Genetic awareness

Had a member of an environmental group said it, a comment about genetic engineering of the nation’s food would have been passed off as just so much hyperbole to enhance the latest membership drive. But this is from William Brown, science advisor to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, on genetically engineered catfish:

“Here we are on the brink of remaking life on Earth through genetic engineering, and we do not have a thorough process for reviewing the environmental impacts,” he said. “The system is full of holes.”

The catfish in question, with the help of genetic material from salmon, carp, zebrafish and other species, grow 60 percent faster than ordinary catfish and some scientists fear that if they are released into the environment, they will wipe out other species and the food those species depend on.

And it’s not just catfish, of course. One of the problems with the drive to label foods that contain genetically modified ingredients is that consumers would be shocked to find that many or most of the products they buy are modified. Corn, soy products, potatoes, chicken, seafood and many others have been remade through genetics to grow faster, resist diseases or pests better or last longer on the shelf. It isn’t that people who worry about the genetic modifications generally oppose the goals of these changes, it is that they worry what else the modifications will bring and want to know how the nation would test these products to ensure their safety.

In the recent Los Angeles Times story that quoted Mr. Brown, Bill Knapp, a senior fisheries official with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said, “My sense is that the current system is not going to be OK and that there are going to have to be changes – or a whole new system put in.” But both men are overstating the current level of protection to consumers by suggesting there is a system, however faulty, in place. The system they are referring to is the one for unmodified foods, the one that assumes that a tomato is a fruit without a fish gene stuck in it or a potato grows without the DNA of a toxic (to pests) protein.

But there really isn’t a system that re-quires producers of genetically modified foods to document, through tests, that their products will not cause widespread environmental harm or that holds out punishment if the producer does cause harm. It is why the concern about the effects of these products is not limited to environmental groups but seems, over the last decade, to have settled into the consciousness of government.