According to the New York Times genetically engineered Xa21 rice was big news journalist Sandra Blakeslee wrote it was:
“the first time that a disease-resistance gene has been put into rice”
Gary Toenissen, deputy director of agricultural sciences at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, heralded it as:
“a new era in plant genetics and resistance breeding”.
But eighteen years after that artice was written, the failure of these predictions is clear. No commercial GMO rice of any kind exists, nor has Xa21 or any similar gene for disease resistance been developed for commercial purposes.
A 2011 New Scientist article portrayed a new GMO cassava developed using money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that was reported to contain protein levels elevated by a factor of four and apparently sufficient to greatly improve the nourishment of “hungry children” No such cassava is ever likely to feed the hungry of Africa. A subsequent investigation at the Danforth Center found that the “modified” cassava plants in their greenhouses had no zeolin gene in them. The research paper was therefore retracted.
In 2001 US special envoy Dr Andrew Young flew into Kenya to launch a GM virus-resistant sweet potato developed with Monsanto. According to Forbes magazine its yields were “astonishing”, fully twice that of standard sweet potatoes. Dr. Wambugu, at that time the Kenyan project leader, told the Toronto Globe and Mail that her “modified sweet potato, for example, can increase yields from four tonnes per hectare to 10 tonnes”, and Canada’s National Post called GMOs a technology to pull “the African continent out of decades of economic and social despair”. Subsequently, in 2004, it was acknowledged in Kenyan newspapers and on the website GMWatch that Monsanto’s virus resistance was ineffective in field tests and an official one report even claimed that“non-transgenic crops used as controls yielded much more per tuber compared to the transgenics”. Kenyan scientists involved in field testing were quoted as saying that:
“all lines tested were susceptible to viral attacks.” and “The transgenic material did not quite withstand virus challenge in the field.”
These negative reports, however, didn’t prevent this being cited once again in the US press, this time by celebrity scientist Pamela Ronald in the May 14th 2010 New York Times, that “virus-resistant sweet potatoes and high-yielding pearl millet are just a few examples of genetically engineered foods that could improve the lives of the poor around the globe.”
In fact no GMO virus-resistant sweet potato varieties or scientific publications have ever emerged from Kenya or elsewhere and the story reported by Kenyan newspapers, that yields were considerably less than “astonishing”, was accurate.
The creation of edible vaccines seemed to be a potentially unique opportunity for GMO crops:
“Tangible consumer benefits could turn the debate on genetically modified food,” said Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella about the possibilities of edible vaccines. The edible vaccine concept (variously, lettuce, tomatoes, bananas and potatoes) was described by the Guardian in 2000 as “the most exciting area of biological science”, almost ready to “benefit millions of people in the developing world who could not afford western medicine.” Similar reports, spanning the years 2000-2005, appeared on PBS radio, in the New York Times, Scientific American. These articles focused on the theoretical advantages of edible vaccines (cheapness and ease of preservation) but neglected to discuss their downsides. These turn out to dwarf the problems they are intended to solve. Some of these problems are applicable to any vaccine, but others relate to the Genetic Engineering process. For example, most established vaccines are not edible. They are injected expressly so as to bypass the saliva and stomach acids that would render them useless. Problems also arose getting GMO plants that produce vaccines to still grow well.
Many of the downsides of edible vaccines are more basic. Some stem from the questionable wisdom of making living medical products that are visually indistinguishable from food; others from the problems associated with self-medication by untrained individuals. With plants grown in backyards how will individuals keep track of the dose they have received? How does one safeguard the food supply against contamination with vaccine genes? How should edible vaccine programmes overcome likely inconsistencies of dose due to natural variations in climate, season, and other factors? An alternative edible vaccine scenario often put forward, in which the vaccine is grown in a regional centre and distributed from there, poses its own problems, such as how to transport the edible vaccine, which is a perishable foodstuff, separately from the rest of the food supply?
As a consequence of these unresolved issues no product has gone beyond the status of a small initial trial in people or animals and a 2011scientific review concluded: “Edible transgenic plant vaccines have a long way to go before they will be ready for large-scale tests”. Yet even a large-scale test is not a final product.
Golden rice + vitamin A generates 131,000 results on Google’s internet search engine. Golden rice has genes inserted which produce in its endosperm modest quantities of beta-carotene, the precursor molecule of vitamin A. Golden rice has become the standard bearer for the humanitarian and beneficial use of a GMO and was famously featured on the cover of Time magazine as well as being the inspiration for eleven separate articles in the New York Times alone. Typical is The Hindu of India’s description of a recent visit to that country by Nobel prizewinner Richard J. Roberts (whose prize was unrelated to agriculture). The Hindu wrote:
“Describing the protest by “green” parties in Europe against GM crops as a “crime against humanity,” he particularly drew attention to the project to produce a GM rice variety for tackling the problem of vitamin A deficiency in India and other countries.”
Amidst an almost total absence of journalistic scepticism, only Greenpeace and Vandana Shiva pointed out that the claims for it were false: GR1 was incapable of solving vitamin A deficiencies because the levels of beta-carotene were too low. This was disputed at the time, but it is a clear acknowledgement of GR1′s failure that Syngenta developed a new rice (GR2). The current version of golden rice (GR2) has been the subject of just three scientific publications. Nothing is known about its yield or agronomic characteristics and hardly any more is known about its efficacy or safety. GR2 has not been approved for commercial use or public consumption in any country. It is thus a product still in development, and indeed the transgenes in GR2 have only recently been crossed into the indica rice subspecies that most Asian people eat. There is thus what must surely be an unprecedented disparity between the number of articles generated around golden rice and its actual achievement, which currently stands at zero.
On occasion, press coverage have indicated that there are socio-cultural and technical obstacles to golden rice achieving genuine success in improving the nutrition of those with a Vitamin A deficiency. For a start golden rice will have to be widely grown (which means replacing many thousands of local varieties, or breeding the transgenes into each one); it must be made available to the poorest and most isolated (who actually need it); and it will have to overcome strong cultural preferences for white rice (by means not yet known). Moreover, in both scientific trials on humans GR2 was immediately frozen at -70C to prevent loss of the apparently easily degraded beta-carotene (2). It was then fed to the study participants with 10% or more butter or oil (to ensure the availability of the fat necessary for absorption of beta-carotene). It perhaps doesn’t need saying that -70C storage capability and comparably fatty diets are not characteristics of those likely to be deficient in vitamin A.
Thus, between its technical flaws and its requirement for very large quantities of financial resources and political will (for plant breeding, distribution, etc.), it is highly probable that golden rice will never progress beyond a nice media story. Michael Pollan proposed that golden rice (at that time GR1) was a “purely rhetorical technology”. Pollan’s scepticism proved fully correct.
Fakethrough reporting is simple old-time boosterism, whose art largely consists of leaving information out. Except it isn’t quite that innocuous. Because these products are not just the latest cell phone, the quantity of information left out is enormously large and hugely significant. As a non-technical example: when the reader is expected to believe that the agribusiness industry is operating a humanitarian enterprise, is it appropriate to leave out (or deny) the same industry’s historical record of intimidating farmers or manufacturing dangerous agricultural products and then denying and evading responsibility?
The gap between the global coverage and wide acclaim versus the ensuing reality in which two of these five ‘breakthroughs’ failed (or never existed) and the rest which never progressed, can now be understood. GMO news coverage worldwide points to uniformly one-sided reporting of no value to readers. Its major use is to demonstrate the extent to which biotech journalism has been captured by agribusiness interests.
“...misreports of biotechnology are endlessly useful to the industry. Articles about supposed breakthroughs constitute the excuse for stern editorials in prestigious magazines decrying ‘irrational objections’ to GMOs. Supposed breakthroughs, like golden rice, are also an opportunity to prise open specific foreign markets. But the main benefit is less obvious but more fundamental. Agribusiness is an industry whose financial success springs ultimately from building a technological treadmill and establishing monopoly control of agriculture. However, its products are invariably dispensable to agriculture and it struggles to develop new ones. Therefore, fakethroughs’ great value is to confirm, in the eyes of the world, the industry’s claim to be ethical, innovative, and essential to a sustainable future.”
The fundamental driver behind scientific misreporting, therefore, is not intellectually lazy journalists . It is that for agribusinesses and other powerful corporations everything is at stake in science journalism. GMO corporations perennially manipulate the scientific literature. The FDA, advised by its own scientists that GMOs should receive close scrutiny, took the purely political and probably illegal decision to disregard that advice? Imagine if the New York Times or NBC published, under appropriately such scathing headlines. Customers would rebel, political support would disappear and the industry would probably collapse. Consequently, the agbiotech industry must make sure such a scenario never happens. It is for just this reason that BASF, Coca-Cola, Merck, L’Oreal, Monsanto, Syngenta, Smith & Nephew, the Nuclear Industry Association and their competitors now support coordinated attempts to manage scientific news coverage in the form of the UK’s Science Media Centre.
Science journalism could at any point over the lifetime of biotechnology have asked some foundational public interest questions: Is the technology ready? Are the regulators competent? Why is it considered appropriate for industry to fund and conduct its own safety studies? What are the views of dissenting scientists? And many others. Yet only a tiny handful of professional science journalists have ever escaped the standard narrow framing around a specific product, which therefore leaves the reader imagining there are good answers to these questions. In the words newspaper man Lord Northcliffe as:
“News is what people do not want you to print. All the rest is advertising.”
Full article here
No comments:
Post a Comment