Row over drugs in crops continues

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GMW: Row over drugs in crops continues

" GM WATCH " <info

 

 

Sun, 7 Nov 2004 12:36:02 GMT

 

 

GM WATCH daily

http://www.gmwatch.org

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The International Academy of Life Sciences (IALS) claims that the

" academic community " supports the idea of producing pharmaceuticals in

food

crops (item 1).

 

How far that is from the truth is demonstrated by an editorial from

earlier this year from the normally aggressively pro-GM science jounal

Nature Biotechnology: " we should be concerned about the presence of a

potentially toxic substance in food plants. After all, is this really so

different from a conventional pharmaceutical or biopharmaceutical

manufacturer packaging its pills in candy wrappers or flour bags or

storing

its compounds or production batches untended outside the perimeter

fence? " (item 2)

 

1.THE CENTER FOR FOOD SAFETY REFUTES CRITICISMS OF ITS GM RICE REPORT

2.EXCERPT from: Drugs in crops - the unpalatable truth

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1.THE CENTER FOR FOOD SAFETY REFUTES CRITICISMS OF ITS GM RICE REPORT

Phillip BC Jones

ISB News Reports, November 2004

http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2004/news04.nov.html#nov0406

 

As detailed in last month's ISB News Report ( " Plant-made

pharmaceuticals: progress and protests " ), Sacramento-based Ventria

Bioscience sparked

a controversy with its plan to cultivate rice engineered to synthesize

pharmaceutical proteins.

 

In July, the Friends of the Earth, Center for Food Safety, Consumers

Union, and Environment California sent copies of a 22-page report,

" Pharmaceutical Rice in California, " to California's Department of

Food and

Agriculture, Department of Health Services, and Environmental Protection

Agency. After describing concerns about the genetically modified rice,

the groups urged a moratorium on pharmaceutical-producing crops until

state agencies have investigated potential impacts on human health and

the environment.

 

A few weeks after the release of the report, representatives of the

International Academy of Life Sciences (IALS) published its views. In a

letter to the same three Californian agencies, Drs. Hilmar Stolte

(Hannover Medical School, Germany) and Robert Rich (University of

Illinois,

Urbana-Champaign) countered that the report does not present an objective

or accurate perspective of the risks. Stolte and Rich went further by

concluding that " the authors of this report have intentionally confused

`risk' with `hazard,' presenting the hazards as if they were risk. "

 

The Center for Food Safety responded to the IALS allegations in a

letter sent to the Californian health, agriculture, and environment

agencies. At the outset, Dr. Doug Gurian-Sherman (Center for Food

Safety) and

Bill Freese (Friends of the Earth) targeted the IALS claim that the

" academic community " supports the idea of producing pharmaceuticals in

food

crops. They pointed to recent studies from the National Research

Council as evidence that this strategy for synthesizing drugs does not

benefit from a consensus of the scientific community.

 

Gurian-Sherman and Freese tackled the IALS contention that their report

confuses risk and hazard. Their report to the Californian agencies,

they stressed, highlights that their concerns represent potential risks,

or hazards that might occur. They explained that the groups called for

the state's agencies to perform an independent risk assessment to cure a

deficiency in federal regulation. " Federal regulatory agencies, " they

asserted, " have not performed risk assessments to determine either how

serious the identified hazards are, the levels of exposure that may

cause harm, or the likelihood that they may occur. " In their view, a

responsible risk assessment process must find that a hazard does not

exist,

or, if the hazard does exist, that exposure to the hazard either does

not occur or is too low to cause significant harm.

 

The Center's response also contends that the IALS exaggerated the

feasibility of producing pharmaceuticals from crops. Gurian-Sherman and

Freese noted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved over

100 biopharmaceuticals produced in controlled fermentation facilities,

whereas biopharming has not yielded an FDA-approved pharmaceutical

despite 14 years of outdoor field trials. Since no plant-made

pharmaceutical

has reached the market, they argue, there's no reason for a commitment

to food crops to produce drugs; alternative plants should be

considered.

 

Copies of the Center for Food Safety/Friends of the Earth response and

the " Pharmaceutical Rice in California " report are available at the

Center's website (http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/policy_com.cfm).

 

Phillip B.C. Jones, PhD., J.D.

Spokane, Washington

PhillJones

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2.EXCERPT from: Drugs in crops - the unpalatable truth

Editorial, Nature Biotechnology

doi:10.1038/nbt0204-133

February 2004 Volume 22 Number 2 p 133

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nbt/journal/v22/n2/full/nbt0204\

-133.html

or

http://www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=2621

 

....One might expect - and some in the industry obviously do - that drug

production in plants could be good for the image of GM crops. After

all, new/cheaper medicines are the sort of thing that consumers want.

 

The problem is - as anti-GM lobbyists have argued already - that the

production of drugs or drug intermediates in food or feed crop species

bears the potential danger that pharmaceutical substances could find

their way into the food chain through grain admixture, or pollen-borne

gene

flow (in maize, at least) or some other accidental mix-up because of

the excusably human inability to distinguish between crops for food and

crops for drugs. The 'contamination' of soybeans and non-GM corn in 2002

with a corn engineered by Prodigene to produce an experimental pig

vaccine shows just how plausible this is (Nat. Biotechnol. 21, 3, 2003).

 

This position is not anti-GM (something industry should appreciate) -

we should be concerned about the presence of a potentially toxic

substance in food plants. After all, is this really so different from a

conventional pharmaceutical or biopharmaceutical manufacturer

packaging its

pills in candy wrappers or flour bags or storing its compounds or

production batches untended outside the perimeter fence?

 

 

 

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