The best place to start would be with Arpad Pusztai, a
Hungarian biochemist
who worked in the UK at the Rowett
Institute, the British body responsible for
food safety. You
could Google him, or you could check out a
few of these
articles:
Wikipedia entry, or Physicians
and
Scientists for Responsible Application of
Science and Technology
(PSRAST) or this
interview with Pusztai on Organic Consumers
Association
website.
Pusztai lost his job because he said in an interview on the
BBC that he wouldn't eat GM foods. Sounds like the IT
director of
Massachusetts after he approved ODF as a state
format, doesn't it?
There
were only three publicly-available studies on the
safety of GM food on humans
when GM foods were approved by
the FDA. Two of them showed adverse effects of
GM food on
humans, and the other was inconclusive. All studies used to
get the
approval were sealed as a
trade secret.
Note that the approval was gotten
using the doctrine of
substantial
equivalence. I am giving you the Wikipedia
version because the FDA has
nothing on its website about
substantial equivalence except as it relates to
medical
devices.
Now if a food is approved based on substantial
equivalence,
it means that there is no difference between the GM food and
the
existing food. But in order to get a patent on the GM
food, you have to show
that the new food is a novel
invention, and is not obvious to the average
practitioner of
the art.
So, which is it? Is it the same food, thus gaining
FDA
approval, or is it novel and different, thus deserving of a
patent. You
can't have both. They are mutually exclusive.
Also, consider the so-called
"BT" corn. It is sold as being
equivalent to spreading bacillus thuringensis
bacteria (BT)
on a crop. But the corn obviously does not grow its own
bacteria. What it grows is the toxin that bacillus
thuringensis expresses ONLY
when it finds itself in the
digestive tract of a cutworm or other larval form
of insect.
Except the GM corn expresses the toxin always and
everywhere.
So
what we get (and what I get to live in most of the year)
is a plant that has a
toxin throughout every part of it -
the root, the stalk, the seed, the leaves,
the tassel.
Everywhere. So when the corn tassels and pollinates, or
during
harvest, you get to breathe air laden with BT toxin.
If this were spread in any
other way, I could file chemical
trespass charges against my neighbors for
doing so. The test
case for this has not yet been pursued in Iowa. See
this article for other
considerations on environmental impacts.
There
were also shortcuts made in the applications. Someday,
I will dig them up
again. It has been a long time since I
have looked for them.
This isn't
complete, but it's a start. Believe it if you
will, but I would prefer that
there were some publicly
available evidence that I could look at so that
someone
could tell for sure. As of now, we are operating in top-
secret mode.
The only evidence available says we shouldn't
be using GM food, but the GM
companies say that they have
evidence otherwise, and we shouldn't worry. Sound
familiar?
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