Education in England is no better than mediocre, and billions of pounds have been wasted on pointless university courses and Sure Start schemes for young children, Michael Gove’s special adviser has said in an outspoken private thesis written a few weeks before he is due to step down from his post.
Dominic Cummings, the most influential adviser to the education secretary in the past five years, also argues in a revealing 250-page paper that “real talent” is rare among the nation’s teachers – and, eye-catchingly, says educationists need to better understand the impact of genetics on children.
What does noncoding DNA—ncDNA—do? That’s the DNA formerly known as junk; the DNA in every cell that is not organized into the classical genes that make proteins.
The question arises because of a recent piece by Sam Kean in Slate. The article explored some implications of a genome project on a carnivorous plant known as the humped bladderwort (aka Utricularia gibba.) U. gibba is a big deal because it has a tiny genome.
This plant has about 28,500 genes, an amount of protein-coding DNA typical for a plant. But only 3 percent of its DNA is noncoding. That’s an uncommonly low percentage. The amount of ncDNA in a plant is nearly always much larger, ranging from 10 percent to 60 percent of the genome of a species across most of the plant kingdom.
The humped bladderwort lives a successful weed’s life all over the world. It can even flourish in a teacup. It is in no way handicapped by its tiny genome. Which suggests that it’s perfectly possible to get along fine with very little ncDNA.
What is noncoding DNA for?
A question Kean’s piece did not take up is this puzzler: If lots of ncDNA is not necessary to a prosperous life, why are most organisms just stuffed with ncDNA? Take, for example, our own species. Only 2 percent or so of the human genome is genes. The other 98 percent is ncDNA. What, if anything, is it up to? Or is it junk after all?
One answer to that question was published in September of last year. The ENCODE project catalogued all ncDNA in the human genome, collating it into a huge publicly accessible database. This was very big Big Science, resulting in more than 30 papers with hundreds of authors. But what made headlines–and infuriated many scientists—was ENCODE’s claim that 80 percent of human ncDNA was functional. Was doing something.
I won’t recap the ENCODE brouhaha other than to point out that there was one. I wrote two posts about it at the time; you can read the first one (“Junk”) here and the second one (“Junk Too”) here. They are both full of links if you want to delve more.
Despite the ENCODE public relations offensive, which was indeed offensive to many, it is completely clear that most human ncDNA (and therefore the majority of all human DNA) isn’t contributing materially to your life or mine. So I asked for help in understanding ncDNA from Sean Eddy, who does computational biology at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm, and Michael Eisen, another HHMI star, who does computational and experimental genomics at Berkeley.
ncDNA is mostly transposons
The ncDNA story is mostly about transposons. Occupying fully half the human genome, transposons are stretches of DNA that can hop around in host DNA. They are somewhat related to viruses. Eddy calls transposons “molecular parasites.” We do delete them, but they replicate so fast that we can’t keep up. “Transposon load –the extent to which a genome is currently infested with them—varies from genome to genome, and largely explains the otherwise puzzling variation in content of ‘nonfunctional’ DNA,” he told me in an email.
Without having read the bladderwort paper, Eddy was willing to bet that U. gibba has almost no transposon-derived DNA and almost no active transposons. He was, of course, quite correct. U. gibba has fewer than 400 transposons, although they dominate its small amount of ncDNA, accounting for 2.5 percent of its genome. It also has genes that silence transposons.
Most junk DNA (oops, sorry, ncDNA) is composed of dead and decaying transposon-derived sequences. Some, however, does have an impact on its host. Sometimes when a transposon jumps around, it jumps into the middle of a gene and disrupts its work.
Transposons affect transcription. They can act as enhancers or promoters. This being Nobel Prize time, Eddy reminded me that Barbara McClintock got her Nobel Prize in 1983 because she discovered transposons. She worked with maize, finding that the mobile elements inserted themselves into pigment genes and altered the color of corn kernels. Think about McClintock’s transposon Nobel Prize when you’re shopping this month for decorative Indian corn.
Transposons can also be agents of disease, lately a hot topic. They can, for example, boost the potency of genes involved in disorders. Clinical geneticists have identified several instances where a “novel insertion creates a highly damaging allele affecting the coding capacity of a known disease gene,” a recent review observes. Also, transposon mobility in body cells is now known to be a factor in at least some kinds of cancer.
On the other hand, as the authors point out, when these mobile elements move around in eggs and sperm, they can become an important source of genetic diversity, including human genetic diversity. A 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argues that transposable elements have been a major factor in the success of Homo sap, contributing significantly to our unusually rapid evolution, especially evolution of our big brains.
So ncDNA can sometimes be damaging and sometimes quite useful. Mostly it is neither. In every cell of our being we manufacture this seriously excess DNA avoirdupois (ok, junk) and then we lug it around. Yet the humped bladderwort makes it quite clear that worldwide success doesn’t require a lot of ncDNA, and neither does evolution; U. gibba has invented new traits that make it a more efficient carnivore despite devoting only 3 percent of its genome to the raw material for evolution.
Why does nonfunctional ncDNA hang around?
Wouldn’t it be sensible for organisms that are schlepping a lot of apparently useless ncDNA to have evolved deleting mechanisms? Why isn’t the H. sap genome lean and mean like U. gibba’s?
Turns out that nonfunctional ncDNA probably isn’t much of a burden. Eisen tells me in an email that while there may be an energy cost to replicating ncDNA, whether that affects fitness is “largely unknown.
“However, even if we stipulate that non-functional DNA is deleterious, it does not immediately follow that organisms will just get rid of it. Remember it’s not like there’s a mechanism for the organism to just purge itself of non-functional DNA in one fell swoop.”
Eisen suggests a thought experiment. Imagine an organism with lots of presumably non-functional DNA. Humans, for instance. Imagine also that in one generation some chunk of nonfunctional DNA was lost. “Even if non-functional DNA is deleterious in some way, the difference between having 50.000 percent of your genome non-functional DNA and 49.993 percent is negligible, and, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant,” he argues.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible for selection to act on DNA content. “This is all theory/speculation – because we don’t really have any cases where we understand what’s going on – but you can imagine an individual in some species that develops replication machinery that tends to lose DNA in each generation,” he says. By chance, or maybe because extra DNA is particularly harmful, the DNA-losing trait can become dominant in the species. “[O]ver time, its genome size will decrease, with those losses primarily coming in non-functional DNA, since losing functional DNA is clearly bad.”
So loss of all of a species’ irrelevant DNA does not happen in a single event. It comes about through a series of steps, probably a great many of them. Which explains why it doesn’t happen all that often. Why there aren’t more slimmed-down genomes like the humped bladderwort’s. Why there are a lot of organisms whose genomes are way more overstuffed than ours.
And the many-step process looks likely to be entirely random, not the product of selection for genome efficiency. Eisen emphasizes, “I know of no case where we have strong evidence for small genome size having been selected for, and it is entirely possible that all the variation we see in genome size is the result of purely neutral processes.”
Brenner’s proposition: The stuff you want to get rid of is not junk, it’s garbage. Junk is the interesting stuff you keep around because it might come in handy some day.
Tabitha M. Powledge is a long-time journalist and editor specializing in science and medicine. She writes “On Science Blogs” for the PLOS Blog Network; new posts appear on Fridays.
Anyone who has taken a long plane ride knows all too well how jet lag can adversely affect us. But a new discovery could soon make jet lag a thing of the past and cure the sleepless nights that come from traveling long distances.
In August, a team from the University of Oxford discovered that a genetic mechanism is partly responsible for regulating our sleep cycles, giving hope that scientists would one day be able to turn off this gene and prevent jet lag. Last week, a team of researchers from Kyoto University in Japan followed up that discovery by engineering mice that are immune to jet lag. According to an article posted on National Geographic’s Phenomena Blog, this success could help suppress the proteins that cause jet lag and one day cure jet lag entirely.
The Kyoto researchers, who published their results in early October, put mice in cages with lights designed to mimic day and night. They then altered these lights to mimic an 8-hour time difference–roughly the length of a flight from San Francisco to London. The engineered mice were able to readjust almost immediately, suggesting that hormones could prevent jet lag, which comes from a disruption of our body’s natural rhythm.
The body runs on an internal clock based on the 24 hours in a day. This clock helps regulate not just our sleep schedules, but also our metabolism, blood pressure, hunger and body temperature. The proteins that control this clock are produced in greater quantities at certain parts of the day and then fall when they aren’t needed, creating the circadian rhythm. These proteins are regulated by the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a collection of 10,000 neurons at the base of the brain.
The SCN is very sensitive to light, which helps it know when to produce certain proteins and stop producing others. Based on signals attained from our eyes, the SCN allows us to feel more awake during the day and tired enough for sleep at night.
When we take a long plane ride, we confuse the CSN, since it has regulated the proteins in our body based on one schedule while we demand it adjusts to a new one. Typically, it takes the CSN one day to adjust for every time zone we cross. Until it readjusts, we suffer from jet lag, which alters our sleeping habits and other basic functions.
The Kyoto team discovered that about half of the neurons in the SCN secrete a hormone, arginine vasopressin (AVP), and also detect it using receptor proteins. The researchers were able to deliver chemicals to mice that blocked these receptors and minimize the effects of disrupting the mice’s circadian rhythms.
The researchers also discovered, however, that curing jet lag isn’t as simple as delivering chemicals that would block the AVP receptors. Since drugs are unable to be delivered directly to the brain, the chemicals that would block AVP receptors in the brain would also do so across the entire body. Because these receptors are found in other vital organs, such as the kidneys, this solution would create more problems than it solved.
The team thinks that a cure for jet lag lies somewhere in the way that the neurons in the SCN connect with one another. The neurons that produce and detect AVP synchronize with one another on a tight schedule. While delivering chemicals disrupts this synchronization, the process resumes after the chemicals wear off. The mice engineered by the Kyoto team showed a looser connection of these SCN neurons, which allowed them to adjust so quickly to disruptions in their natural rhythms.
But finding a way to prevent the effects of jet lag is not simply to spare travelers an annoyance. Finding a way to cure or combat circadian rhythm disruption could be particularly useful for shift-workers and other people who have inconsistent schedules. Studies have found that shift-working can lead to higher risks of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and even some cancers.
Additionally, an article published in Wired a few years ago reported that jet lag can also have a serious impact on the ability to learn and retain memories. The article reported the results of another experiment using mice in which researchers at the University of California, Berkeley found that jet lagged mice produced about half the neurons in the hippocampus compared to regular mice, which lessened their ability to learn or remember. The mice in the study even showed inhibited learning ability after four weeks of a schedule that returned their circadian rhythms to normal.
While scientists are still years away from discovering a cure for jet lag, the recent research on the subject has helped provide a solid understanding of the genetic mechanisms that regulate our circadian rhythms. This understanding will help give scientists targets to develop drugs to battle the effects of this disorder and will likely one day make jet leg a thing of the past.
“A small interfering RNA is a neat molecular way of being able to turn off one gene within cells,” said Dr. Stuart Peirson, the study team leader and a senior research scientist at Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, in an article in The Independent. “There’s no reason you couldn’t develop specific drugs to inhibit this particular mechanism, so it should be possible in the future to develop drugs that allow us to adjust more quickly and help alleviate jet lag.”
New varieties of genetically modified soy beans are being grown and tested in Essex County.
Monsanto, a well-known agricultural biotechnology company, is trying to develop a new strain of soy bean that is resistant to both Roundup and dicamba.
The farmer leasing his land to Monsanto said he can’t talk about the crop but confirms it’s already been harvested.
Monsanto hopes to have a new dicamba resistant variety of soy bean ready for 2014 or 2015.
Dicamba is a broad-spectrum herbicide used for general weed control on grain crops, pastures and non-crop areas.
Monsanto and farmers are pursuing new weed killers and genetically modified soy bean crops because the number of Roundup resistant weeds continues to increase in Canada.
The Government’s moratorium on genetically modified crops expires next year.
Yesterday, more than 100 protesters marched through Hobart, demanding the Government continue its ban on GM crops. Despite a Government review underway, the Premier Lara Giddings wants the ban to remain.
“We do not believe that we should have GM products grown here in Tasmania,” she said.
The Deputy Liberal leader Jeremy Rockliff also says his party is yet to be convinced of the need for a change. The Poppy Growers Association’s Glynn Williams says if the ban is not revoked, poppy growers could mount a legal action
Read the full, original story here: “Legal challenge threat over GMO moratorium”
The following open letter was written by E. Alan Kennett, an executive for 20 years in the sugar industry on Kauai, which is the target of anti-GMO legislation:
The people of Kauai were [the] most congenial and supportive, especially during and after Hurricane Iniki, when everyone pulled together for the good of Kauai. However, now I see a community being pulled apart because of the GMO debate. I recognize that there are many people who are worried about GMO crops.
I am not one of those, but the concerns being expressed come from strong convictions whether real or imagined. That being said, to mount a campaign to shut down the corn companies and put many people out of work particularly those on the Westside of Kauai is, to put it mildly, unconscionable! The anti-GMO movement recognized early on in their campaign that to further their agenda they would need to have a reason to apply pressure on the corn companies so they would leave Kauai.
Read the full, original story here: “Kauai heading down a slippery slope”
[The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation] financially supports Philippine activist group MASIPAG and supposedly addresses the effects of the Green Revolution in the Philippines which have more recently evolved towards the use of genetic modification with GMO maize and rice. The Swedish funding is about discouraging companies from taking patents on crops, which they believe “forces” small farmers to large-scale agriculture.
Plant breeders are starting to develop flood tolerant rice potentially using genes “COP1” and “Kidari” that can turn out to help Philippines grow rice in flooded conditions amid climate change threats.
The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is collaborating with the International Society for Plant Anaerobiosis (ISPA) in developing rice with more intensive resistance against flooding similar to how aquatic plants survive in long submergence.
“The way to go is to produce more plants under conditions of flooding. We have more people in this planet. We need to produce more food,” said IPSA President Voesenek ACJ Laurentius in an interview at an IRRI forum.
In a sharp rebuke of opponents of GM technology, UK Environmental Secretary Owen Paterson told The Independent that those who oppose Golden Rice are “wicked…casting a shadow over attempts to feed the world.”
Despite the decades of research on the safety of GMOs and the assurance that Golden Rice will be given away for free, opponents continue to claim that it is a ‘Trojan Horse’ for GM technology that will ultimately harm human health and the environment.
Secretary Paterson, an ardent supporter of Golden Rice, said, “It’s just disgusting that little children are allowed to go blind and die because of a hang-up by a small number of people about this technology.” He reiterated that there was no scientific evidence that GMOs posed any threat to human health or the environment.
In a separate article, The Guardianpointed out that the comments by Secretary Paterson coincided with statements made by other proponents of Golden Rice, including Patrick Moore, a former high-ranking Greenpeace member who now is an activist for crop biotechnology. Moore’s non-profit organization, Allow Golden Rice Now, advocates for the innovation. Many prominent scientists, under the banner Science magazine, also condemned the vandalism of a Golden Rice field trial in the Philippines by anti-GMO activists, an attack that was supported by Greenpeace.
The Guardian‘s Karl Mathiesen set up a forum for readers to contribute to the debate, which prompted hundreds of responses, including one from Alexander J Stein, an agricultural economist with the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC, whose PhD focused on Golden Rice.
“The key conclusion is that Golden Rice offers a very promising intervention that could complement other current interventions, above all supplementation with vitamin A pills,” Stein wrote. He suggested that instead of attacking GMOs by claiming health and environmental risks, critics should instead target the “framework in which GM crops are developed,” which would include “the promotion of weaker patent rights [or] the facilitation of more competition in the field of agricultural biotechnology.”
Another Guardian journalist, Claire Provost, offered more context to Secretary Paterson’s remarks, discussing the protests against this year’s World Food Prize winners, who have all have made contributions to agriculture biotechnology. One of the winners, Robert Farley, is a chief technology officer for Monsanto and another, Mary-Dell Chilton, is a scientist and founder of Syngenta Biotechnology.. “The World Food Prize has been criticized for prioritizing biotechnology over other strategies for achieving food security,” Provost wrote.
The hundreds of other comments were spread across Twitter and Facebook, encompassing a wide range of views, both negative and positive of Golden Rice.
Vitamin A deficiency affects 40% of children in the developing world and can cause serious health issues. Golden Rice, which is fortified with beta-carotene, is said to be able to provide 60% of daily required intake of vitamin A. Though there have been efforts to combat the widespread deficiency with better farming practices and food distribution, a solution using biotechnology is strongly supported by the scientific community.
The battle concerns how easily pharmacists can dispense cheaper, near-generic versions of biotechnology drugs, which can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
The California bill, SB 598, would have allowed biosimilars to be substituted by pharmacists if the F.D.A. deemed the biosimilar “interchangeable” with the reference product, a higher standard than merely being similar. Opponents of the bill, which included some labor unions and pharmacists, contended that once the F.D.A. had declared a biosimilar interchangeable with the original product, notification of doctors and patients was unnecessary and would only raise doubts about the safety of biosimilars and discourage their use.
Until now, biologics, which are complex proteins made in living cells, have been insulated from the generic competition eventually faced by simple chemical pills like Lipitor or Prozac. But the 2010 Affordable Care Act called for the Food and Drug Administration to approve such copycat versions of biologics. They are usually called biosimilars rather than generics, because they are not exact copies of the original.
Imagine a dating site where, in addition to a completed survey, you have to submit a genetic profile. This could be the future of matchmaking, especially now that some scientists think that our compatibility genes—the same genes that determine whether an organ transplant will take—play a role in sexual attraction.
Daniel Davis, an immunologist at the University of Manchester in England, tells the story of these distinct genes and their impact on our relationships in his new book, The Compatibility Gene: How Our Bodies Fight Disease, Attract Others, and Define Ourselves.
Read the full, original story here: We Know Your Genes Can Influence Your Health, But Can They Also Influence Who You Love?
Evolution and genetics are “two very closely interwoven disciplines,” as the Genetics Society of America observes, so it is difficult to disentangle the two from each other or from the fabric of biology as a whole.
But, relying on a general trust in genetics and a general ignorance of, skepticism about, or hostility toward evolution, creationists regularly attempt to misrepresent genetics – whether the population genetics of the middle twentieth century, the molecular genetics of the late twentieth century, or the genomics of the early twenty-first century – as posing a problem for evolution.
Read the full, original story here: Bad Science: Genetics as misread by creationism
Viruses are the most abundant entities on the planet—and among the most mysterious. Mya Breitbart, a microbial ecologist at the University of South Florida, has figured out how to quickly decipher what they are and what they’re doing.
Rather than try to isolate individual virus species from a sample—there are up to 10 billion viruses in a liter of seawater—Breitbart extracts all the genetic material present, chops it into smaller pieces, and sequences those pieces simultaneously. The technique, which she likens to assembling multiple puzzles at the same time, enables her to study the entire community at once.
In a few days a big part of our lives will be no more. For the past six years our single surviving embryo has been in stasis; frozen in time. Here, but not here. The promise and whisper of another precious life, yes, but also its spectre.
The paperwork we can no longer ignore tells us its time is about to be up. And my husband and I must face the final hurdle of our infertility. Letting go.
This embryo comes from the same ‘batch’ that yielded us two healthy sons. If its brothers are anything to go by, then this frozen pea is one tough nut.
Give me a quick overview of your experiment? What is going to happen with this mouse?
Daniel Wuttke: We have aged mice (females and males) of the C57Bl/6 strain which will undergo a treatment of a combination of drugs that were shown to robustly extend the lifespan. One group of mice will receive placebo, while the other group will undergo the combined drug treatment. During the time of the experiment we will take measures of biomarkers of aging to assess the effect of the drugs. We hope that the drugs will slow down the aging process in this mice effectively and extend their lifespan… and healthspan!
To understand the environmental effects of GMOs, I started by looking at plants genetically modified to be insect-resistant — and concluded that they have, on balance, helped reduce overall insecticide use in U.S. farming. The picture isn’t so rosy with the other main trait that GM agribusiness promotes, herbicide tolerance.
While it’s clear that genetic engineering has reduced the amount of insecticides that farmers spray, it’s just as clear that it has encouraged a much larger increase in the use of the herbicide glyphosate. And while insect resistance is safeguarded by some (insufficient) regulations, there are no regulations to rein in the way that herbicide-tolerant plants encourage overuse of herbicides.
And when scientists from the University of Guelph scoured the DNA in a number of herbal products, they found that many times the labels on the merchandise didn’t accurately reflect what was in the container.
Some products contained fillers like wheat or rice that were not listed on the label. Some were contaminated with other plant species that could have caused toxicity or triggered allergic reactions. And still others contained no trace of the substance the bottle purported to contain.
People buying herbal products need to know they may not be getting what they are paying for — and they may be ingesting something they aren’t expecting, Steve Newmaster, an integrative biology professor at the university who was the first author on the paper.
Opponents of GM food understand that diminished understanding and lack of knowledge is the key to obstructing biotechnology.
—American Medical Association
“[T]he GM debate is over. It is finished. We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe. … You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food.” So said Mark Lynas, the British environmentalist, who helped launch the anti-GMO movement in the 1990s.
Lynas went on to say that “people who want to stick with organic are entitled to—but they should not stand in the way of others who would use science to find more efficient ways to feed billions.”
We could not have put it more succinctly ourselves.
Organic activists are on the attack at the local level in a bid to influence global acceptance of genetic engineering. For years we’ve been asking why those leading the organic industry are so dead-set opposed to genetically modified organisms. GMOs are already cutting down drastically on pesticide use, fuel consumption and the amount of land devoted to agriculture. Aren’t these the stated goals of the organic movement? This 20-year-old technology will also soon lead to drastic reductions in agricultural water-use, and genetically engineered crops capable of pulling their own nitrogen from the earth’s atmosphere are already on the drawing board. Innovations like these will further reduce the amount of energy farmers use, along with the overall amount of energy humankind requires as it continues to produce more food on less land for more people.
And yet, a fierce either-or (and we must stress one-sided) debate ensues between a minority activists who want the entire world to “go organic”, and scientists and humanitarians who are using genetics and biotechnology to improve our food and medicine. If science makes the human race more efficient in the areas of transportation, communication and housing, then surely it can, and should, also help us in the vital arena of food production. Shouldn’t it? The world’s premier national and international academies of science have reached an unqualified consensus that GMO crops are good for the poor and hungry. Even the president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences stated recently, “Genetically-modified food represents a step forward in evolution.”
Crop biotechnology 2.0
While most people think only of commercial crops like Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola or Bt corn when they hear mention of GM food, the three of us (two academics and a former organic inspector) are left to wonder why an entire discipline is being rejected by “organic” anti-GMO activists when this discipline holds such promise beyond the commercial realm. Commercial crops, which farmers can freely choose to grow, are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to debating the two competing philosophies of food production before us.
GMO crops that fix their own nitrogen would drastically reduce energy consumption on conventional farms by eliminating the natural gas used in synthesizing ammonium nitrate and the fuel burned in trucks that deliver that fertilizer to farms. Such technology could eliminate the current organic practice of planting legume cover crops, which are subsequently plowed down to trap nitrogen in the soil. This could cut an organic farmer’s fuel bill by as much as 50 percent! If only the organic industry would consider accepting GMO crops on a case-by-case basis, there could be the possibility of a more rational approach to the new technology of genetic engineering.
And what, we hasten to ask anti-GMO activists, about a life-saving GMO crop like Golden Rice? According to the World Health Organization, 250,000 to 500,000 children in the developing world go blind each year due to vitamin A deficiency, half of whom die within a year. 250 million preschool children, mainly in urban slums, suffer from this deficiency. In all, 2-3 million people die from vitamin A deficiency-related diseases every year.
Protestors rally against Monsanto. (Credit: Infrogmation of New Orleans, via Wikimedia Commons)
Genetically modified Golden Rice was developed in response to this unfolding humanitarian disaster by Swiss scientist Dr. Ingo Potrykus and his colleagues in 1998. It contains beta-Carotene, and not only prevents blindness but also boosts the immune system and contributes to general good health. However, Greenpeace and its allies in the organic movement have successfully managed to block the introduction of this non-commercial GMO product based on the flimsy claim that it may pose “environmental and health risks.” As if 250 million children with vitamin A deficiency is not itself a “health risk.”
In response to this we quote Lord Walter Northbourne, one of the preeminent forefathers of the organic movement. In 1931 he wrote:
“If we waited for scientific proof of every impression before deciding to take any consequential action we might avoid a few mistakes, but we should also hardly ever decide to act at all. In practice, decisions about most things that really matter have to be taken on impressions, or on intuition, otherwise they would be far too late…. We have to live our lives in practice, and can very rarely wait for scientific verification of our hypotheses. If we did we should all soon be dead, for complete scientific verification is hardly ever possible. It is a regrettable fact that a demand for scientific proof is a weapon often used to delay the development of an idea.”
If such reasoning is good enough for the organic movement, then surely it’s good enough for the science of genetic engineering. But many organic activists remain adamantly opposed to this new and promising technology. Rather than even consider the possible benefits, commercial or humanitarian, of GM technology, they seek instead the following goals, by any means necessary:
To prevent organic farmers from ever using genetically-modified seed – on pain of facing certain de-certification not only of a crop, but of the field where such seed might have been used, and potentially of an entire farm where the indiscretion occurred, for as long as a decade or more.
To prevent all possibility, no matter how remote, of cross-pollination—they call it “contamination”— between an organic crop and a neighboring GMO crop through pollen drifting over a fence line in spite of the fact that minimal cross-pollination is regarded as a fact of life in agriculture. (Only pedigree seed growers are required to literally eliminate the possibility of it from ever occurring.)
And finally, the organic activists’ most ambitious undertaking: To ban the use of GMOs altogether by all farmers everywhere, regardless of the choices individual farmers might want to make on their own land.
Impossible you say? Here’s how the activists are already imposing these anti-scientific, and we believe anti-human, ends.
Welcome to the new normal
The three of us have been involved in public education on genetically engineered/modified crops and food for decades. Although the science has advanced a great deal over the years, the critics have not changed their position that GM crops and food represent a threat to people and the environment. But, having failed to convince federal, provincial and state authorities, the critics have turned their attention to local governments where they hope politicians might more easily be swayed by public persuasion.
In the arena of public opinion, first-hand experience has taught us that fear can be very effective in winning the public over. There is a great deal of pseudo-science available on the Internet designed to generate fear of GMOs. GM crops are produced, in part, with recombinant DNA technology. Few in the public, particularly politicians, are trained in this field of science, and so the failure to recognize the difference between the real science and the pseudo-science is to be expected. Indeed, just imagine if Einstein’s theory of relativity was for some strange reason at issue at the local level. Experts would be called upon to help explain things. But this was not the case, for example, when the Richmond City Council and the District of Saanich, both in the Canadian province of British Columbia, voted to ban or express their opposition to GM crops.
Robert Wager, an academic with almost three decades of experience in the field of recombinant DNA, first met with Richmond City’s Sustainability Manager in early 2012 as the city first began to research the issue. After a short presentation the question session began. Two hours later, after he had debunked a large number of widely held myths that were presented to council by anti-GM activists, it became clear that city officials had already absorbed a great deal of pseudo-science on GM crops and food. Indeed, documents that surfaced later prove that a group called GE-Free-BC had been petitioning the City of Richmond to ban GM crops since June of 2010, a year and a half prior to Wager being allowed to present.
At the subsequent Richmond public council meeting the usual fear stories were relayed as fact by many genuinely frightened attendees. Some expressed fears of the alleged health dangers posed by GM crop technology. They were sure of their “facts” having gleaned them from the Internet. Sadly, Wager was the only one at the meeting who conveyed the actual science of GMOs, according to world health and food safety experts. Despite the endorsement of GMOs by every food-safety authority in the world, it became evident that nothing could alleviate the fear in the room, and Wager soon realized a ban was imminent
The Richmond council cited two reasons to justify its ban: it stated that the transfer of GM pollen or seed to a neighboring organic field would threaten organic certification; alleged human/animal health issues associated with GM food were the second reason for the ban. Neither of these two reasons cited is supported by history or science.
In 19 years of monumental growth of both GM and organic agriculture there has not been one case of decertification of an organic crop caused by trace amounts of GM pollen or seed. A spokesperson for an organic food company admitted as much to council. History clearly demonstrates that GM crops do not represent any risk to organic farmers, except for what might be understood as an activist/bureaucratic risk whereby an organic farmer could face decertification of his crop, his field or even his entire farm as punishment from those who lead the organic industry. You heard right… the anti-GM activists who lead the organic industry are willing to go as far as to inflict hardship on organic farmers just to prove their point and ensure a tight lid is kept on the advancement of GM farming.
(Credit: John Serrao via The Conversation)
All of the alleged dangers of GM crops and food have been assessed by global experts and dismissed. Everyone from the European Union (EU) to the World Health Organization (WHO), National Academies of Science (NAS), Health Canada to the local Vancouver Coastal Health Authority (VCHA) agree there is no evidence of harm from consuming food made with GM ingredients. And yet, this local council decided it knew better and proceeded full-steam ahead towards an outright ban.
Unfortunately, the scientific facts Wager presented had little effect, and fear and a lack of scientific understanding left the door open for the manipulation of the council. One example came from a councilor who claimed: “They put the genetic characteristics of the chemical into the food and then it goes into us!” But there is no such thing as “genetic characteristics” of chemicals. And yet, the two hundred people holding up anti-GMO signs during the meeting cheered the comment. The Richmond council subsequently decided to move forward with the ban at the next public meeting, a definite case of public policy based on fear from anti-GMO pseudo-science.
Suppressing scientific assessment
The debate played out in a different but also discouraging, way in Saanich. Public documents show that one particular council member, the chair of Healthy Saanich Advisory Committee (HSAC), was intent on getting a “non-support” resolution passed regardless of the science. The HSAC minutes of May 2011 call for advice on GMOs from The Peninsula Agricultural Commission (PAC).
As the issue was coming to a head, Wager learned that the PAC had been asked to develop an opinion on a proposed GM crop ban for Saanich (subsequently downgraded to a vote of non-support for GM crops). Naturally he contacted them immediately. Having dozens of GM-specific publications and extensive speaking experience on GM crops and food under his belt, and being a resident of the region, Wager offered to come before PAC at no charge. But he was turned down because the members of this commission claimed to already have enough experts lined up. One of these “experts” has zero publications in the field of GM crop technology; not surprisingly this “expert” recommended a ban of GM crops. The other was a local organic farmer with a long history of anti-GMO activity. Saanich council clearly did not seek balanced expert opinion on GM crop technology.
The minutes for the April 2012 PAC meeting show that there was no discussion or debate about whether to impose a ban; the issue had already been decided before the council meeting. “The Healthy Saanich Committee’s [HSAC] consensus was to support the concept of a ban on GE-GMO food crops in Saanich,” the minutes read. It was noted that this type of ban would be difficult to enforce [actually impossible, as it is under federal jurisdiction]. It was therefore decided to obtain information from other municipalities to see how a local ban could be achieved. The subsequent “debate” by the HSAC was clearly a sham, as the committee members had already decided their position on GMOs.
HSAC did go through the motions of holding a special meeting for public input on the GM crop issue in September. Wager again attended at his own expense. After sitting for over an hour listening to one speaker after another present fear stories, he was given the opportunity to present the real science to HSAC. But minutes into his presentation, the chair cut him off. Wager would later learn that the HSAC consensus had already been reached six months prior to this meeting—and the public meeting was an empty exercise.
Between that September HSAC meeting and the Saanich District Council meeting in November, when a final decision was scheduled to be made, Wager was assured he would get another opportunity to come before council. But one day before the District meeting, Wager was informed he would not be permitted to make any presentation.
After discussing this turn of events with Saanich Legislative Services (a non-political body that’s supposed to help citizens who live in Saanich), Wager discovered a possible avenue to provide further input. He respectfully requested that council refer the agenda item for the non-support declaration for GMOs back to Committee for further consideration at their next meeting. But the council rejected that request. Instead, the mayor himself weighed in, saying the council had to trust the HSAC in coming to its recommendation. To no one’s surprise, Saanich Council then voted to move ahead with the non-support declaration for GM crops, precisely as recommended by HSAC.
In Wager’s last correspondence with the HSAC in Saanich, the Chair admitted, “The committee felt strongly that the information you and others shared clearly demonstrated the inconsistent and contradictory opinions and findings with respect to GMOs.” And yet, the fact remains that this committee embraced pseudo-science-driven fear. The process cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered science-based, much less democratic. And remember, Wager lives, votes, and pays taxes in this region! And yet he was purposely ignored.
Organic farming contradictions
The contrast between the over-regulation of genetically modified foods and the lax regulation of organic foods is striking. At the same time as a concerted attack against GMOs is being waged at the local level, the organic industry in North America remains largely unregulated, running almost entirely on record-keeping and record-checking. Indeed, by the United States Department of Agriculture’s own admittance, “The number of results reported to the NOP [National Organic Program] in 2011 represents a sampling rate of less than 1 percent of certified operations.” Things go rapidly downhill from there because it turns out, “The majority of results reported to the NOP in 2011 were received from certifying agents which are headquartered outside of the United States, where periodic residue testing is a requirement under international organic standards (e.g., the EU). In Canada meanwhile – one of America’s largest trading partners in organic products – there is no testing whatsoever to ensure organic products are genuine.
(Credit: Alanthebox, via Wikimedia Commons)
And while there has not been one death or even an illness linked to the consumption of foods made with genetically modified ingredients, thousands of people get sick and die every year because of contamination problems linked to slipshod organic farming practices at some farms.
Consider the news just over the past week. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Costco Wholesale Canada announced that Costco recalled its Kirkland Signature brand Organic Lean Ground Beef likely contaminated by E. coli. And the largest processor of organic peanut butter shuttered its facilities over the weekend, the victim of a Salmonella outbreak that sickened 41 people in 20 states in 2012.
These are not isolated stories. Organic food is more dangerous than conventionally grown produce because organic farmers use animal manure as the major source of fertilizer for their food crops. Animal manure is the biggest reservoir of these nasty bacteria that are afflicting and killing so many people. Because of lack oversight, the organic industry has been plagued by contamination problems worldwide. When dealing with the potential dangers of un-composted feces, mere record-keeping and record-checking cannot possibly be expected to keep people safe. In one notorious recent case involving the finding of a novel strain of O104:H4 bacteria linked to an organic farm in Lower Saxony in Germany in 2011, 3,950 people were affected and 53 died.
Said simply. While manure used in organic farms can be deadly, the cumulative conclusion after more than 2000 studies of genetically modified foods is that GMOs pose no serious health or safety concerns. There is still no such thing as organic testing, neither in the field nor after harvest nor in any certified-organic processing facilities—and, most disturbingly, not on incoming shipments of certified-organic product from countries like China, Mexico or Argentina. These foreign shipments account for the majority of the certified-organic food being sold in North American grocery stores. Organic certification on this continent is all based on paperwork with no recourse to science.
As such, long before one considers the remote possibility that an organic crop might become “contaminated” (to the level of 0.01 percent or less by pollen drifting from a neighboring GMO field), there is a far more pressing consideration: Are prohibited synthetic fertilizers or pesticides being used fraudulently on organic farms? Aren’t these the things that the organic industry once claimed to eliminate or at least drastically-reduce our exposure to? Sadly, such a commonsensical consideration, alongside the much more troubling possibility that lethal pathogens might be entering the organic food chain through the improper composting of animal and plant waste, does not warrant concern from those who lead the organic industry. Shouldn’t a luxury food item be safer, or at least as safe, as its competition? Shouldn’t science be used to prove its worth? Instead, organic food turns out to barely exceed conventional food in purity and not at all in the nutritional department—no wonder, given the laxity of the organic certification system.
When it comes right down to it there nothing in GM technology that should offend organic growers. It is, in fact, an entirely “organic” procedure, and a very precise one at that. Organic farmers seem content to use seeds that are produced with nuclear and chemical mutagenesis which are very imprecise and hardly organic. They also use many inorganic substances such as copper, phosphorous and potassium with no apparent contradiction. And which is better—the broadcast spraying by organic farmers of a Bacillus thuringiensis (or Bt) microbial pesticide over entire fields with attendant drift into non-target areas, or the selective targeting of only those pests that actually attack the crop through the use of Bt corn and Bt cotton?
In the final analysis organic farming and GM technology would make a powerful team to improve our food production and nutrition on a large number of fronts. There is no reason why GM seeds cannot be grown organically. The benefits to organic farmers would soon become apparent and the real farmers in both camps could slough off the misinformation and fear mongering of the urban-based anti-GM activists. That’s the real promise of sustainability.
We conclude where we began, with the candid admission by one of the world’s most highly respected opponents to the science of genetic engineering that he was wrong. Mark Lynas stands in contrast to devout anti-GMO activists like Arpad Pusztai who remain steadfast in their baseless opposition to this new and promising field of science.
Pusztai was the lead scientist on the only remotely scientific attempt to prove that genetically modified food might be dangerous, and is still held up as a hero of sorts for the anti-GMO movement. The popular myth surrounding Pusztai is that he “was effectively silenced over his research and a campaign was set in motion to destroy his reputation.” But the fact of the matter is that Pusztai failed to use a control group in his study on rats, one of the most basic rules of the scientific process. He also fed his rats a strict diet consisting only of potatoes (GM potatoes of course), which any lab technician can tell you is a very poor diet for rats, low in protein, which is guaranteed to produce health problems. After all, as Paracelsus (the medieval founder of modern toxicology) so aptly put it, “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.”
Most damning is the fact that even with all the billions of dollars floating around in the organic industry, Pustzai‘s simple and inexpensive experiment has never been repeated.
Is this the best the anti-GMO organic movement can come up with as a reason to stand idly by and allow 2 million people or more to continue dying from vitamin A deficiency every year? Apparently the answer is yes. And we find that deplorable on all levels.
Robert Wager is a teacher in the Biology Department at Vancouver Island University. With almost three decades of experience in the field of recombinant DNA, he writes and speaks in defense of modern agriculture whenever the opportunity arises.
A co-founder and 15-year leader of Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore is now an independent ecologist and activist based in Vancouver Canada. He is the author of Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist and today leads the Allow Golden Rice Now! campaign.
Mischa Popoff is a former organic farmer and Advanced Organic Farm and Process Inspector who worked on contract under the USDA’s National Organic Program. He is a policy analyst with The Heartland Institute, The Frontier Centre for Public Policy and Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, and is the author of Is it Organic?
