Intellectual Basis for GM Business Flawed
The $73.5 billion global biotech business has to grapple with the science which says that the human genome might not be a "tidy collection of independent genes" after all, with each sequence of DNA linked to a single function, such as a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease.
Instead, genes appear to operate in a complex network, and interact and overlap with one another and with other components in ways not yet fully understood. Writing in the New York Times, Denise Caruso reported that a consortium of scientists published findings that challenge the traditional view of how genes function. A four-year effort was organized by the United States National Human Genome Research Institute and carried out by 35 groups from 80 organizations around the world. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/business/yourmoney/01frame.html
The presumption that genes operate independently has been institutionalized since 1976, when the first biotech company was founded. In fact, it is the economic and regulatory foundation on which the entire biotechnology industry is built. But when it comes to innovations in food and medicine, presumptions can be dangerous. For example, over-prescribing antibiotics for virtually every ailment has given rise to "superbugs" that are now virtually un-killable.
The scientists who invented recombinant DNA in 1973 built their innovation on this mechanistic, "one gene, one protein" principle. Scientists then believed that a gene from any organism could fit neatly and predictably into a larger design - one that products and companies could be built around, and that could be protected by intellectual-property laws - what New Zealand molecular biologist Jack Heinemann calls the industrial gene. "The industrial gene is one that can be defined, owned, tracked, proven acceptably safe, proven to have uniform effect, sold and recalled."
In the United States, the Patent and Trademark Office allows genes to be patented on the basis of this uniform effect or function. In fact, it defines a gene in these terms, as an ordered sequence of DNA "that encodes a specific functional product." Australia's patenting laws uses a similar presumption.
While no one has yet challenged the legal basis for gene patents, the biotech industry itself has long since acknowledged the science behind the question. Barbara A. Caulfield of Affymetrix noted that, "scientists announced that they had decoded the genetic structures of one of the most virulent forms of malaria and that it may involve interactions among as many as 500 genes."
Professor Heinemann, who writes and teaches extensively on biosafety issues said, "regulators may be unaware of the potential impacts arising from these network effects." Yet to date, every attempt to challenge safety claims for biotech products has been categorically dismissed, or derided as unscientific.
A 2004 editorial in the journal Nature Genetics beseeched academic and corporate researchers to start releasing their proprietary data to reviewers, so it might receive the kind of scrutiny required of credible science.
After reading Denise Caruso's article Tom Philpot wrote in Gristmill about the implications for human foods. Human bodies require more than a bunch of isolates mixed together, dyed, and packaged. Nutrients work not alone, but within the context of whole foods. Pollan calls it "nutritionism". But as incidence of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related maladies surges, nutritionism is looking more and more suspect. http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/7/3/122551/9999
Monsanto and other GM-seed companies like Syngenta and Dupont have applied a similar theory to seeds. They take what they see as a desirable trait -- say, the ability to withstand one of their own herbicides -- isolate it, and splice it into seeds for a crop like corn or soy. For ten years now, the FDA and USDA have reliably nodded their approval when the biotech industry comes out with a new gene-altered wonder seed.
Global GM plantings surged from nothing in 1995 to 250 million acres today. By 2004 in the United States, 80 percent of all soy and 45 percent of all corn -- the two crops that prop up industrial food production - were GM. (Since then, the biofuel craze has almost certainly pushed those numbers up.) Shockingly, according to a recent report, one company - Monsanto's agricultural arm - owns the proprietary GM traits for more than 90 percent of the gene-altered corn, soy, cotton, and canola planted worldwide. Further, we have no idea what sort of long-term effect all of those gene-altered corn, soy, and cotton plants are having on ecosystems.
These and other GM reports can be found at www.gmwatch.org which provides an excellent enews service free.
