The End of Food. Thomas F. Pawlick

or the modern Prometheus, or even seen the host of Hollywood productions based on it (my personal favorite is the 1931 Boris Karloff version), playing around with the basic stuff of life can get messy, resulting in things the players never expected, much less intended– and genes are, in every sense of the expression, the basic stuff of life.

      Obviously, GM techniques hold enormous promise, particularly in medicine where they may eventually lead to cures for some of humankind’s worst physical and mental afflictions. Applied in the field of agriculture, they hold just as much promise—and terrible dangers. The latter come under two headings: 1) the effects of GM foods on human health and, 2) the effects of GM crops on their surrounding environments.

      The plain truth is, no one yet knows what those effects might be. And it’s equally plain that far too many of the corporate players, who see quick fortunes to be made in GM crops and their applications, are unconcerned with such questions. There is a rush, like the blind, pellmell stampede of the nineteenth-century Gold Rush, to grab patents and exploit them to the maximum, fast-tracking GM varieties onto an unsuspecting market before anyone has time to evaluate them, and to reap the short-term, maximum financial benefit regardless of long-term consequences—the consequences you and I, and our children, will eventually pay.

      The question is not whether GM varieties should be developed, but whether they should be developed responsibly, with adequate pretesting and evaluation of their environmental, market, and social impacts, or whether they should be introduced willy-nilly, recklessly, with no view toward any future more distant than the next fiscal quarter and no consideration beyond the potential financial bonanzas of greedy corporate CEOs. As the infamous Enron scandal, and others similar to it, ought to have demonstrated beyond question, the first concern of our modern corporate elite is hardly the public good.

      The potential impact of GM foods on human health is largely unknown, but we do have some early indicators. A national advertisement published in 1999 by the Turning Point Project, titled “Unlabeled, untested.…and you’re eating it,” noted that “while there have been no tests so far conclusively establishing that genetically engineered foods are harmful to humans, the potential dangers are significant enough to mandate long-term independent testing of GE food products before release into supermarkets.”⁴⁵

      The ad listed areas of concern:

       Toxicity. According to some FDA scientists, the genetic engineering of food may bring “some undesirable effects such as increased levels of known naturally occurring toxicants, appearance of new, not previously identified toxicants, increased capability of concentrating toxic substances from the environment (e.g. pesticides or heavy metals), and undesirable alterations in the levels of nutrients.” In other words, scientists from the FDA itself suspect that genetic engineering could make foods toxic.

      Allergic reaction. FDA scientists also warn that genetically engineered foods could “produce a new protein allergen” or “enhance the synthesis of existing plant food allergens.” And a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that when a gene from a Brazil nut was engineered into soybeans, people allergic to nuts had serious reactions. Without labeling, people with certain food allergies will not be able to know if they might be harmed by the food they’re eating.

       Antibiotic resistance. Many GE foods are modified with antibiotic resistant genes; people who eat them may become more susceptible to bacterial infections. Commenting on this problem, the British Medical Association said that antibiotic resistance is “one of the major public health threats that will be faced in the twenty-first century.”

       Cancer. European scientists have also found that dairy products from animals treated with bovine growth hormone (rBGH) contain an insulin-like growth factor that may increase the risk of breast cancer, as well as prostate and colon cancer.