ALTERED GENES, TWISTED TRUTH: How the Venture to Genetically Engineer Our Food Has Subverted Science, Corrupted Government, and Systematically Deceived the Public by Steven Druker

Author:Steven Druker [Druker, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Clear River Press
Published: 2015-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

In light of the foregoing discussion, it’s clear that the bars associated with genetic engineering in the report’s comparative chart must be adjusted to reflect far more than the unintended effects of tissue culture, because those effects are not the only ones the committee ignored. As we’ve seen, they not only overlooked the range of disruptions that could occur through both the viral promoters and the insertional process itself, they failed to comprehend bioengineering’s unprecedented capacity for forming harmful substances – and due to such oversights, they would surely have underestimated its full perturbational power.

This has important implications. As we’ve already seen, conservatively revising the chart to reflect a measure of influence from tissue culture boosts the rank of one major mode of bioengineering beyond radiation breeding (and well off the chart) – rendering it the most disruptive method of all. And the technology’s other main commercial mode gets lifted into a virtual tie with radiation breeding. So if the committees’ conclusions are further recalibrated to register an additional (and sizable) group of neglected effects, the bars associated with both these forms of bioengineering will have to be stretched a lot farther. And, although it’s not clear exactly how far the stretching should go, it is obvious that the bars for both of these modes should surpass the one for radiation by so wide a margin that each extends way beyond the border of the chart, decisively branding them the most perturbational and unpredictable techniques. And because (as was previously demonstrated) the length of the bars ultimately depicts the degree of danger to human health, these techniques also stand forth as the riskiest.

Further, when a careful comparison is made between genetic engineering and the mutative methods based on radiation and chemicals, it’s evident that the revised chart proposed above fairly reflects the risk differential. Such a comparison appears in Appendix D, which supplements Chapter 11 and should be read in conjunction with it.

However, even after making the adjustments prescribed above, the chart would still need further revision – not to the length of the GE-associated bars, but to their number. That’s because there should only be two of them, not four; and they ought only to register the mode of gene transfer, not the biological distance between the species involved.

I realize that this assertion may seem questionable, considering that biological distance is highly relevant in conventional contexts, where crossing plants that are closely related is safer than crossing those that are distant. But genetic engineering is different. Although the products of genes from distinctly foreign species could cause problems due to their foreignness, equal (or greater) risks could also result when the species are similar.110 After all, the uncontrolled hyper-expression of a protein that ordinarily interacts with a plant’s native chemicals in a highly regulated and well-coordinated manner could cause riskier side reactions than the overexpression of one that’s completely foreign to the cellular system – and may have scant impact upon it. As we saw in Chapter 3, when

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