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GM debate not over — there’s still fresh scuttlebutt to debunk.
Thursday, February 7, 2013 2:40
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Farm Weekly (Thursday, February 7th) Western Australia
Congratulations to Colin Bettles on an excellent account of the address by former anti-GM campaigner Mark Lynas at the Oxford Farming Conference in early January (GM debate is over: scientist). Yes, the GM debate should be over, but that pre-supposes that the current group of anti-GM activists would have the intellectual honesty to do what Mark Lynas did and actually read and seek to understand the highly respected volume of scientific evidence showing GM crops to be both safe and effective. Unfortunately, most are ideologues with closed minds who gain their “knowledge” fron websites that either publish faulty science or flagrantly distort the truth. Consider the latest case to emerge:
Plant viruses are a normal part of the human diet, less than one percent of them are harmful to the plant, and the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus (CaMV) occurs in about 10 percent of all brassica crops such as cabbages, cauliflowers and brussel sprouts. Brassicas have been around for many centuries and there is a long history of safety as we continue to eat our daily greens. Scientists have used a sequence from the CaMV as a promoter (P35S) or genetic switch to turn on genes in GM crops, and this goes back about 25 years. Noted Swiss virologist Thomas Hohn has estimated that we consume at least 1000 times more of the 35S promoter from natural virus infection in conventional cabbages and cauliflowers than we do from eating a transgenic plant. So why the new scare campaign?
Here is what happened. European Food Safety Authority scientists did a computer study to examine the overlap between the P35S promoter and a CaMV sequence called Gene VI, which codes for a multifunctional protein which has been observed in some cases to cause traits such as leaf chlorosis, plant stunting, and late flowering - traits that would lead to a cultivar being discarded on productivity grounds. They found what are called “open reading frames” so they went ahead and looked at the theoretical products that might possibly arise in a plant cell. Their direct quote and conclusion was: “A bioinformatics analysis was performed to assess the safety for human and animal health of putative translation products of Gene VI overlapping P35S. No relevant similarity was identified between putative peptides and known allergens or toxins, using different data bases”. They saw no safety threat.
This should have been the end of the story, but their work was seized upon by anti-GM activists Latham and Wilson, and a grossly distorted commentary was published in their own blog called “Independent Science News”. This in turn was used by the MADGE group of anti-GM ‘website disciples’ who have ably demonstrated how a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous, and they issued a press release on this new and so-called danger! This is a non-issue, but the example is a good one because it demonstrates just how science becomes distorted. No, the debate is not over, but let’s set aside the alarmist diatribe, continue to enjoy both our greens and GM crops. Finally, let’s understand that plant viruses infect plants, animal viruses infect animals, and the two never replicate in the same cells!
Ian Edwards
Edstar Genetics Pty Ltd.
SABC – Murdoch University.
2013-02-07 02:31:01
Source: http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2013/02/gm-debate-not-over-theres-still-fresh.html
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