European Union gets it wrong on GMOS. Again.

Teosinte on the left, modern
corn on the right, a hybrid in

the center.

A European Union court just issued a new decision about GMOs. Disappointingly, this decision is likely to confuse rather than clarify this complex and contentious issue. The court announced that plants whose genomes have been modified with CRISPR technology, a very precise form of genome editing, are subject to the EU's very strict restrictions on genetically modified crops.

More specifically, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) decided that:

"Organisms obtained by mutagenesis are GMOs."

If we take this literally, then here’s a list of all the foods that have never been subjected to mutagenesis, and are therefore NOT GMO:

1. Salt
2. Wild boar
3. Wild blueberries

That’s it. (OK, maybe there are a few others.)

We have been modifying the genes of the foods we eat for millenia. Every loaf of organic, non-GMO bread is made from wheat that humans have modified since ancient times. Every glass of milk from your grass-fed, bovine-growth-hormone-free cow comes from a cow that humans have bred for centuries. All cows are genetically modified. Those delicious croissants you bought at the organic bakery? Sorry, those are GMOs, no matter how organic you think they are.

And corn? Have you seen what ancient corn, called teosinte, looks like? I encourage you to Google it (or see the image on this blog, above). Modern corn is the result of many generations of human-driven genetic modifications.

To be fair, the EU court recognized that many of our foods have been genetically modified for a long time, and that it might be impractical to remove all of them from our food supply. So they carved out an exception:

"varieties [of plants] obtained by means of mutagenesis techniques which have conventionally been used in a number of applications and have a long safety record are exempt...."

What's ironic here–though I'm confident that the EU court didn't mean this–is that by this definition, virtually all of the GMO crops in the U.S. are exempt. You see, we've been eating them for decades, and they have a phenomenal safety record.

Two years ago, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a massive report that reviewed over 1,000 studies of GMOs. The bottom line: there are no health risks whatsoever from eating genetically modified foods.

Earlier gene editing technology sometimes added foreign genes to an organism, such as adding a bacterial gene to a plant. The EU court's new decision is intended to clarify that even if a foreign gene is not involved, plants bred using the newest form of gene editing (CRISPR technology) are nonetheless GMOs.

Banning GMOs doesn't make sense, and it never did. Genetic technology is just a tool, one that can be used for countless purposes, some of them highly beneficial–such as golden rice, which has the potential to prevent blindness in countries where many people depend on rice as their main staple food. If someone objects to a particular use of GM technology, such as Monsanto's use of it to create herbicide-resistant plants, that's something we can reasonably debate. But banning all GMOs is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go out to my grill and see how my wild boar is doing. It might need a bit more salt.

Controversial GMO corn study being retracted over the authors' objections

Retractions are always interesting. When a scientific paper is retracted, it usually means the authors have found a serious error, and that the major conclusions are no longer valid. The error can be unintentional, but in some high-profile cases, the story is far more interesting.

Reading about a retraction is, for a scientist, kind of like reading about a celebrity divorce. You know something went wrong, and it just might be a bit scandalous.

Last year, I wrote a detailed takedown ("Does genetically modified corn cause cancer?") of a very poorly done scientific study by Gilles-Eric Seralini and colleagues, in which they claimed that genetically modified corn, Roundup Ready® corn, caused cancer in rats.  The study had many egregious flaws, and I explained a few of them after reading the paper.  Hundreds of other scientists criticized the study at the time, and six French science academies took the unusual step of issuing a joint statement that rejected the study's conclusions.

Among the many flaws, the study used far too few rats to make statistically valid conclusions, and it contained self-contradictory results, such as data showing that rats fed the highest amount of GMO corn lived longer than rats fed the lowest amounts.  They also used a strain of rats that is highly prone to cancer.  Basically, it was unconvincing junk science.

Last week, Retraction Watch reported that this paper is being retracted. Particularly interesting was the news that the retraction is being made by the editors of the journal, not by Seralini and his co-authors, who are pretty darned upset about it. The journal conducted a lengthy investigation (much too lengthy, I might add - they should have been able to act more quickly) and decided that the many flaws in the paper mean that its major findings are not valid.  It is very unusual for editors to force a retraction like this, especially when fraud is not involved. The journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology, issued a statement that said:

"A more in-depth look at the raw data revealed that no definitive conclusions can be reached with this small sample size regarding the role of either NK603 [RoundupReady corn] or glyphosate [Roundup] in regards to overall mortality or tumor incidence. Given the known high incidence of tumors in the Sprague-Dawley rat, normal variability cannot be excluded as the cause of the higher mortality and incidence observed in the treated groups."

In other words, the editors concluded that Seralini's results were not supported by the data. Together with the rest of their statement, it seems pretty clear the editors are admitting that they screwed up during the peer review process, and they never should have published the article.

Seralini is very unhappy.  So unhappy, in fact, that he's threatening a lawsuit, as Forbes contributor Jon Entine reported.

But is this grounds for retraction? Lots of bad science gets published, often due to sloppy peer review, and most of these papers aren't retracted. In this case, it's pretty clear that the high-profile nature of the paper played a role.  Seralini is part of an anti-GMO organization, CRIIGEN, which has used this paper as justification for an aggressive campaign to ban GMO crops in Europe and elsewhere.

As bad as this study is, and as much as I'd like to see it retracted, I'm not sure that the justification given by the editors of Food and Chemical Toxicology is sufficient for retraction. Maybe it's because their statement is too carefully worded - wimpy, in fact. If they just came out and stated clearly that the study's conclusions are erroneous, then they would have a much better case for forcing the retraction. But they don't quite say that.

Here's what they are trying to say: "we screwed up and did a shoddy job in the peer review process, and now we realize that we never should have published this piece of dreck. Now we want to retract it so that no one will associate our journal with this bad science."

I know some very good scientists who have retracted papers merely because they couldn't replicate the results, and they grew worried that something was wrong. That's how science should work: rather than publish something erroneous, most scientists will admit their errors and retract their findings, or at least issue a correction. Obviously, Seralini has no plans to do this. His intent on publishing this paper was to make a political point, not a scientific one, and he distorted his findings in the paper itself, overstating his results with insufficient statistical evidence, and more so in statements to the press.

Retractions are indeed interesting. I'm still not sure the journal did the right thing to retract this paper, but I know they never should have published it in the first place.

(And for those who don't have time to look at the controversy after the original study: no, genetically modified corn does not cause cancer. Not even a little bit.)

GM corn causes cancer in rats: a study in bad science

Last week a scientific paper appeared that reported that eating genetically modified (GM) corn causes cancer in rats.  Specifically, the scientists fed Roundup Ready® corn, or maize, to rats for two years, and reported that both females and males developed cancer and died at higher rates than controls.  

This is very surprising.  If GM corn causes cancer, why aren't Americans "dropping like flies," as one scientist asked?  We've been eating Monsanto's Roundup Ready® corn for over a decade, even if most of us aren't aware of it.  But our rates of cancer haven't increased more than Europeans, who eat far less GM corn.  Maybe the effect is limited to rats - in which case we should also have seen dramatic increases in cancer in lab rats.  But we haven't seen that either.

So what's wrong?  The best way to find out is to read the paper, which I did.  It turns out to be a very badly designed study, and the report itself omits many crucial details that may (and probably do) completely invalidate the findings.  The scientists leading the study have a strongly biases agenda and a conflict of interest, which they failed to reveal. I'll explain below, but meanwhile this study has already been taken up by politicians as proof (proof!) that GMO crops are harmful.  As Forbes blogger Tim Worstall explained, this paper is more politics than science.

Let's look at the study itself, which was led by Gilles-Eric Seralini (more on him below) and published last week in Food and Chemical Toxicology.  (A copy of the full paper is here.)

The authors studied 200 rats for 2 years, dividing them into 20 group of 10 rats each.  The test rats were fed a variety of diets:

1. Non-GM corn comprising 33% of the diet (this was the control group).
2. Roundup Ready corn comprising 11%, 22%, or 33% of the food.
3. Roundup Ready corn that had been treated with Roundup during cultivation.
4. Non-GM corn but with Roundup itself added to the rats' water.

So what happened?  Well, in some groups, the rats got more cancer than controls.  But not always.  In fact, the authors had to cherry-pick their own data to support their conclusions.

One major problem is that only 10% of the rats were controls - 10 male, 10 female. The study's main claim is that rates of cancer were significantly higher in the rats fed GM corn.  Martina Newell-McGloughlin from UC Davis, in an interview with Discovery News, said 

"The type of statistical analysis they used is really a type of fishing expedition.  One individual referred to it as 'fantasy statistics.' "

Another major problem is that there's no dosage effect.  In other words, if Seralini is right and GM food is bad for you, then more of it should be worse.  But the study's results actually contradict this hypothesis: rats fed the highest levels of GM corn lived longer than rats fed the lowest level.

A third problem, as Discovery News and other sources reported, is that the rats used in this study are a special laboratory strain that is highly prone to cancer.

Perhaps most damning, though, is the fact that rats fed Roundup directly had the longest survival times.  As Seralini's own Figure 1 shows, the longest-living rats in the entire study, out of all the conditions, where those that drank Roundup in their water.  These rats outlived the control rats.

Yum!  Maybe Perrier should start selling Roundup-enhanced spring water?

Seralini and colleagues struggle to explain the internal contradictions in their study.  They write, 

"Interestingly, in the groups of animals fed with the NK603 [Roundup Ready corn] without R[oundup] application, similar effects with respect to enhanced tumor incidence and mortality rates were observed."  

This tortured English is their way of admitting that rats did worse ("similar effects") when fed GM corn that was grown without Roundup.  They don't want to admit that this result contradicts their central hypothesis.

The study was designed to fail: the sample sizes (10 rats in each group) are so small that all the results are likely just due to chance, and none of the differences are meaningful.  It's exceedingly unlikely that the Roundup in the rats' water made them live longer, just as it's unlikely that Roundup Ready corn had any effect on the incidence of cancer.

I know that ad hominem attacks aren't valid, but I can't resist pointing out that Seralini's co-author, Joel de Vendomois, is a homeopath, with a "Homeopathy and Acupuncture Diploma", a double dose of quackery in a single degree.  Seralini has also published a book about the supposed dangers of GMOs, and he and de Vendomois are the lead scientists at CRIIGEN, an organization devoted to lobbying against GMOs. Of course, even if Seralini and de Vendomois are bad scientists, and even if they have a strong bias, their paper isn't necessarily wrong.  It's wrong simply because the science is wrong.

Not surprisingly, an anti-GMO group in California has gleefully embraced the claims of this dreadful paper to argue in favor of Proposition 37, a ballot initiative that will require labelling of genetically modified foods.  And Jose Bove of the European Parliament has used it to claim that all GM crops are harmful to human health.

Let's be clear about the science here.  Genetic modification of foods is a powerful technology that can be incredibly beneficial.  The recent development of salmon that can grow faster is an example: these salmon (developed by a company called AquaBounty) will make fish farming more efficient, and thereby help preserve the perilously endangered wild fish species in our oceans.  On the other hand, GM technology can be used, as Monsanto has done, simply to allow farmers to use more pesticides, which doesn't seem to benefit anyone other than the pesticide producers.  It's unfortunate that Monsanto's behavior has been used as an excuse to give all GMOs a bad name.

Now we have a bad study done by anti-GMO scientists who have allowed their political agenda to trump their scientific judgment.  What a mess.

They engineered a better salmon, so why can't I eat it?

What happened to genetically modified salmon? A few months back I was looking forward to my first taste of the new AquaBounty salmon, which grows to maturity twice as fast as wild salmon. Will it taste just as good? Better? I thought I'd know soon. But then politics intervened.

It's almost always bad when politicians meddle in science. Usually they do so because they just don't like what they're hearing, as they have done time after time with global warming. Now it's genetically modified salmon. What happened? The FDA was ready to approve the new salmon until two weeks ago, when Congressman Don Young from Alaska, under heavy lobbying pressure from the Alaskan fisheries industry, simply stepped in to block it. The FDA had already found that the fish was safe to eat, but hadn't yet issued final approval. So Congressman Young and his pals decided to pass legislation to halt the process.

I wrote about AquaBounty's salmon last year, when the FDA was holding hearings to approve it for human consumption. Ironically, the FDA doesn't get to approve genetically modified crops, and our food supply is filled with GM corn, soy, and other plants. But thanks to the vagaries of U.S. law, the FDA gets to weigh in on salmon.

The science is pretty cool: AquaBounty took two genes from other fish and added them to Atlantic salmon. They added a growth gene from Pacific Chinook salmon, and another gene from a fish called ocean pout (Trisopterus luscus). Together, these genes allow AquaBounty's new salmon, called AquAdvantage ®, to grow to maturity in 18 months rather than 3 years. This promises to make salmon farming much more efficient, if we ever allow it.

Better fish farming is incredibly important for the future of wild fish on our planet. Wild fish populations have plunged 90-99% all over the planet, and many fish populations have been completely wiped out. Here on the east coast of North America, wild cod populations completely crashed in the 1990s, and by 2004 the World Wildlife Fund predicted that wild cod would disappear completely in 15 years. The situation isn't any better for Atlantic salmon, which are at "perilously low levels." The U.S. declared Atlantic salmon an endangered species in 2000, and added more salmon populations to the endangered list in 2009.

The solution, obviously, is to farm our fish, just like we do with every other food we eat. As I wrote last year:

"We farm all the other animals that we eat. Imagine that we only ate wild cows, or chicken, or pigs. The human race can't be fed by wild animals alone - we're too numerous and too hungry. Sooner or later, we will drive wild fish to extinction, unless we make the switch to farmed fish."

To make fish farming more efficient, we need to apply new genetic technologies to increase yields the way we have with our crops and with domesticated animals.

These new salmon are nothing to be afraid of, but anti-GMO activists have labelled them "Frankenfish" as a transparent scare tactic. I'm neither a fan nor an opponent GMO foods, but knee-jerk opposition to all GMOs doesn't make any sense. Modifying crops to make them more resistant to pesticides, as Big Agriculture firms (Monsanto in particular) have done, strikes me as a terrible use of the technology. "Roundup Ready" corn and soy allow Monsanto to sell more of their herbicide, and make farmers dependent on it. If anti-GMO forces want to boycott this type of genetically modified organism, I'm on their side.

But not with salmon. AquaBounty salmon doesn't promote the use of pesticides or other industrial chemicals. It just makes salmon farming more efficient. The genes added to the salmon are naturally-occurring ones from other fish, so they are still 100% fish. (In contrast, GM crops have genes injected into them from bacteria and other foreign species.) Furthermore, the farming operations by AquaBounty are all inland farms, so there's almost zero chance of the fish escaping into the wild. (I went to one of the FDA hearings last fall and heard a detailed description of the farms.) And even if they did escape, it wouldn't matter because the AquAdvantage salmon are sterile, and couldn't breed with wild fish.

Despite these facts, environmental organizations such as Food and Water Watch are waging a campaign to "Stop Frankenfish,", and spreading misinformation about the science. I was particularly disappointed by the comments from the Union of Concerned Scientists at last September's FDA hearing. Jane Rissler from the UCS compared GM salmon to the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a ridiculous bit of overstatement. I thought the UCS were the good guys! I agree with their stances on many issues, but they do not speak for me on this one.

I can't resist pointing out that Republicans such as Alaska's Rep. Young claim to hate regulation, and favor the free market - except when they don't. Here we have Young stepping in and imposing regulation to halt the free market under pressure from lobbyists. Not surprisingly, Young is joined by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, but his efforts are also supported by Democratic Senator Patty Murray from Washington, who also has a salmon industry to protect. As happens all too often, politicians are in favor of science only when they agree with it. They're all too happy to pass laws on behalf of special interests, even if it goes against with their supposed political positions on government regulation.

Sadly, environmentalists who oppose GM salmon don't seem to realize that they are acting against their own interests. The same is true of the fishing industry. If they win, the result will be the eventual extinction of many wild fish species, with unpredictable consequences for the ocean's ecosystem. The arguments about the threat posed by GM salmon haven't stood up to scientific scrutiny, so these groups have turned to politics instead. It looks like they might win, in the short term. But if we insist on taking so many of the ocean's fish for our dinner plates, the wild fish will soon be gone.

Non-GMO foods: nonsense

I was at a local organic food market recently buying lunch, and I noticed that my avocado-and-hummus sandwich proclaimed that it contained "non-GMO" ingredients (GMO = "genetically modified organism).

Now, I happen to like organic groceries. The ones near me tend to have better produce and fish, two of the main ingredients in my diet. But organic markets are a hotbed of bogus, even laughable health claims, and I often have to suppress my urge to complain to the store's management. (I once wrote to Whole Foods, but they never responded.)

Here in the U.S., most of our food supply is filled with so-called GMO foods, but in Europe the situation is dramatically different. For some reasons, our otherwise well-educated European friends are terrified of GMO foods. They don't seem to realize that we've been modifying the genes in our foods for centuries, and it's generally been a good thing. The latest biotechnology merely allows us to modify plants (and animals too, though none are yet on the market) much more quickly, and more intelligently. Today we can alter just a few genes to produce a more-desirable plant, rather than doing it by trial-and-error over many generations.

In fact, the "GMO" foods of the past likely had hundreds of unknown gene modifications.Farmers selected plants for seed because they looked and tasted good, without having any idea of what was really different about them.

Let's take a look at corn. The corn we eat today, organic or not, looks nothing like the "real" corn (or maize) from centuries ago. The earliest corn cobs discovered by archaeologists were tiny, with only a few kernels. This picture shows a primitive form of corn, called teosinte, compared to modern corn:

The history of corn is a history of genetic modifications made by earlier humans who didn't even know what a gene was. Today's GMO food is simply a continuation of that history.

That hasn't stopped opponents of GMO foods from sounding the alarm. Even the World Health Organization makes some errors on its website, where it discusses three main "issues of concern for human health":

1. Allergenicity. Not a problem. The WHO says "No allergic effects have been found relative to GM foods currently on the market."
2. Gene transfer. The WHO gets this one wrong. They write that "gene transfer from GM foods to cells of the body or to bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract would cause concern if the transferred genetic material adversely affects human health." Gene transfer is a topic that I've studied in some detail, and published papers on. The WHO says that the likelihood of a gene transfer event is "low," but in fact it is vanishingly small - so small, in fact, that not a single gene transfer event has ever happened. In the history of our species, and of all mammals, going back tens of millions of years, not a single gene from something we've eaten has been transferred into the human genome or, as far as we can tell, into bacteria within our guts.
3. Outcrossing. This is "the movement of genes from GM plants into conventional crops," and this really can happen - they're the same species, so they can interbreed. But it's only a concern if GM plants are harmful, which they're not.

The bottom line is, you're far more likely to be harmed by being hit on the head by a corn cob than by some kind of deviant GMO corn gene.

The WHO concludes that GM foods "are not likely to present risks for human health." Of course, not all GMO foods are good. I'm not a fan of engineering crops to be more tolerant of pesticides, for example: this type of GMO food benefits big agricultural firms rather than the consumer. And it is theoretically possible to insert harmful genes into plants, but agricultural firms wouldn't have any reason to do that.

So the next time you see the non-GMO claim in your grocery, ask yourself whether the ingredients could really be completely unmodified from their "natural" state. I doubt it.

My sandwich was really good, by the way.

Scientists build a better salmon

Salmon may soon be the first genetically modified animal to hit our dinner plates. We've been eating GMO foods for years, mostly without noticing it, but until now all the genetically modified organisms have been plants.

The new salmon was developed by AquaBounty Technologies, a company in Massachusetts, and here╒s how it works: start with Atlantic salmon, add a growth gene from the Pacific Chinook salmon, and add another gene from the ocean pout (Trisopterus luscus). In combination, these two genes make the Atlantic salmon grow to maturity in just 18 months, instead of the normal 3 years. The new salmon have the potential to make salmon farming much more efficient. The Washington Post reported this week that the FDA is close to approving the fish for human consumption.

This is cool science. So why are all the reports, both in the mainstream media and the blogosphere, making it sound like a frightening development?

Let's get one thing straight: we have to learn how to farm our fish. The human race is rapidly depleting the stocks of almost every wild fish that we like to eat, and many traditional fisheries are already wiped out. Others have been depleted so badly that severe fishing limitations have been imposed in a desperate attempt to allow stocks to recover. This can't go on.

Think about it: we farm all the other animals that we eat. Imagine that we only ate wild cows, or chicken, or pigs. The human race can't be fed by wild animals alone - we're too numerous and too hungry. Sooner or later, we will drive wild fish to extinction, unless we make the switch to farmed fish.

And as I wrote recently, oily fish like salmon contain omega-3 fatty acids, which appear to carry health benefits, especially when compared to the fats contained in other meats. We should all eat more salmon.

Okay, but what about the downsides of GMO salmon? The anti-GMO forces have issued statements warning of dire consequences if these "Frankenfish" are allowed on the market. Wenonah Hauter, the director of Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit whose goals I generally support, issued a statement that is full of misinformation. For example, she claims that the salmon are "toxic", which sounds pretty scary. As evidence, she says "a recent study commissioned by the European Union revealed that fish that have been modified to grow faster also have a higher tolerance to the toxins in their environment."

I looked up the EU study, by by Fredrik Sundström at the University of Gothenburg, to learn what it actually said. Although the university's press release says that "transgenic fish can be more resistant to environmental toxins," the study itself didn't provide any evidence for this claim. In fact, it didn't even study toxins. Instead, Prof. Sundström looked at what might happen if GMO fish escaped into the wild, and he concluded that they might survive better than wild fish. He didn't conclude anything about toxins.

Hauter of Food and Water Watch isn't the only one to get this wrong. Reporter Paulina Reso at the New York Daily News got it just as wrong, reporting that "A study commissioned by the E.U. found that these engineered fish have a higher tolerance to toxins, putting consumers at risk." She cites the same press release from the University of Gothenburg.

Not only is the claim about toxins unfounded, but it ignores the very real (and widely documented) danger of mercury accumulating in wild fish, including salmon. If you're truly concerned about toxins in fish, you would support fish farming, not oppose it.

The Center for Food Safety's George Kimbrell, quoted in The Post article and elsewhere, threatened to sue the FDA if they approve the new transgenic salmon. He says they are concerned about "catastrophic consequences like the gulf oil spill." Wow, that sounds awful! Transgenic salmon will be as bad as the largest oil spill in U.S. history? Is he kidding? Rather than spend time on breathless hyperbole, Kimbrell should be worried about the very real possibility of driving wild salmon to extinction. He doesn't explain what his concern is based on, and it seems that his group simply opposes any genetically modified organisms on principal. Their opposition is not based on science, nor on any well-thought-out concern about nature or the environment.

And yes, I know that fish farming itself can be harmful to the local environment. But our response can't be to abandon fish farming and continue overfishing until all wild fish are extinct. As the saying goes, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We should work on ways to improve fish farming techniques and make them more sustainable.

Transgenic technology is cool. Of course it can be used in ways that don't benefit consumers - but so can traditional genetic techniques (which don't require any FDA approval, by the way). Take tomatoes: I can't remember the last time I found a tasty store-bought tomato in the U.S. They look great but taste like cardboard, all thanks to selective breeding that makes them easier to pack and transport. If someone creates a transgenic tomato that tastes good, I'll be the first in line to buy it. Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to the day when I can taste the new transgenic salmon.