Fake meat: real pressure on government

August 2022

Make no mistake, your government will be under a lot of pressure to jump on the fake real 'cultured' meat bandwagon [1]. Westminster won't risk being seen as an old-fashioned, backward-looking government, scared to grasp the lab-meat nettle while other governments race ahead.

Fake real meat is being presented as inevitable by companies planning to market it. GOOD Meat, for example, is confidently predicting that its product "will replace conventional meat at some point in our lifetimes" as "consumers increasingly recognise the environmental impact of their diet choices and search for healthier and more sustainable products". 

Government public relations drive on gene edited food

July2022

Analysis

Westminster is pulling out all the stops to force gene-edited foods down UK throats. Its tactics are very reminiscent of those employed a quarter-of-a-century ago, when first-generation GM foods were imminent. However, a couple of lessons have been learned from that first PR disaster.

Gene-edited farming - rescue or last straw?

December 2021

Modern 'conventional' farming: too big, too uniform, too much fancy technology, too hype-ridden, and unsustainable.

Paving the way for the acceptance of Westminster's consultation on the regulation of genetic technologies, an opinion piece, written by a top UK crop-pest scientist, was published in the Guardian newspaper. Its headline was:

"Science can rescue farming. Relaxing gene editing rules should be the start"

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The villains that farming needs to be rescued from are "new (climate-change driven) plant diseases moving rapidly around the world", and some old plant diseases (such as the blight which caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s) which still plague us, and the skill and patience required for the long process of conventional plant breeding.

The heroes which will rescue farming are super-fast, precise, trait-specific new crops courtesy of gene editing.

The article also acknowledged that, before farming can be rescued by gene-editing, gene editing will have to be rescued from negative consumer opinion.

Take a step back and look at why our agriculture is being caught so far on the back foot that it needs rescuing.

In old-style 'conventional' plant breeding (a.k.a. 'domestication'), seed is saved, exchanged locally, and possibly selected for planting the following year. The plants evolve* alongside the farmers and everything else which shares their mutual environment. Farmers are producers with key skills in food production, while their naturally genetically-diversified crops evolve into new genetically-diversified crops.

* Note Evolution is an ongoing, ecosystem-wide shifting to new states of equilibrium as all organisms interact with each other and with their non-living environment. "Like all organisms, humans alter the environments around them in ways which have evolutionary consequences" (Mueller and Flachs)

Seventy years of the inappropriately named 'green' revolution have given us new-style 'conventional' (a.k.a. 'traditional') intensively-bred crops which are mainly inbred-hybrids. Such crops have uniform genetics and often include desired traits induced by humans using random mutagenesis (absent safety testing). They are developed off-farm with a prime focus on high yield to supply a globalised market. Key to growing such crops are chemical inputs (fertilisers and pesticides), the cash to buy the inputs and new seed every year, water, and the machines to enable uniform planting, multiple chemical applications, and harvesting on a vast scale. Add to these, government subsidies and an elaborate market infrastructure. Farmers growing them have become consumers of whatever seed, chemicals and machines their suppliers want to flog them.

The green revolution's monocultures and transportation of seeds around the world are big players in the global spread of plant diseases (the ones gene-editing will 'rescue' farming from), and climate change.

The focus on yield, uniformity and scale has long side-lined the nutritional value, taste and sustainability of the crop, and the needs and knowledge of the local people, and evolution. While the on-farm environment keeps changing, just like it always has, industry-supplied inbred-hybrid seed has no capacity for evolution.

The latest shift in agriculture is to crops which have been genetically modified (GM) or gene edited (also GM). These have desired specific traits engineered into them in the laboratory. In a desperate attempt to normalise these GM creations, genetic modification has been absurdly described as "a continuation of the ancient process of (crop) domestication" by which humans "have been manipulating their crops for millennia". Gene-editing takes the public sedation exercise a stage further: it "could happen in Nature" and “allows us to give Mother Nature a helping hand to accelerate the process of evolution". Since all GM traits are bred into existing crops varieties with uniform genetic backgrounds, they are quite clearly nothing to do with old-conventional, evolving, plant breeding and everything to do with new-conventional, non-evolving, green revolution crop production.

Consumers have every reason to be just as uncomfortable with gene editing as they were with genetic modification.

For one thing, there's the science (which isn't difficult to find or to grasp):

• Apart from the question of functional disturbances in the genome caused by the intended DNA change, there's a mounting body of evidence that the gene editing process itself induces damage elsewhere in the genome [1,2,3].
• The latest alarming discovery is the possibility that CRISPR gene editing can cause the chromosome to shatter and re-assemble haphazardly, with who-know-what effects on the GM organism.
• Crop scientists check the success of their genetic engineering by looking for the desired edit at the 'precise location': random wreckage elsewhere remains invisible.

For another thing, as some concerned New Zealand scientists pointed out "the risk of harm from gene technology accumulates over time and scale of production". If Big Biotech gets its way on the scale of gene-tech crops grown all over the world, it's just a matter of time before the risk of harm becomes actual harm.

Then, there's the desperate and unconvincing propaganda such as that described above. As the concerned scientists in New Zealand pointed out, "the risks from technology don't disappear by calling it natural" (and, an edited gene doesn't become natural by calling it evolution).

Suggestions in the crop-pest scientist's article for tackling the public confidence deficit in gene editing include the need for transparency and a 'national debate'. That same month, a letter published in Nature Biotechnology advanced principles for 'Responsible governance of gene editing in agriculture and the environment' which included 'robust, inclusive societal engagement'. Note that no one's suggesting any need for safety testing to reassure the public. What all that transparency, debate and engagement sounds like is a smokescreen for 'educating' the public to want this new-fangled GM food, just like in the 1990s when the first old-style GM crops emerged from the field.

Relaxing gene editing rules' as suggested by the top UK crop scientist translates into a means to avoid safety testing. Indeed, the outcome of the 'consultation' is that UK regulators will now permit field trials of gene-edited crops without risk assessment, and new legislation to exclude gene-edited organisms from the definition of a GMO is now on Westminster's agenda.

OUR COMMENT

The hype surrounding all things GM hasn't changed in quarter of a century. Don't let yourself be 'educated' to think that gene-edited foods will ever be anything but a quick, commercially-lucrative patch shoring up an over-sized unsustainable system with multiple opportunities for harm to health.

The top UK crop scientist acknowledged that "Organic farming has provided us with creative and powerful alternatives for how we grow food" and hints that combining crop 'improvement' using gene-editing with organic methods could be a solution for sustainable agriculture. Obviously giving Mother Nature a helping hand ... and giving the biotech industry an even bigger helping hand while compromising our future organic food supply. Organic farming doesn't need rescued, but it will if genetic engineers get their hands on it.

Ask your MP to take action. Rather than rush simplistic gene edited 'improved' crops to market, the UK government must promote small-scale, diversified, climate-friendly, unadulterated organic, regenerative, and agro-ecological methods that work with nature and put farmers back in the driving seat. In that way, farming might actually rescue itself along with our health, our food supply and our future.

In Scotland, our Environment Minister tells us: 

"Scotland's policy towards GMOs has not changed, and we have no plans for a similar review. As for gene editing, we are disappointed DEFRA would choose to move unilaterally on this. The Scottish Government is committed to keeping aligned with the EU, and we are monitoring the EU's position closely". 

Now is a good time to tell your MSP that you don't trust the new gene technology trajectory of English agriculture and that you fully support Scotland's no GM and no gene editing policy.


Background

[1] THE PRECISION PROBLEM IN GENOME EDITING - August 2021

[2] CRISPR'S EPIGENETIC SCARS - August 2021

[3] CRISPR CATASTROPHE IN THE MAKING - August 2021

SOURCES:

·         DEFRA Consultation outcome, Genetic technologies regulation: government response, updated 29.09.21

·         Nick Talbot, Science can rescue farming. Relaxing gene editing rules should be the start, Guardian 19.09.21

·         Natalie G. Mueller and Andrew Flachs, September 2021, Domestication, crop breeding, and genetic modification are fundamentally different processes: implications for seed sovereignty and agrobiodiversity, Agriculture and Human Values

·         Barbara Van Dyck, The Stories We Trust: Regulating Genome edited Organisms, Agroecology Now! 23.07.21

·         British farmers 'could lead the way' on gene editing after Brexit, Farming UK 4.12.18

·         Jack Heinemann and others, Calling the latest gene technologies 'natural' is a semantic distraction - they must still be regulated, The Conversation, 22.09.21

·         Doria R. Gordon, et al., September 2021, Responsible governance of gene editing in agriculture and the environment, Nature Biotechnology Correspondence

·         Mitchell L. Leibowitz, et al., 2020, Chromothripsis as an on-target consequence of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, Preprint (subsequently published in Nature Biotechnology)

·         Chromothripsis: Bad news for gene editing, GM Watch, 22.09.21

Photo Creative Commons

Science born of perverse incentives

December 2019

Perverse: 'persistent in error'; 'different from what is reasonable or required'; 'perverted'; 'wicked' ... (Oxford English Dictionary)

A paper on 'Academic research in the 21st Century' describes how scientific progress and integrity are being adversely affected by the current climate of "perverse incentives" driving research.

For example, the yardstick for the most 'successful' scientist is the one who has published the greatest number of papers, and who has been awarded the most funding.

The outcome of this is an avalanche of substandard papers and short-term experiments. More care and attention is paid to writing grant proposals, in which positive results are oversold and negative results are downplayed, than on data quality. Research 'hot topics' generate a windfall in both potential papers and funding opportunities.

The pinnacle of the scientific profession is, of course, the Nobel prize.

Heavily politically-orientated food

May 2019

Earlier this year, a story appeared in Le Monde newspaper entitled "GMO poisons? The real end of the Séralini affair". Le Monde implied that a newly published study, pithily named 'GMO90+', disproved Séralini's controversial experimental results, and showed that the alarm generated by media reports on Séralini's work was fake news.

Somewhat different crops for Africa

May 2019

The WEMA project to provide 'Water Efficient Maize for Africa' is a public-private partnership co-ordinated by the African Agricultural Technology Foundation, and involving among others, agribusiness multinational Bayer-Monsanto, and national research systems in Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, and most recently Ethiopia. It is largely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Howard G. Buffet Foundations, and USAID. (African Centre for Biodiversity)

The US government / Gates Foundation project to provide 'Water Efficient Maize for Africa' (WEMA) is hitting some rocks.

Roundup on trial

May 2019

Monsanto has spent four decades manipulating the science, the regulators, the media, and patent law in pursuit of profit from its blockbuster glyphosate-based herbicide, Roundup [1]. When the Roundup-causes-cancer scare reared up, Monsanto seemed confident it could manipulate that too. Bayer, a company well used to handling litigation over harmful products [3], also seemed confident it could ride out the storm, and proceeded with its acquisition of Monsanto despite the impending law suits.

It's interesting to see what's been unfolding in the American courts, where two glyphosate-based cancer cases have so far been judged (although the appeals will no doubt stretch out for some time to come).

The CRISPR wrecking ball revealed

April 2019

US government information on genome (gene) editing describes it as a "group of technologies used by scientists to change an organism's DNA".

The most popular member of this group is 'Cas9', an enzyme which cuts DNA and can be designed to home in on a precise location in the genome [1,2]. Recently, a variant of this enzyme, 'Cas12a', has been developed: this seems to cut in a way that causes less disturbance at the cut ends of the DNA.

With regard to gene-edited crops, a team of Chinese scientists took a belated, close look at all the DNA changes arising in a novel rice model and what part of the technology caused them.

Avoiding unwanted genetic baggage

April 2019

The tool of choice for engineering crop plant DNA (be it transgenesis or gene editing) uses a plant pathogen, the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens, as the vector.

Wild-type Agrobacterium naturally introduces its own DNA into the plant genome for the purpose of creating a gall (tumour) of plant tissue in which the bacterium can live. Genetic engineers create a GM Agrobacterium, has had its gall-inducing DNA removed and replaced with gene-editing DNA which therefore becomes inserted into the plant instead.

Despite the number of decades Agrobacterium has been in used for the genetic transformation of food and feed, and despite the recognition that such DNA insertion is error-prone, and despite the regulatory need for knowledge of the exact DNA alterations in the GM crops being assessed, the techniques for fully documenting the presence of unwanted changes have only recently become available.

Let's think omnigenics

April 2019

You don't have to look too far to realise that the one, consistent, feature of all the products of GM technology is that they have failed to deliver on their promises.

In 1994, we were informed of an imminent series of world-changing GM crops destined to emerge in five-year leaps. Monsanto Vice President, Robert Fraley, listed 60 plant species which had already been genetically transformed. The first wave of GM crops would be pest-free, weed-free, and virus-proof by 2000. After this we would have GM improved foods on our tables by 2005, followed by pharmaceuticals from the fields by 2010, and finally GM-grown speciality chemicals.

The only limit to what was possible was the imagination of the genetic engineers, but the basis for this five-year leaping GM programme was never questioned, nor explained.

Now, over two decades later, how many of these leaps have actually been leapt?

Engineering the name

March 2019

'Engineer' means construct according to a design: it's something humans do. The design and construction of DNA is chemical engineering: it uses computers, lab equipment, and a lot of fancy enzymes. Lately, the DNA inside a living cell can also be re-designed and re-constructed.

Sadly, all this DNA fiddling has now got so many different names that the basic artificial alteration of life is getting lost in the semantic clutter.

We started off with 'genetic engineering' when the engineered DNA formed a 'gene' (a protein-coding unit). This was followed by 'transgenesis, cisgenesis and intragenesis (depending on where the novel gene originated), and 'genetic modification' (because it sounds less scary). Recently, the Americans hit on the term 'bio-engineering' [1], and there are also anti-sense (back-to-front) genes which block the expression of right-way-round genes. So far, that's seven names just for sticking in an extra bit of DNA.

Then, things moved on with 'gene-editing', a.k.a. 'GM2.0' or 'new GM', which depending on the technique used, can be referred to as ZNF-1, ZNF-2, ZNF-3, TALENs, Meganucleases, CRISPR/Cas, CRISPR/Cas9, ODM, RTDS [2]. This got so complicated that they all got grouped together as New Breeding Techniques or NBTs, as a catch-all phrase for a plethora of molecular nuts and bolts to change life. If you're counting, that's some twenty names for DNA engineering.

The rosy face of gene drive organisms (GDOs)

February 2019

Much attention has been focused on gene drives to eliminate mosquitoes plus all the horrible diseases they carry [1], and to eliminate invasive small mammals plus all the havoc they wreak in foreign ecosystems [2]. The take-home message is that gene drives can be harnessed for the common good as invaluable tools in medicine and conservation.

Odd really, because the patents filed for gene drives are largely for agricultural applications.

Outside the media radar lie plans to eliminate insect pests and weeds, plans to speed-breed GM seeds and higher-yielding GM livestock, and even plans to convert whole bee colonies to a GM form which can be directed by light beams to the required crop needing pollinated, and plans to create GM locusts which don't swarm.

Our irrational unclean food supply

January 2019

The next 'must-have' for our food promises to be 'clean food labels'.

Amidst growing consumer concern about chemical residues in their food, organic and all-natural foods are growing in popularity and more than half of US adults are avoiding artificial ingredients and preservatives. Public awareness of the agrichemicals in their food has been sharpened by the cancer scare surrounding Roundup weedkiller and its active ingredient, glyphosate [1].

Agriculture is one of the worst polluting industries on the planet, and GM crops, all designed for use within, and to expand, the chemical-based agricultural business model, are a continuing pillar of the problem. A huge proportion of GM crops has been transformed specifically to enable spraying with glyphosate, and many now withstand other, more obviously harmful, herbicides, or generate their own artificial insecticides.

GMOs are also a source of 'natural' supplements, food additives and processing aids [2,3,4].

Are consumers right to be wary?

Golden Rice: a curious sort of safety evaluation

October 2018

Project 'GM Golden Rice' was embarked on over 20 years ago to "reduce or eliminate much of the death and disease caused by vitamin A deficiency (VAD), which has the greatest impact on the poorest people in Africa and Southeast Asia".

Despite all these years of development, Golden Rice has still not been tested to see if it can alleviate VAD. Nowhere has it received the appropriate regulatory authorisation or institutional review board clearances, nor authorisation for unconfined environmental release. In short, GM vitamin A-enriched rice hasn't reached the starting line.

Curiously, however, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) now developing Golden Rice has asked the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Food Safety Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), and Health Canada for an opinion on the GM rice.

Since Golden Rice is clearly not intended for cultivation or consumption in any of these areas, why start by seek confirmation of its acceptability there?

Court rules: gene editing is genetic modification

September 2018

Concerns that the European Commission was getting itself in such a twist just trying to define new mutagenesis techniques that it would never get its head round how to regulate them [1] seem to have been straightened out by the European Court of Justice.

A succession of sick pigs?

May 2018

In a re-run of the GM wonder-crop revolution which promised weed-free fields growing pest-free crops, it looks like we're getting a GM wonder-pig revolution of disease-free herds (soon to be followed by flocks of GM wonder-hens and shoals of GM wonder-fish).

Scottish scientists have modified pig genes to "massively increase resistance and resilience to infection". The first targets are 'Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome Virus' (PRRSV) which causes breathing problems and leads to still births and stunted offspring when sows are infected, and African Swine fever.

Who's stirring the GMO pot?

May 2018

Would you believe that, after decades of blaming the pesky Greens for stirring up consumer resistance to GM foods, US scientists have worked out that it's really the pesky Reds!

With state funding, the researchers tried to get a better understanding of the GM food controversy, the hope being that they could "put information out there to make people better understand GMOs ... then that fear (of GMOs) might go away". To this end, professors of sociology and agronomy in Iowa State University joined forces to look at how the media portrayed biotechnology to the public.

If this smells like a grand plan to counter the increasing US public scepticism about GM and all things connected to it, read on and decide for yourself.

Taking on GMO propaganda

March 2018

Remember Robert, and his answer to the Cornell University 'GMO Debate' which wasn't a debate?  His GM LESSONS, FOR FREE, FOREVER (June, 2017) are well worth viewing.

Now, our Robert is planning to make a documentary film about his encounters with Cornell's massive  GM propaganda machine.  If he can raise enough funds, Robert also hopes to go to India and Bangladesh plus Brazil and Argentina to meet the people affected by the GMO-industrial agricultural systems there, and to tell their story.

The film will be called 'Grow More Organic Wholesome Tasty Food': check out the trailer for it at www.gmowtf.com.  It's worth viewing the trailer to catch Cornell's promotional material for its GMO Debate which Robert has incorporated into the background. 

You might also like to give a small donation to encourage Robert in his quest to keep us supplied with 100% Monsanto-free information on GM.

SOURCE:

·         Please fund GMOWTF's documentary on GM foods and crops, GM Watch, 24.01.18

Missed molecular scars

January 2018

In October last year, the Wall Street Journal's Global Food Forum provided a platform for the biotech industry to promote its latest GM escapade. This is, of course, 'gene editing' which can be done using a variety of different techniques [1] all of which are fancy versions of GM.

Executives are busy strategising on how to 'sell' edited-GMOs to a suspicious and sceptical public.

Fake news machine

December 2017

'Fake news' - false, often sensational information disseminated under the guise of news reporting. - Collins 'Word of the Year' 2017

COMMENT

Cornell University's 'Alliance for Science' has announced a further contribution to its work from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Originally endowed with $5.6 million in 2014, this new grant brings the total Gates' contribution to $12 million.

The mission is to promote GM in agriculture by "depolarising" the global debate and training the uninformed in "evidence based decision making". One of the Alliance's major initiatives has been to teach "strategic communications" to local advocates so they can spread the word, and train others in developing countries where GMOs are contentious.