March '08 | Industrial IMOs
Modern science seems to have identified two sorts of gene.
One is the industrial gene, which exists for commercial purposes. The other is the natural gene which exists to facilitate the flow of living intelligence, and to annoy the biotech industry.
Industrial genes can be defined in terms of their DNA structure and the specific functional protein they generate. They can be understood, owned, tracked, proven safe, tweaked, proven to function uniformly, legalised, linked to disease, and recalled.
Natural genes on the other hand, operate in a complex network. They interact and overlap with one another, with other cellular components and even with the wider environment. Their products operate in much the same way. We will never understand them.
Needless to say, the existence of a networked genome shatters the scientific basis for virtually every official risk assessment of today's commercial GM products: the details of a gene's structure and its product, no matter how exactly described, are useless in a networked system.
The biotech industry is, of course, in denial and has categorically dismissed, or derided as unscientific, every challenge to safety claims for its products. Its unshakable belief is that “Both theory and experience conform the extraordinary predictability and safety of gene-splicing technology and its products” (Dr. H. I. Miller, Hoover Institute).
However, one problem has been less easy to shake off simply by consistent denial: people don't trust foods with foreign, artificial genes in them, and the very term 'GM' is now anathema in the marketplace.
To get round this sticky situation, genetic engineers have come up with a cleaner, greener tweaked genome subject only to 'intragenic modification', or 'IM'.
IM involves inserting novel constructs of the plants own genes to up- or down-regulate natural metabolic pathways. The technique, thus, overcomes concerns about the presence of foreign genes in our food.
Or, does it?
The change in terminology is misleading because IMOs are still GMOs and are still “prone to all the mutagenic effects of the GM transformation process.” (Dr. Michael Antoniou). Put another way, IM genes are just another version of the industrial gene.
The biotech industry is not only in denial about the real nature of genes, but also about their lack of predictability, and where this attribute comes from. Transgenes, of any kind, become rearranged and disrupt the host genome. This occurs not only during the transfection process, but is an on-going process. There is no reason whatsoever to expect IM products to be any different.
ACTION
Check out THE DANGERS OF DNA TRANSFER ARE UNKNOWN – News, March 2008, and don't be fooled into thinking that IM food is likely to be any safer than GM.
SOURCES
- Dr. Michael Antoniou, comment on intragenic modification to GM Watch 11.09.07; www.gmwatch.org/ archive=8272
- Denise Caruso, A Challenge to Gene Theory, a Tougher Look at Biotech, New York Time, 1.07.07