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Safe GMOs may help millions of poor people around the world
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Editor’s note:
According to media reports earlier this month, Yuan Longping, father of China’s hybrid rice, says that he was studying GMO rice and that GMOs are not necessarily bad. We hope the following article can contribute to a rational debate.
For poor people whose diet is composed largely of rice — a carbohydrate-rich but vitamin-poor source of calories — “biofortified” strains are invaluable.
In developing countries, 200-300 million preschool children are at risk of vitamin A deficiency, which compromises immune systems, increasing the body’s susceptibility to illnesses like measles and diarrheal diseases.
Every year, vitamin A deficiency causes blindness in about a half-million children; some 70 percent of them die within a year.
In September, an eminent group of scientists called upon the scientific community to “stand together in staunch opposition to the violent destruction of required tests on valuable advances... that have the potential to save millions” of people from “needless suffering and death.”
But this passionate appeal fails to address the fundamental problem: the unfounded notion that there is a meaningful difference between “genetically modified organisms” (GMOs) and their conventional counterparts. The fact is that GMOs and their derivatives do not amount to a “category” of food products. They are neither less safe nor less “natural” than other common foods.
Humans have been engaging in “genetic modification” through selection and hybridization for millennia. Breeders routinely use radiation or chemical mutagens on seeds to scramble a plant’s DNA and generate new traits.
Wide cross
A half-century of “wide cross” hybridizations, which involve the movement of genes from one species or genus to another, has given rise to plants — including everyday varieties of corn, oats, pumpkin, wheat, black currants, tomatoes, and potatoes — that do not and could not exist in nature.
Indeed, with the exception of wild berries, wild game, wild mushrooms, and fish and shellfish, virtually everything in North American and European diets has been genetically improved in some way.
Despite the lack of scientific justification for skepticism about genetically engineered crops — indeed, no cases of harm to humans or disruption to ecosystems have been documented — they have been the most scrutinized foods in human history.
The assumption that “genetically engineered” or “genetically modified” is a meaningful — and dangerous — classification has led not only to vandalism of field trials, but also to destruction of laboratories and assaults on researchers.
Moreover, the GMO classification has encouraged unscientific regulatory approaches that are not commensurate with the level of risk, and that, by discriminating against modern molecular genetic-engineering techniques, inhibit agricultural innovation that could reduce strain on the natural environment and enhance global food security.
Even as study after study — both formal risk assessments and “real-world” observations — has confirmed the technology’s safety, the regulatory burden placed on GMOs has continued to grow. This trend is making the testing and development of many crops with commercial and humanitarian potential economically unfeasible.
Despite robust laboratory research on plants since the invention of modern genetic-engineering techniques in the early 1970s’, the commercialization of products has lagged.
In 1936, the Nobel laureate Max Planck observed that scientific innovations rarely spread as a result of their opponents’ conversion; instead, opponents of innovation “gradually die out,” and the next generation accepts the breakthrough. This was the case with vaccinations and the recognition that DNA is the stuff of heredity — and it will happen eventually with genetic engineering.
Unfortunately, many will suffer needlessly in the interim.
As long as today’s activists and regulators remain convinced that GMOs represent a distinct and dangerous category of research and products, genetic engineering will fall short of its potential. That is bad news for the millions of poor people for whom genetic engineering in agriculture, medicine, and environmental science could offer a healthier, more secure future.
Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology in the US Food and Drug Administration. The views are his own. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2014. www.project-syndicate.org. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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