Exposing the Roots of Genetically Modified Crops: The Monsanto Factor

Exposing the Roots of Genetically Modified Crops: The Monsanto Factor



Anti-genetically modified (GM or GMO) crops advocate Jeffrey M. Smith
wrote a persuasive book about the perils of genetically modified crops a
few years back: Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods. Truthout is now offering the DVD adaptation of the book as a Progressive Pick of the Week. Order it now with a minimum contribution of $25
(plus shipping and handling). The takeaway from the DVD is that without
more extensive government and academic research, we are left with
disturbing signs about how GMOs affect human health. The reason we don't
have more research is that Monsanto and other agrochemical companies
are deeply embedded in high positions in the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) and the Department of Agriculture - and
agrochemical companies smear researchers and threaten to withdraw
contributions to universities if they post studies on the dangers of
GMOs. Get the Genetic Roulette DVD now (with an extra bonus disk). It could change how you eat and improve your health.
The following is an introduction to the book version of Genetic Roulette:

When Kirk Azevedo accepted a Monsanto Company recruiter's offer in
1996 to sell genetically modified (GM) crops, it wasn't the pay increase
that inspired him. It was the writings of Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro
that were his motivation. Shapiro had painted a picture of feeding the
world and cleaning up the environment with his company's new technology.
Kirk was fascinated by the idea of swapping genes between species,
creating designer organisms that could reduce manufacturing waste,
turning "fields into factories and producing anything from lifesaving
drugs to insect-resistant plants."1 When he visited Monsanto's St. Louis
headquarters for new employee training, Azevedo shared his enthusiasm
for Shapiro's vision during a meeting. When the session ended, a company
vice president pulled him aside and set him straight.

"Wait a second," he told Azevedo. "What Robert Shapiro says is one
thing. But what we do is something else. We are here to make money. He
is the front man who tells a story. We don't even understand what he is
saying."

Azevedo was jolted. His image "of helping and healing" the world
through GM crops turned out to be a manufactured reality—a lie—crafted
to gain public acceptance and to push products. Azevedo realized he was
working for "just another profit-oriented company."

Helping the world is only one of several manufactured realities about
GM crops, the most fundamental of which is that the foods are safe. The
key source for this claim is the United States Food and Drug
Administration (FDA). According to their 1992 policy on GM foods, "The
agency is not aware of any information showing that foods derived by
these new methods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform
way." On the basis of that sentence, the FDA claimed that no safety
studies are necessary and that "Ultimately, it is the food producer who
is responsible for assuring safety." Biotech companies thus determine on
their own if their products are harmless. This policy set the stage for
the rapid deployment of the new technology. The seed industry was
consolidated, millions of acres were planted, hundreds of millions were
fed, consumers and nations objected, laws were passed, crops were
contaminated, billions of dollars were lost—and it turns out that
sentence was a lie.

The FDA was fully aware that GM crops were meaningfully different.
That, in fact, was the overwhelming consensus among "the technical
experts in the agency." The scientists agreed that genetic engineering
leads to "different risks"3 than traditional breeding and had repeatedly
warned their superiors that GM foods might create unpredictable,
hard-to-detect side effects. They urged the political appointees who
were in charge at the FDA to require long-term safety studies, including
human studies, to guard against possible allergies, toxins, new
diseases, and nutritional problems.

The scientists' concerns were kept secret in 1992, when FDA policy
was put into place. But seven years later, internal records were made
public due to a lawsuit and the deception came to light. The agency's
newly released 44,000 pages revealed that government scientists'
"references to the unintended negative effects ... were progressively
deleted from drafts of the policy statement (over the protests of agency
scientists)." They further revealed that the FDA was under orders from
the White House to promote GM crops and that Michael Taylor, Monsanto's
former attorney and later its vice president, was brought into the FDA
to oversee policy development. With Taylor in charge, the scientists'
warnings were ignored and denied.

As a result, consultation with the FDA on GM food safety is a
voluntary exercise, in which the agency receives summaries without data
and conclusions without foundation. If the company claims that its foods
are safe, the FDA has no further questions. Thus, GM varieties that
have never been fed to animals in rigorous safety studies and probably
never fed to humans at all are approved for sale in grocery stores.

In the mid-1990s, the UK government decided to institute what US
leaders refused to—rigorous, long-term safety testing. They commissioned
scientists to develop an assessment protocol for GM crop approvals that
would be used in the UK and eventually by the EU. In 1998, three years
into the project, the scientists discovered that potatoes engineered to
produce a harmless insecticide caused extensive health damage to rats.
The pro-GM government immediately canceled the project, the lead
scientist was fired and the research team dismantled. The assessment
requirements that were eventually adopted by the EU were a far cry from
those that were being developed in the UK. The superficial testing
schemes still have yet to meet the demands of the FDA's stifled
scientists.

Industry is in charge of safety

Ironically, policy makers around the world gain confidence in the
safety of GM crops because they wrongly assume that the US FDA has
approved them based on extensive tests, and approvals everywhere rely on
the developers to do safety studies on their own crops. Research does
not need to be published and most is kept secret under the guise of
"confidential business information." Very little data is available for
public scrutiny. In 2003, for example, researchers reviewed published,
peer-reviewed animal feeding studies that qualified as safety
assessments. There were ten. The correlation between the findings and
the funding was telling. Five studies "performed more or less in
collaboration with private companies" reported no adverse effects. In
the three independent studies, "adverse effects were reported." The
authors said, "It is remarkable that these effects have all been
observed after feeding for only 10–14 days."

Biotech advocates claim that there is plenty of evidence for safety.
In December 2004, for example, Christopher Preston did a database search
of peer-reviewed animal feeding studies worldwide and came up with 41.6
Although this is still an incredibly low number of papers by which to
judge safety, according to Arpad Pusztai, an expert in feeding studies,
Preston's list failed "to distinguish between a scientific study and an
animal production exercise." The latter "may be of some value to
commercial animal production but have limited scientific value." When
the commercial studies were removed from the list, it left only 18 (of
which are in Russian or Chinese).

In October 2005, Wayne Parrot compiled 60 abstracts entitled,
"General Safety and Safety Assessment of Specific Genetically Modified
Crops from Scientific Journal Articles." The list was presented to the
minister for agriculture and food in the government of western Australia
as evidence that sufficient research had been conducted to conclude
that GM food was safe. According to an analysis by epidemiologist Judy
Carman, "A review of these abstracts found that most were animal
production studies. ... In fact, only nine abstracts could be considered
to contain measures applicable to human health. The majority of these
(six abstracts; 67%) found adverse effects from eating GM crops." Carman
pointed out that several other studies with adverse findings had been
omitted from the compilation. She concluded, "The list of abstracts
therefore does not support claims that GM crops are safe to eat. On the
contrary, it provides evidence that GM crops may be harmful to health."

By the beginning of 2007, there were just over 20 peer-reviewed
animal feeding safety studies on GM crops. Only a single human feeding
trial has been published and there is no post-marketing surveillance on
those eating GM foods. Trials funded or conducted by the GM crop
producers, however, are consistently substandard. They typically fail to
investigate the impacts of GM food on gut function, liver function,
kidney function, the immune system, the endocrine system, blood
composition, allergic response, effects on the unborn, the potential to
cause cancer, or impacts on gut bacteria. In addition, the
industry-funded studies have become notorious for using creative ways to
avoid finding problems. They feed older animals instead of more
sensitive young ones, keep sample sizes too low to achieve the
statistical significance needed for proof in scientific studies, dilute
the GM component of the feed, overcook samples, compare results with
irrelevant controls, choose obsolete insensitive detection methods,
limit the duration of feeding trials, and even ignore animal deaths and
sickness. They've got "bad science" down to a science.

Genetic engineering creates wide-spread, unpredictable changes

The prevailing worldview behind the development of GM foods was that
genes were like Lego blocks, independent pieces that snap into place.
This is false. The process of creating a GM crop can produce massive
changes in the natural functioning of the plant's DNA. Native genes can
be mutated, deleted, permanently turned off or on, and hundreds may
change their levels of expression. The inserted gene can become
truncated, fragmented, mixed with other genes, inverted or multiplied,
and the GM protein it produces may have unintended characteristics with
harmful side effects.

To make this clear, we'll use the popular analogy comparing DNA to a
book. The four bases that make up the genetic sequence are the letters
in the book; the genes are special pages that describe characters called
proteins. The common way people explain and promote genetic engineering
is to say, "It is just like taking a page out of one book and putting
it into another."

In reality, a book would look quite different after it had undergone
genetic engineering. The inserted page (gene) may turn out to be
multiple identical pages, partial pages, or small bits of text. Sections
of the insert are misspelled, deleted, inverted, or scrambled. Next to
the inserts, the story is often indecipherable, with random letters, new
text, and pages missing. The rest of the book has also changed. There
are now typos throughout, sometimes hundreds or thousands of them.
Letters are switched, words are scrambled, and sentences are deleted,
repeated, or reversed. Introduction passages from one part of the book,
even whole chapters (chromosomes), may be relocated or repeated
elsewhere, and bits of text from entirely different books can show up
from time to time. Many of the characters in the story (proteins) now
act differently. Some minor roles have become prominent, leads have been
demoted and some may have switched roles from hero to villain or vice
versa. And, if you get bored with this story, take the original book,
insert another page—even the same one—and the changes will be completely
different. Or stick with the original book and over time, it might
actually rearrange the inserted page.

In addition to unintended changes in the DNA, there are health risks
from other aspects of GM crops. When a transgene starts to function in
the new cell, for example, it may produce proteins that are different
than the one intended. The amino acid sequence may be wrong, the
protein's shape may be different, and molecular attachments may make the
protein harmful. The fact that proteins act differently in new plant
environments was made painfully clear to developers of GM peas in
Australia. They canceled their 10-year, $2 million project after their
GM protein, supposedly identical to the harmless natural version, caused
inflammatory responses in mice. Subtle, unpredicted changes in
molecular attachments might have similarly triggered deadly allergic
reactions in people if the peas were put on the market.

Even if the GM protein is exactly what is intended, there are still
problems. For example, corn and cotton varieties are engineered to
produce a pesticidal protein called Bt-toxin (from Bacillus
thuringiensis). Because it is used in spray form by farmers, it was
claimed to be harmless to humans. That's clearly wrong. People exposed
to Bt-toxin spray had all sorts of allergic-type symptoms; mice that
ingested Bt had powerful immune responses and abnormal and excessive
cell growth; and Bt crops are being blamed for a growing number of human
and livestock illnesses.

Another problem is that inserted genes may transfer from food into
gut bacteria or internal organs. This possibility had been dismissed
earlier based on the assumption that ingested genes are quickly
destroyed by the digestive system. Not so. Animal studies demonstrate
that ingested DNA can travel throughout the body, even into the fetus
via the placenta. Transgenes from GM crops fed to animals have been
found in the blood, liver, spleen, and kidneys. The only published human
feeding trial on GM food verified that genetic material inserted into
GM soy transfers into the DNA of our intestinal bacteria.

Now combine the two risks above and get a third. If the corn gene
that creates Bt-toxin were to transfer into gut bacteria (like parts of
the soy gene have been doing), it might turn our intestinal flora into
living pesticide factories. A biotech proponent may argue that this is
just speculation since there are no studies to show that Bt genes also
transfer. But that is the point. There are no studies on Bt gene
transfer to human gut bacteria—period. We don't know if this happens
because no one is looking. Thus, biotech companies are gambling that
this and many other untested dangers won't materialize. And so are
regulators. And so are consumers. It's genetic roulette.

If results from the few animal feeding safety studies are any
indication, then the odds are stacked against us. Lab animals tested
with GM foods had stunted growth, impaired immune systems, bleeding
stomachs, abnormal and potentially precancerous cell growth in the
intestines, impaired blood cell development, misshapen cell structures
in the liver, pancreas, and testicles, altered gene expression and cell
metabolism, liver and kidney lesions, partially atrophied livers,
inflamed kidneys, less developed brains and testicles, enlarged livers,
pancreases, and intestines, reduced digestive enzymes, higher blood
sugar, inflamed lung tissue, increased death rates, and higher offspring
mortality. About two dozen farmers report that GM corn varieties caused
their pigs or cows to become sterile, 71 shepherds say that 25% of
their sheep died from grazing on Bt cotton plants, and others say that
cows, water buffaloes, chickens, and horses also died from eating GM
crops. Filipinos in at least five villages fell sick when nearby Bt corn
was pollinating and hundreds of laborers in India report allergic
reactions from handling Bt cotton. Soy allergies skyrocketed by 50% in
the United Kingdom, soon after genetically engineered soy was
introduced; and one human subject out of the few tested showed a skin
prick allergic-type reaction to GM soy, but not to natural soy. In the
1980s, a GM food supplement killed about one hundred Americans and
caused sickness and disability in another five to ten thousand people.

How do biotech companies deal with adverse reactions to their
products? A cursory look at how Monsanto responded to adverse reactions
from its toxic chemical PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) gives us some
insight. In communication with the US Public Health Service, Monsanto
claimed their experience "has been singularly free of difficulties."
Their internal files obtained from a lawsuit, however, reveal that this
was part of a cover-up and denial that lasted decades. Company memos
referred to liver disease, skin problems, and even deaths in workers
associated with exposure. Monsanto's medical department wanted to
prohibit employees from eating at the factory because research showed
that PCBs "were quite toxic materials by ingestion or inhalation." The
US Navy refused the product because in their safety study, all exposed
animals died.

Monsanto was aware that their industrial customers were mixing PCBs
into coatings applied inside "potable water supply storage tanks,"
swimming pools,12 and grain silos. In the latter case, Monsanto knew
that high levels of PCBs ended up in the milk of cows fed the grain. A
Monsanto memo also acknowledged that "one million lbs/year" of PCBs were
used in highway paints, and "through abrasion and leaching we can
assume that nearly all of this ... winds up in the environment." But
Monsanto refused to warn consumers or protect the environment because,
as an executive made clear in a 1970 memo, "We can't afford to lose one
dollar of business." The court fined the company $700 million.

Monsanto has brought this type of reckless denial into the field of
GM foods. They have also added to their repertoire extensive bribery,
hijacking of regulatory agencies, and threats to reporters and
scientists.

Kirk Azevedo experienced firsthand how the company responded to a
potentially serious safety hazard in its GM cotton. In 1997, a few
months after he was set straight by the Monsanto Vice President at
headquarters, a company scientist told him that Roundup Ready cotton
plants contained new, unintended proteins that had likely resulted from
the gene insertion process. No safety studies had been conducted on the
proteins, none were planned, and the cotton plants, which were part of
field trials near his home, were being fed to cattle. Azevedo "was
afraid at that time that some of these proteins may be toxic." Azevedo
asked the PhD in charge of the test plot to destroy the cotton rather
than feed it to cattle. He argued that until the protein had been
evaluated, the cows' milk or meat could be harmful. The scientist
refused.

He approached everyone on his team at Monsanto to raise concerns
about the unknown protein, but no one was interested. "Once they
understood my perspective, I was somewhat ostracized," he said. "Once I
started questioning things, people wanted to keep their distance from
me. I lost cooperation with other team members. Anything that interfered
with advancing the commercialization of this technology was going to be
pushed aside."

Azevedo believed that Monsanto's irresponsible practices might
devastate the health of consumers. "These Monsanto scientists are very
knowledgeable about traditional products, like chemicals, herbicides,
and pesticides," he said, "but they don't understand the possible
harmful outcomes of genetic engineering."

He tried to blow the whistle. "I spoke to many Ag commissioners. I
spoke to people at the University of California. I found no one who
would ... even get the connection that proteins might be pathogenic, or
that there might be untoward effects associated with these foreign
proteins that we knew we were producing. They didn't even want to talk
about it really. You'd kind of see a blank stare." Azevedo decided to
leave Monsanto. He said, "I'm not going to be part of this disaster."

Azevedo had witnessed an example of an assumption-based safety
assessment. His colleagues assumed that the protein was safe, so they
put it into the food supply without testing their assumptions.
Similarly, scientists and regulators assumed that genes act as isolated
units, produce only one protein, and are destroyed during digestion.
They assumed that GM protein will act the same as before in new
organisms, that Bt-toxin is harmless, and that disruption of the host
DNA poses no concern. These and many other assumptions used as the basis
of safety claims have been proven wrong. In spite of that, biotech
proponents either adamantly repeat their now-obsolete arguments, or
declare that it doesn't matter anyway—the crops are still safe.

But the converging lines of evidence in this book suggest, in fact,
that GM crops are inherently dangerous and may be responsible for an
unfolding health disaster. What is astounding, moreover, is the absence
of research following up this mounting evidence and the continued
dismissal of serious adverse reactions. It demonstrates a reckless
disregard for safety by the biotech industry and by governmental bodies
charged with regulating and ensuring the safety of their products


Source:-
http://truth-out.org/news/item/12690-exposing-the-roots-of-genetically-modified-crops-the-monsanto-factor