Uncomfortable questions about GMOs

December 2018

Twenty years and two continents apart, two scientists sounded the same warning about the same GM crop. Both were mad-keen on the promises of genetic engineering, until they looked at the results of their own experiments and changed their minds. The crop which brought about this dawning was the potato [1].

In Scotland, 1998, Dr. Arpad Pusztai spoke out about the multiple adverse effects he saw in his laboratory rats fed GM spuds. In America, 2018, Dr. Caius Rommens reviewed his years of work in industry creating thousands of GMOs: he realised his "almost daily experience" was that "most GMO varieties were stunted, chlorotic (yellowed), mutated, or sterile, and many of them died quickly, like prematurely-born babies".

Rommens is now very clear that real scientists are people who love to study the natural world, not to modify it. Those who call themselves 'scientists' today spend their days staring at computer screens, generating and analysing numbers. Their focus is on imposing a controlled predictability on the capricious natural world so as to liberate society from the erratic forces of nature. Genetic engineering is not science, nor even a profession but "the expression of distorted mind-set".

Ever expanding miracle grass

April 2017

... the sorcerer's apprentice recited the magic words, and the golf course grew bigger and bigger, engulfing the world with its ever-expanding miracle grass that never dies ... 

Unfortunately, this isn't a fairy-tale. The 'ever-expanding grass' for golf courses is Scotts Miracle-Gro creeping bentgrass genetically transformed never to die when sprayed with glyphosate herbicide; the 'magic words' were what Scotts and its partner, Monsanto, said to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to allow the GM grass to be field-tested without any environmental impact assessment; and it is, indeed, growing 'bigger and bigger', because although the novel grass never made it to any golf course turf-managers, it is nevertheless rampaging across the Oregon landscape and beyond.

Frankly bizarre

May 2014

As awareness of the issues surrounding GM crops and food escalates in the US, and the myth of 'acceptance' in the homeland of GM wears thin, the quirkiest GM-promotion yet has been launched.

'Mr. Foode', or 'Frank' to his friends, is a cuddly, myopic, aged corn-cob genetically engineered to be male and to grow eyes.

Gene pollution update 2013

November 2013

Wheat growing in Oregon, USA. Photo Gary Halvorson
Oregon State Archives [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons

The chance discovery of illegal GM wheat growing in a field in Oregon highlighted some uncomfortable home-truths (see GM CONTAMINATION DÉJÀ VU - June 2013).

Despite its wholesale move to GM agriculture and widespread field-trials of experimental GM plants, America isn't monitoring gene 'escapes': the rogue herbicide-tolerant wheat only became obvious when it survived spraying with Roundup herbicide, and its source has never been pin-pointed. While it seems unlikely that a single field could become so widely contaminated accidentally, no other similarly polluted areas have been identified.