GE lessons from Britain - 4

by

CARROLL DU CHATEAU

PUBLIC AWARENESS GROWS

Although the tomatoes for the

Flavr Savr

had been developed in England and the tomato paste had been labelled as genetically modified, up until then few people had understood (or indeed cared about) what genetic modification actually meant.

In hindsight there was a feeling that the DNA-altered products had been introduced stealthily, with little public discussion. Observed Lord Melchett of Greenpeace, "This caused real outrage." (21)

Bad PR.

Concerns were greeted with a "we know what’s good for you" attitude from both agritech companies and scientists. Monsanto launched a series of advertisements to explain their case. Colin Merrett, Monsanto’s Cambridge-based biotechnology development manager, explains: "We were so convinced of the value and vision of the whole technology…To me it’s a very convincing story. A wonderful tribute to science – allowing us to improve what plants can do for us without using the energy-intensive and chemical-intensive regimes of the last century. What could be more natural than a plant making its own proteins?"

However, the ads, rather than mollifying the situation, alerted the masses to what the company was doing and actually made the situation much worse – a fact which is admitted by people in the business side of the organisation today. (22)

Choice.

In line with its approach on BSE, the UK government was initially reluctant to label GM foods, while Monsanto insisted it couldn’t be done – a claim that was clearly untrue. (23)

Bad Press.

By now the press had taken up the cause, not only identifying and reporting on genuine worries, but also on ideas and experiments that were still at lab stage as though they were already in the food chain. According to Lord Soulsby and many others, the controversy was whipped up by irresponsible headlines which were totally unethical, especially when the GM issue was difficult enough for even scientists to understand.

Counter pressure.

Well-organised, well-funded and well-meaning self-appointed Green-style pressure groups, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Soil Association, the Green Alliance and many more –- backed by Prince Charles -- banded together to mount a hard-hitting anti-GM campaign. The Soil Association ruled that no organic food could contain even one percent of GM-produced food.

Scientific squabbling.

The controversy over safety testing, both in the scientific and public arenas, opened the way for scientists to throw up scare stories around genetic modification. Most damaging for the GM industry was Arpad Pusztai’s experiment with GM potatoes. Pusztai claimed the GM potatoes damaged the gut of laboratory rats. He also suggested that not just the lectin gene which had been added, but the virus promoter that had transported it into the plant (the same virus promoter that had been used to control the activity of many new genes) might have had unforeseen effects. (24)

Although Pusztai’s experiment was soundly rubbished, first by a collection of 23 high-ranking international scientists, then by the Royal Society, his claims regularly resurfaced in the media, including the

Lancet

where his experiment was finally published on October 16th 1999, despite its lack of scientific rigour. The editor of the

Lancet

wrote at the time: "The issue of genetically modified foods has been badly mishandled by everyone involved. Governments should never have allowed these products into the food chain without insisting on rigorous testing for health." (25)

A more recent claim (17 November 1999) by a team from the University of New York, is that Bt maize (maize with an added Bacillus thuringiensis gene which makes it toxic to some insects) is leaking toxins into the soil through its root system. In the US 15 million acres of Bt corn – 20% of the total crop -- were planted in 1998. "The fact that the toxin was released from the roots was unexpected," said Prof Guenther Stozky of the University’s lab of microbial ecology who led the research. He went on to say that the Bt toxin was a large protein molecule which they’d considered too large to cross the root membrane. (26)

Not-so-secret political agenda.

The public, confused about the safety of the new technology, called for a moratorium while more research was carried out. The scientific community, the business sector and the government treated this as little more than the result of scare-mongering by pressure groups such as Greenpeace and the reaction of an ill-informed public.

As late as February 20, 1999 the government stance was obdurate to a point where Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote in the Daily Telegraph under the headline "We stand firm" rejecting the call for a moratorium on GM crop development. (Nuffield Council on Bioethics, GM Crops: The ethical and social issues.)

Professor Derek Burke, former chairman of the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes gave a speech in Washington in November 1999. His contention: That pressure groups, aided by the press "have put together a sustained and highly professional press campaign to discredit GM foods, and in particular, GM soya." (27)

Robin Grove-White of the Centre For Environmental Change, Lancaster University, has another point-of-view. He suggests that the government had been driven by its huge stake in the success of the new biotechnology. "Hundreds of millions of pounds had already been put into research in the UK. There was an alliance between government, industry, molecular biology and scientists…the Biotech and Biology Research Council especially had developed enormously close ties with government. Tony Blair’s line was, ‘This is a winner for Britain -- we’re good at this – and Luddites mustn’t be allowed to get in the way’."

Footnotes:

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