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Beyond Bad Science and Big Business
Lecture for ‘Big Money Bad Science’ Teach-in
on globalisation and genetic engineering, Vogue Theatre, Vancouver, November
10, 2000. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
Abstract
The mechanistic mindset of western science is all of a piece with the
neo-liberal economic theory promoting globalisation - the removal of all
international barriers to trade, investment and finance - that has enabled
corporations to ruthlessly exploit human beings and destroy our planet in
their quest for maximum profit. This paradigm has failed us in life as it
has within science, but is still perpetrated by the academia and the
political mainstream, if only because it serves so well to promote gene
biotechnology and to make even unethical uses seem compelling.
GM crops destroy livelihood and self-sufficiency, and are strenuously
opposed by family farmers everywhere. There is compelling evidence that
genetic modification is inherently unsafe, as are many of the GM products.
While the benefits of GM crops remain illusory, the success and benefits
of ecological, natural farming systems are well documented. It is time to
turn the tide on bad science and big business, to reclaim the good life in
every sense for everyone.
Britain might be mistaken for a Third World country, says a newspaper
headline: chaos on the rail network and protests over fuel price increase
in the midst of the worst storms and floods in decades, and a CJD epidemic
that may claim up to tens of thousands of lives.
The public enquiry report, published at the end of October, blames
persistent government denials over the link between CJD and BSE beef based
on the ‘best scientific advice’ given by the Southwood Committee
in 1989, which concluded "it was most unlikely that BSE will have any
implications for human health". The ‘best scientific advice’
is saying the same about genetic engineering. The scientific establishment
has failed, again and again, to acknowledge that science is by its nature
incomplete and uncertain and to insist on the precautionary approach. The
precautionary approach might also have averted global warming, had it been
adopted ten, twenty years earlier. It is high time that the precautionary
approach is applied now in gene biotechnology.
If climate change and the CJD fiasco can teach us anything, it is that
science is too important to be left to the politicians or to a scientific
establishment increasingly in bed with big business. Our academic
institutions have given up all pretence of being citadels of higher
learning and disinterested enquiry into the nature of things; least of
all, of being guardians of the public good. The corporatization of science
is the greatest threat to our survival, and it works in subtler ways than
generally recognized.
Western science dominates the world through its technologies, many of
which become instruments of destruction and oppression in the hands of
corporate business. More significant, however, is the mechanistic mindset
of the science, through which the world is perceived and shaped. It
presents nature as isolated atoms at every level, jostling and competing
against one another in the Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest.
Organisms are mistaken for machines, and there is no limit to how they can
be manipulated for profit, especially by changing their genes. Genes and
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have become the latest, hottest
commodities.
The mechanistic mindset is all of a piece with the neo-liberal economic
theory promoting globalization - the removal of all international barriers
to trade, investment and finance - that has enabled corporations to
ruthlessly exploit human beings and destroy our planet in their quest for
maximum profit. That was why 50 000 took to the streets of Seattle to
close down the World Trade Organisation last November; and a further 20
000 turned up to demonstrate against the World Bank in Prague this
September. And it will go on, until peoples’ aspiration for a safe,
just, equitable, sustainable and compassionate world is heeded.
The mechanistic paradigm has failed us in life. It has also failed
within science. Contemporary western science, across the disciplines, has
been rediscovering how nature is organic, dynamic and interconnected.
There are no linear causal chains linking genes to the characteristics of
organisms, let alone the human condition. Genes function in complex
entangled networks, constantly responding to feedback from the internal
and external environment. Genetic engineering grew out of laboratory
techniques for modifying the genetic material of organisms discovered some
25 years ago. These same techniques enabled geneticists to study the
genetic material in ways that were not possible before. The findings have
turned genetics upside down.
By the 1980s, geneticists have coined the phrase, "the fluid genome"
to describe the dynamic state of the genetic material in all organisms,
which is subject to both small and large changes in the course of
development and in response to feedback from the environment. The new
genetics is radically holistic and ecological, as is life itself. But the
discredited paradigm is still perpetrated by our academia and the
political mainstream, if only because it serves so well to promote gene
biotechnology, and to make even unethical uses seem compelling.
The human genome project to map the genetic material of our species has
been hyped a great deal, but the only concrete offers thus far are
patented gene tests, some 740 already in the market. In cases where such
tests can help to diagnose and treat patients, exorbitant licence fees
have prevented their use. On the other hand, healthy people testing
positive are denied employment and health insurance. Among the human genes
and cell lines patented and sold by corporations are those stolen from
indigenous tribes under the pretext of providing medical care, and even
coercion is used.
Prenatal and pre-implantation diagnoses are eliminating human foetuses
and embryos carrying genes said to pre-dispose them to cancer as adults.
Jim Watson, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA, the
genetic material, suggested that parents might want to eliminate the
unborn carrying homosexuality genes. There are no such genes, by the way.
The overwhelming causes of ill health are environmental and social. The
World Health Organisation has long concluded that at least 80 percent of
all cancer is attributable to environmental influences. Hundreds of actual
and potential carcinogens have been identified among the 70 000 industrial
chemicals that pollute our air, water and soil. Rising epidemics of
childhood cancers are linked to mutations caused by radioactive wastes
seeping from processing plants, or dumped into the sea and washed up on
our beaches. But the cancer research establishment is doing little for
cancer prevention except identifying putative genes predisposing people to
cancer.
The focus on genes is misplaced. It is diverting attention and resources
away from the real causes of ill health, allowing the chemical industry to
continue to pollute our life support system with impunity, and to profit
from the lucrative health market created by the rising tide of ill health.
A headline in the financial pages of The Guardian (Wednesday
August 2, 2000) says it all: "Gene hunters say patients are a
bankable asset". Worse yet, the ‘genetic mantle’ placed on
diseases and other human conditions end up blaming the victims, fueling
the re-emergence of genetic discrimination and eugenics that have blighted
the history of the last century.
A prominent band of scientists and ‘bioethicists’ are
advocating human germline gene therapy, which amounts to making
genetically modified human beings. They see the creation of a gene-rich
class of human beings to be inevitable due to the free reign of the global
marketplace. The rich will pay to genetically enhance their offspring, in
the same way that they will pay for expensive private education.
Consequently, there will be a genetic underclass - children of the poor -
that will eventually become a separate, inferior species. Social inequity
is thereby translated into genetic inequity and vice versa.
Human embryos are cultured in the laboratory to provide cells and
tissues for transplants. International trafficking of human organs is
already rife, and eggs and embryos will be added to the list. In the
Indian Seed Tribunal in September, three farmers in the same family in
told the Tribunal how each had to sell a kidney when their crops failed
from the bad seeds they were sold. They were the responsible ones, other
farmers committed suicide instead. In future, the women may well be forced
into selling their eggs and embryos.
Two years ago, the first ‘human’ clone was created, by
transferring the genetic material of a human cell into a cow's egg. In
October this year, researchers from an Australian and a US company made
another by transferring human genetic material into the egg of a pig.
Mercifully, the experiments were destroyed at 14 days, which is the
current legal limit; or we would have been faced with Frankenstein. At
least the original Dr. Frankenstein did not do it for money. And that is
the bottom line. In deciding whether any application is ethical or
beneficial, ask whether it would be done if there were no money to be
made. And who but the rich can benefit when all the genes, cell lines and
reproductive processes are patented for commercial exploitation?
Gene biotechnology is not just about GM food or GM human beings. It is a
commitment to an existential nightmare, a descent into a self-made hell on
earth. Mary Shelley´s brilliant novel was not only a parable of the
arrogant scientist playing God, it is also about mechanistic science out
of control, today, in the service of the corporate empire.
In China, where my family originates, ‘rice’ pronounced ‘faan’
means livelihood, it means contentment and self-sufficiency. In Thailand,
rice is life, and the Karen hill tribes are so intimately connected to
rice that the ‘rice spirit’ is brought back to the people and
the land in a rice ceremony every year. Tens of thousands of rice
varieties still exist in Thailand, which have been collected, created and
propagated by farmers in the course of thousands, if not tens of thousands
of years. That, despite the fact that a US scientist, Dr. Love, absconded
with 120 000 varieties collected for the Thai gene bank in the 1950s.
Thai rice varieties come in endless shades of gold, red and black, each
with a distinctive fragrance, serving different purposes and occasions, to
enhance life as much as to provide nutrition. Each variety is valued and
loved for its own sake, more than a connoisseur might appreciate varieties
of tea, coffee or wine. I was given a bag of red rice to take home to
London, and have savoured every mouthful since. Seeds are freely given and
exchanged as gifts among farmers in Thailand, as they are all over Asia,
Latin America and Africa.
To people whose lives are so inextricably interwoven with their
indigenous plant varieties, what else can GM crops be but an abomination?
And why should the rest of us not recover to some extent this aesthetic
and spiritual connection to our food?
There is little doubt that GM crops will further destroy livelihood and
self-sufficiency through corporate patents on seeds that farmers cannot
resow or exchange, and through GM ‘terminator’ seeds that are
rendered sterile, breaking the very cycle of renewal and regeneration that
is the essence of life. There are 152 patents on rice, some 70 of them
associated with the GM ‘golden rice’ that Astra Zeneca is
supposed to be offering free to the Third World as a cure for Vitamin A
deficiency.
Farmers all over South East Asia are incensed about the introduction of
GMOs and the accompanying corporate propaganda and intimidation. In
September, thousands of Thai citizens plus representatives from Cambodia,
India, Malaysia and the Philippines took part in a long protest march.
They issued a joint declaration rejecting all GMOs and patenting of seeds
and plant varieties, and demanding government support for sustainable,
natural farming systems.
GM is furthermore an untried, inadequately researched technology. There
is no evidence that GM crops are safe, of the kind that could stand up in
a court of law or to scientific scrutiny, despite what our regulators and
their chosen scientists are saying.
The UK Government tried to place Aventis’ Chardon LL GM corn on the
National List, but overwhelming objection from the public forced a public
hearing which is still going on. Aventis is also behind the recent massive
recall of taco shells and other maize products contaminated with the ‘Starlink’
GM variety that has not been approved for human consumption because it
showed all the signs of being allergenic. As for Chardon LL, Aventis’
unpublished report submitted to the hearing showed that there were twice
as many deaths in chickens fed the GM corn compared to those fed non GM
corn. And on the basis of that, our Government had approved it for use as
animal feed.
There is less than a handful of published papers on GM food safety from
industry, and these are no better. The two papers from Monsanto on Roundup
Ready GM soya showed that it increased milk fat in cows and decreased
weight gains in male rats, and has an unexpected 26.7% increase in
a-antitrypsin, a major allergen and growth
inhibitor. Monsanto failed to make available even more damning data
indicating that the GM soya had 100% increase in soya lectin, another
allergen, which was also unexpected.
The evidence of hazards, much of it in the scientific literature, is
stronger than ever before. That is why some 370 scientists from more than
40 countries are calling for a moratorium, as well as a ban on patents of
organisms and living processes and support for sustainable, organic
agriculture (see www.i-sis.org.uk).
The hazards are inherent to the uncontrollable, unpredictable nature of
the genetic modification process (see Boxes 1 and 2).
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Box 1
GM is inherently hazardous
- GM involves making artificial genes and combinations of genes
that are transferred into cells and embryos to create GMOs, none of
which may ever have existed in billions of years of evolution.
- GM genetic material are typically from dangerous bacteria,
viruses and other genetic parasites that cause diseases and include
antibiotic resistance genes that make infectious diseases
untreatable. The gene products encoded by the genes may be harmful,
as they have never been part of our food chain, and are also new to
the ecosystem.
- GM constructs are designed to cross species barriers and to
invade genomes. But the genetic engineer cannot control where and in
what form the GM constructs end up in the genome. Unexpected toxins
and allergens may result.
- GM constructs are unstable, as are GM lines. GM constructs are
often scrambled when inserted in the genome. In later generations of
the GMO created, the GM constructs may get scrambled further, become
inactive or lost altogether. This seriously compromises agronomic
performance as well as safety, because the GM line will change
further in unexpected ways, and the lost genes may jump into
unrelated species.
- Dangerous GM genes and constructs can spread, not just by cross
pollination to related species, but by horizontal transfer to
unrelated species, spreading antibiotic resistance genes, creating
new viruses and bacterial pathogens, and triggering cancer in
animals.
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The biotech industry and their supporters claim we need GM crops to feed
a growing world population. But UN studies show that world population
growth has been slowing down since the 1960s. The prediction in 1998 was
that total world population will peak at 7.7 billion in 2040, then go into
long term decline to 3.6 billion by 2150, less than two-third of today’s
number. The FAO report on Agriculture released earlier this year,
similarly concludes that existing technologies, not counting GM, will
produce enough and more than enough food to meet population growth for the
foreseeable future. The real problem is distribution, as generally
acknowledged. People are starving in the midst of plenty.
Finally, there is plenty of evidence that low input, ecological farming
methods using crops and knowledge adapted to local conditions have been
increasing yields two, three-fold or more in Latin America, Africa and
Asia since the 1980s, providing social, environmental and health benefits
besides. There are compelling reasons for farmers to grow and sell locally
crops adapted to local conditions, rather than national or international
varieties for export. Export industrial agriculture is responsible for a
great proportion of the fossil fuel consumption that contributes to
climate change. There is also incalculable health bonus to be gained by
all in phasing out agro-chemicals already linked to cancers and many other
illnesses.
In short, now is the time for all of us to join forces to turn the tide
on bad science and big business, to reclaim the good life in every sense
for everyone.
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Box 2
Evidence that GM and GMOs are unsafe
- Bt-toxins, isolated from a soil bacterium, Bacillus
thuringiensis, and incorporated into a wide range of GM crops,
are harmful to beneficial and endangered species, such as lacewings
and the monarch butterfly.
- Several Bt toxins are allergens or suspected allergens, including
the Cry9C in Aventis’ Starlink GM corn, which is responsible
for the recent massive recall of contaminated taco shells and other
corn products in the United States and elsewhere.
- Random insertion of GM constructs result in monstrous
abnormalities in animals such as pigs and fish. No one has checked
for toxins and allergens.
- In plants, unexpected toxins and allergens have arisen, as in
Monsanto’s GM soya: 26.7% increase in allergen and growth
inhibitor, a-antitrypsin, and 100%
increase in soya lectin, another allergen.
- In 1989, a genetically modified batch of tryptophan killed 37 and
made 1500 seriously ill, many to this day.
- The instability of GM constructs lead to inconsistent performance
in the field, yield drag, and other failures which have frequently
turned up in GM crops.
- Herbicide tolerant GM crops created weeds and superweeds. A
canola resistant to three different herbicides made by different
companies, was found in Alberta, Canada.
- GM genes in GM pollen have transferred to bacteria and yeasts in
the gut of baby bees.
- UK government scientists provided indirect evidence that
antibiotic resistance genes from GM pollen and dust can transfer to
bacteria inhabiting the human mouth and respiratory tract.
- GM genes from GM plants have been found to transfer to soil
bacteria in laboratory experiments and in field monitoring.
- GM corn DNA has been found transferred to chicken.
- ‘Gene therapy’ experiments show that animal cells,
including human cells, can readily take up GM constructs, and
incorporate them into the genome. These GM constructs are similar to
those used to make GM plants and animals and pose the same risks.
- New viruses have arisen in GM plants engineered with viral genes.
- GM constructs may recombine with, and wake up dormant viruses
that have now been found in all genomes. Reactivation of dormant
viruses by GM constructs in cultured cells is a major problem in
packaging gene therapy vectors.
- Random insertion of GM constructs into animal genomes may lead to
cancer. This also occurs when GM constructs are put into cultured
cells.
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