The Scientist

GM Food Debate Gets Spicy

Several points in Kate Devines article, GM Food Debate Gets Spicy, deserves amplification. The first pertains to the widespread recall of foods containing StarLink corn. The bottom line is that not a single person is at all likely to be harmed by this product, which differs from other commercial varieties by the presence of a Bacillus thuringiensis protein called Cry9C. The foods in question are actually far less likely than thousands of other products on the market to cause allergic or other health problems. For example, fava beans, a fixture of upscale restaurant cuisine in the United States and Europe, can be life-threatening to persons with hereditary glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency; by contrast, even after exhaustive testing, no allergic reactions, toxicity, or any other problem has been demonstrated with Cry9C or any substance similar to it.

The real problem lies not in StarLink corn, but in the United States regulatory policy toward gene-spliced plants and foods. As noted in Devines article, there is widespread consensus that because of gene-splicings precision, products are better characterized, more predictable, and often safer than those made with other techniques of genetic modification. Dozens of new plant varieties produced through hybridization and other traditional methods of genetic improvement enter the marketplace each year without scientific review or special labeling. Many such products are from wide crosses, hybridizations in which genes are moved from one species or one genus to another to create a plant variety that does not and cannot exist in nature. For example, Triticum agropyrotriticum is a new human-engineered species that resulted from combining genes from bread wheat and a grass sometimes called quackgrass or couchgrass. Possessing all the chromosomes of wheat and one extra entire genome from the quackgrass, T. agropyrotriticum has been independently produced in the former Soviet Union, Canada, United States, France, Germany, and China, and it is grown for forage and grain.

The scientific consensus notwithstanding, the Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies hold gene-spliced plants to a higher standard than other similar foods, requiring the hugely expensive testing as pesticides of gene-spliced crop and garden plants that have been genetically improved for enhanced pest or disease resistance. The policy has been repeatedly condemned by the scientific community. The report on food safety from the Institute of Food Technologists referred to in the article specifically took current regulatory policies to task. The report concludes that the evaluation of gene-spliced food does not require a fundamental change in established principles of food safety; nor does it require a different standard of safety, even though, in fact, more information and a higher standard of safety are being required. It continues that science does not support more stringent safety standards than those that apply to conventional foods.

Henry I. Miller, MD
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
miller@hoover.stanford.edu
K. Devine, GM food debate gets spicy, The Scientist, 14[21]:10, Oct. 30, 2000.

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