GM-free Scotland

News | June '07 | Precise hoops and hurdles

Science is well known for its fundamental precision : in measurement, in repeatability of technique, and in justification for conclusions. Before the rest of the world gets to know about an experiment, it is examined by a chosen panel of other scientists to ensure these precise qualities have been met.

One team of senior scientists isn't so sure. It submitted a paper to the British Medical Journal after concluding that animal trials, a key component of safety testing, are often so flawed by poor standards of methodology that their value has to be questioned. Dr. Arpad Pusztai, who is a leading expert in the use of animal testing methods, has previously reviewed the published animal studies on GM food safety, and come to very similar conclusions.

Add to this the intrinsic problem that the effects of a substance (e.g. drug, food, additive, pesticide) on an animal physiology may be irrelevant to its effect on humans. For example, it was discovered recently that the same master regulatory proteins which are found in both mouse and human liver cells function quite differently in each. The researchers summed it up: “Evolution has discovered several different ways to make a liver from the same building blocks”. Since the liver is the major organ for dealing with toxins which have entered the body, this casts major doubts on the common use of the mouse as a model for human beings in laboratory testing.

COMMENT The scientific measurements may be precise and repeatable, but if the experimental conditions have not been controlled sensibly, the conclusion can't be justified.

Two recent scares over benzoates, a group of preservatives usually added to soft drinks, revealed some major flaws in our science.

First there was the discovery that benzoates in solution with ascorbic acid (another commonly added preservative) and stored without temperature control, reacted to form the highly toxic derivative, benzene. Science can easily predict that this will happen under such circumstances, but the knowledge wasn't being heeded. Science can easily test for benzene, but no such testing is routine nor mandatory. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) acted quickly to order the withdrawal of all products identified as containing benzene, but refused to outlaw the use of benzoates or to regulate storage conditions.

Hot on the heals of benzene,came the discovery that benzoates can damage the mitochondria. Mitochondria are small bodies inside all cells and are vital to life because they produce the energy to drive cell functions. Damage to the mitochondria results in cell malfunction and is being linked to the whole aging process, and to neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's. The researcher who revealed this unwelcome finding pointed out that the tests conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were out of date: “The food industry will say these compounds have been tested and they are completely safe. By the criteria of modern safety testing, the safety tests were inadequate. Like all things, safety testing moves forward and you can conduct a much more rigorous safety test than you could 50 years ago.”

COMMENT Science may measure single substances and their effects with great accuracy, but what happens when these interact needs different tests and may lead to very different conclusions. The science may be perfect, but the regulators may not demand it: product recalls are less expensive to industry than banning almost all of their product range. Not trying to find out if anything is amiss in the first place is, of course, less expensive still. Today's scientific methods may be sensitive, specific and a valuable route to knowledge, but it may be yesterday's methods which are actually used.

Microwaves from mobile-phone transmitters were pronounced safe because they are unable to heat our cells. When science is used to measure different parameters, however, a more damaging picture emerges:

Science has recently revealed that magnetic fields can stimulate the growth of new nerve cells. This is exciting if you are trying to cure a degenerative nerve disease by controlled applications, but sinister if you consider the implications for a brain subject to an uncontrolled bombardment with microwaves on a daily basis. Couple this with the accumulating evidence of links to cancer above.

Even if the science does manage to come up with the right tests on microwave effects, the siting of mobile phone masts is controlled by the network operators, who won't disclose their location, and by local council planning committees who are not allowed to consider health issues when approving a new development.

COMMENT Science is worthless if it is used to measure inappropriate parameters. Failures to notice the wider implications of a scientific finding suggest that willful ignorance is endemic in the world of science. Our regulatory system is geared to promoting industry at the expense of safety no matter what the science is shouting at it.

In theory, a whole precise, scientifically designed, integrated battery of tests should be applied routinely to all GM foods to check that the known, but unpredictable and inevitable, genetic side-effects triggered by the insertion of peculiar DNA are not making our food unfit. This, of course, is the job of regulators, and begs the quest what are the scientific hoops and hurdles that regulators force our food through, in the name of safety, before allowing us to eat it?

The benzoate problem with soft drinks gives us an inkling: the British Soft Drinks Association, the industry's representative body, described the safety of this additive as “an area” for the FSA. The FSA said the additive has been approved for food use by the European Commission (EC), adding:”Food additives are only permitted for use after a long and careful process of evaluation. This includes rigorous assessments for safety, undertaken by independent scientific committees.” The EC looks to the guiding light of the World Health Organisation (WHO).

And the WHO?

A study in the Lancet showed that the WHO is producing health guidelines with little or no evidence to back them up.

COMMENT Lots of buck-passing and committees, but not much science anywhere there.

At the end of the day, GM foods are 'tested' on the general population with no control group, no data on levels of consumption and, as the Health Protection Agency pointed out in relation to stomach flu, epidemics can't be measured unless they are notifiable diseases. Without establishing, by precise scientific observation, the nature of potential problems from GM foods, the problems will never become notifiable and never be measured.

COMMENT This sounds remarkably like the animal trials mentioned above which 'are often so flawed by poor standards of methodology that their value has to be questioned'

OUR COMMENT

In their quest for precision, modern 'life' scientists have developed a habit of reducing their observations to single events and single chemicals inside cells, whose reactions proceed machine like to attain a certain conclusion. In this way, 'life' has become dependent on fixed strings of DNA which reel off standard proteins with a standard function. The very simplicity of the scheme has fuelled the global adulteration of our food , seed and microbial environment with peculiar DNA engineered by man. Genetic engineering and transformation only 'work', however, if we measure nothing more than the immediate, desired outcome and ignore the complexities of interaction and evolution. There is no doubt that the model basic to genetic engineering and transformation is flawed: science increasingly reveals that genes operate in a highly fluid way. For example life-experiences can tweak the self-same genes to make more or less protein, to make a different protein, to hand over activity to another gene, or to do nothing at all. And, these changes can be long-lasting and even passed on to future generations.

Dr Mae-Wan Ho gives us a more exciting view of life than genetic engineers can ever manage:

“Organisms are thick with spontaneous activities at every level, right down to the molecules, and the molecules are dancing, even when the organisms sit still ... The macromolecules, associated with lots of water, are in a dynamic liquid crystalline state, where all the molecules are macroscopically aligned to form a continuum that links up the whole body, permeating throughout the connective tissues, the extracellular matrix, and into the interior of every single cell. And all the molecules, including the water, are moving coherently together as a whole ... The liquid crystalline continuum enables every single molecule to intercommunicate with every other”

In such a system, what havoc could a single, tiny strand of interfering man-made DNA wreak?

If you want to read more about the coherent system which is life, subscribe to Science in Society or, read Dr. Mae Wan Ho's books on the subject. Check these out on www.i-sis.org.uk.

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