The Battles

Thanks to Elaine:

This is LONDON

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/13323695?source=Evening%20Standard

22/09/04 – News and city section

Fresh fears over GM crops

By Mark Prigg , Evening Standard Science Correspondent Dramatic new claims about the dangers of GM crops emerged today.

Scientists have found that pollen from genetically modified plants is capable of contaminating crops more than 12 miles away.

That is more than double all previous estimates of its ability to travel.

The news will reignite the debate over GM crop safety by suggesting the contamination risk from the farming method has been seriously underestimated. Former environment minister Michael Meacher said the research was “extremely significant”.

He added: “What this means is that Britain is too small an island to ever grow GM crops.

“We would need to have exclusion-zones of around 12 miles for every farm. It just isn’t practical.”

The study was carried out by the American environmental protection agency, a US government body, and studied how far GM grass seeds were carried over nearby fields.

Seeds from wild grasses growing around the experimental plots were analysed for traces of GM.

The team found extensive gene contamination within 1.2 miles downwind of the experimental plots. But some contaminated grass seeds turned up across an area of 193 square miles, with the most distant discovery 13 miles away.

It is the first time GM crops have been proved to travel such large distances, and the suspicion is that pollen from many crops could actually travel hundreds of miles.

Mr Meacher today called for the Government to outlaw GM crop farming in light of the research.

He said: “Logically this should end the debate – it shows that any GM crop would contaminate traditional crops over such a huge distance that it would effectively wipe out organic methods.

“However, the Government seems determined to find a way around this, so I think the whole thing will go on. But it is particularly important that this research has come from America, where there are several examples of contamination already.”

The National Farmers’ Union said the effects of GM in Britain could be different from the American results but agreed the report was a matter of concern.

Dr Helen Serrier of the National Farmers’ Union said: “This research was on a particular type of grass seed. In the UK we would grow different crops but this is definitely an area we need to look at more, and we are currently working with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on just this.”

The department is discussing GM contamination and hopes to reach a conclusion later this year on safe separation distances between GM and non-GM crops.

A spokesman said: “We are currently working on co- existence, which includes separation distance. We hope to publish the results before the end of the autumn, and plan to have any co-existence measures in place before any commercial GM crops are grown in the UK.”

Find this story at http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/13323695?version=1

©2004 Associated New Media

From the article below “Monsanto said the corn had been given full approval by authorities in the U.S., Canada and Japan..”.

I did not know that Canada had given approval to GM corn?

/Sandra

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Thanks to Elaine:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1201452.htm

NEWS ANALYSIS

GM corn safety study overlooked, critics Anna Salleh ABC Science Online

Friday, 17 September 2004

French scientists were concerned about a type of GM corn based on the findings of a rat study (Image: iStockphoto) Genetically modified (GM) corn has been approved as a food ingredient without Australia and New Zealand’s safety regulator considering a study showing adverse effects in rats, critics say.

The Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) and environmental organisations are now calling for imports of Monsanto’s GM corn, known as MON863, to be suspended pending independent review.

Last October, Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) found the GM corn safe for human consumption.

But critics are concerned that the assessment did not consider Monsanto’s 90-day rat study. This had been submitted earlier to European authorities and had led to France’s genetic engineering commission, the CGB, to advise against the corn.

“In its report, CGB concluded it was not able to show the absence of health risks to animals with regard to MON863 corn,” Dr Judy Carman of the PHAA told ABC Science Online, citing an article in French newspaper La Monde.

Although the European Food Safety Authority had subsequently given the corn the all clear in April this year, the Le Monde reported the CGB remained concerned about the Monsanto study, which found blood and kidney irregularities in rats fed the corn.

“The feeding study was made available to CGB in June 2003,” said Carman. “Therefore the document existed and was circulating before FSANZ made its decision on this corn four months later in October 2003.

“So FSANZ should have been aware of this study. FSANZ should have made sure it got a copy of the raw data in the document and it should have made sure that it took the results of those studies into account in its assessment,” she said.

Carman said the PHAA wanted imports of the GM corn suspended pending review by an independent body such as the National Health and Medical Research Council or the PHAA. The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand and Greenpeace have made similar calls.

FSANZ said a Monsanto study found chickens fed the corn grew just as rapidly as if they had been fed conventional corn (Image: iStockphoto) Rat study not necessary, says FSANZ

FSANZ said while Monsanto had supplied it with a chicken feeding study, no studies on rats were provided while the agency was assessing the corn’s safety. And that at the time no further data was thought necessary or requested.

FSANZ said the New Zealand Greens had informed it earlier this month of the rat study. The agency said it contacted Monsanto the same day for further information, which it would evaluate once it had received the full package of raw data.

But on the data it had received so far, FSANZ believed there were no concerns for human health.

FSANZ said that it was aware that CGB had raised some concerns about the rat study but noted that the European Food Safety Authority had examined the study, along with other data Monsanto had provided, and concluded that the corn was “unlikely to have an adverse effect on human and animal health or the environment”.

The corn, which may appear unlabelled in processed foods in Australia and New Zealand, has been engineered to produce an insecticidal protein normally produced by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt).

FSANZ said for such foods, studies where the GM plant food as a whole is fed to the animal added little to safety information.

Toxicity studies

Instead, the agency said it relied more on toxicity studies, in which high levels of the purified protein, in this case Bt toxin, were produced by a bacterium and given directly to the animal.

“FSANZ does not require feeding studies in animals, such as this 90-day feeding study in rats, to be submitted as part of an application to FSANZ for a GM food,” it said in the statement.

Carman, from the PHAA, criticised this approach, arguing it assumed that the GM plant would only produce the new proteins it was designed to produce, nothing else.

“That’s a huge assumption,” she said. “Because one of the question marks is whether the GM crop, because of the way it’s made, is going to throw up novel substances.”

She said toxicity studies also assumed the protein bacteria produced had the same structure and function as the protein as it appeared in the plant.

“The protein as it appears in the plant is not tested,” she said. “And plants can do things to proteins once they’re made, to change their structure and their function, that bacteria can’t. So it’s a big assumption it’s going to be exactly the same.”

She also criticised the short-term nature of toxicity studies.

Corn cleared by other agencies

Monsanto said that given the European Food Safety Authority concluded there were no concerns over the corn’s safety, claims that the rat study showed adverse effects were misleading.

A spokesman said the study, which was first forwarded to European authorities in August 2002, was not given to FSANZ because the agency did not require it.

“Different countries ask for different studies to be done. So this study was one that was requested in Europe,” he said. “It’s not something the Australian regulators asked for. Hence it wasn’t provided to them.”

Monsanto said the corn had been given full approval by authorities in the U.S., Canada and Japan. It also said that no expert committee in Europe or in France, apart from the CGB, expressed concerns relating to the study. While it had received the “final scientific sign-off” in Europe, politicians had yet to approve it, Monsanto said.

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Journals act against publication bias, News in Science 9 Sep 2004 Mexican maize madness, The Slab, ABC Science Online 4 Jul 2002 Controversial corn, News in Science 26 Apr 2002

© 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Turning Genetically Engineered Trees Into Toxic Avengers

By HILLARY ROSNER

Last summer, on the site of 35 former hat factories where toxic mercury was once used to cure pelts, city officials in Danbury, Conn., deployed a futuristic weapon: 160 Eastern cottonwoods.

Dr. Richard Meagher, a professor of genetics at the University of Georgia, genetically engineered the trees to extract mercury from the soil, store it without being harmed, convert it to a less toxic form of mercury and release it into the air.

It was one of two dozen proposals Dr. Meagher has submitted to various agencies over two decades for engineering trees to soak up chemicals from contaminated soil. For years, no one would pay him to try. “I got called a charlatan,” he said. “People didn’t believe a plant could do this.”

He will begin to assess the experiment’s success this fall. But his is not the only such experiment with trees.

In laboratories around the country, researchers are using detailed knowledge of tree genes and recombinant DNA technology to alter the genetic workings of forest trees, hoping to tweak their reproductive cycles, growth rate and chemical makeup, to change their ability to store carbon, resist disease and absorb toxins.

The research is controversial. Environmentalists and others say that because of the large distances tree pollen can travel, altered genes will migrate to natural populations, leading to damage to ecosystems and other unforeseen consequences.

Dr. Jim Diamond, a retired pediatrician who is chairman of the Sierra Club’s national genetic engineering committee, sees trees as a bastion of the natural world.

“It’s quite possible the stands of trees that are left will be domesticated new varieties of trees and the natural varieties will cease to exist,” he said. “Where do you draw the line?”

Dr. Meagher’s toxic-avenger trees are intended to remove heavy metals from contaminated soils in places where other forms of cleanup are prohibitively expensive. Because mercury is an element, it cannot be broken down into harmless substances; the Danbury trees release the diluted mercury into the atmosphere, where it dissipates and falls back to earth after a few years.

This has opened Dr. Meagher to the charge that he is engaged in a shell game, simply moving toxins from one place to another. He does not disagree, but says the risk of human exposure will be lower if the chemicals are not concentrated in certain areas. In time, he says, such trees may be deployed in places like Bangladesh and India, where mercury- and arsenic-laden drinking water has created a growing health crisis.

“I really believe we’re on the way to doing something great, and 20 years from now this is how these things will be taken care of,” he said.

Tree geneticists are acutely aware that public acceptance will depend at least partly on whether altered trees can be made sterile or their reproductive capacity tightly controlled.

Dr. Steven Strauss, a professor of forest science at Oregon State University, directs the Tree Biosafety and Genomics Research Cooperative, a group working on strategies for gene containment, including control of flowering cycles and sterility. He is also exploring ways to link desirable traits to traits that make a tree unlikely to spread.

“If you take a gene for herbicide resistance that you don’t want to spread, and you link it to a gene that makes a tree shorter and fatter, that’s a tree that’s not going to be very invasive,” he said.

Not everyone is convinced that these containment strategies will work.

“Any number of molecular geneticists will tell you, ‘Oh, these things are not a problem, we’ve got various ways of making sure the genes won’t function outside of their intended plants,’ ” said Dr. Yan Linhart, a biologist at the University of Colorado who studies the ecology and evolution of forest trees. “But just as confident as they are, you will find any number of ecologists and evolutionary biologists like myself who believe in the Missouri motto, ‘Show me.’ ”

Dr. Strauss and his colleagues view genetic engineering as a way to ease the pressure for logging in wild forests. If they can engineer trees in a plantation setting that grow faster and possess other desirable commercial traits, they say, then the industry will have less incentive to go after old-growth trees.

“It is possible,” said Dr. Ron Sederoff, a professor of forestry at North Carolina State University, “that we could engineer trees that are so much better for specific purposes that you wouldn’t want to cut down a natural tree.”

Among the goals is the creation of trees that produce less lignin – a substance similar to plastic that makes wood fibers stiff – so they can be turned into paper and lumber using fewer chemicals. Lignin production is important to trees in the wild, contributing to the strength of their trunks, but less so on a plantation, where trees will be harvested every few years. Researchers have discovered a link between low lignin and faster growth, which could make the engineered trees desirable for plantation foresters.

Still, this has not satisfied critics.

“Perhaps part of growing faster is that it won’t put all this effort into useless pine cones,” said Dr. Diamond of the Sierra Club, “so there’s no sustenance for the chipmunks. What if the tree in your backyard turns out to be a low-lignin tree but just happens to fall on your house or your car in a moderate wind? There are all kinds of risks besides just my aesthetic problem with remaking nature.”

Dr. Strauss is also trying to use genetic engineering to address climate change. He wants to create trees that would store more carbon in their root systems – “sequestering” it from the atmosphere, thereby cutting atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas. In a project sponsored by the Department of Energy, Dr. Strauss and colleagues at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory are modifying tree architecture and cell wall chemistry to increase the amount of carbon stored below ground.

Much of the research relies on basic tree genetics – made easier by the sequencing of the poplar tree genome, a major effort in forest biotechnology whose results are to be made public this month. Scientists can now study classes of genes that affect absorption of sugars and carbohydrates, which in turn can change the chemical processes that affect the rates at which trees rot and release stored carbon.

“In the U.S., there are about 40 million acres of excess, surplus or idle agricultural land,” said Jerry Tuskan, a researcher at Oak Ridge, who led the effort to sequence the poplar genome. “If we could economically capture those and deploy fast-growing trees bred and created for carbon sequestration over a 10-year period, we could reach 25 percent of the Kyoto prescription for the U.S.” The Kyoto treaty, never signed by the United States, calls for reductions in the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

The aboveground portion of the trees would be harvested every 10 years and used for ethanol, which Dr. Tuskan believes would offset the use of petroleum and, by extension, carbon dioxide emissions.

In another forest biotechnology project that has been making strides, researchers are using genetic engineering to produce a disease-resistant strain of American chestnut, a tree that once dominated Eastern forests but was decimated by the mid-20th century by a fungus introduced from Asia. The American chestnut project has proved among the least controversial, in part because the tree’s demise was caused by human intervention.

Elsewhere, researchers are using forest biotechnology to quicken the pace of traditional breeding experiments. At the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forest Resources, Dr. Jeffrey Dean monitors individual genes to learn how they react to changes like the addition of fertilizer or the presence of a fungus.

Dr. Dean said he had spent the past several years “philosophizing” about the genetic engineering of trees, weighing the pros and cons. “We probably don’t want to be thinking about genetic engineering as a magic bullet or cure-all,” he said. “There will be times where we may want the magic bullets, but they have to be applied in specific ecological contexts.”

Said Dr. Linhart of the University of Colorado: “One always needs to put into the equation biological caution and common sense. It’s a case-by-case basis. One has to not make sweeping judgments that say this particular type of activity is all good or all bad.”

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company