Gene escape is seriously bad news

March 2022

In 2005 the scientific view was that "... the movement of transgenes beyond their intended destinations is a virtual certainty" (quoted in Ellstrand)

Gene escape from GM crops is something environmental activists have done a lot of shouting about. However, although regulatory lip-service is paid to it in risk assessments, the consequences of walk-about genes seem to be swept under the carpet. The biotech mindset is that artificial genes (including edited ones) will only do what they've been constructed to do wherever they end up: for example, herbicide-tolerance genes will be neutral in the absence of the herbicide, pesticide-generating genes specific to a target pest will be neutral in the absence of that pest, and anyway artificial genes won't find their way into a comfortable, alternative plant host often enough for it ever to matter.

In real-life, not all GM plants are growing neatly in fields [1] and, where wild relatives grow within pollinating distance of GM plants, gene-pollution of their weedy cousins has been widely reported. Although studies on the ecological consequences of this are thin on the ground, what little information we have is ominous.

Indirectly GM bees

 March 2022

"Even with the complete genetic information of a synthetic micro-organism, it is beyond the capacity of any existent bioinformatic analysis to fully predict the capability of a synthetic organism to survive, colonise and interact with other organisms under natural conditions, given the uncountable diversity of potential microhabitats and their temporal variability." (European Food Safety Authority, 2020)

By "synthetic micro-organism" is meant GM bacteria, GM fungi and GM yeast*. In their natural form all of these are a permanent feature inside, on and around higher plants and animals where they interact with each other and with their host to play a vital role in health and disease.

Caddisfly non-science nonsense

March 2022

The industry-friendly notion that the by-products of GM crops would somehow remain harmlessly in the fields was proved wrong in 2007 when a team of American biologists went out and did some science.

Escaped genes - a risk assessment minefield

March 2022

While conventional breeding speeds up the evolution of plants and skews it gradually to fit human needs, genetic engineering forces abrupt and disruptive changes in genome structure and function. The artificial gene (or edit) functions as it's designed to within the highly uniform genetic and environmental context of a modern commercial crop. How does it function in any other genome and ecosystem?

Risk assessment of GM plants has always focused on the intended artificial trait coupled to an assumption that if the altered bit of DNA 'escaped' into other plant populations it would fizzle out over time unless it conferred a clear, identifiable, risk-assessable fitness advantage. Now that we've grown GM crops in various environments for over two decades and there's been time for gene contamination incidents to inform the science, this trait-centred risk assessment is proving shaky.