It's 'can, could' fear. Not necessarily wrong to be cautious and it's right to examine possibilities, but I've come to be suspicious of the agenda behind it.1.2 MYTH:
Genetic engineering is precise and the results are predictable
TRUTH:
Genetic engineering is crude and imprecise, and the results are unpredictable
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The first step in genetically engineering plants, the process of cutting and splicing genes in the test tube, is precise, but subsequent steps are not. In particular, the process of inserting a genetically modified gene into the DNA of a plant cell is crude, uncontrolled, and imprecise, and causes mutations – heritable changes – in the plant’s DNA blueprint.1 These mutations can alter the functioning of the natural genes of the plant in unpredictable and potentially harmful ways.2,3 Other procedures associated with producing GM crops, including tissue culture, also produce mutations.1
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But manipulating one or two genes does not just produce one or two desired traits. Instead, just a single change at the level of the DNA can give rise to multiple changes within the organism.2,4 These changes are known as pleiotropic effects. They occur because genes do not act as isolated units but interact with one another, and the functions and structures that the engineered genes confer on the organism interact with other functional units of the organism.
Because of these diverse interactions, and because even the simplest organism is extremely complex, it is impossible to predict the impacts of even a single GM gene on the organism. It is even more impossible to predict the impact of the GMO on its environment – the complexity of living systems is too great.
In short, unintended, uncontrolled mutations occur during the GM process and complex interactions occur at multiple levels within the organism as a result of the insertion of even a single new gene. For these reasons, a seemingly simple genetic modification can give rise to many unexpected changes in the resulting crop and the foods produced from it. The unintended changes could include alterations in the nutritional content of the food, toxic and allergenic effects, poor crop performance, and generation of characteristics that harm the environment.
These unexpected changes are especially dangerous because they are irreversible. Even the worst chemical pollution diminishes over time as the pollutant is degraded by physical and biological mechanisms. But GMOs are living organisms. Once released into the ecosystem, they do not degrade and cannot be recalled, but multiply in the environment and pass on their GM genes to future generations. Each new generation creates more opportunities to interact with other organisms and the environment, generating even more unintended and unpredictable side-effects.
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1. Latham JR, Wilson AK, Steinbrecher RA. The mutational consequences of plant transformation. J Biomed Biotechnol. 2006; 2006(2): 25376.
2. Wilson AK, Latham JR, Steinbrecher RA. Transformation-induced mutations in transgenic plants: Analysis and biosafety implications. Biotechnol Genet Eng Rev. 2006; 23: 209–238.
3. Schubert D. A different perspective on GM food. Nat Biotechnol. Oct 2002; 20(10): 969.
4. Pusztai A, Bardocz S, Ewen SWB. Genetically modified foods: Potential human health effects. In: D’Mello JPF, ed. Food Safety: Contaminants and Toxins. Wallingford, Oxon: CABI Publishing 2003:347–372.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaizeThe Maize Genetics Cooperation Stock Center, funded by the USDA Agricultural Research Service and located in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a stock center of maize mutants. The total collection has nearly 80,000 samples. The bulk of the collection consists of several hundred named genes, plus additional gene combinations and other heritable variants. There are about 1000 chromosomal aberrations (e.g., translocations and inversions) and stocks with abnormal chromosome numbers (e.g., tetraploids). Genetic data describing the maize mutant stocks as well as myriad other data about maize genetics can be accessed at MaizeGDB, the Maize Genetics and Genomics Database
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Primary sequencing of the maize genome was completed in 2008.[27] On November 20, 2009, the consortium published results of its sequencing effort in Science.[28] The genome, 85% of which is composed of transposons, was found to contain 32,540 genes (By comparison, the human genome contains about 2.9 billion bases and 26,000 genes). Much of the maize genome has been duplicated and reshuffled by helitrons - group of rolling circle transposons.
The EU, for example, has invested more than €300 million in research on the biosafety of GMOs. Its recent report states: “The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies.” The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.
Apart from the vested interests that depend on ideological opposition to the concept, there is also the industry of internet articles and sentiment that generates click-traffic and advertising aimed particularly at anti-science/distrust authority/natural/alternative medicine-types.
Is this a warranted fear?
But manipulating one or two genes does not just produce one or two desired traits. Instead, just a single change at the level of the DNA can give rise to multiple changes within the organism.2,4 These changes are known as pleiotropic effects. They occur because genes do not act as isolated units but interact with one another, and the functions and structures that the engineered genes confer on the organism interact with other functional units of the organism.
Because of these diverse interactions, and because even the simplest organism is extremely complex, it is impossible to predict the impacts of even a single GM gene on the organism. It is even more impossible to predict the impact of the GMO on its environment – the complexity of living systems is too great.
From: The Safety of Genetically Modified Foods Produced through BiotechnologyConcern has been expressed about the randomness with which genes are inserted into the host by current genetic engineering processes. This could, and does, result in pleiotropic and insertional mutagenic effects. The former term refers to the situation where a single gene causes multiple changes in the host phenotype and the latter to the situation where the insertion of the new gene induces changes in the expression of other genes. Such changes due to random insertion might cause the silencing of genes, changes in their level of expression, or, potentially, the turning on of existing genes that were not previously being expressed. Pleiotropic effects could be manifested as unexpected new metabolic reactions arising from the activity of the inserted gene product on existing substrates or as changes in flow rates through normal metabolic pathways (Conner and Jacobs, 1999).
Unexpected and potentially undesirable pleiotropic or mutagenic changes in the genome of the host do occur (e.g., see a recent listing by Kuiper et al., 2001), but these would likely be revealed by their effects on the development, growth, or fertility of the host, or by the extensive testing of its chemical composition compared with isogenic untransformed plants, which is a necessary part of any safety evaluation of transgenic crops.
In the U.S., since 1987, the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has completed over 5000 field trials with more than 70 different transgenic plant species. The only unexpected result was a mutation in a color gene and gene silencing through changes in the methylation status of these genes that led to unexpected color patterns in petunia flowers. Both of these effects are also seen in conventional plant breeding (Meyer et al., 1992). While the possibility of an undetected increase in a toxic component in a new food cannot be entirely eliminated, the current safeguards make this unlikely, and no toxicologically or nutritionally significant changes of this type are evident in the transgenic plants so far marketed for food production.
It is within their rights but, given the economic implications, one would hope that their decisions would be based on sound scientific study rather that fear mongering by special interest groups and ideologues that are willing to take advantage of the lack of specific knowledge in the general public to spread misinformation and promote their political and economic agendas.
Manipulating the genes of plants by standard practice, changes the whole DNA of the plant. Trial and error verses precise change. Sounds like going backwards to me.
What I love is the number of comments showing the readers either didn't read past the initial paragraph or if they did were unable to understand that the post is a work of satire being used to make a point.
