Foes of Genetically Modified Food Should Remember Scientists Have Been Altering Seeds With Radiation For Years With Beneficial Results
CHURCHVILLE, Va.-Did you know the world’s plant breeders have been putting mutant genes in our foods and beverages? The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization currently lists more than 1700 crop varieties produced from mutant genes.
The mutant genes are found in at least 150 different plant species, already released in more than 50 countries. If we set the standard for regulation by the current debate over genetically engineered crops, none of these mutant foods were tested thoroughly for their impact on people or the environment.
A classic example of the mutant crops is an English barley variety called Golden Promise, created by irradiation, was produced in 1956 by the British Atomic Energy Research Establishment.
Technicians zapped seeds from an established brewing barley called Maythorpe with gamma rays. The radiation produced a mutation, which kept the Maythorpe’s brewing qualities, but gave it a stiff straw. Thus the plants didn’t fall over when the seed heads became heavy near harvest time. Golden Promise was widely used in English brewing throughout the 1960s and 1970-in organic beers!
Another major mutant crop is triticale, a natural hybrid of wheat and rye that is normally sterile. Triticale was bombarded with radiation to make it fertile, and millions of tons are now grown every year in such cool, sandy places as Poland and Germany.
The grain is used both in baking and livestock feed. Plant breeders have even mutated tomatoes, a member of the oft-deadly nightshade family. What kind of testing did the mutant plants undergo? Pretty much the routine plant screening.
The test plots were probably planted outdoors, where they might have contaminated other species with their pollen. The mutant grain was undoubtedly fed to some laboratory rats, to make sure they didn’t fall over dead or develop tumors.
But that’s not much of a test hurdle. Hardly any chemicals harm rats at low doses. Cancer testing typically subjects them to at least several thousand times the expected human exposure.
Rats simply can’t eat enough of a modified food to match the cancer- test doses. For the last 75 years, plant breeders have been reaching out for more genetic diversity through artificial processes such as hybridization, wide crosses, embryo rescue and tissue culture, without much help from environmental groups like Greenpeace or Sierra Club.
So far their record of success is just about unblemished. I’m forced to the conclusion they and their regulators know pretty well what they’re doing.
Biotech is more powerful than previous breeding strategies, but is also less likely to produce an unexpected result. The new biotech plants are unlikely to cause allergies, because scientists know a lot about what causes allergies.
Using biotech, researchers are more likely to take allergies out than put them in. Ditto with toxins. As for creating a new pathogen, you basically can’t do that with one gene, or even a dozen.
A really awful health threat, such as bubonic plague, must adapt itself to feeding on a host organism, overcoming the host’s natural defenses (like antibodies), multiplying itself into fantastic numbers and then moving on to another host.
All those behaviors take many, many specialized genes. That won’t happen through a biotech “accident.” We already do a much more exhaustive set of tests on the new biotech than we did on the early mutant crops.
But the opponents of the new technology are demanding far more testing. They apparently hope to drive biotech costs out of sight, as they did nuclear power and have nearly done with pesticides.
It would be well to remember we’re pursuing biotech crops today for exactly the same reasons we irradiated seeds in 1950. A stable, affluent human population of 9 billion in 2050 will need nearly three times today’s farm output for its well-fed kids and pets as.
We’re already farming 37 percent of the world’s land area. We don’t want to expand our farming onto fragile soils or displace critical wildlife habitats. Maybe we should weigh the costs and benefits of genetically engineered crops with a bit more realism.
DENNIS T. AVERY is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis. His views are not necessarily those of BridgeNews, whose ventures include the Internet site www.bridge.com.
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Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
