The End of Doom (20 page)

During the past twenty years hundreds of millions of euros and dollars of taxpayer money have been spent on endocrine disruptor research with essentially no results. In a remarkable and thorough 2013 scientific review article, a team of toxicologists bluntly suggests that all this funding has likely produced “a vested interest of scientists in the endocrine disruption field to keep the endocrine disruption hypothesis on the agenda in order to stay in business.” Decades of research and hundreds of millions of dollars in funding have resulted in the publication of more than 4,000 different articles. “Taking into account the large resources spent on this topic, one should expect that, in the meantime, some endocrine disruptors that cause actual human injury or disease should have been identified,” the researchers argue. “However, this is not the case. To date, with the exception of natural or synthetic hormones, not a single, man-made chemical endocrine disruptor has been identified that poses an identifiable, measurable risk to human health.” They damningly add, “Certainly, there has been much media hype about imaginary health risks from bisphenol A, parabens, or phthalates. However, no actual evidence of adverse human health effects from these substances has ever been established. To the contrary, there is increasing evidence that their health risks are absent or negligible—or imaginary.”

As Denis Rousseau cogently reminds us, his description of “science gone bad is not a portrait of deliberately fraudulent behavior. Pathological science arises from self-delusion—cases in which scientists believe that they are acting in a methodical, scientific manner but instead have lost their objectivity. The practitioners of pathological science believe that their findings simply cannot be wrong. But any ideas can be wrong and any observation can be misinterpreted.”

On the basis of the evidence so far, there is a very good chance that the study of endocrine disruption will ultimately turn out to be what Ioannidis calls a null field. In which case, apocalyptic researchers will have provoked the public and policymakers into spending a great deal of time, energy, funding, and regulatory attention on another exaggerated environmental scare.

 

5

The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes?

THE CRYSTALS AND GEMS GALLERY IN HANALEI,
a trendy little town on Kauai, displayed several posters protesting GMOs and offered flyers urging a ban on biotech crops. The gallery is the sort of place where, when my wife picked up an attractive stone and asked a clerk what it was, the reply came back, “Do you mean, what does it
do?
” Apparently, that particular rock can dispel negativity.

After being advised on the therapeutic properties of various crystals, we asked the clerk what all the anti-biotech literature around the shop was about. Among other things, she informed us that biotech crops cause cancer, stating emphatically that Kauai's cancer rates were exceptionally high, especially among people who live close to the seed company fields on the island where biotech crop varieties are grown.

As it happens, the state Health Department reported earlier in 2013 that “overall cancer incidence rates (all cancers combined) were significantly lower on Kauai compared to the entire state of Hawaii.” Nor did the department find higher rates of cancer in those districts where the seed company farms are located.

Some readers will recognize that the title of this chapter is taken from the 1977 comedy horror movie of the same name in which giant mutant tomatoes nearly destroy humanity. Unfortunately, it is not just winsome clerks in crystal shops who fear that modern biotech crops are the moral equivalent of homicidal tomatoes. Major environmental lobbying groups claim to be troubled by them too. For example, Doug Gurian-Sherman, a scientist formerly with the Union of Concerned Scientists and now at the Center for Food Safety, asserted in 2014, “There's no real consensus on GMO crop safety.” In 2012, a statement issued by the Friends of the Earth in Europe demanded a moratorium on all foods derived from biotech crops. That FOE statement declared, “As well as posing unnecessary risks to human health, Friends of the Earth Europe believes GMOs destroy biodiversity, lead to increased costs for conventional farmers, increase corporate control of the food chain, and fail to combat global hunger.” In 2013, Daniel M. Ocampo, Sustainable Agriculture and Genetic Engineering Campaigner for Greenpeace in Southeast Asia, stated, “There is no scientific proof that GMOs pose no danger to human health and the environment.” Ocampo added, “Even the scientific community is divided on whether GMOs are safe.”

All of these statements by representatives from the world's leading environmentalist organizations are false. There is, in fact, a broad scientific consensus that modern biotech crop varieties are safe for people and the environment. Why, then, are prominent environmentalist groups opposed to this technology? That takes a bit of history to explain.

Biotech Born Precautionary

Biotechnology was born precautionary, and that's been a problem ever since. Modern biotechnology got its start in 1971 when Stanford University biochemist Paul Berg figured out how to splice segments of DNA together. He called this process
recombining,
and it enabled researchers to move genes from one organism to another. In 1980 Berg won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for this discovery. This new capability made some researchers uncomfortable, so a committee of prominent molecular biologists published a letter in the journal
Science
in July 1974 asking for a worldwide moratorium on certain types of gene-splicing experiments. The moratorium was supposed to last until the hazards that might be posed by gene splicing could be assessed. The researchers also asked that the National Institutes of Health devise a set of safety procedures for working with recombinant DNA. This was the first self-imposed ban on basic research in the history of science and it lasted two years.

Naturally, the moratorium attracted the attention of a wide variety of activists, many of whom worried about researchers playing God with nature. Some warned that super-plagues would escape the laboratories. Alarmed members of Congress including Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Representative Al Gore (D-TN) proposed significant and burdensome regulation, including the creation of a National Biohazards Commission modeled on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

In 1976,
The
New York Times Magazine
published an alarming front-page article, “New Strains of Life—or Death,” by Cornell University biochemist Liebe Cavalieri. Cavalieri asserted, among other horrors, that gene splicing could lead to accidental outbreaks of infectious cancer. “In the case of recombinant DNA, it is an all or none situation—only one accident is needed to endanger the future of mankind,” he warned.

Also in 1976, Alfred Vellucci, the mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, guided by the left-leaning group Science for the People, wanted to ban gene-splicing research in his city. Of course, Cambridge is home to Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We want to be damned sure the people of Cambridge won't be affected by anything that could crawl out of that laboratory,” Vellucci told
The
New York Times
. He added, “They may come up with a disease that can't be cured—even a monster. Is this the answer to Dr. Frankenstein's dream?” There is no little irony that today Cambridge promotes itself as “one of the world's major biotech centers.” Needless to say, more than forty years after gene splicing was invented, no plagues, much less epidemics of infectious cancer, have emerged from the world's biotech labs.

In the context of this furor, some 140 molecular biologists convened in 1975 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California, to draft guidelines for conducting gene-splicing experiments. They self-consciously thought that they were avoiding what they saw as the mistakes made a generation earlier by Manhattan Project nuclear physicists when they unleashed the power of the atom. The initially restrictive guidelines have been greatly relaxed, not least because it turns out that microorganisms are natural and promiscuous exchangers of genes.

Reflecting later on the hysteria and rush to regulate, James Watson, codiscoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, for which he won the Nobel Prize, succinctly noted, “Scientifically I was a nut. There is no evidence at all that recombinant DNA poses the slightest danger.” Similarly, biophysicist Burke Zimmerman, who participated in the congressional debates over regulating biotechnology, concluded, “In looking back, it would be hard to insist that a law was necessary, or, perhaps, that guidelines were necessary.”

“We Shall Not Be Cloned”

However, once fears are raised, they are hard to allay, especially if some groups find them useful for advancing other agendas. One master promoter of fear is onetime radical organizer Jeremy Rifkin, who early on became an anti-biotech campaigner. In 1977, Rifkin led a group of protesters into a meeting of molecular biologists at the National Academy of Sciences, where they joined hands singing, “We shall not be cloned.” Also in 1977, Rifkin and his fellow activist Ted Howard published
Who Should Play God? The Artificial Creation of Life and What It Means for the Future of the Human Race.
“The traditional notion of ruthlessly exploiting and controlling nature in the name of progress is being challenged by an environmentalist creed that emphasizes a reintegration into the ecosystem,” wrote Rifkin and Howard. They also railed against “unbridled scientific and technological progress” and creeping “corporate hegemony” and called for a “new spiritual awakening,” which would produce “a fundamental change in the values and institutional relationships of American society.”

In 1984, Rifkin penned a semi-mystical tract,
Algeny: A New Word—A New World,
in which he disparaged biotechnology by likening it to medieval alchemy. Modern technology was alienating humanity from nature, argued Rifkin. “Humanity seeks the elation that goes with the drive for mastery over the world,” he asserted. “Nature offers us the sublime resignation that goes with an undifferentiated participation in the world around us.”
10
Nature may indeed offer sublimity, but it also deals out plague, floods, droughts, and starvation quite liberally. In a review, Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould correctly decried
Algeny
“as a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship.”

Rifkin established the Foundation on Economic Trends, from which he launched many protests and legal challenges against the nascent biotechnology industry. For example, he challenged researchers who wanted to field-test a genetically modified version of the ubiquitous
Pseudomonas syringae
bacteria as a way to prevent frost damage to crops. The natural bacteria carry a gene that causes ice crystals to form around them when temperatures drop below freezing so that they can dine on the frost-damaged plants. Researchers had simply removed the gene and wanted to spread the modified bacteria over crops in the field to see if it would protect against frost damage. In what would later become a standard operating procedure for opponents of biotech, members of the group Earth First! ripped up one of the test plots in 1987. Eventually research showed that the modified bacteria did protect against frost damage, but efforts to commercialize it were dropped as threats to vandalize test plots persisted.

Rifkin was also a big player in the campaign that delayed the Food and Drug Administration's approval of a biotech version of the hormone bovine somatotropin (BST) to boost milk production by as much as 25 percent. In 1986 the FDA had determined that BST was safe, since it is inactive in people. In addition, tests cannot differentiate milk from dairy cows treated with the hormone from milk from cows not so treated. The FDA finally approved BST in 1993 after finding that “milk from treated cows was safe for human food.” Every subsequent review by the agency has confirmed its safety. Spooked by the controversy and eager to avoid producing surpluses of highly subsidized meat and milk, regulators in Europe took the precautionary step of banning its use and the import of meat from treated cows. In 1999, the World Trade Organization ruled that the European ban on imports was based on phony safety concerns, the chief goal of which was to shield its farmers from competition and to protect its system of bloated farm subsidies.

In 1994, Calgene's delayed-ripening Flavr Savr tomato became the first genetically modified food crop grown and consumed in an industrialized country. Unfortunately, the tomato did not actually taste all that good, so the product failed among consumers. The first commercially successful modern biotech crops were planted in the United States in 1996. They included corn, potato, and cotton varieties that had been enhanced to resist pests and soybeans with an added herbicide resistance trait.

Modern Crop Biotechnology Arrives

For pest resistance, researchers installed versions of a gene from the
Bacillus thuringiensis
(Bt) that kills insect pests with alkaline digestive systems.
Bacillus thuringiensis
has been used for decades in agriculture, especially by organic farmers, as an insecticide. Pest insects, usually caterpillars, ingest the bacteria, and their highly alkaline guts activate it to release protein crystals that poke holes in their digestive tracts, causing them to die. Studies accepted by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) show that Bt protein is safe for people to eat; it is degraded by human gastric fluids within thirty seconds. The herbicide resistance trait is derived from a gene isolated from another soil bacterium that prevents the glyphosate herbicide (Roundup) from interfering with the production of plant-specific amino acids needed for growth and development. The EPA pointed out that the bacterial gene that confers herbicide resistance differs little from the same gene that all plants already have. Reviewing the test data, the agency also found that the herbicide resistance trait is not toxic to mammals or birds.