How can PSRAST claim to be impartial having taken a position against GE food?

First, we claim to be impartial only about the scientific evidence concerning GE foods.

And we find that an impartial evaluation strongly speaks against the use of genetic engineering of foods.

Second you can very well take a standpoint against something after an impartial evaluation of facts. We have found that there is not enough knowledge to warrant safe release of GE organisms and safe use of GE foods, see "Is there sufficient scientific knowledge..." [EL].

Third we don't claim to be impartial in the question whether it is OK to market products that may threaten the health of people and the environment. We are strictly against any irresponsible commercial application of new technologies. In this respect we are strongly partial in favor of safeguarding the health of people and the safety of the environment. For this reason we find it justified to campaign actively for a ban on the release of GE organisms and on their use as foods.

It is our judgement that present GE foods are of little or questionable benefit as you find in "Traits introduced into foods by genetic engineering" [EL]. We find potential benefits of future GE foods irrelevant as long as it has not been established that this technology is safe. The biotech proponents have claimed many possible benefits. But there is much too little scientific knowledge today to be able to judge whether any safe and really valuable products will be possible to create at all. The possible benefits are, from an impartial standpoint, nothing more than unverified hypotheses that are completely irrelevant to the question whether present products should be approved today.

Often media, trying to make an impartial presentation of the issue, have presented yet unrealized but great expectations of the biotech industry on one side and the potential hazards on the other. The expected benefits have much too often been presented as if they were granted and the hazards as "unproven". This has given the public a greatly distorted picture of the situation. Such treatment of the issue is definitely not impartial.

Lofty visions of future benefits have had an unduly large influence on the debate and have unfortunately been a significant reason for political decisions supporting an approval, not seldom because it is believed that "the benefits justify taking some risk". The result is that unknown and potentially serious risks with public health and the environment are now being taken for the sake of unproven benefits.

I have been looking for scientific documentation about the hazards but have found very little - where is it?

As you will find from the article "Is there sufficient scientific knowledge..." [EL];  and its links, the problem with GE is the scarcity of knowledge. But there is enough knowledge to say that the hazards are potentially serious and require careful investigation.

The industry has in practice extensive control over the research done in applied gene technology. And it has not been supporting research that may yield results that are not of commercial interest. In addition governments spend very little money on research on the safety of GE products. For example in the leading GE country, USA ,the department of Agriculture (USDA), has year after year time been spending a very small part of its budget on safety issues (in year 2000 it was 4 percent of public agricultural research funding of biotechnology).

This scarcity of knowledge is the reason why we find it irresponsible to release and use GE products today. Proponents are misusing this situation, saying that the technology is safe as "no evidence of serious environmental harm or harm for humans has been found".

But absence of evidence is of course not evidence of absence of harmful effects. It would cost the industry many millions of dollars in each case of a new transgenic organism to rigorously prove its safety for health only (this figure comes from the drug industry that uses similar methods to assess the safety of a new drug). And it would probably cost as much or perhaps even more in each case to prove its long-term environmental safety in an exhaustive way.

Do you think all GE foods are harmful?

Nobody knows. No GE food has been exposed to rigorous safety testing which has to include long term testing in order to be reliable. The most problematic harmful effects that might arise are those that come from unexpected substances that are not acutely poisonous but slowly derange and damage some aspect of the physiology. The reason why they are problematic is that they may be difficult to detect. No research has been done to find out how many out of e.g. one hundred instances of genetic engineering, unexpected substances may appear.

What seems to be quite certain is that unexpected substances will appear in some genetically engineered foods. The appearance of unexpected substances has been predicted for molecular biological reasons and there are experimental observations verifying this prediction. Nobody knows how likely it is for these substances to be harmful. But some cases have been discovered experimentally  [ML] .

The present scarcity of knowledge might have serious consequences if it turns out that long- term harmful effects are common due to GE foods.

The reason why this research has not been done, is that it would probably cost the industry many millions of dollars in each case of a new transgenic organism to rigorously prove its safety for health only. (This is the cost level in the drug industry that uses similar methods to assess the safety of a new drug - however the costs for reliable food testing will be considerably larger because testing is more difficult).

This is the reason why the industry has been lobbying hard and unfortunately very successfully to make the governments accept very low demands on safety assessment. Their argument is that they consider it unnecessary as the foods used are "substantially equivalent" to their natural counterpart. However, this argument has no scientific validity, see "Inadequate safety assessment of GE foods" [EL].

So the approval of GE foods at a large scale today in spite of insufficient research and testing is nothing less than blind experimentation with the health of millions consumers.

For more details, see "The safety of GE foods. Reasons to expect hazards and the risk for their appearance" [ML] [Partly EL]   

How dangerous is it to eat GE foods?

Nobody knows. As said in the answer above, science does not know how likely a GE food is to be harmful. And it is not known how harmful they may be.

But there are experiments indicating that unexpected substances appearing due to GE may be harmful.

The substances may be such that are produced normally in very small quantities in the metabolism. GE may cause a substantial increase as for example in the case of a yeast producing a toxic and mutagenic substance.

The substances may however also be such that are normally neither produced in the recipient nor in the donor organism. This was the case when a toxin appeared in a tobacco plant engineered to produce gamma-linoleic acid, see unexpected toxin.

These are just a few examples. Theoretically there are many possibilities for harmful substances to appear. The most problematic ones are such that are slow-acting, so that an immediate connection with the food is not obvious.

We find it justified to conclude that unexpected harmful substances may appear and that therefore rigorous food safety assessment is necessary in every case of genetically engineered food.

What GE foods are on the market?

This section has been moved to a separate page.