When Science Media Abandon Science

Imagine a future where no farmer in the world can grow a crop without paying exorbitant royalties to a multinational corporation. Discover magazine doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong with that future. Like other science media that seem to embrace genetic engineering as “real scientific breakthrough” and view those opposing it as scientific neanderthals, Discover is in fact ignoring the facts and the science around this technology.

After recently reading an article on GMOs in the magazine it was obvious to me how delicately the author danced around the science on GMO crops, cherry-picking the information he wanted to convey and doing his best to paint European anti-GMO activists as science deniers. Like most media I see supporting biotechnology, there is a concerted effort to misdirect the argument towards the scientific and away from the political. In fact, they try hard to make the point that the political is trumping the scientific. But sometimes the political is more important than the scientific because there are real issues at stake.

Discover says that “As transgenic crops have spread around the world without the apocalyptic consequences activists initially foretold, objections to the technology have shifted away from science.” In other words they couldn't stop GMOs with a scientific argument, so now they are resorting to simple politics. But why this would happen is never fully explained or justified. That maybe these activists are different from the ones who initially brought up the health and safety concerns about GMOs (a very real statistical possibility) is never explored. Maybe this issue has always been part of the case against transgenic crops, or maybe early activists could not have envisioned the greater designs of biotech companies (control of the world's food systems) when they began their fight against GM crops with real fears about the unknown.

 

Given that much GM research is done privately and without the public's knowledge, it would seem valid for a citizen to be concerned about how these genes might affect our food supply. After all, it's a fact that plant genes cannot really be contained since the pollen of most crops is designed to be spread far and wide by wind or insect (a fact the biotech companies have based their business model on). There has always existed a real possibility that food crops could be contaminated with something inedible and harmful. As these crops and the research on them spreads throughout the world, the likelihood of this happening only increases.

Of course, the scientific rationale, and one that is reiterated in Discover and in most other pro-GMO propaganda, is that research has shown that transgenic crops pose no health risk. It's easy to site this research as a blanket “get out of jail free card” for biotech, but most of the research was done on the health risks of GM crops intended to be food. This is part of the misinformation and the cherry picking of the science. Research results in one area of study are used to justify all biotech research as harmless. Considering how easily pollen can spread, and taking into account the secrecy of the research, what's to stop food crops from being contaminated by crops intended for industrial or medical applications? There have been many cases where transgenic crops intended for non-food applications have passed their genes on to food crops that ended up in products on the shelves of grocery stores. The Union of Concerned Scientists, scientists who see that the science points to danger in unregulated GM crop research and propagation, are calling for putting limits on the growing of transgenic crops for industrial for pharmaceutical applications outdoors, where they can easily contaminate the food system.  Since GM crops are being experimented with to produce plastics, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals of all kinds (basically anything you can imagine), there is a real risk of these different transgenic applications contaminating food crops. This likelihood which has already caused great economic loss around the world is not mentioned in the article.

So the idea that scientific research has given a green light to biotech is really just a big ag-funded load of pseudoscientific propaganda that science media have foolishly embraced.

But the science used to back up claims that GM crops are safe is questionable as well, and makes you doubt whether the science media are speaking in the interest of true science and not just their own political agenda. Unscientific statements like “this is something that plants do naturally all the time” (a direct quote from the Discover article) are common in pro-GMO science media. This statement would be true if applied to the conventional plant breeding that is responsible for the creation of hybrid crops. This kind of breeding is engineering on a species-specific scale. The breeder has only genes already found in that species' genome to work with.

 

However, transgenic crops are something that does not occur naturally. They are not “something plants do all the time”. Interspecific flow of genes is rare in nature and in fact species are often defined by their lack of ability to viably reproduce with one another (meaning they cannot exchange genes). In other words, it's not really scientific to claim that corn and wheat exchange genes in nature, let alone pigs and tomatoes. Some bacteria do exchange genes with plants and an example of crown gall's relationship to its host plant is used to illustrate this in the article, possibly because it makes the practice of genetic recombination seem more natural. Somewhere between the mention that this kind of gene manipulation happens in nature all the time and the added rationale that humans have been manipulating plants for thousands of years by breeding domestic plants, the justification is made and the science behind the statements lost. It's the same technique used by psychics and magicians--the old shell game to throw you off the scent. In reality, neither of these rationales justifies or relates to the creation of transgenic plants by humans. Most of what biotech companies are doing could never happen in nature.

Throughout the article, the author tries to provide counter arguments to those of biotech supporters, but most of the arguments he chooses seem to be weak at best. For some reason the counterargument to this claim that nature creates transgenic plants all the time is not that they don't do this, but instead has to do with the fear that transgenic plants will cross with their wild relatives and bring the errant genes into the wild gene pool. This is one reason to fear the crazy genes that molecular biologists are introducing into the gene pool, but it isn't really a counter to the falsehood that transgenic crops are perfectly natural.

Discover has an accompanying article that covers the growing anti-GMO movement in the US. It talks about the FDA approval process for GM crops, which is pretty much non-existent. The FDA apparently feels that because DNA is in other human food it cannot harm consumers. I wonder what they'd say if we injected DNA that produced arsenic into some GM food crops. This policy would strike any thinking scientist as scientifically dubious, I'm sure. Saying DNA is simply an edible molecule is like saying a nuclear bomb is just a bunch of metal.

Another part of the propaganda message of science media is this “better living through science” argument—that biotech is the wave of the future and is being applied for the good of humanity. While there may be some hypothetical future they can point to where GMOs can provide real benefits to humanity, this is not the reality of the application of the technology.

When we hear GM crops being covered in science media, there's always a focus on the amazing revolutionary applications of the technology—rice is being made more nutritious, GM crops are going to increase yields and feed the world's hungry. This article goes so far as to say that the high costs of legal battles and security required of GM crop research in Europe has limited it to the likes of profit-making biotech companies, who have concentrated more on fighting pests and weeds and less on the real crop improvements relating to nutrition.

It's interesting though that in the US, where there has been little resistance to GM crops, that hasn't been the case at all. In fact, Monsanto has almost single-handedly taken over the entire seed and pesticide market for American farmers, and all this without having to worry about activists or legal costs.* Their only legal costs have been racked up by their lawsuits against American farmers who had their seed contaminated by Monsanto's genes. When Monsanto wins these suits, they not only get their legal costs paid, they get a fat reward. Yet even without any restraints, we see little in the way of nutritional improvements in our crops. Of course, when American farmers are growing nothing more than corn and soybeans to be fed to animals, who cares about the nutritional content being touted in all the pro-GMO articles in science media.

*Congress just passed a bill that included a rider dubbed the Monsanto Protection Act to specifically prevent a court from stopping the sale or cultivation of a GM crop approved by the FDA if there is a pending case challenging its safety to public health.

Another flaw in the “better living through science” claim has to do with yield increases. There is no evidence that yields are increased significantly by use of biotech crops, yet Discover equates the era of biotech crops to another Green Revolution. The article implies activists are rejecting this clear advancement that will feed the world's hungry. This is the justification for getting out of the way of biotech—that they will feed the world's hungry with this new technology. Absent from this paragraph is any mention of the science showing that GM crops will produce better yields and more food. You'd think that would be the first thing they'd mention, but they can't mention it, because it isn't true.

A lot of the science against GMOs is real and is being ignored by the pro-GM science media. For instance, the overwhelming evidence that GM crops that contain BT (Bacillus thurengiensis) are making the organic pesticide ineffective by exposing pests to it constantly is not mentioned in the article at all. Organic and IPM farmers apply BT only at select times in the life cycle of the plant, thus only exposing the pest to the pesticide briefly so that it has limited ability to adapt. Untargeted application, in other words exposing BT to the pest throughout the plant's life cycle as these GM crops do, breeds resistance into the pests much faster. Less exposure to the insecticide means bugs that are not naturally immune to it will survive and pass on their lack of immunity to future generations. If all bugs are exposed all the time, the only ones to survive will be those that are immune. In a short time the entire population will be resistant because the only breeding occurring is between resistant individuals. Having entire populations of resistant pests means that one of the major weapons for organic farmers against pests is going to be useless soon because of the carelessness of GM farmers and researchers.

Maybe if scientist are upset about concerns raised by activists, they should start looking at the way the technology is being applied worldwide. They should stop trying to redirect the argument to science and look at the very political tactics corporations like Monsanto are using to spread biotech throughout the human food system. The problem may be that a lot of these scientists are working for the biotech companies, so their perspective on the political end of the argument is compromised.

 

Why isn't a political argument enough?

But moving onto the political arguments, which are valid as well....in the beginning of their fight against biotechnology, activists might not have envisioned how biotech companies would use GM crops to gain even greater control over the food systems of humanity.

Big agribusiness had tried to increase their control over humanity's food systems using hybridization to take seed production out of the hands of farmers and put it in the hands of agribusiness. Because the hybrid crops were more productive than traditional crops grown from seeds saved over millennia by farmers, farmers were quick to adopt them to increase yields and potential profits. Massive marketing efforts embraced the Green Revolution claims of being able to feed the booming human population and got governments to adopt and promote hybrids as the way of the future. These hybrid crops, that used conventional plant breeding techniques to increase yields, provided real increases in yield per acre and led to a boom in food production. But their improved gene combinations went hand in hand with the mechanization, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and often irrigation that were needed to make them so productive. Farmers saw their yields increase, but also found a new dependence on agribusiness for their seed, expensive equipment, fertilizers, and pesticides. The old crops (heirlooms or land races) they'd saved the seeds of over generations were naturally better adapted to pests, weather variations, and the specific conditions of their local fields. As well, heirloom crops didn't require massive inputs of chemicals to produce good crop. To the big ag company's dismay, there were still many farmers in the world who chose to stick with their own locally adapted crops grown from their own saved seed. Big ag needed something better, and that's when they saw the advantage of GM crops to their bottom line.

 

Hybrids gave control of growing seed to the corporations, but if a farmer didn't want the hybrid seed, they didn't have to buy it. They could always choose to save their own seed. And though the genes of hybrid plants could be passed on to and “contaminate” a farmer's saved seed, they didn't give corporations the ability to track their gene's spread. Or at least, before the advent of biotechnology, there was no way for corporations to identify their genes when they escaped and contaminated saved seed. Once biotechnology gave them the ability to isolate and mark plant genes, the genes could be tracked when they escaped their native crop and flowed into uncharted territories.

It's likely that biotech companies early on saw the convergence of three different factors: the ability to patent genes, the ease of flow of genes through wind and insect pollination, and the ability to easily identify the genes when they escaped their native variety. These factors meant that companies could easily contaminate farmer's saved seed with their patented genes, thus giving them the ability to sue the farmer for patent infringement. Under threat of a lawsuit farmers are forced to buy the seeds that Monsanto sells, because their own heirloom seed now contains Monsanto's genes and would be illegal to plant.

GM crops are rapidly spreading their tainted genes around the world. In the late 90s heirloom corn containing biotech genes was discovered in parts of Mexico where the crop had originated. Apparently, surplus corn from the US had made it down there and been planted by local farmers who were unaware that it contained GM genes. Around the world, organic farmers are being put out of business by the spread of GM crops because transgenic crops are not allowed under US and international certification requirements. Consumers of organics do not want to eat GM crops. Unfortunately, anywhere that GM crops are grown it is impossible for organic farmers to grow the same species of crop. Organic canola cannot be produced in any regions where conventional canola is grown, because the GM canola will inevitably contaminate the saved or commodity seed of the organic farmer, making his or her crop useless on the organic market. But even conventional canola farmers who used to save their own seed now cannot grown their own variety without worrying about contamination by Monsanto's genes and a pending lawsuit from the company.

You may ask why Monsanto is not liable for contaminating the crops of organic farmers when clearly they are the ones doing the economic damage. Why is it ok for one company to put organic farmers out of business in entire regions, to contaminate and make useless thousands of acres of crops, and still get to sue the people that it puts out of business?  That is all evidence of the power biotech companies have over governments, particularly the US government. Fortunately, informed and concerned consumers and activists in Europe have impeded the market for GM crops. There is at least one region that cares about the will of the people not to eat transgenic food.

All of these factors are leading to the extinction of truly organic farming and the practice of seed saving worldwide, and are pushing our food systems toward total dependence on agribusiness. Indeed, this has been the goal of companies like Monsanto in lobbying government to put the responsibility for contamination on the victim instead of the criminal.

 

It seems a shame, with all the real science out there and with so many real world examples of the costs and hazards of GM crops, that the science media can't get the science or the politics right.