 |
Field of Genes Pt 3: Effects of Genetically Altered
foods AVRIL BENOIT(?) (CBC): Hello again, I'm Avril Benoit
with Michael Enright.
You're listening to This Morning, here on CBC Radio 1. We now continue with
our
series on genetically modified foods. With the look at some of the science
involve. This Morning producer Bob Carty is in Ottawa. Good morning, Bob.
BOB CARTY (CBC reporter): Hi, Avril.
BENOIT: Now the science of genetic engineering is complex. It's an immense
field and 25 minutes can't possibly cover it all.
CARTY: It's giving me a few headaches in the past few weeks.
BENOIT: How are you planning to approach this?
CARTY: Well, I think we have to narrow down because it is such a wild
field...
wide field. It's a... you know, there's a lot of issues about resistance of
pests and weeds, and super-weeds. There's questions of environmental
diversity,
about possible spread of these biologically changed organisms into other
organisms. There's even concern about increased antibiotic resistance because
antibiotics are used as markers inside genes.
All of that we're going to put aside, and today, look at something that's
really quite new just in the past year. And that is some beginning evidence,
very preliminary evidence that there might be some human health concerns. Now,
I should make a couple of caveats here. The regulators, you know, food...
Health Canada the FDA in the United States, and the regulators in England, and
the biotech companies themselves insist, and they're quite right, there is no
proof as yet. There's no evidence of... solid evidence of human health dangers
from these kinds of new foods. The soya, the corn, the cotton, the potatoes,
the tomatoes, et cetera. But there is some intriguing new evidence and it
arises out of sort of a new, more modern concept of genetics.
BENOIT: Well, the traditional concept is what? That they're the building
blocks of life, the blueprints that give plants, and animals, and people their
characteristics.
CARTY: And people say that with sort of a mechanistic kind of view. You know,
that one gene produces one kind of trait. One gene in us produces blue eyes
or...
BENOIT: Right.
CARTY: In my family's case, a big nose, I guess.
BENOIT: And that's not true?
CARTY: Well, it is in part. It's partly true. But it's not just as simple as
saying, one gene gets one trait. It's how they act... the new understanding of
genetics is how the gene operates in relation to other genes. And where it
sits
inside the DNA structure, you know? An individual plant might have 40,000
genes. If the gene you put in is at the beginning, it's going to do something
different to the plant than if it's at the end or the middle of it. It sits on
top of another gene. So this is a much more, lets call it, ecological view
genes. One thing always affects the others, if you want.
In the ecology, we saw the example of rabbits being introduced in Australia
some years ago, and they had no natural predators so they just went wild and
destroyed tremendous amounts of grass lands. Now, they were trying to put
something positive into the environment, but they changed many, many other
things in the environment as a result. That's the new understanding of the
insertion of genes, that it can be unpredictable.
BENOIT: Right. Now these scientists, how do they actually insert the genes?
CARTY: There actually, you know, is a gene gun. I actually saw one. And it
actually has a little 22-calibre casing for a little shot to go in. That's one
of two ways that genes get into cells. The hurdle is that cells don't want
foreign material inside them. They have natural defences. So there's two ways.
One, is you take a little gene gun and the shot you're using is in effect
tiny,
tiny, tiny pellets of gold or tungsten that are coated with genetic material,
with DNA. And the gun goes off and it hits right into... it splatters a piece
of root or a piece of stem, or a leaf of a plant. And the material goes
physically inside those cells. The other way is using bacteria, because
bacteria can also be invasive. They are pathogens, they're diseases. They
actually can go inside other cells and leave genetic material behind. So...
BENOIT: And you would insert that how? With a syringe or something, or?
CARTY: You would basically culture the bacteria and develop your gene, the
gene you want. You can isolate the one gene you want to put in. And you put it
inside the bacteria and let the bacteria go to work on the other cells,
just in
a petri dish right?
BENOIT: Right.
CARTY: And so that's how they get it in. I tried to think of what that would
sound like in radio so, maybe you'll indulge me just for one moment? This is
more or less how I imagined the insertion of genes would work. Have a listen.
(SOUND EFFECTS)
CARTY: There we go.
BENOIT: Oh Bob, you're out of control.
CARTY: Courtesy of Warner Brothers, and see too many cartoons out there.
BENOIT: Now what were you trying to do there? What was that about?
CARTY: You didn't get that image?
BENOIT: You know, my imagination was working in overdrive. But I kept seeing
cartoon figures bouncing around.
CARTY: Yeah, what I imagined happening, and it actually comes from a
discussion I had with a geneticist about this process. It's a random process.
It's like imagining trying to get a beautiful statue, a priceless piece of
art,
say a Michelangelo, wanting to get that into a museum, and doing that and
putting it on display. And doing that by putting it on a catapult and hurling
across the street, through the windows of the museum, and hoping that it lands
upright without damaging itself and without destroying any other priceless
artefacts in the museum so, let me demonstrate if... play that sound again.
BENOIT: Okay.
CARTY: Okay, here's the gene, the statue, okay? There's the catapult, that's
the gene gun being put into the cell. Here it goes.
BENOIT: It's flying through the air now? Across the street?
CARTY: Across the street. And it crashed the cell lining, come on now, there
it goes, and it lands inside. But we don't know where and how and what damage
it does and whether it's okay.
BENOIT: So for all we know, it's upside down.
CARTY: I feel like Bill Nie(?) the science guy, how's that?
BENOIT: That's wonderful. It sounds like a random process.
CARTY: Yes, and this is true on... if you talk to both sides of the debate,
the pro and con side of the genetic engineering debate, everyone agrees that
there are certain things that are fairly predictable and other things that are
not. It's predictable... you can isolate individual genes. But once you put
them in by either of these two methods we have so far, the bacteria method or
the gene gun method, we won't really know where it lands up in the
chromosomes,
where it lands up inside cells.
So, the biotech companies, in effect, get a lot of what they call undesirable
cells. They use that word rather than say maybe a more crude word. They get a
lot of mutations, a lot of mutants in the cells they develop. And their
hope is
that one out of a million lands in the right place, the statue standing
upright
without hurting anything else. And the trick is really how to eliminate all
the
others undesirables. That's what they do at Monsanto.
I went down there to have a look at how that process of weeding out really
works. And after the gene gun process or the bacteria insertion process are...
they do this at a rate of about 10,000 cells at a time. What happens is, those
cells start replicating. They put them into environments where they will
reproduce really quickly. And of course, you're probably worried about that
tungsten and gold earlier? Remember that?
BENOIT: Yeah.
CARTY: Well that's left behind in the original cells. But all the offspring of
that cell have those new genes inside. And they grow them up in petri dishes,
sort of like you know, you have a cutting of a plant and you put it in a
jar of
water on your window sill, right? And it eventually grows roots and
everything.
Well, they do that in petri dishes, and get more and more bigger, bigger
stuff.
Eventually, you see a plant emerge. And they throw out all the bad stuff. So,
at Monsanto in St. Louis, I took the tour to understand this and here's a bit
more explanation from two Monsanto people. One is Dr. William Cosinski, he's a
microbiologist. And the other is my tour guide who you'll hear first, Ron
Condray.
RON CONDRAY (Monsanto tour guide): We're now in the heart of the Agriculture
Research Centre. Literally, almost as far as the eye can see, are growth
chambers. As we do tours of visitors and we have some of the academicians,
university professors, they may have one or two growth chambers. And they see
our vast array of growth chambers and they think they've come to heaven. There
it is.
This is one of our growth chambers that's set up for warm room purposes, or
incubator purposes.
This is wheat, we're beginning to actually culture the wheat, has all the
genetic information to produce a wheat plant but it doesn't look like a wheat
plant. It looks like just a mass of tissue. And what our tissue culture people
then do, is take bits and pieces of that growth, put it in various enzyme
systems, other systems, to stimulate root growth, leaf growth, and eventually,
will produce like you can see here, a little wheat plant that has that
characteristics.
DR. WILLIAM COSINSKI (Monsanto microbiologist): And we look at these
plants in
the tissue culture stages, and the plantless(?) stages, and the growth
chambers, and the greenhouses. We go through a rigorous field trial
evaluation.
And even after we have a commercial product, we are constantly, continually
evaluating. These are safe products to eat.
CONDRAY: This is one of our more sophisticated growth chambers. In this
chamber, we are simulating a rather cool but sunny day in a wheat growing
field. We have a soya bean growth chamber next door. We can show some of the
soya bean there that's not looking very good. And it's not because of the
environment, because these growth chambers provide an ideal environment. So
when something goes wrong, our scientists know it's something that they have
done, not the environment.
COSINSKI: Our guests will ask what type of a crop plant is this? And when we
look out at the plants, what we see, it looks basically like a standard corn
plant, or a soya bean plant. And our answer has to be, we don't know.
CARTY: Could something get by you with all this screening?
COSINSKI: If you're a religious person, God is perfect. Let me tell you this,
I can predict that 99.99999 % surety that you will take your next breath...
and
you just did. But I cannot predict that with 100 % surety.
CARTY: Avril, that was Dr. Bill Cosinski. And earlier, Ron Condray, both of
Monsanto in St. Louis.
BENOIT: Now what happens if they make a mistake? What are the consequences?
CARTY: Well, they say they don't. They do insist that this is a very careful
process with a lot of very advanced science. And it does take 10 years to
bring
a cell along to eventual commercial crop. So they say they basically don't
make
mistakes, that they get what they plan. There was, however, an interesting
incident in 1997 where some cotton... Monsanto cotton, which was resistant to
the cotton boar. It worked quite well in resisting cotton boar. But the cotton
balls fell off and a lot of farmers were upset and got some payment from the
company in return. That was unexpected.
Now on the human health side, there is... again, there is no proof there have
been any incidences of genetically modified food causing human harm. But some
say there is a sort of smoking gun and it's tryptophan.
BENOIT: Which is what?
CARTY: It's a health care product that's been around for some time, made
naturally from bacteria. And tryptophan is sort of an enzyme. It's a precursor
to seratonin, as you'll hear, and it's a sedative. And it's used by people
because it was natural rather than a sleeping pill. And most tryptophan has
been a safe product. But there was one batch in the late 80s that was made
with
genetically engineered bacteria. And it resulted in a terrible human tragedy
that's still largely unknown in Canada and North America.
I asked two people, Avril, to tell this story. One you'll hear from is Brian
Goodwin, he's a Canadian-born geneticist and genetic theorist who now teaches
at Schumacher College in England. And first though, telling the tryptophan
story is one of the tryptophan casualties. And she is Karen Johnson from
Abbotsford, British Colombia.
KAREN JOHNSON (Victim of tryptophan): My name is Karen Johnson. I'm 47 years
old. I have three children, two grandchildren. I used to go snow skiing, I
used
to bowl, I used to play baseball, I used to have energy. I used to be able to
come home from work and quickly do my housework so on my day off tomorrow type
of thing, I wouldn't have to do anything. Ten years ago, I had trouble
sleeping. I've always had trouble sleeping. And I started reading these
articles in health food stores, books about L-tryptophan(?). When I first
started taking L-tryptophan, it worked wonders. I took it for insomnia and it
worked. And I thought well, this is good, it's better than taking sleeping
pills or whatever, you know? It's natural.
BRIAN GOODWIN (Biologist, Schumacker College in England): Tryptophan is a
food additive that's viewed as kind of mild sedative. It's a precursor of one
of the neurotransmitters in the brain call seratonin which puts you to sleep,
or relaxes you. Production of tryptophan depended upon the use of a bacterium
and they simply knocked out the control gene. And the result was that the
bacteria then overproduced this product. They produced much more of it than
they normally would have. But the consequence is that there appears to be a
toxic bi-product.
JOHNSON: I got up one morning and I could not lift my head off the pillow. My
body was in excruciating pain. After a couple of weeks, these various changes
started happening in my body. I swelled up, my face was swelled up. I wasn't
recognisable by any of my friends. I started getting these skin lesions and
the
pain was incredible. When I went to bed at night, it was like laying on a bed
of hot needles. And every time you rolled over, those needles just stabbed you
throughout your body.
GOODWIN: Nobody believed simply producing a perfectly safe substance,
tryptophan, that that would lead to a toxic substance which was simply two of
these molecules stuck together. Now, I have to insist that that's a
hypothesis.
But it's a very, it's a very convincing hypothesis. And the evidence, I think,
points in that direction. This had the result of causing the epidemic known as
eocinifiliamiolgea syndrome. A minimum of 37 deaths from this, and a
minimum of
1,500 people who suffered various types of pain, disability, and it continues.
It has continued for a long time.
JOHNSON: I was eventually diagnosed with eocinifiliamiolgea syndrome, EMS.
It's a blood disorder and it destroyed my life, you know? Like I have no life.
I'm too tired to do anything, I'm too tired to go anywhere. My life is not
anywhere near as bad as some people. And many people have died, many people
are
paralyzed, all because of L-tryptophan.
BENOIT: So that was Karen Johnson of Abbotsford, B.C., and geneticist Brian
Goodwin of Schumacher College in England. Now Bob, how would these health
problems compare to say the bad side effects from taking pills?
CARTY: Well in a sense, there is a similarity and that different people react
differently.
BENOIT: Yes.
CARTY: And not everybody got sick. And that some people got much more serious
consequences and died. On the other hand, this was a case where the drug
wasn't
the problem, the actual product tryptophan. It was that there was something
else put in as a result, totally unexpectedly, of the genetic engineering of
the bacteria which were like the manufacturing plants. Now, we have a little
link on our web page, by the way, to the survivors of that tragedy. And they
say there's been over 2,000 cases now litigated with the company that was
responsible. And they've paid out over two billion dollars because of those
impacts to people.
But the key concept, again, it s not quite proven because much of the evidence
was lost or destroyed. The key concept is, the hypothesis of Goodwin, that
this
was the result of genetic engineering.
BENOIT: Now, how do you know that this factor of unpredictability hasn't been
taken into account? You know, by the biotech companies and the regulators who
are supposed to be looking through all of these things.
CARTY: But they do take it into account. But I think that they manage that
risk quite adequately, and so do the regulators. The critics of course say
that
they don't adequately enough. The newest science that has come into this
debate
comes from Scotland, that's the Pustai... the Arped Pustai(?) affair. He's a
scientist at the Rowet(?) Institute. He did this experiment with rats. He was
putting lectin(?) in rats because it's a possible insecticide. It could fight
against nematodes, little worms, and little flies, that it would have great
potential. He fed rats some of lectin that was genetically produced, and some
that was just naturally produced. He thought the results would be the same,
that is there'd be no harm to the rats. But the rats with genetically modified
potatoes were injured.
BENOIT: Right. Now... and tell me more about him. What's his reputation as a
scientist?
CARTY: (inaudible) incredible. He's a Hungarian, escaped the revolution, the
repression in 1956. He went to England, he's been with the Rowet Institute for
35 years, published 275 peer-reviewed research papers.
BENOIT: All right. Okay...
CARTY: Pretty, pretty impressive man. But when he... he went on TV and he
said
my research... he didn't give the details but he said on TV last year, that
people are being used as Guinea pigs. Oh! His employers, he say, forced him
into retirement. He was not allowed to speak out because of his contract. He
subsequently had a heart attack, was in depression. Now however, he's been
sort
of rehabilitated, the House of Commons in England is interested in his
testimony, and he's speaking out. He's... he says he's not a prophet, he's not
a radical, he's just a researcher. Here's Arped Pustai.
ARPED PUSTAI (Researcher): Please don't think that I was hostile to this
technology. I expect the scientist working at (inaudible) during the Second
World War were probably in the same situation. They were so heavily taken up
and concentrating on the job in hand. They didn't have really much time to
think about the implications. And I probably was in the same situation.
CARTY: Dr. Pustai, your research was in the area of lectins which are
substances that protect plants from insects. What did you find that surprised
you there?
PUSTAI: What I found was very surprising. And we could not explain a great
deal of it. In fact even now, we couldn't explain a lot of it. But facts are
facts. Young, rapidly growing rats which are developing their internal organs,
they are preparing for life, and we found that there were problems with the
development. The liver was depressed. Some of the tissues indicated to us that
there will be some problem with the immune system. Totally surprising. Now, I
have to say it again. It was not the gene which we expressed in the potatoes.
But it was aided how it was introduced, or how it was incorporated into this
constructed... shot into the gene(?). There is no other explanation for it.
But
we still don't know what the explanation for it. But no matter what the
biotechnology industry say, I don't mind if they stand on their head, I would
say that I would state my professional reputation on it, that we do see these
changes and these changes have to be taken into account. You can only reject
them at your own peril. Guinea pigs are... should be in the lab, and not
should
be running on the street.
CARTY: On of the criticism people have made of your work, Doctor, is that you
put it forward in the media rather than in a peer-reviewed journal.
PUSTAI: Look, I published 275 papers, so I know something about how to
publish
a paper. Now if... this process takes about, a good two years. Now, we were at
a point when the project was coming to an end because we had no money. That's
it. The money is at the bottom of everything. Now, we agreed with my director
and with Rowet that the best way to make some sort of impact is to go through
the media. Everybody does it. Those people who know me and they know that I
never over-claimed anything in my life. And people who believe in
biotechnology, they regard me as the scum of the earth. I mean, they've
destroyed my scientific credibility. I'm regaining it slowly. But you see,
that
for example, one of the charges levelled against me, that... so why haven't
you
published it? You know that that... when I was gagged, I couldn't even say who
let alone write a paper. And even now, if I write a paper, it will have to be
approved by my director, the very same director who said that it is rubbish. I
mean, he has an absolute veto over me.
CARTY: What do we need to do now?
PUSTAI: Some form of biological testing is absolutely necessary. There is no
science done. I mean, there is one paper in the Journal of Nutrition in
1996, a
contract work done for Monsanto. They introduced a new technology on the back
of one paper. The second paper will be my paper on genetically modified
peas(?)
in July in the same journal. I mean, you can't really call that rigorous
testing. I'm not saying that I said the last word, I didn't even say that like
Moses, brought down the tablets from Mount Sinai. If there is anything to
credit us that was when we did see the results, which were not to aid in my or
other people's expectations, I did see them and I did say that I did see them.
From here, the world will have changed.
CARTY: Avril, that's Arped Pustai, the former science researcher at the Rowet
Institute in Aberdeen Scotland.
BENOIT: All right. And as he describes it, there are people who have reasons
to dismiss his research. We can only speculate really on what they are. But
what are, as far as you can see, the implications of the research?
CARTY: As he put it, A, there's not enough science but... above all, that the
problem may not be the actual gene that's going in, but how it's going in and
what it's going in with. I didn't mention this other complicating factor,
Avril. When this genetic material goes in, it goes in with vectors. There is
the bacteria that carries it in, but the genetic material that you want to put
in also carries with it a promoter that sort of turns it on. It's like a
switch
and makes it work harder. And it also has a marker, DNA material, to identify
which cells actually accept the new gene. So, these packages of DNA
material go
in all together. And those packages, in addition to the gene, are often
made up
of bacteria and viruses, which are pathogenic. They can be diseases. He's
worried that this might be a very, very important avenue of research which
might lead to well... it's the case in rats, could it be the case in young
children who are also young people preparing for life? You know, that they
could be injured by genetically altered food.
BENOIT: Yeah, it's certainly alarming. But Dr. Pustai hasn't published his
findings yet.
CARTY: He says it's coming, it's being peer-reviewed right now at the
Lancet(?) Magazine, a very reputable publication. We'll see how they do. I
think it's important to say that replication of his work is quite important.
And it's also important to say that other scientists in his field are not so
excited about his findings. They don't think it's that significant. One of
them
is Brian Forstanski(?), he's a plant geneticist at the University of Manitoba.
He does admit that Mr. Pustai's work is interesting, even deserves more work,
more attention, more investment. But Dr. Forstanski questions how much
importance too attached to it.
DR. BRIAN FORSTANSKI (Plant geneticist, University of Manitoba): From any one
study, it's very hard to draw hard conclusions. So you really need to do
additional experiments and to reproduce the experiments. For example, compare
different varieties of potatoes and see if you get as much difference from
variety to variety, as you did between the transgenics and the untransformed.
And of course, rats are different that humans so again, you have to be careful
drawing any conclusions from that. Maybe the best way to put it into
perspective is to say that if you have a disaster like the Exxon Valdez oil
spill, you don't see everyone giving up their cars. We don't eliminate an
industry simple because we see one thing that we may not like. What we do, is
we work to improve it. Most of the people working in our field don't feel that
there's any real intrinsic safety problem with genetically modified plants
that
would be any different than you would get with traditional breeding.
BENOIT: Now Bob, you've drawn a picture here of unpredictability in the
science of this food. What are people supposed to make of it? What... where
are
we supposed to go with this as consumers and as people who buy and eat food?
CARTY: I guess we're really in a quandary because the food is not labelled.
And so you don't really have as yet much choice. And I think that there are...
there's movement on that front. We're going to talk about it in the coming
days. But, because of the lack of labels as a... even I as a consumer walking
through the grocery store, we can't choose. If we decide that we want to be
cautious about this now, the other factor of course that we talked about the
other day, is how much faith we have in our regulators and in the producers,
the companies. Individuals will have different appreciations and different
risk
assessments of that. But if you want to have the choice, we're really
limited.
The other problem, of course, is that if - and it's a big if - if there are
some problems with genetically modified foods for humans, because they're not
labelled, you can't do epidemiological studies. So it comes back to a set of
regulatory questions, and we're going to look at those a bit tomorrow. And
also
on Friday, hope to have the Minister of Agriculture, Lyle Vanclief, who has
been a supporter and promoter of these foods, and also is responsible for the
Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
BENOIT: Very well then. Thanks very much, Bob.
CARTY: You're welcome, Avril.
BENOIT: Bye, bye. Bob Carty is This Morning's Ottawa producer. |