods to fight the contamination of

organic crops from GMOs -- Save Organic Food.

 

IMPORTANT NEW REPORT

 

In what could be considered to be a major set-back for the biotech

industry, the National Research Council of the National Academy of

Sciences released a 219-page report on Tuesday titled " Biological

Confinement of Genetically Engineered Organisms. " The report was

commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

 

The report raises significant concerns about the ability to control and

contain genetically engineered organisms. The release of such organisms

into the environment could create major problems and threatens to

contaminate the food supply.

 

Posted below is an article from the Washington Post titled " Genetically

Modified Organisms Not Easily Contained " with a sub-title of " National

Research Council Panel Urges More Work to Protect Against Contamination

of Food Supply. "

 

Also posted below is the press release on this report from the National

Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. And you can view

the entire 219-page report online at:

http://books.nap.edu/catalog/10880.html?onpi_newsdoc01202004

 

The real question now is will the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the

Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration act

upon the many important concerns raised by this report? Often reports

commissioned by government agencies are never acted upon because of

pressure from the industries that are affected.

 

The expense to enact the additional safeguards suggested in this report

would be costly to the biotech industry. Will the USDA act on behalf of

the American public and require additional safeguards or will the agency

do nothing in order to avoid creating extra financial burdens on the

biotech industry?

 

ANNOUNCING SAVE ORGANIC FOOD

 

One of the major reasons we started The Campaign to Label Genetically

Engineered Foods is to fight the contamination of organic crops from the

cross-pollination by genetically engineered crops. If genetically

engineered crops are labeled, most consumers will not buy them. If

consumers do not buy them, farmers will not grow them. And if farmers

are not growing them, organic crops will no longer be subject to the

cross-pollination problem.

 

While we continue to push for the passage of legislation that requires

the mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods, we have decided

to launch an additional effort to directly fight the contamination of

organic agriculture from GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

 

Next Monday, January 26th, we will be officially launching the Save

Organic Food coalition. You can get a sneak preview of the logo and

theme of the web site at:

http://www.saveorganicfood.org

 

A primary goal of the Save Organic Food coalition will be to get the

U.S. Congress to hold hearings on the contamination of organic

agriculture from GMOs. The USDA knows that organic corn is being

contaminated by the cross-pollination from genetically engineered corn.

Yet the USDA is ignoring this problem.

 

The current Secretary of Agriculture, Ann Veneman, used to work in the

biotech industry. Is Secretary Veneman favoring the biotech industry at

the expense of the organic industry? It appears that way since she is

ignoring the ongoing organic corn contamination problem.

 

(Note: Ann Veneman used to be on the board of directors of Calgene, the

company that introduced the first commercially grown genetically

engineered crop, the Flavr Savr tomato. Calgene was later sold to

Monsanto.)

 

We want the USDA to be called on the carpet by the U.S. Congress. We

want members of Congress to ask Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman why

she is allowing the contamination of organic agriculture to take place.

 

Visitors to the Save Organic Food web site will be able to send instant

e-mails to the USDA, to members of the U.S. House and Senate agriculture

committees, and to your own House Representative and Senators about this

important issue.

 

Membership in the Save Organic Food coalition will be FREE! Consumers,

Businesses, Organizations and Farmers will be able to be publicly listed

on our web site as members of the Save Organic Food coalition. (Naturally,

public listing is optional.) Consumers will be listed by name, city, state

and country. Businesses, Organizations and Farmers will be able to publicly

list complete contact information, including a 25-word description.

 

The only way to prevent the contamination of organic corn from

genetically engineered corn is to stop growing genetically engineered

corn outdoors. The Save Organic Food coalition will be a vehicle for

making that case to the U.S. Congress and the American public.

http://www.saveorganicfood.org

 

The new " Biological Confinement of Genetically Engineered Organisms "

report provides father evidence about the problems of trying to contain

GMOs. We will definitely be using it in presenting our evidence to the

U.S. Congress on why no genetically engineered corn should be grown

outdoors.

 

Thanks for your continued support of The Campaign to Label Genetically

Engineered Foods! If you wish to support our ongoing efforts with a

donation, you can do so at:

http://www.thecampaign.org/donate.php

 

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. "

 

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

 

Genetically Modified Organisms Not Easily Contained

National Research Council Panel Urges More Work to Protect Against

Contamination of Food Supply

 

By Justin Gillis

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

 

Techniques for confining genetically engineered organisms are still in

their infancy, and far more work needs to be done to make sure new

organisms under development don't taint the human food supply or wipe

out important species, a National Research Council panel said today.

 

Most attempts to control potentially hazardous, gene-altered organisms

have involved physically segregating them, but those efforts have

already proven susceptible to failure, including human error. Scientists

have invested considerable hope in newer technologies that might impose

biological limits on the spread of genetic material from altered

organisms like fish, insects and some crops. Scores of genetically

engineered organisms of this sort are under development in the nation's

laboratories, offering numerous potential benefits -- and many perils.

 

But the most promising methods of " bioconfinement " are still in the

early research stages, and no available method offers complete assurance

that new organisms could be kept under control, the panel said today in

a report commissioned by the Agriculture Department, which is charged

with regulating many aspects of genetic engineering.

 

" What they seem to suggest is the science for creating risky organisms

exists, but we don't have the methods for safely confining them yet, "

said Gregory Jaffe, director of biotechnology programs at the Center for

Science in the Public Interest, in Washington. " The sad conclusion from

the report is that there really aren't any viable bioconfinement methods

that could be adopted commercially without significant additional

research and testing. "

 

Jaffe's organization is a consumer group that supports genetic

engineering in principle but has often criticized federal oversight of

it. He was one of the few people in Washington who had read the 219-page

report before its official release this afternoon.

 

Given the imperfect control methods available today, the National

Research Council panel recommended that companies and laboratories

contemplating the release of potentially hazardous organisms into the

environment adopt an " integrated confinement system " that includes at

least two distinct techniques. The plans should factor in the likelihood

of human error, the panel said, adding that confinement had often seemed

to be an " afterthought " in genetic-engineering research.

 

If widely adopted, that idea would impose new costs and burdens on the

American biotechnology industry. While emphasizing its commitment to

safety, the industry has generally opposed elaborate control methods for

gene-altered organisms, saying the risks have often been exaggerated and

the potential benefits under-appreciated.

 

Indeed, the new report said the techniques of genetic engineering

promise to improve the food supply, help control disease and offer many

other benefits. " Agricultural biotechnology has enormous potential to

better the human condition, " panel chairman T. Kent Kirk, professor

emeritus of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin, said in an

introduction. But as scientists design ever-more-exotic organisms --

ranging from corn that produces pharmaceuticals in its kernels to fish

that grow 10 or 20 times faster than normal -- the risk will rise that

altered genes could spread to unwanted locales, threatening the ecology

or the food supply, the report said.

 

That nearly happened in 2002, when human error allowed corn designed to

produce a pig vaccine to spread too widely in fields in Iowa and

Nebraska. Expensive, last-minute intervention by the Agriculture

Department kept the product out of the food supply, and the department

has since been tightening its regulations. Some advocates of genetic

engineering have charged that regulation has already become excessive

and threatens to choke off one of the nation's most promising new

industries, while environmental and some consumer groups assert that the

government hasn't cracked down enough.

 

The new report was commissioned before the corn incident, but it has

taken on added importance in light of that near-miss. The National

Research Council is the research arm of the National Academy of

Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of

Medicine, the nation's three most prestigious scientific advisory

bodies, and its reports generally carry weight with all political

factions in Washington.

 

Many scientists have said that confinement, or lack thereof, is proving

to be the Achilles' heel of genetic engineering. The gene-altered food

crops commercialized to date -- the most important are soybeans, corn,

and canola -- have turned up repeatedly in unexpected places. Seeds have

fallen off trucks, pollen has blown into nearby fields, grains have been

mixed together accidentally in silos.

 

These incidents have not created a problem for the food supply, since

the crops are tested and approved for human consumption, but they have

cost some farmers money, particularly in overseas markets where people

don't want gene-altered ingredients in their food. One gene-altered crop

not approved for human consumption, Starlink corn, did taint the

American food supply, and companies were forced to recall scores of

grocery products such as taco shells. That problem was caught not by any

government testing regime -- there isn't one -- but by an environmental

coalition that bought corn products at Safeway and ordered its own

tests.

 

The newer organisms under development promise to be even harder to

control. Plants, after all, are stuck in place with roots in the ground,

but some of the newer organisms are animals, capable of moving about on

their own. Some of the new organisms are not meant for human

consumption, and the Food and Drug Administration is likely to tolerate

no accidental mixing with foods, even at extremely low levels. Other

organisms are expected to be tested and approved for food safety, but

may still pose ecological risks if they are not controlled properly.

 

Various bioconfinement techniques have already been developed, but all

suffer from problems that undermine their reliability, the new report

said. It noted that scientists are working on additional techniques that

might, in the end, prove highly reliable. For instance, a plant could be

engineered so that its flowers always die before spreading pollen, or an

animal could be made dependent on some man-made substance so that it

would die if it escaped. But these methods are still in the early

research stages and many years of work and testing are needed before

they can be deemed reliable, the report said.

 

As a case study of the difficulties, the new report offered the example

of a genetically engineered salmon under development by Aqua Bounty

Technologies Inc. of Waltham, Mass. The salmon grows four or five times

as fast as normal salmon in its youthful stages, and reaches market size

in half the usual time, requiring less feed. Aqua Bounty wants to sell

the fish for use in ocean pens along the East Coast, where other

farm-raised salmon are grown. The company has acknowledged that some

fish will inevitably escape, but it has said they will be so dependent

on food supplied by humans that they are likely to die in the open

ocean.

 

Environmentalists are worried that the fish, which they have dubbed

Frankensalmon, would not die, but instead would wipe out dwindling

stocks of wild Atlantic salmon by competing with them for food and,

among males, competing for access to wild females. To meet these

concerns, Aqua Bounty plans to sell only sterile, female lines of fish.

But the new report said the methods for sterilizing the fish are not

entirely reliable, and it urged that the Aqua Bounty fish be tested

individually for sterility or grown only in tanks on land -- expensive

methods that most fish-farming companies are likely to resist.

 

Joseph McGonigle, a vice president at Aqua Bounty Technologies, said

this morning that his company was still evaluating its production

techniques and the report was premature in drawing conclusions about how

reliable they would be.

 

" All of this is really just sound and fury, " McGonigle said. " Nobody has

any evidence, and it's not going to be there until we put it on the

table. We're certainly aware of the risks. "

 

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

 

PRESS RELEASE

 

National Academy of Sciences

 

Jan. 20, 2004

Contacts: Bill Kearney, Director of Media Relations

Heather McDonald, Media Relations Assistant

Office of News and Public Information

202-334-2138; e-mail

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

Integrated, Redundant Approach Best Way to

Biologically Confine Genetically Engineered Organisms

 

WASHINGTON -- Developers of genetically engineered organisms need to

consider how biological techniques such as induced sterility can prevent

transgenic animals and plants from escaping into natural ecosystems and

breeding or competing with their wild relatives, or passing engineered

traits to other species, says a new report from the National Academies'

National Research Council. The committee that wrote the report used the

term " bioconfinement " to describe such techniques.

 

" Deciding whether and how to confine a genetically engineered organism

cannot be an afterthought, " said committee chair T. Kent Kirk, professor

emeritus, department of bacteriology, University of Wisconsin, Madison,

and a former microbiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

" Confinement won't be warranted in most cases, but when it is,

worst-case scenarios and their probabilities should be considered. Also,

progress in research aimed at developing new biological confinement

methods will further minimize risks and boost the public's confidence in

biotechnology. "

 

Because no single bioconfinement method is likely to be 100 percent

effective, the committee recommended that developers of genetically

engineered organisms use more than one method to lower the chance of a

failure. It was also clear to the committee that scientists need to do

more research to understand how well specific methods work, and that

planned combinations of confinement methods will need to be tested in

organisms with representative genetic profiles and in a wide variety of

field environments.

 

The report was requested by USDA, which is considering how to regulate a

number of genetically engineered organisms that had not yet been

developed when the federal government's original 1986 " Coordinated

Framework " for regulation of biotechnology products was enacted.

Ensuring confinement for some of these new organisms may become one of

the requirements for regulatory approval, the committee noted.

 

Ecological studies have shown that some genetically engineered organisms

are viable in natural ecosystems and can breed with wild relatives. The

most publicized environmental danger is that invasive weeds could be

created if transgenic crops engineered to tolerate herbicides or to

resist diseases and pests pass these resistant genes to weedy relatives.

Plants also can be engineered with traits that allow them to grow

faster, reproduce more, and live in new types of habitats. An additional

risk is that transgenic fish or shellfish could escape and mate with

their wild counterparts or out-compete them for food. Another concern is

that plants and animals engineered to produce pharmaceuticals could harm

humans or other species who may accidentally consume them.

 

The efficacy of bioconfinement methods will vary depending on the

organism and the environment in which it will be released. Other factors

include how long confinement needs to last, and the size of the area

affected. Confinement is expected to work best over short time scales

and small geographic areas, the committee said, emphasizing that no one

method can achieve complete confinement. Where confinement is deemed

desirable, techniques are needed to monitor any escape of genetically

engineered organisms or the flow of transgenes; mitigating a confinement

failure will be far easier if it is discovered quickly.

 

The committee paid particular attention to transgenic fish, shellfish,

trees, grasses, and microbes, because many of these organisms have been

engineered successfully and currently are undergoing regulatory

evaluation. Genetically engineered aquatic species can be confined by

physical barriers, by disrupting sexual reproduction, or by methods that

prevent their survival in the wild. For example, a technique called

triploidization can sterilize some fish and shellfish by adding an extra

set of chromosomes to the animal's cellular makeup, although the

technique cannot guarantee 100 percent sterility. Fish also can be

engineered to rely on a man-made substance for survival, so that they

would die if they escaped into the wild. For plants, bioconfinement

methods include inserting genes that induce sterility, or engineering

plants not to produce pollen, which can help close this avenue of gene

flow.

 

There are two major bioconfinement methods for microbes, the report

says. One method involves engineering bacteria or fungi to use so much

energy or nutrients that they do not compete well with native bacteria

and fungi. Because of the rapid adaptability of microbes, the

effectiveness of this bioconfinement method remains unclear, the

committee cautioned. The second method is to use a chemical to trigger

" suicide " genes in bacteria or fungi if they escape confinement and pose

a risk, though this method has never been field tested. Little research

has been done on bioconfinement of genetically engineered insects, the

committee noted. Confining genetically engineered insects can be

particularly challenging because the typically large number of insects

in any population makes even a small confinement failure problematic.

 

The committee also said that when bioconfinement methods are needed, an

" Integrated Confinement System, " or ICS, should be used. ICS is a

systematic approach that includes a commitment to confinement by senior

decision-makers within the institutions developing genetically

engineered organisms, written plans for confinement and for mitigation

of failures, employee training, periodic outside review, and reporting

to an appropriate regulatory body. The committee was not asked to

evaluate current government practices or policy, but it said that " for

ICS to work, it must be supported by a rigorous and comprehensive

regulatory regime empowered with inspection and enforcement. " Government

regulators also need to consider the effects that a confinement failure

could have on other nations.

 

The study was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The

National Research Council is the principal operating arm of the National

Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. It is a

private, nonprofit institution that provides science and technology

advice under a congressional charter. A committee roster follows.

 

Copies of Biological Confinement of Genetically Engineered Organisms

will be available later this winter from the National Academies Press;

tel. 202-334-3313 or 1-800-624-6242 or on the Internet at

http://www.nap.edu. Reporters may obtain a pre-publication copy from the

Office of News and Public Information (contacts listed above).

 

[ This news release and report are available at

http://national-academies.org ]

 

 

NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL

Division on Earth and Life Studies

Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources

 

Committee on the Biological Confinement of Genetically Engineered

Organisms

 

T. Kent Kirk* (chair)

Professor Emeritus

Department of Bacteriology

University of Wisconsin

Madison

 

John E. Carlson

Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics, and

Schatz Center for Tree Molecular Genetics

School of Forest Resources

Pennsylvania State University

University Park

 

Norman Ellstrand

Professor of Genetics

Department of Botany and Plant Sciences

University of California

Riverside

 

Anne R. Kapuscinski

Professor

Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, and

Founding Director

Institute for Social, Economic, and Ecological Sustainability

University of Minnesota

St. Paul

 

Thomas A. Lumpkin General

Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center

Shanhua, Taiwan

 

David C. Magnus

Associate Professor,

Division of Medical Genetics, Department of Pediatrics,

and

Co-Director

Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics

Stanford University

Palo Alto, Calif.

 

Daniel B. Magraw Jr.

President

Center for International Environmental Law

Washington, D.C.

 

Eugene W. Nester*

Professor

Department of Microbiology

University of Washington

Seattle

 

John J. Peloquin

Group Leader for Protein Chemistry

American Protein Corporation Inc.

Ames, Iowa

 

Allison A. Snow

Professor of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology

Ohio State University

Columbus

 

Mariam B. Sticklen

Professor

Department of Crop and Soil Sciences

Michigan State University

East Lansing

 

Paul E. Turner

Assistant Professor

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Yale University

New Haven, Conn.

 

RESEARCH COUNCIL STAFF

 

Kim Waddell

Study Director

 

 

* Member, National Academy of Sciences

 

 

 

 

 

 

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