Biotech crops risky to consume, says former pro-GMO scientist

A decade after retiring from his job as a research scientist at Agriculture Canada, Dr. Thierry Vrain, a former promoter of genetically modified organisms (GMO), has warned that eating biotech crops is essentially risky.

In an article on PreventDisease.com on May 6, Vrain cites Russian and European studies in saying that “diets containing engineered corn or soya cause serious health problems in laboratory mice and rats.” He adds that studies have also questioned the efficacy of proteins produced by engineered plants.

“These studies show that [these] proteins…are different [from] what they should be. Inserting a gene in a genome using [genetic-engineering] technology can and does result in damaged proteins. The scientific literature is full of studies showing that engineered corn and soya contain toxic or allergenic proteins,” Vrain says.

Genetic engineering, now 40 years old, is “based on the naive understanding of the genome, based on the ‘one gene, one protein’ hypothesis of 70 years ago that [says] each gene codes for a single protein. The Human Genome project, completed in 2002, showed that this hypothesis is wrong,” he adds. 

Read the full story: Biotech crops risky to consume, says former pro-GMO scientist

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