Suppressed Report Shows Cancer Link to GM Potatoes 325
Doc Ruby writes "After an 8-year-long court battle, Welsh activists have finally been allowed to released a Russian study showing an increased cancer risk linked to eating genetically modified potatoes. While the victory of the Welsh Greenpeace members in the courtroom would seem to vindicate the work of the Russian scientists that did the original research, there are still serious questions to be answered. The trials involved rats being fed several types of potatoes as feed. The rats who were fed GM potatoes suffered much more extensive damage to their organs than with any other type; just the same, serious questions remain about the validity of the findings. The Welsh group wants to use this information to stop the testing of GM crops in the UK, tests currently slated for the spring of this year."
The good Dr.'s site (Score:4, Informative)
**and his paper** (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Killer potatoes (Score:1, Informative)
The studies involving artificial sweetners usually take two different approaches. One common approach is that which you mentioned, of overdosing the lab mice. The second common approach is that of long-term exposure at common levels.
For the overdosing-style studies, the overdose amount is usually quite reasonable. Depending on the chemical in question, we're talking of amounts 1.2 to 1.5 times the maximum recommended dosage. It's quite possible for a human to ingest comparable amounts of these sweetners. I'm sure you've seen your colleagues, some of who drink upwards of 10 cups of coffee during each 8-hour workday. With two packets of artificial sweetner for each coffee, you're ingesting quite a bit.
The second approach, of long-term exposure, usually avoids going anywhere near the maximum recommended dosage. The focus is on creating a scenario that would match what the typical human would experience. For sweetners, this often means small dosages one or two times a day, for the mouse equivalent of several years. Some of the more elabourate and better-funded studies can simulate decades of exposure.
You may want to avoid commenting on this subject any more. I'm guessing from your posts that you don't have much of a biology background. Of the two posts of yours that I've read in this topic so far, both have been quite inaccurate, if not making outright invalid claims. Please go do some basic research so you have a better idea of the science behind these experiements.
Re:It's not nice to fool with mother nature... (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the GM foods being pushed have nothing to do with starving people - it's all about increasing corporate profits, as usual. The "terminator gene" was being pushed to prevent poor third-world farmers from saving their own seed after buying grain crops once. Roundup-ready crops are developed to allow farmers to use increasing amounts of Glyphosate to control weeds, because of the inherent problems with how large-scale agriculture is "managed". Flavr-Savr tomatoes were designed to be picked at an even less ripe state so they survive shipping better. All of that runs counter to helping starving people - heck, even for the "first world" it means crops that are less nutritious than before.
The only GM crop I know of that was developed in an attempt to actually help the third world is golden rice - a rice that provides beta carotine. That was developed at a university, and while given lip service by the agro-giants it's not high on their agenda.
Re:So...all potatoes are bad? (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. You can't compare humans/animals and plants in terms of DNA similarity (or lack thereof). The basic structure is too different to make any comparisons worthwhile.
If we are only
Wrong. Most of the 0.5% difference between mice and humans involves genes that are currently classified as inactive. Thus they basically have no identifiable effect, even after decades of study. The amount of DNA that actually causes the differences between humans and mice is remarkably small. While 0.5% of the total DNA is different, approximately 98.5% of that 0.5% is considered inactive.
And like I said in my earlier post, decades of studies have shown that mice are a very accurate representation of humans, when it comes to testing chemicals. The organs are proportioned almost exactly the same, and comparable responses to humans have been observed again and again and again. Doubt it if you wish. The fact remains that if something is harmful to mice, we can be sure that a relative proportion of that chemical is harmful to humans.
Re:What are "GM potatoes"? (Score:5, Informative)
Poking around a bit, it turns out that the genetic engineers and the researchers were both looking at one particular lectin, introduced to make the potatoes resist insects and nematodes better. Which is important because "lectin" is a whole family of chemicals with different biological effects.
Now, the natural chemical defenses in plants are bad enough. Wild potatoes may need elaborate preparation to be safe to eat. Farmed ones are screened for solanine [wikipedia.org]. Potatoes, in case you didn't know, are in the nightshade family.
So the real question here is what other research was done and what results it had. Does other work confirm or contradict the Russian study?
Then there's the systems question, which is whether we're better off with the risks of the engineered potatoes or the risks of the pesticides needed to keep "natural" ones alive. The word "natural" is in quotes because they're quite different from their wild relatives.
Terminator gene (Score:2, Informative)
Re:So...all potatoes are bad? (Score:3, Informative)
there are exactly two reasons why we perform tests on certain mice. You're focused on reason #2 -- namely, "a high past correlation of harm in these creatures to harm in Humans." #1 is "the short lifespan and low genetic variety make for a highly economical test pool."
Mice are significantly different than humans: for example, a 5 ft/lbs blow to the chest isn't much to a human, but it's death to a mouse.
Re:Why all? (Score:3, Informative)
Which is probably one of the reasons why biologists use genetically identical strains of test animals.
What the hell? (Score:4, Informative)
Wait, wait. Wait. I just went to look in the article for where these folks had been published (i.e. what quality of peer review they had). Right at the bottom of the page, it says that Greenpeace _admits_ that the Russian studies had errors. So, they're admitting that they're using a poorly-designed study in order to try and scare the government into banning trials on GM foods? What is going on here?
Re:GM food supporters suck (Score:2, Informative)
Umm, seedlessness isn't a genetic modification. It's the result of intentionally selecting and breeding grape plants that produce grapes with less seeds than the average grape. This is done over several generations until no seeds are produced. Think Gregor Mendel and a Punnett square. It's the manipulation of pre-existing genetic information to achieve some desired end.
Genetic Modification is inserting (or deleting) pieces from the genome (DNA) of a certain whatever. Introducing pieces of new genetic material is certainly different from what you're talking about.
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So...all potatoes are bad? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:... and they couldn't do a study themselves??? (Score:2, Informative)
The Independent is currently loss-making and is seeking to carve out a section of Britain's left wing newspaper readership by being highly critical of the government and agressively pursuing an environmental agenda.
Greenpeace is a widely criticised environmental lobby group, who have made famously unfounded attacks on Shell and Apple among others
The new leaf potato which the fuss was put in production 8 years ago, eaten by many people, was found not to be profitable and is now defunct.
Articles like this are the reason that people are skeptical of global warming. I do not take advice from people like Greenpeace or the Independent, because they are self-serving scare-mongers.
Re:What are those "serious questions" with the stu (Score:2, Informative)
I think the point is that this is FUD - no-one knows what it means, but it scares people. If you look at Microsoft press releases about Linux you might spot a similar pattern.
Re:So...all potatoes are bad? (Score:3, Informative)
So for research where that kind of difference is important, scientists don't use mice as a model, but use something like a crash-test dummy. They only use mice in cases where they can take advantage of the similarities.
Duh.
Re:Agreed... (Score:2, Informative)
This is the paper [colorado.edu] in question.
99.5% similarity????? (Score:4, Informative)
Humans and chimpanzee DNA are very similar, there are apparently about 40 million differences (out of about 3 billion positions) between chimp and human DNA; in protein coding regions, the number of differences is much smaller.
Humans and mice, on the other hand are far more evolutionarily distant (80 million years since the last common ancestor, compared with 5 million, or less for chimps). In protein coding regions, mouse and human DNA sequences are about 80% identical, on average, but outside protein coding regions, the level of sequence similarity is no higher than would be expected by chance. (This large difference was one of the reasons the mouse genome was sequenced after the human genome - sequences that were more similar than chance were expected to have a function.)
While plants and animals (and bacteria) share a large number of proteins that do similar things, their DNA sequences do not share any significant similarity except in protein coding regions for very highly conserved proteins.
What all of this has to do with unpublished Russian studies on genetically modified plants, I cannot imagine.
Re:Stop testing? Bury heads in sand? (Score:3, Informative)
There's certainly a difference worthy of at least semantic note between selection / breeding by phenotype, and direct manipulation of genotype. GM foods may turn out to pose no risks to consumers, but saying they're produced in the same way new breeds have been produced for thousands of years is deceptive.