Sure.
I think both the relative risks and the benefits get blown out of proportion. The theme here is relative risk and relative benefit. I've broken the presentation down into a few topics today. Again, I want to bring in different perspectives.
The first topic is ethics. I think what the population believes is that molecular geneticists are tinkering with nature; they're playing God. The perspective of a molecular biologist is the following. Remember, a transgene is breaking the species barrier; it's taking one gene from one species and putting it into another species.
From a molecular geneticist's point of view, the way we think is that species really are not that important, to be honest. I'll give an example. Genes come from other genes; they're inherited from other genes through evolution. When molecular geneticists discover a new gene in plants, one of the first things they do is look to see how similar that gene is in a bacterium or in a human, where something that looks like it may have been more studied. What that tells you is that genes are related across billions of years of evolution, because they're derived from one another.
That's a very important concept. When a molecular geneticist looks at the fact that we're taking a gene from one species to another species, it's not such a big deal, because they all came from an ancestral species from which all species are derived. In fact, 30% of human genes work in yeast cells, and potentially vice versa. Yeast cells—what you make bread from—are separated from humans by 1.5 billion years of evolution. That just tells you how related all organisms are. In fact, to me that is the greatest discovery of the twentieth century: all of life on this planet and all of its DNA is highly related.
So breaking the species barrier is not such a big deal for us. In fact, when we look at crop plants, we can become more subtle. We know, for example, when we look at corn, that corn is the ancient fusion of two different species; one of them is related to sorghum. In fact, all of the crops that we see out there are fusions of multiple species. So again, through natural evolution, it's not such a big deal.
Look at corn—again, we're talking about tinkering with nature. Corn comes from an ancient grass from Mexico that looks nothing like modern corn. It's called teosinte, and ancient indigenous peoples in Mexico bred teosinte into modern corn. To put that in perspective, what the ancient people did was take a Chevy Nova and make it into a Ferrari. What GMOs do is change the cover of the steering wheel. To me, that's really again how molecular geneticists look at it.
Even if we look at modern corn varieties—again, this is not a GMO issue—some are missing entire suites of genes and others have entire extra suites of genes. This is all natural. At the bacterial level, microbiologists are actively discussing whether they should even talk about species, in the case of microbes, because there is so much natural gene flow between species.
All of the above is more or less the perspective of the molecular geneticist.
Contrast that with an equally valid perspective from an ecologist. Ecologists definitely care about species, and they care about how those species interact in an ecosystem. If you change how one of those species behaves in that ecosystem, you can disrupt the entire ecosystem. So crossing a species barrier or changing the behaviour of a species can have drastic effects.
I think these are the two large perspectives that you see from biology. Both are valid. Both come at it from different perspectives. I just wanted to address the ethics of tinkering with nature.
On the environmental front, Dr. Van Acker talked about gene flow, and that is a real issue. We should not dispute that issue. What I would suggest is that there are tricks that molecular geneticists can do, that companies can do, to reduce gene flow.
I'll give you a simple example. We all know that we get a gene from our mother and a gene from our father. It's the same case in plants. We can develop transgenes that will only work when there are two partners—in other words, when there are two genes. Only then will they work. You can put one of these genes on the mother chromosome and in the exact opposite location put its partner on the father chromosome. Without getting further into it, what will happen, if there is pollen flow, is that one of the genes will flow, but it won't have any effect.
So I'm saying that there are tricks molecular geneticists can do, and which I would encourage the regulatory bodies to encourage, to reduce the impact of gene flow. In terms of reducing biodiversity, when companies create a new GMO, they do put it into a diversity of genetic backgrounds that are adapted to local environments, so that's less of an issue.
The much bigger problem, to be honest--and this has nothing to do with GMOs--is that the world is focused on only a few crop species. I suppose GMOs may make that problem worse because of the emphasis on a few species. There are potentially 20,000 edible species, and if we really want to address the global issue of food and climate change, I think the issue is increasing biodiversity. That's less of an issue than GMOs. GMOs do not take the place of practising good ecology.
Let me address human health issues. We have this concept that natural is better. I often hear this: nature is better. No, nature is not wonderful. Nature does not want to be eaten. Plants do not want to be eaten. What do they do? They produce a toxic soup of chemicals. That's why leaves are not eaten alive when you walk through a forest. In fact, in terms of land plants out there, there are up to 100,000 different chemicals on this earth that are natural chemicals. We say that chemicals are artificial. No, chemicals are totally natural, and the world is a dangerous place.
Now, in my opinion, it is exaggeration and even a myth to suggest that all GMOs are necessarily safer to humans than spraying with pesticides. If the GMO produces a toxin and if that toxin or its breakdown product gets into seeds or whatever is edible, of course it's not safe. Of course it's not; it's a toxin.
So the key is, which gene? That's the key. Which gene is it and what does it do? Does it produce a toxin or does it not? Or does it have a breakdown product that is toxic? There needs to be appropriate regulation at that level.
This gets to the labelling issue and the relative risk issue. We're very obsessed with GMO and if it's safe or unsafe. Three studies done several years ago suggested that half the carcinogens you take in on a daily basis are from drinking three to five cups of coffee--I'm looking around to see who is drinking coffee today--because the coffee bean has 100 different chemicals, several of which are carcinogens.
So we could talk about the relative risk of GMOs, but to me the bigger issue is that we do not have a good database anywhere in the world about the toxic effects of natural chemicals in our foods. I think that's the most important issue when it comes to human health. Cancer rates are going up. We do not know the natural interactions between natural chemicals in the foods we're eating in all sorts of combinations that we've never eaten before.
Some people are concerned about eating DNA. Animals have been eating DNA for 1.5 billion years and we have not turned into plants. People are worried about unintended consequences of putting new genes or DNA into plants. It is absolutely true that if you put a novel gene into a plant, it produces a protein. That protein will interact with other proteins--it might--and it might have unintended consequences. So as part of the regulation we certainly need to look at the molecular interactions. There are technologies to do that. One of them is called a microarray.
We've been eating GMOs for a very long time. If any of you are diabetic and are injecting insulin, that is a GMO product. People who have taken a human insulin gene express the insulin protein in another organism. If you're lactose intolerant, as I am, and take Lactase pills, like I do, that is also a GMO. Several of the medicines we consume are in fact GMO products. So again, we have to look at this in context.
In terms of socio-economic issues...I take students on a tour of the U.S. Midwest, and I've spoken to a lot of farmers. A lot of farmers like GMOs. They really like these new traits; they're fantastic and they work very well. However, what farmers do not like is being forced by the companies that have their best breeding stocks.... They have no choice. If they want to get that best breeding stock, they have to get the GMOs with it, or they have to get combinations of GMOs, whereas they might like some of the GMOs, but not the others.
So I think that's important.
I think if you're going to impose novel regulations, there's a trade-off here. The trade-off is it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to get a GMO to market today. That is reducing competition and increasing the monopolies in this area, which is a concern, I think, for everyone.
Lastly, and very briefly, on the international side, a GMO is not going to feed the world, as was mentioned earlier. There's no silver bullet. What underlies global poverty in Africa and Latin America and Asia is a number of things. It's poor access to good seed. It's lack of fertilizers. It's lack of irrigation. It's lack of agricultural extension officers. A GMO is not going to solve any of that.
However, GMOs have a place, particularly when it comes to traits that have to do with ecological interactions, and by that I mean insect resistance and disease resistance. They seem to work very well. What might be game changing in this area is that while we're talking about introducing one gene or a few genes, there is now a technology available to introduce entire chromosomes. There's a company called Chromatin that's doing this. They have the upcoming ability to introduce entire artificial chromosomes into plants, which means one can potentially introduce thousands of genes at once.
Thank you.