Genetically Engineered Food: Promises & Perils

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Terminator and traitor technologies are much more complicated than any transgenic crops on the market today-, and it is not clear how well they will work, says Hope Shand, research director of the action group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration, a nonprofit organization advocating sustainable uses of technology. According to Shand, patents on Terminator and traitor technologies have been issued to Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, BASF, Delta Pine Land Co., the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Cornell, Iowa State and Purdue universities, for use in Canada, several European countries, Australia, South Korea and South Africa.

Safe to Eat?

The biotechnology industry and its promoters claim GM food is perfectly safe and has been thoroughly tested. However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not require safety tests for transgenic food before it goes on the market. Instead, biotech companies have been doing their own evaluations and presenting summaries to the FDA in a "consultation process." This procedure came out of the agency's 1992 decision to regard gene-spliced food as "substantially equivalent," -i.e., no different than food produced through conventional breeding techniques. This characterization allowed the FDA to classify transgenic food as "generally recognized as safe," which does not require pre-market safety testing.

Last year, the FDA changed its tune and announced a new policy that acknowledges transgenic food is different. The agency now requires data from biotech companies about each genetic modification, though FDA officials have not announced how they will use that information in their decision-making, says Michael Hansen, a biologist with the Consumer Policy Institute, which is part of the Consumers Union.

Meanwhile, a growing chorus of scientists are challenging the concept that GM foods are "substantially equivalent" to conventionally bred foods. According to Richard Lacey, a British medical doctor and microbiologist who specializes in food safety, genetic engineering is not only "inherently risky" but also "substantially different" from natural breeding methods, which involve sexual reproduction between the same or closely related species. With natural breeding, "every gene remains under the control of the organism's intricately balanced regulatory system," Lacey says in a deposition for a lawsuit against the FDA for releasing untested GM food into world markets. "The substances produced by the genes are those that have been within the species for a long stretch of biological time."

With genetic engineering, biotechnologists take cells that were produced with normal reproduction methods and randomly insert foreign genetic material into them. "This always disturbs the function of the region of native DNA into which the material wedges," Lacey says. Foreign genes won't become activated in their new home by themselves, so other gene., known as promoters, must be included to try to make sure the gene functions in its new environment. These genes usually come from viruses or bacteria. "Marker genes, which commonly are derived from a bacterial gene for antibiotic resistance. are used so biotechnologists can find the cells that received the target trait.

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