genetic engineering

[Elisabeth]

Dear Cecil,

I was extremely dissapointed in your research for the bit on genetically engineered foods. Your dismissal of the “Frankinstein” arguement, as you put it, shows an alarming lack of understanding of the process of gene splicing. To add a new gene to an existing organism, scientists coat gold atoms with DNA fragments and then bombard the organism with them. Sometimes it works, more often it kills the organism. Scientists have little or no idea how or why this process works. Furthermore, an organism’s natural defenses against changes in DNA make it even less likely that the desired protein will be expressed. The most alarming fact of genetic engineering, also notably absent from your article, is that all of genetic engineering is based on Francis Crick’s Central Dogma, which states that DNA has absolute and final control over which proteins are expressed in an organism. This was refuted conclusively with the Human Genome project, which found that the human genome does not contain enough information to code for all the proteins it needs to. In other words, no one knows why certain proteins are produced, but it certainly isn’t all about DNA.

I also have to take offense to your blithe assurances that “the risks are usually modest and controllable.” Not only is the consumer market saturated with genetically engineered fruits, vegetables, and products derived from such, but the pollen from the plants is not contained and infects many fields of the same type of crop. Can you imagine what would happen if the protein that conveys herbicide resistance, for example, were found to cause neurological damage? How would you take it off the market? How would you even know which plants carried the DNA that gave them the possiblity to express it? And what would you feed everyone with?

To put it another way, Cecil, I think you need to go back and re-research this one. May I recomend Mark Shapiro’s “Sowing Disaster?”, Karen Charman’s “Genetically Engineered Food: Promises & Perils”, and Barry Commoner’s “Unraveling the DNA Myth”? And next time, put a little more effort into it, please?

[Smeghead]

Sorry, but that post is so full of misinformation and just plain utter wrongness I have to step in. I don’t usually hop in and start attacking newbies, but I don’t think you got a single fact right, and we are about fighting ignorance here. I don’t mean this as a personal attack at all, but I AM going to try and set your facts straight.

Let’s start at the beginning and see how far I get before I have to go to bed:

To add a new gene to an existing organism, scientists coat gold atoms with DNA fragments and then bombard the organism with them

No, they don’t. That is one method proposed for gene therapy, true, because you’re dealing with adult organisms. With GE crops, you can start with the one cell stage, change that one cell’s genome (using viral vectors or any number of other methods), then grow up a plant from that.

Sometimes it works, more often it kills the organism.

Nonsense. Even if you did do the gold-atom method with an adult, it’d be completely harmless. There is a very slight risk of causing cancer, but it’s not likely. It’s certainly not “more often” than anything.

Scientists have little or no idea how or why this process works.

Again, this is complete nonsense. There are entire textbooks and scholarly journals dedicated to explaining how this stuff works.

Furthermore, an organism’s natural defenses against changes in DNA make it even less likely that the desired protein will be expressed

True. So? When you do the engineering, you set it up so that you can test and see whether or not the desired protein is being expressed before you use it. Then you only use those embryos that are expressing the protein you want.

The most alarming fact of genetic engineering, also notably absent from your article, is that all of genetic engineering is based on Francis Crick’s Central Dogma, which states that DNA has absolute and final control over which proteins are expressed in an organism

That’s an overstatement, but I’ll let it go, since it doesn’t really have anything to do with anything here.

This was refuted conclusively with the Human Genome project, which found that the human genome does not contain enough information to code for all the proteins it needs to. In other words, no one knows why certain proteins are produced, but it certainly isn’t all about DNA.

Complete and utter bunk and nonsense. The Human Genome Project found that the actual number of genes in the genome was slightly smaller than expected, but it’s still adequate for its purpose.

If you’re suggesting that some proteins are produced without being coded for by DNA, well, you won’t find a single scientist out there who agrees with you.

I also have to take offense to your blithe assurances that “the risks are usually modest and controllable.” Not only is the consumer market saturated with genetically engineered fruits, vegetables, and products derived from such, but the pollen from the plants is not contained and infects many fields of the same type of crop. Can you imagine what would happen if the protein that conveys herbicide resistance, for example, were found to cause neurological damage? How would you take it off the market? How would you even know which plants carried the DNA that gave them the possiblity to express it? And what would you feed everyone with?

These are actually reasonable concerns that could be debated, though I personally think you’re exaggerating the risk a bit. If you’d confined your criticisms to this paragraph, I probably wouldn’t have said anything.

Welcome to the SDMB!

[friedo]

FTR, I believe this is the column in question: What’s the story on genetically engineered foods?.

I hate biology, probably due to the fact that in ninth grade I accidentally splattered dead frog guts all over my cute female lab partner. Mortifying. So I’ll stay out of this one.

[SirRiff]

As a genetics graduate in biotech, I must state that most of the criticisms of GE are doomsday scenarios.

take in example the US (which is a good example having a large population and good online records available)

45,000 people die in auto accidents every years (10X that are injured)
5000 die of tobacco related illnesses
thousands in violent crimes and so on and so,

so we can be assured that at least 50,000+ people die every year from easily preventable causes. add to this that roughly that same amount have died every year previous, and will die every year to follow.

can anybody really state that putting a Vitamin A gene into rice will kill 50,000+ in the US alone every year? not likely.

thus the vast benefits to the world (especially third world nations) by simply putting vitamins into food and making crops more productive could never bring about the deaths already occurring every day by the use of highways, alcohol, tocabbo, and firearms.

also, every time a sperm fertilizes an egg the merging of two genomes causes mutations, i researched a paper specifically on this subject for my term paper. it happens every time, in every person that has ever lived.

study has shown that of all conceptions (not births, conceptions) only 83% are able to develop to birth. that means there are so many mutations that cause spontaneous abortion before babies are even born, there is a innate level of error in just merging two genomes NATURALLY.

thus in light of these issues, it is completely incorrect to claim a controlled and traceable genetic manipulation is any more dangerous then natural conception. and even if there WAS a inherent danger by this, it would never reach the level of deaths caused by everyday technologies in the developed worlds.

got that?

hector jones

[Chronos]

I hate biology, probably due to the fact that in ninth grade I accidentally splattered dead frog guts all over my cute female lab partner. Mortifying. So I’ll stay out of this one.

See, you’ve got to see these things as opportunities. Suppose, for instance, you had helped her clean up? Nothing like a good excuse to rub paper towels over a cute girl’s body.

[eburacum45]

I am a great enthusiast for genetic engineering, and think it could usher in an era of accelerated evolution more Lamarckian than Darwinian;
but there are surely many dangers to consider.
for instance poorly designed genotypes which are apparently viable but weak after a number of generations or when crossed with a diverse population;
GM on mammals or humans could produce many nonviable foetuses or young individuals which have reduced quality of life.

Should the more advanced type of GM wait until all the consequences of gene modification can be predicted…

would it be possible to run a modelling program approaching the complexity of a real organism to anticipate as many of the effects of the modification before hand? Could such a thing be doable now or inthe near future?

This would be preferable perhaps to actually creating several failures to suffer the effects of unforseen complications.
It is one thing to have naturally occuring non-viable embryos, but to increase this by genetic manipulation must be an ethical issue.

[Smeghead]

Originally posted by eburacum45 *
**
would it be possible to run a modelling program approaching the complexity of a real organism to anticipate as many of the effects of the modification before hand? Could such a thing be doable now or inthe near future?*

Not with current technology. Not when we know so little about what proteins are present in a cell, how they’re shaped, what they do, and what they interact with. The Human Genome Project is a good start, but we really need a Human Proteome Project to complete the picture, and, IMHO, that’ll me a MUCH bigger job.

If anyone were able to correctly model even a single cell, say a bacterium, that would easily be Nobel Prize-worthy.

[eburacum45]

Thank you for you comments, Smeghead.
It is much easier for a natural process to model itself than for to reduce it to a set of numbers in a program…
it may even be impossible to model some processes accurately.

[wavion]

I don’t understand why people always freak out over genetically engineered foods. Genetic engineering has been going on for centuries. Any livestock owner who has chosen to selectively breed animals based on their desirable traits has practiced genetic engineering. Similarly, farmers may plant seeds from particularly large or tasty fruits/vegetables so they can have more of those large, tasty fruits/vegetables. This too, is genetic engineering. It has been going on for years. We’re just better at it now, and we can do it in a laboratory setting. And we are more efficient at reproducing the specific traits we are interested in. Moreover, genetic engineering may be as innocuous as converting a diploid plant into a tetraploid plant – by adding additional copies a plant’s own genome, plants often grow larger and produce larger fruits/vegetables for us to eat. Take care, guys; I’m going to go enjoy a nice seedless watermelon!

[scotandrsn]

can anybody really state that putting a Vitamin A gene into rice will kill 50,000+ in the US alone every year? not likely.

Sorry, being able to declare something “not as deadly” is not an indicator to me that it is safe.

I, too believe that genetic modification of foods has the potential to revolutionize the world food supply. But “potential” is the operative term here.

Not with current technology. Not when we know so little about what proteins are present in a cell, how they’re shaped, what they do, and what they interact with. The Human Genome Project is a good start, but we really need a Human Proteome Project to complete the picture, and, IMHO, that’ll me a MUCH bigger job.

Tell me please, which other proteins in the rice genome are turned on or off by a vitamin A gene? What is the resulting phenotype? What impact does it have on the biome or the human body? Oh, we don’t know yet, and can’t yet model it on a computer? Yum!

We would like to imagine a scenario in which the possibilities of a proposed genetic modification are studied soberly by scientists for as long as it takes to observe most possible outcomes, and dangerous variants destroyed long before they reach market, but is this a realistic hope?

Cecil’s most salient point is that the “Friggin’ Monsanto” argument is about the capitalist system. This system works on this principle: As long as it makes money, don’t change it for any reason, except to make more money.

The result, as we see in the papers (sometimes), is that as long as a product line is profitable enough to pay hush money to victims of unforseen negative effects, a lot of people have to be very badly screwed before changes are made.

Some great (and safe) advances will arise from the study into genetically modified foods, but only the profitable ones will see the light of day, as long as the research limited to corporations. Corporate America hates R&D, and will cut it off as soon as a product is marketable, which may or may not also be the point at which it is safe.

Even assuming only products with no direct negative effects are given to consumers, what about collateral damage? If Monsanto, in the example provided in the original article, can balance harsher pesticides with genetically modified crops that can withstand them, what will the runoff of these superkiller pesticides do to the surrounding ecosystem? You can bet Monsanto will only look into it if the instability caused by unforseen side effects threatens the population of a major city.

So yes, the danger is not in genetic modification itself. The science has great potential to improve worldwide quality of life. It is genetic modification put, without sufficient regulation, into the hands of entities primarily motivated by greed that is the danger.

[Chronos]

Tell me please, which other proteins in the rice genome are turned on or off by a vitamin A gene? What is the resulting phenotype? What impact does it have on the biome or the human body? Oh, we don’t know yet, and can’t yet model it on a computer? Yum!

While you’re at it, how about a discussion of which rice genes are turned off or on in polyploidy, and what is the resulting phenotype and effect on humans? The answer to that one is even less complete, but humans have been cultivating polyploid grains (and other foodstuffs) for millennia.