Point / Counterpoint: Genetically Engineered Foods

Consider, for starters, that a mere 25 years ago we had no seedless watermelons, no strawberries the size of apples, no bananas so big and firm they could choke an ape. Improvements in the size, flavor and quality of agricultural foods are largely the result of “smart breeding,” the selective cross-breeding within a species to yield a plant’s most desirable traits.

Selectively bred food has been widely distributed since the late 1970s, and the practice meets little resistance today. Far more controversial, however, is the genetic engineering of foods. Biotechnicians who tinker with a plant’s genetic makeup are interested in steering the evolution of plants to make them more ideal for production and consumption. Rather than wait for a natural mutation that would yield crops of finer foods, scientists have figured out how to manually alter plant DNA.

Using a device known as a gene gun, biotechnicians in the 1980s learned how to inject the cells of a plant with genetic material the plant didn’t otherwise contain. Cells could be literally shot through with genes to give a plant such evolutionary advantages as making it more resistant to disease, less appealing to pests, or better suited to survive a drought. Today we can breed plants for color, uniformity of size, disease resistance or even yield-per-acre. We can engineer a tomato to prevent the formation of frost on its skin.

Genetically engineered foods (GE, or GMO for “genetically modified”) have been in circulation for more than 10 years now, but opponents believe we know too little about their inherent risks to give these products a universal stamp of approval. This month, Point/Counterpoint takes a look at some of the arguments surrounding consumer health and genetically engineered foods.

Survival of the Fruitiest

“You can’t name a food that has not been genetically modified,” asserts Joseph H. Hotchkiss, chairman of food science at Cornell University. “Traditional breeding does exactly the same thing as GE, which is to change the genome of a food crop. Orange juice is a great example; we have a hundred years of breeding out bitterness from citrus. GE has exactly the same goals [as traditional breeding], but it’s much more targeted and extremely more specific. Conventional breeding is hit-and-miss.”

Opponents are not so convinced of GE’s specificity, and they’re concerned about health risks. Rebecca Spector, West Coast director of the nonprofit Center for Food Safety, says, “Our position is that GE foods are inherently unstable. The gene insertion is random. They use a gene gun to insert the gene they’re trying to change, but they don’t know where it’s going to land. Each genetic insertion has the possibility to change formerly nontoxic elements into toxic elements. They’re getting better at it, but there’s a pretty high failure rate.”

Crop Check

Spector’s criticism is that there have been no long-term tests on people ingesting GE foods—even though some 70 percent of the processed food in your local grocery store contains ingredients that have been “GE’d.”

“We have no way of tracking,” she says. “Because these foods aren’t labeled, we have no way of knowing if there have been any adverse health effects. And there’s no funding to do the studies. [Biotech companies] are saying the foods are safe, but the FDA is not doing studies or requiring them. We’d like to see a large-scale study conducted by an independent entity—not a biotech agency.”

Rob Rose would take issue with that assertion. Rose is head of public affairs for the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, a not-for-profit research institute deeply immersed in the scientific advance of food technologies. He states that GE products are stringently researched and screened long before any product makes its way to a farmer’s field.

“I think the general public would have a greater sense of awareness if they understood the peer-review process,” he says. “The international scientific community provides oversight and review from the very first step of any plant-science development. It can take eight or 10 years before a product is even viable for a test of any kind at all. Scientists who are in opposition to biotechnology and scientists in full support of it have the opportunity to review the science at the same time.”

Rose also mentions that it is in the best interest of biotech companies to make their research available and transparent. Monsanto Co., the Grand Poobah of agricultural biotech—and a corporation constantly under fire—makes its own Safety Summaries available online.