Guide to Genetic Engineering

What can genetic engineering do?

Genetically modified organism, GMOs, (which are mostly plants) are mostly transgenic which means they contain genes pinched from something else like bacteria, viruses, other plants or even animals. By snipping a gene which does something useful from one organism and splicing it into another, say a crop plant, scientists can get the plant to grow bigger or faster or make more for people to eat. Or the plant could be made to be more nutritious with more protein or minerals or vitamins. Some crop plants can be made to grow in salty water or very little water - good for very dry countries. Others could be engineered to resist disease. Some could even make stuff called vaccines which could protect kids against nasty illnesses like polio or measles. And there's more! Plants have been engineered which use up nitrogen fertilisers more effectively. This not only means that farmers need less expensive fertiliser but also helps slow

climate change. Why? Because nitrogen fertilisers produce a lot of nitrous oxide gas which is 300 times more damaging than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Around 6 percent of warming is due to this gas. Some plants -- legumes like peas and beans -- can 'fix' the nitrogen they need directly from the air. If all plants could do that, there'd be no need for nitrogen fertilisers at all, so no nitrous oxide pollution.

What's wrong with genetic engineering?

Most companies like to make lots of money and they like to make it fast. This is what companies are for but some don't care much who or what gets trampled on in the process. The GE companies would really like to have everyone everywhere eating food made from their gentically modified plants. Then they'd make huge amounts of money because they own the technology needed to produce the seeds. Once they have changed plants by GE, companies can patent them. This means that any farmer who wants to sow that seed must pay money to the company which owns the patent. It means that the farmer has to buy new seeds every year. She can't save her (many small farmers are women) own seeds any more as farmers have done since the start of farming. The company, not the farmer, then has control over who grows what food. Many poor farmers won't be able to afford to buy the seed. Patents on living things has also linked in with a new sort of piracy: biopiracy.

But GE is a potentially risky business. How safe will it be if most people end up eating GE food most of the time? What effect will growing all these plants with funny genes have on other plants or animals over time? Maybe nothing will happen - or nothing much. Nobody knows for sure but... fingers crossed!... so far, so good. People have been eating GM foods since the early 1990s and there have been no calamities.

Why the rush?

The GE companies say they want to feed all the world's starving people. Excellent! But few companies want to give money away - which is what they'd have to do to feed the starving. Hungry people have no money to buy

food or land to grow it on. That is why they're hungry. Not because there isn't enough food. I think the companies are in a hurry because they want to make money fast. Many people think this is risky. They think that the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) the companies are already growing -- and you are eating -- have not been tested very well.

It's the same stuff!

Or is it? The big seed companies claim that their GM seeds and foods are 'substantially equivalent' - meaning more or less the same as ordinary seeds. A soy bean seed or tomato looks the same whether it's genetically modified or it isn't. They taste the same. They smell the same. So they are the same (almost), say the companies. So there's no need to test them. Critics say this is wrong. If a plant's genes have been altered by GE, the plant then makes or does something different. So it is different, and it may have effects that no-one can know about. These were genuine worries back in the early days of genetic engineering. GE foods were beginning to be eaten by people (and farm animals) in America and many other parts of the world by the early 1990s. But people in Europe protested in a big way, so big that European governments were forced to ban all GE foods and crops. Protesters had several good reasons taking action. One main objection was that nobody wanted to be a guinea pig. People didn't want to eat food that hadn't been properly tested and wasn't labelled. They mostly still don't and big protest marches regularly take place. So the great world 'experiment' to discover whether these new foods were safe, as the companies that made them claimed, went ahead without Europe. Nothing has gone wrong so far, so it looks like GE foods are not the nightmare 'Frankenfoods' which many protesters called them. From a food safety viewpoint, they seem to be okay.