Genetic engineering is the science of creating transgenic organisms, meaning genes are manipulated from one species to another to create a trait that did not previously exist. This is also called "recombinant DNA technology." For instance, the DNA in Monsanto's "Bt" corn has been modified by inserting specific genes from Bacillus thuringiensis, a ground-dwelling bacterium that is also used as a means of natural pest control. The genetic modification produces a crystalline protein in the stalks, pollen, and leaves of the plant that is toxic to borers and other corn pests.
The first genetically modified organisms, commonly known as GMOs, appeared in 1982 as plant cells that had been genetically modified by scientists of Monsanto Corporation, a chemical giant now turned biotech behemoth, who is also the producer of Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), a commercial livestock hormone that has been linked to breast and prostate cancer. Since 1994, GMO crops and livestock, labeled "Frankenfoods" by anti-GMO activists, have proliferated across the globe, with many unanswered questions creating a firestorm of controversy. What are the long-term health effects of ingesting GMO products? How extensively will airborne pollen taint organic crops? By mutating the genes of plants and animals, how will the evolution of species be affected, including humans? Why were GMOs released into the global food markets with no testing?
According to biotechnologist Deborah Whitman, author of Genetically Modified Foods: Harmful or Helpful? when GMO foods were first unveiled, they were, and still are, touted as a possible cure for world hunger and a breakthrough as an applied technology for the advancement of pharmaceuticals. With a current world population of over 6 billion - a number that is expected to double within the next half century - experts have determined there is a possibility that the unique properties of GMO crops will enable food demands to be met globally. However, a disequilibrium has surfaced in this pragmatopian view not only in financial and public health arenas, but in moral and ethical ones as well; an imbalance that for the sake of humanity demands scrutiny and correction.
A Cure for Cancer?
In 2008, medical researchers in Great Britain reported that a genetically modified "purple tomato" might increase the lifespan of cancer victims. Tomatoes lack by nature extremely powerful antioxidant flavonoids called anthocyanins. Researchers from the FLORA project at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, Great Britain produced a tomato rich in anthocyanins by combining two genes from the snapdragon flower with a tomato.
"The two genes we have isolated are responsible for flower pigmentation and, when introduced in other plants, turned out to be the perfect combination to produce anthocyanins, the same phytochemical found in blueberries," said lead author Eugenio Butelli in a press release. "At a closer chemical analysis it comes out that our purple tomato has a very high antioxidant activity, almost tripled in comparison to the natural fruit thus it is very useful to study the effect of anthocyanins." In a comparison test, the FLORA team fed three groups of mice lacking the p53 gene, the gene responsible for suppressing cancer growths, three different diets. One group had a normal diet with no tomatoes, the second group's diet included regular red tomatoes, and the diet of the third group was supplemented with powder derived from the purple tomatoes. According to Marco Giorgio from the European Institute of Oncology, the mice in the group fed the purple tomatoes "showed a significant increase of lifespan." On average, mice fed purple tomatoes lived 28-percent longer than the other two groups. Toxicity trials have not yet been performed, so the likelihood of seeing the GMO purple tomato on supermarket shelves any time soon is vastly remote. The question is, rather than researchers looking for a way to produce a tomato with anthocyanins, which cause the purplish coloration in blueberries, why not just promote blueberry growing and consumption?
"Genetic Roulette"
In the United States, it is difficult to escape ingestion of genetically modified foods. Currently, over 80-percent of all processed foods contain GMO grain products, particularly corn, soybeans, and rice. Unless otherwise marked, all U.S. canola products are likewise GMO. Genetically modified livestock meats such as poultry, pork, and beef saturate supermarket coolers. The problem lies in the fact that genetically modified foods do not require testing, and in the U.S. the labeling of GMO foods is not required as it is in Europe.
The health implications of ingesting GMO foods is meticulously documented in Jeffrey Smith's compelling book, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods. Smith reveals how two distinguished scientists - Ignacio Chapela of University of California Berkeley and Arpad Pusztai, the world's leading lectins and plant genetic modification expert and a former researcher at Scotland Rowett Research Institute, were vilified and harassed for their independent research.
Pusztai had been commissioned to study GMO foods. However, his shocking findings were not welcomed by giant agribusinesses that foresaw mega-fortunes in cornering the market on GMO crops through patents, nor by the politicians to stood to profit from the success of such monopolistic tactics. Pusztai's findings documented that:
Rats fed GM potatoes had smaller livers, hearts, testicles and brains, damaged immune systems, and showed structural changes in their white blood cells making them more vulnerable to infection and disease compared to other rats fed non-GMO potatoes.Pusztai was fired shortly after publishing his findings.
It got worse. Thymus and spleen damage showed up; enlarged tissues, including the pancreas and intestines; and there were cases of liver atrophy as well as significant proliferation of stomach and intestines cells that could be a sign of greater future risk of cancer. Equally alarming, results showed up after 10 days of testing, and they persisted after 110 days that's the human equivalent of 10 years.
In May of 2009, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) urged doctors to instruct their patients to avoid GMO foods and called for a moratorium on GMO foods. According to AAEM's position paper, authored by Amy Dean, D.O. and Jennifer Armstrong, M.D., "Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food." These risks include accelerated aging, infertility, insulin regulation, immune problems, and changes in the gastrointestinal system and in the major organs. "There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation," wrote Dean and Armstrong.
Numerous studies, including Pusztai's, have documented changes in the pancreas, spleen, and livers in multiple animal studies. Mice fed GM corn, including Monsanto's immensely prevalent Bt corn, expressed infertility and lower birth weights. Additionally, over 400 different genes in the GM corn fed to the mice were altered, many of these genes having to do with, according to genetic researchers Aysun Kilic and M. Turan Akay, the "control [of] protein synthesis and modification, cell signaling, cholesterol synthesis, and insulin regulation."
A 2008 study by Alberto Finamore revealed "...intestinal damage in animals fed GM foods, including proliferative cell growth," and a concurrent study by M. Malatesta discovered a "disruption of the intestinal immune system" in mice. According to top French toxicologist G. E. Seralini, Monsanto's own study showed evidence of poisoning in the major organs of rats fed Bt corn.
The first published human study by Trudy Netherwood and colleagues in 2004 revealed that the genes inserted into GM soybeans and used in soy products transfer into the DNA of human intestinal bacteria (the "good bacteria" that allows us to eliminate toxins properly and promote a healthy immune system), and it remains continuously active. In other words, the GMOs we ingest today become part of our genetic makeup, turning our beneficial intestinal bacteria into veritable pesticide factories, possibly for life. The paper concludes: "...because of the mounting data, it is biologically plausible for Genetically Modified Foods to cause adverse health effects in humans... GM foods pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic, and genetic health..."
With such compelling revelations surfacing, public pressure has been mounting on the U.S. federal government to follow the EU's lead in mandatory labeling of all GMO food products.
Agricultural Feudalism
Multinational agribusiness and biotech giant Monsanto, Corp. currently supplies the majority of the world's GMO crop seeds. As mentioned earlier, biotech corporations lobby Washington, D.C. with promises of "an end to world hunger," especially if the powers that be agree to distribute their products not only within the U.S. but also overseas, particularly to poverty-steeped Third World nations.
"We have an obligation in our generation to leave the world in better shape than we found it and genetically engineered crops can do just that," Monsanto tour guide Ray Duke told reporter Christopher Leonard of the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune in an April 2000 interview. "They can help farmers cut down on pesticide use while saving them money and time and limiting pollution. Engineering also will allow farmers to grow more food on less land to feed a booming world population."
When GMO seeds first came on the market in the mid-Nineties and marketed as miracle crops that defy pests, small family farmers lined up to buy the seeds. Little did they know that what they were buying into was not a magic crop potion, but one of the most heinous schemes to ever rock the agricultural world: patented plants.
A popular product is Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" soybean. The engineered plant is immune to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, a toxin that kills most vegetation that it touches. The company easily obtained a patent on their laboratory-created anomaly because nothing of its kind occurs naturally. With these patents, the company maintains control over the GMO crops and the offspring of those plants.
Farmers traditionally harvest and plant the seeds that their successful crops produce; small farmers can't afford not to. Monsanto demands that any farmers who buy GMO seed must sign a contract agreeing to terms and conditions for using their product. One of those terms states that farmers cannot harvest or use the seeds that their GMO plants bear; they must buy new seed from the company for each crop.
In an ironically Malthusian bent, Monsanto has sued hundreds of small farmers across North America for saving and planting seeds, creating a hierarchal landscape eerily reminiscent of the agricultural feudalism of 16th Century England. Additionally, Monsanto has been ambushing organic farmers who have had their crops tainted by airborne pollen from GM plants, plants that now produce Monsanto's patented seed through no fault or intention of the farmer. These organic farmers not only are dragged into costly legal proceedings, but their crops, which can no longer be labeled "organic," are compromised as well.
"Control Food and You Control the People"
Big agricultural and biotech corporations, Monsanto in particular, have routinely decimated family farms since the late 1990s. These agribusinesses - Cargill, Bunge, Archer Daniels, Smithfield Foods, and ConAgra - are all U.S.-based and control the majority of the world's grain trade. Additionally, there are five agricultural biotech corporations, also all U.S.-based, that control the world's GMO seed market: Monsanto and DuPont - which control 60-percent of the United States corn and soybean production with all crops being from GMO seed - along with Syngenta, Bayer, and Dow Chemical. Six U.S.-based companies including Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow Chemical control three-quarters of the global pesticide and agricultural chemical market.
Imagining a framed photos of Henry Kissinger gracing the walls of the CEO's offices wouldn't be difficult; Kissinger achieved yet another level of infamy when he coined the phrase, "Control oil, you control nations; control food and you control the people." The Machiavellian tactics used by Monsanto and other mammoths of the biotech industry to manipulate governments and populations towards corporate totalitarian objectives are revealed in F. William Engdahl's book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. According to Engdahl, a leading analyst of the New World Order, the corporate agribusiness-biotech industry realizes domestic sales topping over $400 billion annually in the U.S. alone, second in profit only to the pharmaceutical industry.
In a move to ensure unrestricted production for big agriculture, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture's power to balance supply and demand was revoked with the enactment of the 1996 Farm Bill. In April 2000, Monsanto and Searle, Monsanto's pharmaceutical unit, completed a merger with pharmaceutical giants Upjohn and Pharmacia. This merger created a new corporation - Pharmacia Corporation - for a new type of genetic engineering industry - agri-ceuticals.
On April 16, 2003, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer merged with Pharmacia Corporation to create "the world's leading research-based pharmaceutical company." Pfizer's website proudly proclaims that "This top-tier company's innovative medicines and other products saved the lives of many and enhanced health and wellness."
This rhetoric sounds quite altruistic; however anyone reading between the lines might be motivated to conclude that it would be in the best interests of a super-corporation's bottom line to make people sick through the corporation's food so they have to take drugs that the corporation manufactures. If the huge number of government and the profiteering segments of the social services and medical industry are taken into account along with the biotech/ag/pharmaceutical business, the financial implications of executing the above-mentioned scenario are staggering.
Ray Goldberg, the George M. Moffett Professor of Agriculture and Business, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School predicted this Orwellian, yet all-to-real, scenario years ago. Goldberg envisioned that a "genetic revolution [through] an industrial convergence of food, health, medicine, fiber, and energy businesses" would levy corporate control over every facet of everyday life of every person on the face of the earth.
"The genetic research revolution is changing our global economy and society more dramatically than any other single event in the history of humankind," said Goldman at a 2009 gathering of HBS alumni. "On the other hand, we have a worldwide agricultural economic depression and a mistrust of the science by some consumers."
Has humankind gotten itself into a Catch-22? Can biotech really feed and cure the world? They say they can, however thousands of field trials and dozens of academic studies in the past 20 years reveal that it is highly unlikely that GMO crops and their pharmaceutical counterparts are the panacea that they claim to be.
Comment: For more in depth information about the growing concerns over GMOs read: Are you inflamed over GMO foods?