Deliciously pink fish

January 2019

British scientists seem to be heavily into improving farmed fish these days. They might have preferred to feed us GM fish (the patents would be worth a bob or two), but Frankenfish aren't going to feature on consumers' wish-list any time soon so they're settling for GM fish food additives instead [1].

The 'problem' the latest GM venture is trying to solve is that fish in the wild eat all sorts of different things which can end up in, and colour, their flesh all manner of pinks and oranges. Farmed fish have a very boring and unnatural diet, and end up fish-coloured, that is white or pale grey.

GM plants grow polio vaccines

October 2017

World-wide, polio is now a disease of the past in all but two countries. The battle has been waged with mass vaccination programmes reaching, for example, 95% of infants in Europe. Even in Pakistan and Afghanistan, polio's last stand, the annual incidence has been reducing dramatically year-on-year and is down to a few tens of cases. Indeed, conquering this virus has been one of the great success stories of modern medicine.

Metallic rice

February 2017

Global mapping shows an "unequivocal overlap" of poverty, micronutrient deficiency and rice consumption.

Estimates suggest some 15% of the world's population suffer from iron-deficiency anaemia, and a similar number from zinc-deficiency. These have serious consequences for health and energy, immune- and nervous-system function, gene regulation and child development, and for productivity.

Part of the problem is that rice doesn't have enough iron and zinc in it for people with little else to eat. From the biotech scientist's point of view, this is the rice's fault. The answer is therefore to insert artificial genes which drive an unnatural accumulation of iron and zinc in the rice plants.

GM soya harms new-born goats

April 2015
GM-free Scotland has regularly voiced concerns about the lack of GM-food safety studies focused on the most vulnerable populations, especially the very young. Routine feeding tests use healthy, post-weaning laboratory rats fed standard laboratory chow with optimised nutrition: they won't identify problems in infancy.

During the first hours after birth, before the mothers' milk as we know it is produced, suckling mammals receive 'colostrum'.

Colostrum is a clear fluid of concentrated nutrients. It's packed with essential fats and proteins including immune system and growth promoters, protective antibodies and tissue maturation factors. These antibiotic properties of colostrum plus its role in intestinal cell development are thought to be responsible for the formation of a healthy digestive system and gut microbial flora.

In other words, colostrum is what the vulnerable newly-born need to protect themselves from disease and to form the healthy organs and tissues vital for their future growth.

So, what happens to the mother's colostrum when she eats GM food?

Real-life harm from eating GMOs

February 2015

Another piece of unique and very disquieting science was published late in 2014.

The study modelled a real-life situation in which the subjects were eating an unknown mixture of all the GM foods on the market. It was designed to investigate how a practical and relevant post-marketing safety monitoring scheme might be structured.

Genetically modified humans?

February 2015

All the myths and assumptions of a "vanishingly small" risk of horizontal gene transfer from GM food into humans have now been blown apart.

In the prevailing culture of denial, regulators and industry have peddled a science-free rationale on how impossible any harm from horizontal gene transfer is.

But now we know:

• DNA in food is not digested down to an amorphous mix of its nucleic-acid subunits in the gut: it can survive in strands (up to and including as big as genes) which can, and do, pass into the body
• Dietary DNA can circulate to all tissues, where it can be incorporated into the genome if it has even a short sequence similar to the genome of the consuming organism
• Most DNA isn't a gene which codes for protein but is regulatory in nature and highly active in altering gene function; unlike genes, such DNA can consist of very short sequences.
• Some DNA is naturally prone to mutation and change
• Some DNA is mobile and can jump from one location in the genome to another, or into another genome

The pseudo-science which claims that the DNA carefully crafted by human hand to work in soya or maize couldn't possibly affect human consumers is definitely wrong in the case of 80% of currently commercialised GM crops. And possibly in all of them.

No so smart Smartstax

January 2015

Image © Greenpeace

Agapito-Tenfen et al.'s study looking at the effects of breeding GM plants together to stack multiple artificial DNA constructs into one crop [1] has thrown a very uncomfortable shadow over Monsanto's 'SmartStax' maize.

Indications from this study are that, even with only two transformation events stacked, there's reduced expression of the novel genes and significant changes in biochemical pathways such as energy-production, detoxification, cellular processes, genetic information processing, and others. If this degree of perturbation happens when only two events are stacked, what is happening in SmartStax which has eight events stacked? 

Less than almost zero safety testing

January 2015

CC photo by International Maize and
Wheat Improvement Center on Flickr

In recent years, more than a quarter of the GM crops in commercial production were 'stacked' with more than one artificial gene construct (or 'event'). Such plants have been produced by breeding single-construct varieties together until all the desired GM traits were together in a single crop.

Despite the recognition that crossing two GMOs will produce an entirely novel GMO, stacked plants are being approved on the unjustifiable basis that all their parent GMOs have been approved.

Even in Europe, which has arguably the most stringent GM regulations in the world, and requires a full risk-assessment, stacked GMOs have been approved without investigation of the final product.

At the end of 2014, the first study was published which looked at the metabolic consequences of breeding plants with two artificial gene constructs from single-event parent GMOs.

How much disease is Roundup causing?

December 2014

Pesticide warning sign. CC photo by the justified sinner on Flickr

"We have dispersed hundreds of millions of tonnes of (chemical pollutants and GMOs) in the ecosystem. Most are stable and toxic and penetrate every form of life. For instance, results show that there is no human breast milk on the planet that is free from insecticides (such as DDT) and plasticizers. There is no fetus without several hundred pollutants attached to its genes. There is no Member of the European Parliament measured without at least fifty pollutants in his blood." (G. E. Séralini's team)

This toxic mix from our environment and food now includes artificial DNA, analogues of viral DNA such as the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus gene promoter (CaMV), novel proteins, analogue 'Bt' insecticides, and increased levels of agrichemicals associated with GMOs.

Within the last 20 years there has been an alarming increase in serious illnesses in the US, along with a marked decrease in life expectancy. The onset of serious illness is appearing in increasingly younger cohorts.

Following on from the data presented last year by Dr. Nancy Swanson describing disturbingly parallel annual increases of chronic diseases and glyphosate use [1], her investigation has now been expanded and published.

Fit as a weed

September 2014

 

Wild rice. CC photo by Denrdoica cerulea on Flickr

The vast majority of GM crops now being grown commercially have had a gene inserted to make them resistant to glyphosate herbicide.

 

After spraying with glyphosate, the yield of the GM crop is protected because the weeds competing for nutrients are killed.

 

Gene escape from glyphosate-tolerant crops into wild relatives has never been considered an important problem because unless the wild GM derivatives are sprayed with the herbicide, they will have no special fitness advantage and no reason to run riot. But, this 'wisdom' has been challenged by a team of Chinese scientists.

 

Glyphosate kills plants by inactivating an enzyme, 'EPSPS'*. EPSPS is vital to a number of key metabolic processes because it's responsible for generating a class of essential amino acids (the building block of proteins). These amino acids are vital to the formation of, for example, the plant's supportive material (lignin), plant growth hormone, and a huge range of immune-system substances, which together can account for as much as 35% of a plant's biomass. 

Horizontal gene transfer is widespread

July 2014

Photo from Creative Commons

From GM day-1, there's been a culture of denial over the possibility of artificial genes moving between organisms (horizontal gene transfer).

 

Some lip-service has been paid to the danger of anti-biotic-resistance marker genes (ARMs)* moving from GM crops to bacteria in the environment to create untreatable diseases. Europe even decided to ban GM crops containing such genes, but somehow it never seems to have happened.

Food genes inside you

October 2013

Photo by By Engl101caison (Own work)
[CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
via Wikimedia Commons

Unless it's been processed out of existence, DNA is present in all food and feed. Because the amount of DNA is low compared with other constituents and doesn't have a significant nutritional value, few studies have been carried out on how the body handles it.

This has allowed regulators to issue blandly reassuring advice about the safety of GM DNA based on generalisations and dogma, and very little in the way of science.

For example, DNA in food has long been claimed to be rapidly degraded in the digestive tract. This assertion is backed up by: “a large number of experimental studies on livestock” have failed to detect GM DNA in animal tissues and fluids. And just in case anyone points out the foregoing aren't quite true, be reassured that, even if an occasional DNA fragment does end up in animal produce, this is no different from the occasional non-GM fragment which also ends up there.

The messages of mere “fragments” of GM DNA which occur only “occasionally” and are “no different” from any other DNA is clear: there is nothing to worry about.

Recent research, however, is repainting the picture.

The secret viral gene in most GM crops

March 2013

Electron micrograph of CaMV virions
Image By Patou2602 (Own work)
[CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
via Wikimedia Commons

Fourteen years ago, the Institute of Science in Society (ISiS) issued a warning. It pointed out that the artificial genes in most GM crops are activated by a very problematic stretch of viral DNA copied and adapted from a plant pathogen, the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV).

This activator DNA, commonly referred to as the 'CaMV 35S promoter', is able to switch on genes in most, if not all, life-forms: it also has an inherent tendency to fragment and recombine with other DNA. Outside its viral-particle origins, the potential for these characteristics to promote horizontal gene transfer, create new pathogens or drive inappropriate gene expression must exist. Moreover, synthetic versions of CaMV 35S have been rejigged to boost gene expression: this increases the risk of all the above properties of the promoter.

DNA throws wobblies

April 2011

There is only one predictable thing about transgenic organisms: they will change with time.

However, the way in which they will change is entirely unpredictable.

All GMOs are subject to inescapable destabilising influences. These come from intrinsic structural qualities of their artificial DNA, and, from the natural life-processes within which the artificial DNA must operate. Both act to alter the carefully manufactured DNA cassette, and once destabilised, anything can happen.

Viral promoters

April 2011

Artificial DNA copied from viruses is in most GM plants.

Almost every GM crop ever created has included of a useful little piece of DNA copied from the 'Cauliflower Mosaic Virus' (CaMV). This chunk of DNA is referred to as 'CaMV 35S', and as its name suggests, it is part of the DNA found in a virus which commonly infects cauliflower and related vegetables. In infected plants, its normal function is to switch on the genes needed for the virus to replicate itself. In GM plants its function is to switch on the engineered DNA attached to it which otherwise would likely remain dormant: effectively it overpowers the host cell's own self-regulatory mechanisms to permanently turn on the inserted genes which then generate huge amounts of the transgenic proteins. The value of the CaMV 35S 'promoter' to genetic engineers lies in its promiscuity: it acts on all types of DNA in the genome of all types of plants.