Report 20th Feb
2000
Parliamentary Briefing
to UK Government (Feb.10-11, 2000)
Arranged
by ISIS through Alan Simpson MP and Presented by Professor Terje Traavik -
senior scientific advisor to the Norwegian government and Steven Druker –
lawyer spearheading the civil law suit against the US FDA.
By special arrangement, two
expert witnesses were brought before the UK government to warn of the
hazards of GM food and crops, and of the bureaucratic cover up that
occurred early in the 90’s when GM foods were first approved by the
US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
In a private meeting between
Environment Minister Michael Meacher and his staff at the Department of
the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR), Prof. Traavik did not
mince his words and warned that the first generation of GM crops and food
are undoubtedly dangerous for human health and the environment and must be
banned. The second generation of GM crops may offer the way forward. The
first generation carry huge risks such as cancer and the emergence of new
pathogens that may result in uncontrollable pandemics, adding that these
are just some of the risks we know about. Adequate risk assessment was
impossible to do because so little research had been done to even
characterise the potential risks involved. He emphasized that the
precautionary principle must be used to deal with the terrible mess that
biotech companies had made by forcing such a potentially hazardous new
food science onto the world.
Steven Druker told of how the US
FDA had misrepresented the scientific facts about GM foods to the public.
Internal documents, obtained through the civil law suit, show that the US
FDA ignored repeated warnings from its own scientists that GM foods are
different from conventional foods, require special safety testing and
should not be presumed substantially equivalent to conventional foods. He
explained that the first GM food approved in the USA – the ‘Flavr
Savr’ tomato, failed to pass the FDA’s own toxicological feeding
trail and this matter was never resolved by the agency. Instead the FDA
eliminated feeding trails from the GM food safety assessment protocol and
proceeded to approve them on the principle of substantial equivalence and
GRAS (meaning generally recognised as safe). Furthermore, FDA scientists
also warned that the use of antibiotic resistance marker genes in GM foods
and animal feeds pose significant risks to human and animal health and
should not be allowed. The agency ignored this advice as well, in a
deliberate action that put public health and safety at risk. The meeting
was then given copies of FDA letters and memos from their own scientists
complaining to this effect.
The Minister and his staff were
very interested in the presentations and ‘alarmed’ by the legal
challenge which is now underway in the US. The meeting ran over time by
half an hour as they questioned the speakers in more detail. The Minister
spoke extensively with Prof. Terje Traavik and requested copies of all his
reports to the Norwegian government.
The next day at the
parliamentary briefing in the House of Commons, Steven Druker repeated his
message and informed MPs and the press about the findings of the civil
lawsuit. He said the FDA have wholly misrepresented the scientific facts
about GM foods. They are in direct violation of US law, which clearly
states the precautionary principle and mandates in the US Food, Drug and
Cosmetic Act that new food additives be demonstrated safe through testing
before they are marketed.
He quoted several FDA
scientists, who strongly protested against the whole approach of the
agency. "The agency is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole
by trying to force an ultimate conclusion that there is no difference
between foods modified by genetic engineering and foods modified by
traditional breeding practices’ - Dr Linda Kahl, an FDA compliance
officer. Dr Kahl summarised the input from the FDA’s scientists by
stating: "The processes of genetic engineering and traditional
breeding are different, and according to the technical experts in the
agency, they lead to different risks." Dr James Maryanski, the FDA’s
biotechnology co-ordinator wrote in a letter to a Canadian official that ‘there
is no consensus about the safety of GM food in the scientific community at
large, and FDA scientists advised they should undergo special testing,
including toxicological tests’.
Steven said "The FDA have
totally misrepresented the scientific facts in order to promote the US
biotech industry. The claim that its policy is science-based is completely
contradicted by its own scientific experts and is therefore false and
amounts to a major deception".
Prof. Terje Traavik began by
saying that he is a professional genetic engineer and has been for the
past 20 years. At first, he was a total ‘believer’ in thinking
that there were only benefits. But he changed his mind as the result of
discoveries made in his own laboratory. "We have no gene technology!"
he said categorically, basically because the so-called technology is
uncontrollable and unpredictable, so much so that there is no basis at all
for risk assessment. Perhaps the next generation of technology may deserve
the label. He emphasized that the gene constructs are the same, and offer
the same risks, whether they are used in agriculture or in medicine, such
as gene therapy vectors and vaccines. Nature has never seen those sorts of
genetic constructs before. They pose huge risks as they can become mixed
up with normal viruses and other invasive elements and transfer their
traits elsewhere. The potential hazards of artificial constructs are much
greater than chemicals. Because, instead of breaking down or diluting out,
they are taken up by cells to multiply, mutate and recombine indefinitely.
It may be ‘BSE [mad cow disease] in technicolor’
The foreign genes and constructs
cannot be targeted and are inserted at random, causing all sorts of
genetic disruptions known as epigenetic effects. These can give rise to
the production of new toxins and allergens. All plants contain toxins and
allergens but the toxins are produced at very low levels and are therefore
not harmful. GM can result in the over production of toxins and allergens
in the GM plants and present a serious health risk. He repeated his call
for banning the first generation of GMOs.
Traavik stressed the desperate
need for public funding of risk associated research based on the holistic
and ecological paradigm rather than the reductionist paradigm we now have.
During the discussion that
followed, Prof. Arpad Pusztai formerly from the Rowett Institute added
that in his experiments (published in ‘The Lancet’ last year),
positional effects due to random gene insertion were clearly observed. He
worked on two lines of transgenic potato that were deemed to be
substantially equivalent. However, after stringent analysis it was shown
that they contained very different levels of protein and were certainly
not substantially equivalent. The two lines came from one transformation
experiment but they had two very different compositional profiles
explained by epigenetic effects – disruption of the normal gene
expression of the cells.
One journalist questioned; ‘Surely
not all scientists who support GM have got it so badly wrong?’ Dr
Mae-wan Ho replied from the floor and said that science was in crisis and
funding in science is such that scientists are consciously or
unconsciously adopting the corporate agenda, which is not the same as the
public good.
Dr Ian Gibbson, from the
government’s Science and Technology select committee, added that in
his view the whole process of safety assessment for all foods needed to be
reviewed and updated.
The meeting was alive with
questions from the floor and also ran over time. Reports have appeared in
The Express and The Daily Mail newspapers and Steven Druker gave two radio
interviews to the BBC on the following day.
Steven Druker will attend the
OECD meeting in Edinburgh on 2nd March 2000 - The
intergovernmental organisations on safety in biotechnology, which will
specifically address the safety of GM food and animal feed.
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