Leading Geneticist Exposes Hazards of Gene-Altered Foods & Crops

A GM-Free World: Leading Geneticist Exposes the Bad Science of Biotech
Interview: Mae-Wan Ho, Ph.D.
November 2004, Acres U.S.A.

Mae-Wan Ho obtained her B.S. degree in biology in 1964 and her Ph.D. in
biochemistry in 1967 from Hong Kong University. She was a postdoctoral
fellow in biochemical genetics from 1968 to 1972 at the University of
California in San Diego, during which time she won a competitive fellowship
of the U.S. National Genetics Foundation. She then became a senior research
fellow in Queen Elizabeth College in the United Kingdom, and after that a
lecturer in genetics and a reader in biology in the London Open University.
In 1999, Ho founded the London-based ISIS < the Institute of Science in
Society < to promote her views and those of like-minded scientists. Dr. Ho
retired in June 2000 and remains a visiting reader in biology at the Open
University and a visiting biophysics professor in Catania University,
Sicily. Today, she has close to 300 publications, including 47
experimental works.

Dr. Ho has been one of the most influential figures of the last decade in
the debate within the scientific community regarding the use of genetically
modified organisms. She is a highly consulted scientific figure with many
theories relating to her powerful anti-GM stance. She is also a well-known
critic of neo-Darwinism and reductionist thought in biology and physics.

ACRES U.S.A. We would like to get your insight and your experience on this
genetic engineering, which is kind of a mystery to most people < and I'm
afraid in the United States they don't take it quite as seriously as they do
in Europe. So what is your take on this technology?

MAE-WAN HO. Well, I'm a scientist. In fact, I was a geneticist and a
molecular geneticist, and I got involved in the genetic engineering debate
because I was so disgusted with the quality of the information that was
going out to our policymakers, in the first place, and then the public,
because I was involved as a scientific advisor to the Third World Network. I
was at a conference organized by the Third World Network when they said,
"We're really worried about genetic engineering, and we haven't got anybody
to look at this problem for us." So that was how I got involved.

ACRES U.S.A. What is genetic engineering, from the layman's point of view?

HO. Genetic engineering refers to a whole set of techniques in the
laboratory in which you take the genetic material from different organisms,
from bacteria, from viruses, you join them up together to make new
combinations, and then you use laboratory techniques to produce a lot of
copies of this new joined-up, engineered genetic material which is
completely unnatural. From there, you again use laboratory techniques to
introduce these strange combinations of genes into organisms, into the cells
of say, maize, or the embryos of cows or sheep or anything, any organism, in
order to make genetically modified cells. In the case of plants, you can
then regenerate these cells into a whole plant, and you can breed from that
and start a sort of transgenic line out of this initial cell that has taken
up the foreign genetic material. In the case of cows and sheep, you inject
these strange, foreign genes into the embryo or the egg and you hope that
some of the egg cells, the genome of the egg cell, have taken up this
foreign construct < then it can again be grown into a transgenic animal.

ACRES U.S.A. You said "hope?"

HO. Yes, because this technique is known to be totally unreliable and
uncontrollable. You see, even though the genetic engineer can pretty
precisely chop up and join up the genetic material in the laboratory, once
you try to put it into a cell, then it's completely out of control < it
cannot be controlled in the genome, where this foreign piece of DNA ends up.
What¹s more, it can become completely scrambled when it actually lands in
the genome. So, depending on where and in what form this foreign construct
has landed, then you end up with something totally different. This is why
even if you start with the same cells, the same construct, the same kind of
genetic material joined together, you can end up with completely different
organisms. Basically, each transformed cell is actually the cell that has
taken up the foreign genetic material.

ACRES U.S.A. Wes Jackson of the Land Institute tells us that if you had a
working manual for the corn plant down to the DNA and the rest of it, it
would probably fill the shelves of a major library. If it's that
complicated, do we know what we¹re doing when we're doing this?

HO. Oh no, we don't know at all, and they admit it. It's only recently that
they have gone back and said, "Hey, let's look at where this genetic
material has landed and whether, after it has landed, it tends to stay
there." What they found is that it's horribly complicated, because they know
that when the foreign genetic material "lands" in a cell, it tends to
scramble the genome at the site, and then it scrambles itself as well! Some
of the scrambling is so bad that they can't even identify the resulting
genome sequence. They can't tell where the material has landed. This is why
a lot of these lines are unstable, but the proprietary company will claim
that they have characterized a transgenic line < they have analyzed the
foreign insert and say, "It is like this: A, B, C, D, E, F," the gene order.
When, however, government scientists, European government scientists <
mainly French and Belgian, so far < have looked at it again, they found that
it¹s not like that the company's description at all, that the gene order is
more like "E, B, F, D," and the other bits have disappeared! Furthermore, it
hasn¹t landed in chromosome #7, next to a certain gene, it actually is in
chromosome #5. This is in effect what they have found. French scientists,
for example, analyzed five transgenic lines for a transgenic insert, and in
five out of five lines they showed that it had changed.

ACRES U.S.A. What is the net effect on human cells and protoplasm when you
eat food that¹s created that way?

HO. That is a major area of contention. The companies keep saying that this
genetically modified DNA is no different from natural DNA. "DNA is DNA is
DNA." Some pro-GM scientists even say that this is the ultimate organic
molecule. There are a lot of indications that this genetically modified DNA
is completely new, it has never existed in billions of years of evolution,
it's cobbled together from different sources, a lot of viral and bacterial
DNA is being used to make it, and it is unstable and has a propensity to
jump again < it is designed to jump into genomes and to overcome species
barriers. You know, biological species don't really tend to exchange genes
with other species < first of all because there are natural limits to how
much they can exchange, since each species has its own space and time in
evolutionary history. In the second place, in the laboratory today there is
no limit to what you can make. You can even take DNA from organisms that
have been dead for hundreds of thousands of years < from a fossil, from a
dead fossil < and join it up with organisms that exist today. DNA is
actually a very stable molecule. It can actually persist long after the
organism is dead. And this, again, is something that people who are
regulators haven't realized < they haven't come to grips with it at all.

ACRES U.S.A. So, what actually happens when we eat these foods?

HO. As I already mentioned, these modified genetic materials were designed
to overcome the natural barriers between species. What happens when we eat
ordinary vegetables and animal protein is that the DNA is broken down by our
enzymes. Then, our cells also have enzymes for breaking them down further,
and ultimately they will be nutrition for the cell. Unfortunately, if you
design genetically modified DNA to jump into genomes and to overcome species
barriers, then there is a chance that this DNA can avoid enzymatic breakdown
and get into other unrelated species. For example, one of the dangers of
these organisms is that, as I said previously, they are mainly made up of
genetic material belonging to viruses and bacteria. So if these genetic
materials meet other viruses and bacteria, they can join up to make new
combinations < new viruses and bacteria that cause diseases and resist
medical treatment.

ACRES U.S.A. Is that what they mean by the term "recombinant?"

HO. Yes, recombinant < that is, a recombination. Horizontal gene transfer
and recombination form the major process for generating new viruses and
bacteria that cause diseases.

ACRES U.S.A. It sounds an awful lot like what we're attempting to do here is
to intermarry unlike species at the molecular level. Is that a correct
statement?

HO. Yes, yes, absolutely! And there is no barrier whatsoever now because you
can do all these things in the laboratory. The other thing that is
immediately worrying is that they also use antibiotic-resistant genes. It's
part of the tools of the trade that enable them to select for those cells
that have taken up the foreign genes. They put some antibiotic-resistant
marker genes next to the foreign genes. Now, these genes can actually pass
on < they very often stay in the GM crops that are released into the
environment, and the antibiotic-resistant genes < if they get into bacteria
that cause disease < would make those infections untreatable.

ACRES U.S.A. Is it a possibility that this procedure has something to do
with the prions implicated in Mad Cow disease and things like that?

HO. We don't know, because there have been so few targeted investigations.
But this is the other thing: these DNA can also get into our cells, and the
danger of rogue DNA getting into our cells, or the cells of other mammals,
is that they often contain very aggressive virus promoters. It's not easy to
get a foreign gene to work in a cell. In order to do that, you really have
to give it a very aggressive gene switch < which is called a "promoter" <
that says to the cell, "Copy this gene and make a lot of the protein that's
involved. Express this gene at a higher level." In order to do that they use
the promoter from viruses. A virus, as the name implies, has the ability to
hijack the cell to make many copies of itself, and that is essentially the
basic technology that enables many foreign genes to become aggressive. They
put it next to this kind of aggressive viral promoter. Now, if such an
aggressive viral promoter gets into an alien cell, and if this promoter
should work in that mammalian cell, and if this cell is involved in
controlling cell division, then it could make this cell multiply out of
control < and that's cancer by another name.

ACRES U.S.A. It goes into wild proliferation?

HO. Exactly, and this is not merely a theoretical possibility < you've heard
of gene therapy? Gene therapy is the genetic modification of human cells,
and it uses techniques and constructs very similar to those used in the
genetic modification of plants and animals. In gene therapy there are two
major side effects that people worry about. One of them is cancer, because
if it gets into the wrong place, it turns on the wrong genes, and you get
cancer. The other concern is the regeneration of live viruses, because in
order to make this foreign DNA go into the genome, very often they use what
is called a "gene carrier" or a "vector," which is itself a virus, a
disarmed virus. Disarmed or not, a virus can still pick up genes from our
genome or from the cell's genome and turn back into a fully armed virus by
recombination. Those are the two major acknowledged dangers, or side
effects, of gene therapy. Several years ago a group of scientists in France
devised a method where they would genetically modify bone marrow cells
outside the patient. They took the patient's own cells, genetically modified
them, and then selected the "good" transformed cells < the cells that have
taken up the foreign genes < and then put them into the patient. It was
hailed as a great success that avoids the complications I've just described.
Unfortunately, about a year and a half later, two of the nine successes
developed leukemia. So this is the other problem that we have to worry
about.

ACRES U.S.A. What about research on the effects of these foods?

HO. There have been so few experiments really addressing food safety,
transgenic/GM food safety. Proponents will say, "The Americans have been
eating it for maybe a decade now, since 1994, and there is no evidence at
all that anybody has died from eating GM food." But of course, nobody has
really been looking, and as you have no labeling, you don't even know if you
have eaten GM food directly. In any case, most of the GM goes into feeding
your animals, so at least you're probably once-removed from direct GM food.
However, the Centers for Disease Control's own study, published in 1999,
found that incidences of food-borne illness have risen from twofold to
tenfold as compared to a 1994 study. That was when the first GM food (a
transgenic tomato < "Flavor Saver"tomato) was grown and became available.
Of course, that¹s not evidence that these illnesses were caused by GM food <
critics could question whether the earlier study was done using a different
methodology < but at least this is something worth investigating. Plus, in
Britain, we do have scientists such as Árpád Pusztai, he was a senior food
scientist in Scotland, and he and his colleagues were supported by the
government to do food safety research. They fed GM potato to some young
rats, and much to their surprise < because he was actually a supporter of GM
foods, or at least he wasn't hostile < they found that this GM potato
affected every organ system of these young rats. They recently released some
photographs of the stomach lining and intestinal lining, and it was most
dramatic because it increased the thickness of the lining up to two times.

ACRES U.S.A. What's the significance of that?

HO. We don't fully know what the significance is, but in the colon, for
example, colon cancer is preceded by a state in which the lining increases
in thickness < it¹s kind of an overgrowth. There are other experiments that
have found similar effects, and there are a string of incidences that have
not been investigated. For example, recently there have been reports of
illnesses in some villages, up to 100 villages, in south of the Philippines
that are next to fields of GM maize. In the United States, your fields are
very big, and people don't usually live nearby, but in the Third World, the
fields are very small, and people live right next to them. So in the
Phillippines, a Norwegian scientist who's actually a virologist was asked to
go and investigate these illnesses. He took samples of blood from 39 of the
villagers and found antibodies to the foreign gene expressed in the GM maize
grown nearby < and this apparently happened again this growing season.
There's another case in Essel, Germany, in which 12 dairy cows died between
2001 and 2002 after eating transgenic maize < another transgenic maize, not
the type that was growing in the Philippines. That case hasn't been
investigated to this day, but this maize has since been withdrawn by
Syngenta < it's Bt176.

ACRES U.S.A. We hear many reports from farmers here who have experienced
problems with livestock on GM feeds.

HO. Yes, in the United States there has been a lot of anecdotal evidence
that came from farmers and others who noticed that animals tend to avoid GM
crops if they have the choice. And experiments on livestock and other
laboratory animals showed that if they were forced to eat GM, if they had no
choice, then they failed to thrive or they died. Just recently, Monsanto has
apparently been asked to release results that they have designated
confidential business information showing that the some rats that were fed
GM food and yet another strain of GM maize developed abnormalities of the
kidneys in the males, signs of anemia in the females, and so on. The results
simply were not released to the public.

ACRES U.S.A. The question we have here is whether this technology is safe,
but we don¹t have answers because the question hasn't really been asked.
We've got hundreds of products on the shelves at our grocery stores that are
transgenic, and people are not allowed to find out about it, nor do we have
information on the results or the consequences.

HO. That's right, and you also have lots of secret field trials. People
don't even know there is this next generation of GM crops in which they're
growing really dangerous pharmaceuticals. They are kept in secret, and you
know this really can't continue < I think some of your NGOs have been
putting pressure on the FDA to tighten the controls on these things, these
crops.

ACRES U.S.A. But the pressure is pretty much eclipsed by the amount of money
that the Monsanto- types throw into the political arena.

HO. But the interesting thing is that these companies have really withdrawn
in a big way from Europe because they know there is no money here. So, for
example, in the United Kingdom we started with 159 field trials in year
2001, and today we are down to one field trial.

ACRES U.S.A. For what product?

HO. It's a GM sweet pea being grown on the grounds of the John Innes Centre,
which is a research institute. Nevertheless, even though the European Food
Safety Authority and the European Commission have approved various products,
both Syngenta and Bayer CropScience have withdrawn from commercializing an
approved GM crop.

ACRES U.S.A. This is in spite of the fact that the Codex Alimentarias has
approved these things?

HO. No, it¹s not the Codex Alimentarias, it's the European Commission. I
have to say that the European Commission in the case of the Bt11 < which is
the most recent one < has gone over the debate among the scientific experts.
The experts couldn¹t agree that it was safe, so the European Commission came
in and said, "Well, we will approve it anyway." This is Syngenta's Bt11, but
after they'd done it, Syngenta announced that they weren't going to
commercialize because there was too much consumer resistance and there¹s no
market.

ACRES U.S.A. How do you account for consumer resistance being so strong in
Europe and so lax in the United States?

HO. Well, I think we have a very good situation in Europe in which
scientists work together with civil society. The scientists are very good at
providing information to support the grassroots action, and we also have
governments working together. It really is a very cooperative process, just
getting information out to the public at one end and challenging the
regulators at the top at the other. All this has to go on in a very
coordinated way, and I think somehow without planning we manage that. So,
even though our government is quite pro-GM, we haven¹t got any yet in
Britain, which is a good thing.

ACRES U.S.A. But the government has been quite pro-GM.

HO. Yes, Tony Blair. So this is really a chance for democracy as well as for
science. The scientific information is the baseline < you¹ve got to have the
politics, the economics, everything < but the baseline is: have you got your
scientific evidence right? And if you can't get it right, you have no basis
as a scientist for making a rational decision. To make rational decisions
you want to know if this technology is reliable, you want to know if it
actually lives up to its promise < are there problems, is it safe? < before
you even ask questions about whether it is ethical, economical, and so on.

ACRES U.S.A. On the basis of what we know so far, where is this anti-GM
thing going?

HO. We have two dozen scientists across the disciplines, we launched
ourselves as an independent science panel last May, and we produced a report
called The Case for a GM-Free, Sustainable World, in which we propose that
there should be a global ban or withdrawal of all GM crops. We¹re not
against research < the technology should go back into the laboratory for
some proper research, but under carefully contained conditions. Meanwhile,
there should be a global, comprehensive shift to all kinds of non-GM
sustainable agriculture, because in our report, we not only collected all
the evidence of the problems and hazards of GM crops, but we also gathered
data on the proven successes of all forms of sustainable agriculture.

ACRES U.S.A. Is that report available?

HO. Yes. It is being published by Vital Health in the United States. As
scientists again, we would say take into account all kinds of scientific
evidence, and if you really look at all the evidence carefully you know that
GM hasn¹t lived up to its promise. All the benefits are still "potential."
In fact, a lot of small family farmers who have taken up GM are now
completely devastated, especially in Argentina, which is the second largest
producer in the world after the United States. You know there is now a very,
very strong global uprising against the introduction of GM crops that was
brought to a head a couple of years ago, when Zambia refused to accept GM
maize as food aid from the United States and opted instead to purchase
surplus food from other parts of their country, and now it is doing so well
that it is exporting food surpluses to Angola. That has inspired a lot of
Third World countries. So the message, basically, is that there is no future
in GM crops. Now they are trying to use GM crops to grow pharmaceuticals,
and that¹s even more dangerous, because some of these pharmaceuticals are
immune-suppressive, and some of them are very serious allergens that can
kill people. The message to the producers is just to put a stop to this <
this is madness!

ACRES U.S.A. People like former President Carter and I think even Norman
Borlaug and some of these other people have argued that what we're doing
with genetically modified crops is no different than what the farmers have
been doing all along in selecting and breeding and things like that. How
would you respond to that?

HO. It's completely untrue because, as I said before, what you¹re doing is
joining together bits of DNA, and there is no barrier whatsoever on what you
can join. You're short-circuiting nature altogether, you cross all species
barriers, you make artificial constructs that never existed in billions of
years of evolution, and you use special methods to introduce these
constructs into the genomes of organisms.

ACRES U.S.A. Then that is a bogus argument?

HO. Yes. In fact, GM technology bypasses natural reproduction altogether.
You don't even need reproduction, you see. So to say that this is no
different from natural breeding methods is really bending science. It¹s
either being ignorant or just bending science altogether, and that just
won¹t do.

ACRES U.S.A. Substituting self-interest for science.

HO. It is particularly disappointing for people who are scientists
themselves that: a) they haven't actually bothered to inform themselves
better, and b) that they are accepting bogus arguments of that kind. You
know, science is no different from any other form of knowledge. You have to
ask, "Is this good science, or bad science? Are you just fooling me?"
Scientific evidence is just like any other form of evidence < you have to
use your common sense. If you approach it skeptically, in many cases you
find out that these people are just having you on.

ACRES U.S.A. Well, we've heard the Japanese say that they weren't in favor
of genetically modified foods, and they were going to watch what happened to
the American children for about a generation or two before they made up
their mind. Would you comment on that?

HO. That¹s terrible, isn't it? Unfortunately, I understand what they mean,
but I think that it would be more ethical to say that if GM food is not good
for Japanese, then it's not good for American children. It's not good enough
for Zambia, it's not good enough for Australia < Australia has now more or
less put an indefinite hold on growing GM crops. It's not good enough for
the British because the British have succeeded in putting it off, then it¹s
not good enough for people in the United States, and it's urgent for us to
stop all of this globally.

The Case for a GM-Free, Sustainable World, is available as a free PDF
download at the Independent Science Panel website, <www.indsp.org>, or in
book form from Vital Health Publishing, Inc., P.O. Box 152, Ridgefield,
Connecticut 06877, e-mail <info@vitalhealthbooks.com>, website
<www.vitalhealthbooks.com/index.html>.
The Institute of Science in Society has a website at <www.i-sis.org.uk>.

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