Pew on Biotech? Pugh!

Image: Anthony Canamucio Controversies--or perhaps pseudocontroversies would be more apt--continue to engulf recombinant DNA technology, the "new biotechnology," applied to agriculture and food production. One theoretical concern is that consumers might experience allergic reactions to foods made from recombinant organisms. In a June 2002 report, the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology concluded that regulatory agencies might have difficulty evaluating the potential for allergic reactions caused by foods from the next generation of recombinant DNA-modified organisms.1 This report has garnered attention from government agencies and the mainstream press, largely because the Pew Initiative touts itself as occupying the thoughtful middle ground in the biotechnology debates. Pew's PR machine makes this claim, but that doesn't make it so, and it isn't. The Pew Initiative is different from other antibiotech players that show their colors unambiguously--like political activist Jeremy Rifkin, who has characterized biotechnology as threatening "a form of annihilation every bit as deadly as nuclear holocaust," or Greenpeace, which demands "complete elimination [of biotech products from] the food supply and the environment." Greenpeace and similar groups advocate and have committed vandalism of field trials at universities and on private and corporate farms. Pew, on the other hand, commits only intellectual vandalism, pretending to be what is it not. While adopting a pretense of neutrality and scholarliness, the June report from Pew inexplicably ignores the realities and history of the development of new plant varieties. It wrings its hands about scientists understanding "little about the fundamental mechanism by which people develop allergies." It warns that "biotechnology may ... increase the potential risk of food allergy," because "[t]he ability of biotechnology to move genes from one organism into another creates the possibility of introducing allergenic proteins into foods that would not ordinarily contain them." It expresses concern about "the introduction of novel proteins that previously have not been in the food supply," because "[w]ithout prior exposure data, the ability to predict the potential of the protein to cause an allergic reaction is very limited." When considered in a vacuum--as though farmers, plant breeders, and others had never before sought and wrought genetic improvement of food plants--these seem like legitimate concerns. However, all types of plant breeding, including more traditional techniques as well as the newer molecular methods, routinely introduce new DNA, proteins, and other substances into the food supply. Induced-mutation breeding, a technique in use since the 1950s, involves exposing crop plants to ionizing radiation or toxic chemicals to induce random, desirable genetic mutations. Literally thousands of mutation-bred crops have been commercialized in North America and Europe during the last half-century. And since the 1930s plant breeders have performed "wide-cross" hybridizations in which large numbers of "alien" genes are moved from one species or one genus to another to create plant varieties that do not and cannot exist in nature. Common commercial varieties derived from wide crosses include tomato, potato, oat, rice, wheat, and corn, among others. In all these examples, breeders and food producers have neither knowledge of the exact genetic changes that produced the useful trait, nor knowledge of what other changes have occurred concomitantly in the plant, including those that could alter the ability to cause allergic reactions. Consider, for example, the relatively new manmade "species," Triticum agropyrotriticum, which resulted from the wide-cross combination of the genomes of bread wheat and a grass sometimes called quackgrass or couchgrass.2 Possessing all the chromosomes of wheat and one extra whole genome from the quackgrass, T. agropyrotriticum has been independently produced for both animal feed and human food in the former Soviet Union, Canada, the United States, France, Germany, and China. At least in theory, several kinds of problems could result from a genetic construction that introduces tens of thousands of "alien" genes into an established plant variety. These concerns include the potential for increased invasiveness of the plant in the field, and the possibility that quackgrass-derived proteins could be toxic or allergenic. Yet dozens of new varieties are produced each year through these imprecise traditional methods of genetic improvement, and they enter the marketplace and food supply without any governmental review or special labeling. Only the molecular methods of the new biotechnology allow breeders to identify and characterize the exact changes that have been made in the progeny. This increased precision and predictability make biotech-derived foods safer than conventional ones--but paradoxically, they are far more intensively regulated. Neither government regulators nor the minions at Pew have shown the slightest interest in or concern about the real risks of plant breeding. Anti-innovation, proregulation bias is found consistently, but often subtly, in Pew's biotechnology-related activities, including workshops, conferences, and literature. Commonly, Pew attempts to create a kind of moral equivalence between those who hold ideological, antibiotechnology views and those who are committed to sound science as the basis for public policy-- not unlike equating creation theory with Darwinian theory. A variation on incongruous moral equivalence is the sophistry that is transparent in the membership of the Initiative's "stakeholder forum," whose purpose is ostensibly to "develop consensus recommendations that will enhance" the regulation of agricultural biotechnology. That it includes such uncompromising, hard-core, antibiotechnology activists as Rebecca Goldburg, Carol Tucker Foreman, and Margaret Mellon offers an indication of the direction in which "consensus" is intended to go. The outside speakers invited to address public events sponsored by the Pew Initiative have tended to be cut from the same cloth. A recent workshop on recombinant DNA-modified plants that produce pharmaceuticals, for example, featured Jane Henney, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner who was relentlessly antagonistic to biotechnology during her tenure at the agency. Moreover, the cosponsorship of this workshop by the US Department of Agriculture and FDA reflects Pew's role as a shill for the interests of the regulators--namely, expanded mandates, bigger budgets, and larger bureaucratic empires. Perhaps this bias and disinformation should come as no surprise. Both the executive director of the Pew Biotechnology Initiative, Michael Rodemeyer (a former House of Representatives staffer), and the coauthor of the June report, Lynn Goldman (a former EPA assistant administrator), have a long history of biotechnophobia and of striving to increase the already-stultifying, unscientific regulation of this superior and promising technology. Thus, one should not be surprised to find that the June Pew report on food allergy lacks the context that readers need to make accurate judgments about the safety of recombinant DNA-derived foods. We break out in hives every time we read it. Henry I. Miller (miller@hoover.stanford.edu) is a physician and fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He was an FDA official from 1979 to 1994 and is the author of "Policy Controversy in Biotechnology: An Insider's View." Gregory Conko (conki@cei.org) is Director of Food Safety Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. References 1. L. Bucchini, L.R. Goldman, "A snapshot of federal research on food allergy: Implications for genetically modified food," June 2002, available online at www.pewagbiotech.org/research/allergy.pdf. 2. H.I. Miller, "Risk and regulations: The UN offers swimming lessons to people in the Sahara," National Review Online, March 12, 2002.

Pew on Biotech? Pugh!

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