*" There are countless examples of genes moving naturally between species. Microorganisms swap DNA all the time – this is how antibiotic resistance spreads so quickly between species. Our own genome contains genes that got their start in bacteria and were subsequently taken up by one of our ancestors.
The relatively low rate of such “horizontal gene transfer” in multicellular organisms like plants and animals compared to bacteria is more a reflection of reproductive barriers and the defenses they have evolved to prevent viruses from hitchhiking in their DNA, than from a fundamental molecular incompatibility between species.
This is why I do not find the process of making GMOs unnatural or dangerous – certainly no more so than traditional breeding. And why I find the obsession with, and fearmongering about, GMOs to be so bizarre and irrational.
Of course the fact that making GMOs is not inherently dangerous does not mean that every GMO is automatically safe. I can think of dozens of ways that inserting a single gene into, say, soybeans could make them lethal to eat. But it would be because of what was inserted into them, not how it was done.
For what its worth, it would also be relatively easy to make crops plant dangerous to eat by strictly non-GM techniques. Essentially all plants make molecules that help them fight off insects and other pests. In the foods we eat regularly, these molecules are present at sufficiently low levels that they no longer constitute a threat to humans eating them. But it is likely that the production of these molecules could be ramped up when crossing crop varieties with wild stocks, or by introducing new mutations, and selecting for toxicity, much as one would do for any other trait. Indeed, there have been reports of potatoes that produce toxic levels of solanines and celery that produce unhealthy amounts of psoralens, both chemicals present at low levels in the crops. Which segways nicely into the next topic."*
That entire post is full of ad hominems and unfounded accusations that I’m “unable” to provide valid commentary while patting yourself on the back for apparently doing an upstanding job of it yourself. In fact I’ve been providing such commentary throughout this thread and the other one, most recently and perhaps most succinctly in #196 where I summed up my agreement with the reasoning and recommendations of the latest NAS report. That would be the report that you revived this thread to tell us about, but apparently haven’t read, since you only quoted cherry-picked NYT snippets instead of the important final conclusions I quoted which say almost exactly what I’ve been saying. I also provided the reasoning for my position in the latter part of #186. Finally, I linked to evidence in #195 that the kind of regulation of crops and products with novel traits that the NAS recommends will be an uphill battle because of the GMO industry’s undue influence in the realm of policy making and academic research.
Your counterargument is mainly to jeer and ridicule and hurl ad hominems, along with equating any kind of advocacy of precaution as “woo” equivalent to anti-vaxers and climate change deniers.
Hint: When a large number of scientists protest said ambush journalism as unethical and not the way science should be conducted, and Marshall himself is forced to issue a defensive editorial in a futile bid to justify his extraordinary actions, maybe there’s actually something going on here that shouldn’t be arrogantly dismissed just because you agree with the perpetrator’s politics.
Beautiful! Eisen is saying that multicellular organisms have evolved reproductive barriers and other defenses as an evolutionary safeguard against the kinds of strange and novel and potentially damaging traits that can be created by horizontal DNA transfers. But there’s no fundamental molecular incompatibility between species, so genetic engineering has virtually unlimited open-ended opportunities to do exactly that – meddle with a species’ genetic makeup through horizontal DNA transfers even from distant and entirely unrelated species, and thus has the potential to create profoundly new kinds of genetic modifications with many novel traits and entirely unpredictable impacts.
Eisen seems to have inadvertently produced the best argument yet for why GE crops and foods need to be strictly regulated. And oddly enough, very similar to my ruminations in the last part of post #186.
The obfuscation constantly used by the pro-GMO crowd is based on the fact that GMO products can be characterized by simple and benign modifications that are equivalent and just as safe as conventional breeding. “Can be.” Those are the critical key words. But as the NAS notes, GE itself has virtually unlimited potential to create entirely novel products that may be highly beneficial but may also present correspondingly elevated levels of risk.
Eisen’s point is is horizontal gene transfer between species, rather than a bogeyman invented by biotechnology, has been quite common in nature despite barriers to its occurrence.
Misleading spin.
“WASHINGTON – An extensive study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has found that new technologies in genetic engineering and conventional breeding are blurring the once clear distinctions between these two crop-improvement approaches…A tiered process for regulating new crop varieties should focus on a plant’s characteristics rather than the process by which it was developed, the committee recommends in its report. New plant varieties that have intended or unintended novel characteristics that may present potential hazards should undergo safety testing – regardless of whether they were developed using genetic engineering or conventional breeding techniques.”
Fascinating! So in your delusional world “relatively low rate” now means “quite common”! :rolleyes:
And according to you one can cheerfully ignore the fact that Eisen is talking about how organisms have evolved defenses against precisely this phenomenon, the very one that I described in the last part of post #186 as being the likely cause of BC farmed salmon becoming infected with HSMI due to human meddling enabling precisely such virus-enabled DNA transfers!
For the record, since you love to distort and mischaracterize my statements, I don’t claim that horizontal gene transfers don’t occur in nature. They do, but the effects are often undesirable, as in the salmon example, and so multicellular organisms have evolved defenses to minimize their occurrence. GE forces such transfers using a variety of artificial methods.
“Misleading spin”, eh? First of all what you quote is irrelevant because it only addresses the first part of my statement, the one that you failed to quote and with which it’s fully consistent, when I said “The obfuscation constantly used by the pro-GMO crowd is based on the fact that GMO products can be characterized by simple and benign modifications that are equivalent and just as safe as conventional breeding. ‘Can be.’ Those are the critical key words.”
But what about when they’re not – a situation that may become increasingly common as biotechnology evolves? How about we now examine the second part of my statement, the one that you claim is “misleading spin”. Let’s do it in detail, making it as clear as possible for you, first taking the premise part of my statement, and then the conclusion, and see if the NAS provides support for it.
Part 1 – the premise:
I said “But as the NAS notes, GE itself has virtually unlimited potential to create entirely novel products that may be highly beneficial …”
The NAS said:
Although most novel crop varieties are likely to be as safe as those already on the market, some may raise legitimate concerns … Furthermore, the new suite of emerging genetic-engineering technologies discussed in Chapter 7 is dramatically enhancing the ability of scientists to develop potentially effective new plant traits. Future GE crops discussed in Chapter 8 could greatly expand the use of agricultural biotechnology in the development of biofuels, forestry restoration, and industrial bioprocessing …
Part 2 – the conclusion:
I said “… but may also present correspondingly elevated levels of risk.”
The NAS said:
… and thus potentially lead to new risk-assessment and risk-management issues (NRC, 2015).
One might note that the cite refers to the NAS National Research Council report from 2015 titled Industrialization of Biology: A Roadmap to Accelerate the Advanced Manufacturing of Chemicals, and the specific finding in that report that supports this conclusion reads as follows:
Synthetic biologists cannot always predict the effects of complex combinations of synthesized DNA on the organisms into which they are engineered, and the agency lacks models for assessing the health and environmental risks of such organisms to determine whether they are likely safe enough to release in a field test. As scientists and the agency become more experienced, some combinations of DNA segments in some organisms will become more predictable and regulatory risk-prediction models will be developed.
– Industrialization of Biology: A Roadmap to Accelerate the Advanced Manufacturing of Chemicals, NAS National Research Council, 2015
Yes. Naturally-occurring horizontal gene transfer is not a rare phenomenon. Eisen said:
“There are countless examples of genes moving naturally between species.”
He is far from the only biologist/geneticist to recognize this.
“In complex multicellular eukaryotes such as animals and plants, horizontal gene transfer is commonly considered rare with very limited evolutionary significance. Here we show that horizontal gene transfer is a dynamic process occurring frequently in the early evolution of land plants”
We share many genes with microorganisms. If this process was so horrifically dangerous, humans would be extinct by now.
Yes.
The NAS committee report repeatedly emphasizes that any risks associated with introduction of novel plant varieties depends on the ultimate product and not the technology used to create it. Another example from the committee summary:
"Some emerging genetic engineering technologies have the potential to create novel plant varieties that are hard to distinguish genetically from plants produced through conventional breeding or processes that occur in nature. A plant variety that is conventionally bred to be resistant to a herbicide and one that is genetically engineered to be resistant to the same herbicide can be expected to have similar associated benefits and risks. "
It is not rare, in the sense that there are examples of it happening all over the place.
It is rare in the sense that most particular gene and species combinations do not see transfers. There wouldn’t be many strongly differentiated species, were this not the case. You are not likely to incorporate many new genes from your dog, or your ficus, nor they from you.
Obviously any specific engineered transfer is one that doesn’t readily occur in nature, and is probably impossible by natural means.
There’s a difference between saying that examples of horizontal gene transfer among complex multicellular organisms can be found (as I already acknowledged) and saying that it’s “common” relative to the constantly occurring vertical gene transfers in nature. Good thing, too, because it tends to be associated with new diseases and other undesirable traits like antibiotic resistance and may play a role in cancer. And the paper you cited only reaffirms that it’s considered rare, but hypothesizes that it MAY have been more common in a specific circumstance 480 to 490 million years ago.
You keep raising that irrelevant red herring and I can only conclude that you’re being purposely obtuse. We all agreed a long time ago that both conventional and GE breeding techniques are capable of creating both safe and unsafe products. No one is disputing that the “novel traits” criterion makes sense as a basis for regulation. That has nothing to do with the present discussion. When the NAS explicitly states that emerging GE technologies are “dramatically enhancing the ability” to develop precisely those novel traits and that this potentially leads to new risk issues that we may not even know how to assess, you ought to pay attention instead of engaging the selective deafness that you practice when facts don’t agree with your ideology.
Scoffing at horizontal gene transfer as supposedly being limited to ancient evolutionary events (which is not true) simultaneously derails your argument that it is mostly harmful. Since the genome of many organisms (including humans and other animal species) have long contained DNA from microbes and other organisms, this conservation of “foreign” DNA argues for a beneficial role of such gene transfer.
*"Scientists have known for many decades that prokaryotes such as bacteria and other microorganisms – which lack a protective nucleus enveloping their DNA – swap genetic material with each other all the time. Researchers have also documented countless cases of viruses shuttling their genes into the genomes of animals, including our own.
What has become increasingly clear in the past 10 years is that this liberal genetic exchange is definitely not limited to the DNA of the microscopic world. It likewise happens to genes that belong to animals, fungi and plants, collectively known as eukaryotes because they boast nuclei in their cells. "*
Bottom line: horizontal gene transfer is not a freakishly rare event limited to mad scientists practicing genetic modification - it’s a natural process, often beneficial to recipients of such transfer. The major difference between the “natural” process and what occurs in genetic modification is that the lateral is tightly controlled and tested for effect.
Yes.
That quote appears nowhere in the just-released NAS report summary, which stresses that process-based evaluation of new agricultural products should be replaced by evaluation of that product regardless of the method used to produce it. That’s not a “red herring”, but the basis of the NAS’ evaluation of the GMO foods issue.
“In determining whether a new plant variety should be subject to safety testing, regulators should focus on the extent to which the novel characteristics of the plant variety (both intended and unintended) are likely to pose a risk to human health or the environment, the extent of uncertainty about the severity of potential harm, and the potential for human exposure – regardless of whether the plant was developed using genetic-engineering or conventional-breeding processes.”
The contortions which wolfpup is undergoing to avoid recognizing the NAS committee’s conclusions (after previously having repeatedly suggested that the NAS was the only scientific organization worthy of settling the matter) is amusing. And also depressing.
By the way: bringing up tobacco, thalidomide etc. as supposed examples of why genetically modified foods should be viewed with marked suspicion is right out of the woo (specifically, antivax) playbook.
Correct.
Citing thalidomide is especially ludicrous, since it was the F.D.A. (one of the organizations that regulates genetically-produced agricultural products) that blocked the sale of thalidomide in the U.S., sparing us the outbreak of genetic defects that plagued Britain and Germany.
It is a large body of good scientific work that has determined the dangers of (for example) tobacco and lead) while validating the safety and usefulness of vaccines, fluoridated water and genetically modified foods.
As for Inbred’s question - I see no way in which labeling would improve safety one iota.
The only real world effect that labels will have is the one obviously intended by the anti-GMO folks…to scare the public off from buying GM products and drive those products from the shelves. We aren’t talking about testing of food, which is already being done, we are talking about a campaign designed to bias the buyers of products based on their perception, fueled by the anti-GM people themselves, that there is something wrong with GM products and that the consumer should beware of the evil in those products. It’s very similar to the tactics used by the anti-nuclear folks…not surprising, since there is some cross fertilization going on there. So to speak.
So “beneficial” that it’s the cause of a plethora of new infectious diseases and many old ones, including the salmon disease I mentioned that started this whole side conversation, and has been hypothesized to be linked to cancers through horizontal transfers from bacteria. So “beneficial”, in fact, that the higher organisms have evolved defensive mechanisms to prevent it, as Eisen states himself.
This is just exactly the kind of claim I would expect from a promoter of genetic engineering as being forever incontrovertibly safe, and you never disappoint.
Those “contortions”, it should be noted, consist of direct quotations from the actual NAS report just issued and from a related one issued last year, and not from a superficial public relations piece from the Media Relations office whose main purpose is to counter anti-GMO doomsday crackpots and not to address the complex, substantive, and nuanced issues that are in the actual report. Your selective deafness is on full display.
As the NAS concluded, product labeling serves purposes that go beyond food safety, purposes like transparency, access to information, and consumer choice. They note that the marketplace is also responding to consumer interest in avoiding GE foods, and that the number of products voluntarily labeled as “non-GMO” has increased dramatically in the last 10 years.
That said, I’ve revised my position and believe that labeling should be required only where it’s practical and meaningful, principally where the ingredient has been subject to special scrutiny because of novel traits. And as I said earlier, I’m actually less concerned about the absence of labeling laws at present than I am about the insidious influence of the biotech industry among policy makers and regulators, so that labeling laws will be impossible to enact even when they are well justified. If the EU sometimes appears overly cautious, there is no doubt that the US is on the other extreme because of industry dominance in the political process. This isn’t just a problem in biotech.
You mentioned a salmon virus observed in farmed fish (it also occurs in wild salmon) - nothing about any disease exclusive to genetically modified salmon or that it was caused by horizontal gene transfer.
Imputing only evil to natural horizontal gene transfer could be titled Ignorance Of Evolutionary Biology 101.
*"If not for a virus, none of us would ever be born.
In 2000, a team of Boston scientists discovered a peculiar gene in the human genome. It encoded a protein made only by cells in the placenta. They called it syncytin.
The cells that made syncytin were located only where the placenta made contact with the uterus. They fuse together to create a single cellular layer, called the syncytiotrophoblast, which is essential to a fetus for drawing nutrients from its mother. The scientists discovered that in order to fuse together, the cells must first make syncytin.
What made syncytin peculiar was that it was not a human gene. It bore all the hallmarks of a gene from a virus.
Viruses have insinuated themselves into the genome of our ancestors for hundreds of millions of years. They typically have gotten there by infecting eggs or sperm, inserting their own DNA into ours. There are 100,000 known fragments of viruses in the human genome, making up over 8% of our DNA. Most of this virus DNA has been hit by so many mutations that it’s nothing but baggage our species carries along from one generation to the next. Yet there are some viral genes that still make proteins in our bodies. Syncytin appeared to be a hugely important one to our own biology."*
Some of the “foreign” genes we and other mammals carry around are likely to be nonsense code which has no effect on development. Some, like the DNA that codes for syncytin are likely to be valuable or even essential.
Strawman, yet again. Neither I nor anyone in this thread has ever deemed genetic modification “as being forever incontrovertibly safe”.
So the official NAS summary was set up to distort and subvert what the panelists actually meant? Now that’s a novel conspiracy theory.
The NAS report did not call for GMO food labeling. It merely noted that non-scientific justifications for labeling exist.
*even worse than salmon reovirus is the “red herring” disease, where discussion of actual GMO safety research and actual conclusions of the new NAS report is deemed a “red herring” by wolfpup because (s)he doesn’t want to go there.
It would be if I had said anything even remotely like that. I used the word “superficial”. Do you understand what it means? As you never tire of pointing out, there are crackpots around pushing the idea that GMOs are going to kill us all. The NAS public relations piece is addressed to that level of comprehension. The quotes I provided and discussed are addressed to the substantive but more nuanced science questions of mitigating risk as genetic engineering evolves, risks that the NAS plainly acknowledges are real and tangible and that you plainly wish to ignore.
All the rest of that nonsense you posted is just the trivial argumentative fallacy that if a process can be shown to be sometimes harmless and sometimes even beneficial, then by golly it must always be harmless and beneficial. That is simply a ridiculous argument fail. HGT is fundamentally disruptive, relatively rare, and with fundamentally unpredictable effects in higher-order organisms.
